HHS continues health tech initiative with 7 new industry pledges

The Health and Human Services Department announced Monday it is expanding its health technology ecosystem initiative to include several new voluntary pledges that aim to bolster medical price transparency, help match patients to clinical trials, improve scheduling and give patients access to care through software.

Additional pledges center around improving population health data exchanges with bulk Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources, pharmacy interoperability and real-time patient access to insurance benefits information. The HHS initiative is also expanding to include a “ditch the disk” work group on diagnostic imaging, though it’s unclear what will come from the discussions.

The initiative aims to improve health data sharing so that patients can easily access their own medical records and make better health care decisions with the help of artificial intelligence-powered software. 

Led by the CMS deputy administrator and inaugural chief product officer, Amy Gleason, the initiative kicked off last July with the support of just over 60 companies. It now boasts more than 800 pledges, including big technology giants, the Social Security Administration, the Veterans Affairs Department and state health agencies.

During a one-year anniversary event on Monday, HHS touted progress the health technology ecosystem has made since its inception.

“Sixty percent of patients today in the United States can access their own record in an app of their choice. Sixty percent. Twelve months ago, it was 5%. We think it'll be 80% by October,” Chris Klomp, chief counselor at HHS, said without explaining how the department arrived at those estimates.

Klomp challenged health sector leaders to ensure patients use those apps to share medical records with medical providers. Those providers should be able to ingest the information, he continued, noting that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has a new webpage to support that end.

“That's our job in year two: adoption,” said Gleason.

Klomp also touted the launch of a Medicare.gov “app library” promoting mobile-friendly software to seniors, a National Provider Directory containing information about health care providers and a Medicare payment method for digital technologies as other health technology ecosystem initiative successes. 

But HHS officials provided few substantive updates about federal technologies CMS has promised to build as part of the health technology initiatives on Monday. 

One of those initiatives, the National Provider Directory, came under fire from congressional Democrats after the Washington Post reported a data dump accidentally leaked some doctors’ Social Security numbers. Another one of the initiatives, the Medicare.gov app library, has privately concerned CMS officials because of how some apps are using web-tracking technologies.