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.
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