Apple, Google, OpenAI To Work With Federal Agencies To Make Health Data Helpful
Both Democratic and Republican administrations have long tried to make data sharing seamless across the disjointed US health care system.
Leading US technology companies, including Amazon.com Inc., Anthropic, Apple Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google and OpenAI Inc., have pledged to work with health systems and the Trump administration to make the nation’s fragmented medical data more useful for patients and providers.
The challenges of working with people’s private health information have created a black box around much of medicine. President Donald Trump and top health officials — including Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — are scheduled to tout a voluntary agreement aimed at breaking down those barriers at a White House event Wednesday afternoon.
Both Democratic and Republican administrations have long tried to make data sharing seamless across the disjointed US health care system. The government steered billions of dollars toward digitizing paper records and promoting standards so electronic record systems could link to one another. But the effort has had uneven results, with health technology lagging industries like finance or media. Friction in the system creates frustration for patients and doctors.
The latest effort from the Medicare and Medicaid agency focuses on two areas: improving data sharing between patients and health providers and expanding the suite of apps for consumers. Those apps would focus on helping people manage obesity and diabetes, use artificial intelligence assistants for scheduling and checking symptoms, and cutting paperwork out of the check-in process at medical appointments.
The initiative will involve more than 60 companies and 11 health systems, the agency said. Its goal is to make it easier for seniors to sign up for health plans, find providers and give patients more access to their health data.
As a voluntary initiative, it’s unclear what the consequences are for companies that don’t follow through on their commitments. They agreed to “deliver results” by the first quarter of 2026, the agency said.
People are already uploading health data like lab results into AI chatbots, said Mike Krieger, chief product officer at Anthropic. The company is committed to the data sharing standard promoted by CMS and its chatbot, Claude, will allow users to “connect into these systems and, with patient consent, be able to bring in their health information,” he said.
For the weight-loss app Noom, better connectivity would allow patients to seamlessly share lab results or other medical data. To do that today, many patients have to download the information and then manually upload a document or complete an intake form.
“Your labs data for one provider group might be here, another one might be here,” said Noom Chief Executive Officer Geoff Cook. “Under this CMS framework, patients can use any trusted app to retrieve the complete medical record wherever it’s stored,” he said.
