Today, the White House announced that it’s teaming up with more than 60 tech and healthcare firms, including Apple, in a new effort related to how patient data and digital health tools work across the U.S. Here are the details.
Apple, Google, OpenAI, Amazon, and dozens of other companies are partnering with the federal government on a digital health initiative to build “a smarter, more secure, and more personalized healthcare experience.”
As explained by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the measure will focus on two main areas:
- Promoting a CMS Interoperability Framework to easily and seamlessly share information between patients and providers,
- Increasing the availability of personalized tools so that patients have the information and resources they need to make better health decisions.
In practice, the plan promises to shift control and access of health data to patients, and to make it easier to use that data across different providers and apps.
The effort is being led by the CMS, the Office for Civil Rights, and the Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy.
Apple’s role will be to ‘kill the clipboard’
Part of the project is based on a newly published CMS Interoperability Framework, which outlines technical guidelines for how apps, Electronic Health Records (EHRs), and networks can share data.
The government says more than 60 companies have signed on to build tools and services around the framework, including 30 companies working on new consumer apps.
Those apps are expected “over the coming months”, and will offer access to:
- Diabetes and obesity management;
- The use of conversational AI assistants to help patients check symptoms, navigate care options, and schedule appointments, among other tasks; and
- Tools to “kill the clipboard” by replacing paper intake forms with seamless digital check-in methods; and more.
According to the CMS website, Apple will participate in the “kill the clipboard” initiative alongside b.well, Connected Health, Citizen Health, CVS Health, Fasten Health, Flexpa, Google, NantHealth, Samsung, Sharecare, UnitedHealth Group, and Zocdoc.
The section also shows the following pledge, to which the companies have agreed to adhere:
“We pledge to empower patients to retrieve their health records from CMS Aligned Networks or personal health record apps and share them with providers via QR codes or Smart Health Cards/Links using FHIR bundles. When possible, we will return visit records to patients in the same format. We commit to seamless, secure data exchange—eliminating the need for patients to repeatedly recall and write out their medical history. We are committed to “kill the clipboard,” one encounter at a time.”
You can learn more about the other participating companies, and the CMS Interoperability Framework, at the CMS website.
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