Prior Authorization Legislation Takes Center Stage at Joint Hearing on Health Care Affordability
A joint hearing held on Jan. 22 by the U.S. House of Representatives Energy & Commerce Subcommittee on Health and the Ways and Means Committee hosted...
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The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced the introduction of the Health Tech Ecosystem initiative to streamline health care information sharing between patients and providers.
“We have the tools and information available now to empower patients to improve their outcomes and their health care experience,” CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz, M.D., said in a July 30 press release.
The initiative focuses on promoting a CMS Interoperability Framework to share information between patients and providers and on increasing the availability of user-friendly, personalized tools so patients can access necessary information and resources.
Major health care and information technology firms, including Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Apple, and OpenAI, have committed to working with CMS to achieve results for this initiative in the first quarter of 2026, facilitating data exchange and developing apps to assist in patient service delivery.
CMS will post an app library to Medicare.gov to highlight the secure digital health tools that will be developed. CMS also outlined progress made so far on efforts to support the new digital health ecosystem. CMS will:
- Enhance its Plan Finder for Medicare beneficiaries so they can select plans that have their preferred providers and hospitals in network.
- Build a Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources-based Application Programming Interface for initial functionality of a national provider directory later this year.
- Modernize Medicare.gov to enhance security without disrupting current user access.
- Develop infrastructure to reduce the time between when claims are received and when they become accessible through Blue Button.
- Integrate digital identity and National Provider Directory validation into data at the point of care during its continued development.
Finally, CMS announced it is facilitating trusted data exchange through the new CMS-Aligned Networks concept based on the CMS Interoperability Framework. Patients will have access to their data without needing to set up separate accounts for each health care website.
More information on the CMS Health Tech Ecosystem initiative can be found at https://www.cms.gov/health-tech-ecosystem.
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