President Donald Trump on Wednesday announced an initiative to give Americans greater access to their own medical records through the aid of more than 60 tech and health care companies.
The private system would let Americans share their personal information across apps and programs managed by private tech companies across the nation’s fractious health care system but may be fraught with privacy issues. Digital experts fear it could make patients’ data less secure, exposing them to cybercriminals and others.
For decades, the federal government has sought a mechanism for greater accessibility to health records that allows patients to seamlessly switch between providers. But such efforts have long been dogged by privacy concerns and difficulties companies face in offering competing proprietary records systems.
“For decades, America’s health care networks have been overdue for a high-tech upgrade and that’s what we are doing,” Trump said of the proposed system on Wednesday.
The U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) said it has “secured commitments” from Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp., OpenAI and others “to begin laying the foundation for a next-generation digital health ecosystem that will improve patient outcomes, reduce provider burden, and drive value.”
Those companies have pledged to “work collaboratively to deliver results” by early 2026, though it did not detail any specific benchmarks the group is expected to meet, the CMS said.
Commitment to a digital health ecosystem comes after years of unsuccessful efforts by Democratic and Republican administrations to improve health record access. Their attempts have been hampered by technical challenges and privacy worries.
Trump officials are relying on the private sector to make headway on the problem instead of government intervention, a tactic mirrored by the administration’s approach on health issues, such as encouraging food companies to voluntarily remove artificial dyes from products.
“Medical records should be transparent (to the patient) and easy for all parties to see with the right permissions,” Steven Dickens, CEO and principal analyst at HyperFRAME Research, said in an email. “Patients should have the ability to move their records between providers seamlessly. This means that EHR software vendors need to agree on file formats and APIs. This is relatively easy to do, just look at standards like OTel in observability, GSM standards in Telco or MCP in AI. This is easy to do technically, but it will take 20 years as the healthcare lobby hates change.”
