President Donald Trump’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is partnering with tech giants and healthcare conglomerates to form a broad new online medical database, the administration announced Wednesday.

The CMS Digital Health Tech Ecosystem will include a national healthcare directory, data sharing networks and partnerships with a wide collection of private corporations.

“Today the dream of easily transportable electronic medical records finally becomes a reality,” Trump announced in a Wednesday press conference. “With today’s announcement we take a major step to bring healthcare into the digital age.”

Apple, Google, Samsung, Amazon, OpenAI, Anthropic, Oracle, and supplement company Noom are among the private sector collaborators that Trump announced will be participating.

The close ties with Big Tech spooked privacy and medical freedom advocates, already perturbed by a previous announcement from Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. regarding wearable health monitors.

“Trump’s new ‘Digital Health Tech Ecosystem’ includes all the usual suspects: OpenAI, Amazon, Apple, Google… because nothing says ‘healthcare revolution’ like handing your medical data to Big Tech, right? What could possibly go wrong?” content creator Jason Bassler asked on X.

Trump’s new ‘Digital Health Tech Ecosystem’ includes all the usual suspects: OpenAI, Amazon, Apple, Google… because nothing says ‘healthcare revolution’ like handing your medical data to Big Tech, right? What could possibly go wrong? pic.twitter.com/M0yQX700hB — Jason Bassler (@JasonBassler1) July 31, 2025

Another creator, popular commentator Health Ranger, called the system a “kill switch.”

Trump is launching a “kill grid” using Big Tech, AI and Big Medicine to enforce compliance with vaccines, pharmaceuticals and biometric surveillance technology such as “wearables.” The entire point of this is to efficiently exterminate low-income and left-wing Americans in… https://t.co/8tsU3g5MIW — HealthRanger (@HealthRanger) July 31, 2025

Trump, however, appears to be aware of those concerns as he addressed them directly.

“The system will be entirely opt-in and there will be no centralized, government-run database, which everyone is always concerned about,” Trump said.

HHS also rejected the notion.

“The CMS digital health ecosystem is not a centralized government database. As CMS has made clear, the ecosystem is a framework to support secure, standards-based data exchange between existing health systems, with privacy and patient control at its core. The goal is to empower patients and providers, not to collect or centralize personal health data. All activities remain compliant with HIPAA and federal privacy protections,” an agency spokesperson told the Daily Caller.

Kennedy touted the technological innovation, comparing potential outcomes for Indonesia, which he lauded as a country that has rapidly increased the lifespan of its people. (RELATED: ‘Extinction-Level’: MAHA Warns Pesticide Immunity Provision Could Mirror Anger-Inducing Bill From 1980s)

“There are two major innovations that allowed them to achieve that extraordinary outcome and one of those was to disincentivize people from eating processed foods,” Kennedy said, outlining the country’s program where they paid citizens to eat healthy and penalized them for eating processed foods.

“The other innovation that really transformed Indonesia,” Kennedy continued, “was allowing people control of their individual health records.”

Kennedy explained that Indonesia’s leaders introduced him to the public health application they use which “shows your height, your weight, your blood type, your BMI, your cardiac markers, your diabetes markers, your cholesterol, and any kind of individualized treatments.”

“So if you go to a doctor in another town, he doesn’t do what we have to do here, which is to sit there with a clipboard and a fax machine in order to get your health records,” Kennedy said.

During the press conference, Trump’s crypto czar, David Sacks, touted the ability of artificial intelligence (AI) to diagnose diseases and stressed the importance of getting more data into AI systems.

“The key here is the unlocking of the data because the more data that AI has, the better it performs,” Sacks said.

The program is being spearheaded by Dr. Oz and his chief CMS deputy Amy Gleason.

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Dive Brief:

The Trump administration announced an initiative Wednesday that aims to boost health data sharing through partnerships with major healthcare and technology firms, including Amazon, Google, UnitedHealth and Epic.

The Health Tech Ecosystem focuses on two areas: encouraging adoption of a voluntary blueprint for data sharing called CMS Interoperability Framework and increasing the availability of digital health tools, like products for chronic disease management and care navigation, the CMS said in a press release.

More than 60 companies — including technology firms, providers, insurers and health data sharing networks — have pledged to participate in the initiative. The partnership aims to “deliver results for the American people” in the first quarter next year, the CMS said.

Dive Insight:

Interoperability and information sharing is a long-term challenge for the healthcare sector, made harder by siloed data that doesn’t easily flow between providers and a reliance on dated technology like fax machines.

Still, the industry has seen some recent progress on health data sharing. In late 2023, the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement, a governance framework for information exchange, went live after years of effort.

TEFCA launched with five Qualified Health Information Networks, or QHINs, and their number has since expanded to nine, including new additions like e-prescribing Surescripts’ data exchange and ambulatory electronic health record vendor eClinicalWorks.

Now, the Trump administration is launching its own data sharing initiative. It includes the CMS Interoperability Framework, which the agency said is a “call to action for health data networks that want to move faster.”

The framework’s criteria are supposed to be “visionary,” the CMS said. Some of the goals include ensuring patients can access their electronic medical data anywhere on the network, using apps of their choice.

Patients should also be able to access claims, explanation of benefits and prior authorizations from current and past payers, and data queries should be responded to quickly — possibly in real time, according to the CMS.

“For too long, patients in this country have been burdened with a healthcare system that has not kept pace with the disruptive innovations that have transformed nearly every other sector of our economy,” CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz said in a statement. “With the commitments made by these entrepreneurial companies today, we stand ready for a paradigm shift in the U.S. healthcare system for the benefit of patients and providers.”

Twenty-one companies have pledged to become CMS Aligned Networks, including EHR and health IT vendors like Epic, Oracle Health and athenahealth, as well as data exchanges that have received QHIN status like CommonWell Health Alliance and eClinicalWorks.

The CMS didn’t respond to a request for comment by press time on how the latest data sharing initiative will interact with TEFCA.

Additionally, eleven health systems, including Cleveland Clinic, Bon Secours Mercy Health and Intermountain Health, said they would participate in the networks. They pledged to accept patient information through digital tools to help “kill the clipboard” — or stop requiring patients to fill out medical histories on paper before visits.

Thirty companies, like Google, Apple and Samsung, joined the initiative to improve health outcomes with technology, according to the CMS.

That includes a pledge to allow patients to retrieve their health data through the network or personal apps, and then share that information with providers. Other firms signed on to use the network or apps to access health data to provide support to patients managing diabetes or obesity.

President Donald Trump announced a new health technology program that would “easily” allow patients to share their records from “one doctor to another,” adding that it will also “make it simple” for patients to access their health records.

During a “Making Health Technology Great Again” event on Wednesday with Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz, Trump announced that they were “launching the CMS Digital Tech EcoSystem.”

Trump noted that “for decades” healthcare networks in the United States “have been overdue for a high-tech upgrade,” adding that the current systems are “slow, costly, and incompatible with one another.”

“For decades, America’s healthcare networks have been overdue for a high-tech upgrade, and that’s what we’re doing,” Trump continued. “The existing systems are often slow, costly, and incompatible with one another. But, with today’s announcement, we take a major step to bring healthcare into the digital age — something that is absolutely vital. Moving from clipboards and fax machines into a new era of convenience, profitability, and speed, and frankly better health for people.”

“Under the leadership of Administrator Oz, we are officially launching the CMS Digital Tech EcoSystem to give healthcare providers, insurers, and software companies the tools they need to empower Americans with a 21st century experience on health,” Trump added.

Trump explained that the new health technology would not only “allow patients to easily transmit information from one doctor to another,” even if they were using different forms of record keeping systems, or using different networks, but would “make it simple for patients” to have access to their health records.

Per Fox News, representatives from companies such as Apple, Amazon, software giant Oracle, and artificial intelligence (AI) companies Anthropic and OpenAI attended the event. The companies “will be participating in the voluntary pledge aimed at improving health record sharing.”

The event announcing the Trump administration’s plan to advance a “next-generation digital health ecosystem,” was attended by representatives of companies, including Apple, Google, Samsung, Amazon, OpenAI, Anthropic, Epic, Oracle, Athena Health, and Noom, who will be participating in the voluntary pledge aimed at improving health record sharing. As part of the pledge, the companies will “voluntarily” share information with each other, according to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., also present at the Wednesday event.

“Instead of filling out the same tedious paperwork at every medical appointment, patients will simply be able to grant their doctors access to their records at the push of a button,” Trump added. “Just a button and you’re all set, and all the information the doctor needs will be immediately transmitted. The system will be entirely opt-in, and there will be no centralized government-run database.”

Calling it “another historic victory for the American people”, president Donald Trump announced today at the White House a new private health tracking system that will allow patients to “easily transmit information from one doctor to another.”

Trump called it a “next-generation digital health ecosystem,” after securing partnerships with companies including Amazon, Anthropic, Apple, Google, and OpenAI to better share information between patient and providers within Medicare and Medicaid services.

The Trump administration is also partnering with more than 60 companies to bolster how health information is shared electronically, including through the use of apps, along with beefing up the interoperability of health information networks, according to the (CMS).

“We have the tools and information available now to empower patients to improve their outcomes and their healthcare experience,” CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz said in a statement to Fox News Digital.

President Trump was also joined by HHS Sec. Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who said in a statement: “For decades, bureaucrats and entrenched interests buried health data and blocked patients from taking control of their health. That ends today. We’re tearing down digital walls, returning power to patients, and rebuilding a health system that serves the people. This is how we begin to Make America Healthy Again.”

Trump also said that healthcare providers will finally be able to “kill the clipboard”.

The Trump administration and the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) have announced plans to begin building a new digital health information system, in collaboration with a growing list of private-sector companies. Dubbed the CMS Digital Health Ecosystem, the new program aims to make it easier for patients to access their own medical records and health data.

In a press release announcing the plan, US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., claimed “bureaucrats and entrenched interests” have for decades blocked access to medical data. The CMS was more reserved in its assessment, saying the problem was more rooted in “outdated infrastructure and disconnected data.”

For now, the CMS’s initiative is still in its nascent stages. But the long-term goal is to enable a range of apps that will allow individual patients more control over who can access their medical data and when. The apps are broadly divided into categories including conversational AI assistants, “kill the clipboard” apps for eliminating paper forms, and apps for managing obesity and diabetes.

Companies said to have signed up as partners in the scheme include medical records giants Epic Systems and Oracle Health (formerly Cerner, which Oracle acquired in 2022); tech titans such as Amazon, Anthropic, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI. For-profit healthcare and insurance providers like Citizen Health, Polygon Health, and UnitedHealth Group are also aboard, as are data networks including CommonWell Health Alliance, CRISP, and eHealth Exchange.

A full list of current signees, dubbed “early adopters,” can be found on the CMS website.

President Trump, speaking at a press conference at the White House on Wednesday, said “The benefits to millions of Americans will be enormous. We will save time, we’ll save money, and most importantly, we’ll save lives.”

At the same press conference, officials assured Americans that once developed the system will be “strictly opt-in” and that “no centralized government database” will exist. However, the announcement has already raised concerns about security and data privacy among some quarters. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, for one, cautioned that trading in medical data can be a fraught proposition.

“Any initiative that proposes to collect sensitive data, particularly vast amounts of health information and medical records, must ensure that no one uses that information in ways people don’t expect,” Hayley Tsukayama, Associate Director of Legislative Activism at EFF, told The Register. “This goes double for partnerships between the government and private companies, which both have a bad track record for respecting people’s privacy.”

Balancing competing interests

CMS Administrator Dr Mehmet Oz argued that any such concerns must be balanced with the pressing need to modernize aging healthcare systems. “For too long, patients in this country have been burdened with a healthcare system that has not kept pace with the disruptive innovations that have transformed nearly every other sector of our economy,” he said in a statement.

The US already regulates medical data strictly. Most notably, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), passed in 1996, makes it a crime to wrongfully disclose patient medical information to unauthorized parties.

And yet, such incidents do happen. Earlier this year, US health insurance giant Blue Shield of California accidentally let slip health data belonging to some 4.7 million of its members, thanks to a SNAFU involving Google Analytics and Google Ads.

In today’s Digital Health Ecosystem press release, the Office for Civil Rights, a division of the US Department of Health and Human Services, assured Americans it understood these concerns, saying, “If an individual receives another individual’s electronic protected health information in error, generally, OCR’s primary HIPAA enforcement interests are ensuring that the affected individual and HHS receive timely HIPAA breach notification.”

But HIPAA only applies to “covered entities,” including health insurers, healthcare providers, and related services — not to patients themselves. One of the proposed uses of Digital Health Ecosystem apps is to allow patients to pass on their own data to new providers or resources, perhaps using QR codes or some other means, which presumably would be legal under HIPAA.

As described, there seems to be little to prevent patients from using their newfound freedom unwisely. Unscrupulous medical providers, cranks, and outright frauds abound, and making it easier to hand them your own data sounds dicey, particularly for those who are uneducated or suffering from mental conditions such as dementia.

Despite such concerns, dragging the US healthcare system kicking and screaming into the digital age has been a long-time goal of many players in both the public and private sectors. Owing to the healthcare industry’s complex, fragmented, and market-driven nature, healthcare providers, in particular, have long been among the businesses most reluctant to upgrade their aging systems, with some even still preferring paper records.

For now, it remains unclear when Americans can expect the first changes envisioned by the Digital Health Ecosystem initiative to be implemented, and no formal timeline has been announced. The Register