At a White House–hosted event with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) on July 30, 2025, dubbed “Make Health Tech Great Again,” the Trump Administration unveiled the foundation for a next-generation digital health technology ecosystem. The initiative is intended to promote open app-based innovation, reduce provider burden, and enhance data sharing between patients and the broader healthcare system.
In its simplest terms, the initiative aims to:
- Help patients get access their health data digitally, from anywhere.
- Enable payers to pull necessary clinical data from providers.
The framework augments the existing Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA) and aims to:
- Collapse identity barriers for patients and providers.
- Establish real-time expectations for notifications and query-based networks.
- Reduce manual delivery and faxing of patient records and move to digital check-in tools.
Sixty organizations have pledged to collaborate to deliver solutions that provide more health data to patients by the end of the first quarter 2026, including technology giants Epic, Amazon, Google, and Apple; major health systems, including Bon Secours Mercy, Cleveland Clinic, and Intermountain Health; and payers such as Aetna, Humana, and UnitedHealth Group.
Key Tenets
CMS’s new approach is not a regulation or a mandate. It focuses on voluntary collaboration from tech companies, health systems, payers, and health information networks and exchanges. The effort focuses on two significant areas: 1) interoperability to empower patients to improve their health outcomes and 2) access to health resources and tools to inform decision-making.
CMS states that the new interoperability framework will facilitate the exchange of patient medical records through a program known as the CMS Aligned Network. Key components of the framework include the following:
- Enhanced plan finder to help beneficiaries select a plan to fit their needs
- National provider directory (NPD) powered by FHIR technology to enable apps to find provider networks and participants.
- Addition of a modern digital identity to medicare.gov to enhance security.
- Faster Blue Button data to reduce the time from receipt of a claim to when it is available for patients and developers.
- Data at the point of integration to facilitate digital identity and NPD validation.
- Trusted exchange and CMS Aligned Networks that build on the existing CMS interoperability framework with a plan to respond to patient-provider queries and share claims data through the aligned networks.
Next Steps
Interoperability is not a destination or a simple checkbox—it’s an evolving infrastructure, continuously under development. The CMS Health Technology Ecosystem is not a cure-all that will deliver instant solutions, nor is it a superficial initiative destined to fade. Instead, CMS has raised the bar for all stakeholders in healthcare.
For healthcare organizations at various stages of their interoperability journey, here are a few considerations:
- Healthcare organizations participating in TEFCA that are committing to become CMS Aligned Networks should evaluate their current interoperability capabilities, actively engage with QHINs, and prepare their infrastructure to meet CMS’s proposed accelerated timeline for nationwide data exchange.
- Health systems must evaluate the performance of their current health IT ecosystem—particularly in areas such as data sharing and interoperability—and determine whether their existing partners can scale effectively to support future-state frameworks and evolving requirements.
- Technology vendors, QHINs, and other health information exchanges must proactively assess their security infrastructure and policies to stay ahead of evolving requirements and mitigate potential risk.
