HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Digital Health

Make Health Tech Great Again

CMS just wrapped its Make Health Tech Great Again event at the White House, and it unveiled an ambitious new strategy to modernize how healthcare data is exchanged.

This time is different. We’ve heard similar promises before, but the administration plans to “stop theoretical debates and start delivering real results” by taking a two-pronged approach.

• The first priority is establishing a CMS Interoperability Framework to enable seamless information exchange between patients and providers. 

• The second step is building a Health Tech Ecosystem to improve access to personalized tools so that patients have the resources they need to make better health decisions.  

The CMS Interoperability Framework includes voluntary criteria for data sharing across different network types – health information exchanges, EHRs, and tech platforms.

• The blueprint covers everything from patient and provider access to transparency and security, complete with implementation guidelines co-developed with the early adopters. It’s completely aligned with TEFCA, which CMS is still participating in.

• Over 20 networks pledged to meet the criteria to become CMS Aligned Networks, such as delivering data through FHIR APIs, updating the national provider directory, and providing metrics on network queries for patient records.

The Health Tech Ecosystem is a “standards-based digital health environment” that will integrate apps, EHRs, and care delivery organizations with the new CMS Aligned Networks. 

• The ecosystem will leverage these integrations to develop new solutions for: (1) managing diabetes and obesity, (2) conversational AI to help check symptoms and navigate care, (3) “killing the clipboard” by replacing paper forms with digital solutions.

• Over 30 companies and 11 major health systems signed on to “deliver results for the American people” by the first quarter of 2026, and the full roster includes some of the biggest names in healthcare.

The Takeaway

We apparently won’t have to wait long for the CMS Interoperability Framework and Health Tech Ecosystem to deliver results, although what those deliverables will look like remains to be seen.

Ambient AI – From Helicopter to Hospital

In emergency medicine, ambient AI solutions like Playback Pro have become a lifeline for both doctors and patients, allowing them to record and share important information amidst all the chaos. Tune in to this webinar recording to hear North Shore University Hospital and air medical transport provider Life Link III share how ambient AI is supporting clinicians in the highest-pressure environments.

Elevate 2025: Medallion’s Virtual Conference Returns September 17

Now in its fourth year, Medallion’s annual conference is back – bringing together healthcare leaders to explore this year’s theme: Elevate the present. Reframe the future of healthcare. Hear from industry voices like Tom Lawry, author of Hacking Healthcare, UPMC Chief Medical Information Officer Robert Bart, and many more. Reserve your spot now.

The Wire

• OpenAI Goes Direct: It’s a bad day to be a “ChatGPT wrapper” after OpenAI quietly launched AI Solutions for Healthcare. The new service directly supports clinical operations such as summarizing notes and answering medical questions, representing the ChatGPT developer’s first B2B healthcare play marketed directly toward providers. The move adds even more pressure to middleware vendors to differentiate beyond their core LLM capabilities (workflow integration, proprietary data, clinician trust, etc.).

• Sword Intelligence: Sword continued its hot streak with the debut of Sword Intelligence, a new AI division to help payors and providers streamline their operations. Sword Intelligence is the result of internal innovation at the digital MSK company, which led to the development of AI Care Manager agents that it’s been using to streamline care coordination, enrollment, triage, and high-risk member outreach. Sword’s now opening up its “battle-tested” agents to other orgs looking to scale critical workflows and ease administrative burdens.

• An Apple a Day: New research in JAMA Network Open gave us a first look at the results from Apple and Elevance’s digital asthma self-management solution (DASM), an app that encourages users to log their symptoms and reflect on their asthma triggers. The study of 550 adults with uncontrolled asthma found that DASM led to a clinically significant improvement in asthma control over 12 months (+2.8 points on the 25 point ACT scale), which seems like pretty compelling evidence that app-based treatments can actually move the needle on outcomes.

• Arbital Series B: Arbital Health locked in $31M of Series B funding to scale its AI infrastructure for value-based care contracting. The platform centralizes fragmented data and automates contract reconciliation across all major risk models, then backs it up with an actuarial team to help payors and providers better-manage their performance. The funding was earmarked to build out the actuarial team and expand payor-facing automation capabilities

• Abridge + HHS: Abridge is rolling out enterprise-wide at Hospital for Special Surgery, the world’s top ranked health system for orthopedics. HHS is the provider of choice for over 100 professional sports teams and 200k patients annually, as well as a “living laboratory” for orthopedic procedures. Abridge’s ambient AI platform was purpose-built to handle the depth and complexity of these exact settings, and it will now be working with HHS on orthopedics-specific enhancements for documentation and coding precision.

• Healthcare Investment Slowdown: Silicon Valley Bank’s mid-year healthcare update counted a total of $3B in VC fundraising across the industry through the first half of the year, a steep drop from 2024 and potentially setting us up for the worst year in over a decade. SVB’s methodology is a lot wider than Rock Health’s, and includes biopharma, health tech, medical device, and diagnostics startups… all of which have been lagging. The lone bright spot was – you guessed it – artificial intelligence. AI investments accounted for a third of the H1 total, driven by a surge in administrative and back-office use cases.

• Eleos Expands Into Post-Acute: Eleos Health is growing beyond its roots in behavioral health by expanding its ambient scribing tech to home health, palliative, and hospice care providers. The behavioral health market is huge, but not as huge as the old people market. Eleos explained the logic behind the move by citing estimates that Americans over the age of 65 will outnumber children 18 and under by the end of the next decade, and that the U.S. home hospice market is estimated to top $75B by 2032.

• Unrecorded Patient Harm: More than half of patient harm events are apparently missed by hospital surveillance systems. An HHS OIG investigation into 266 harm events across 154 hospitals found that 49% of the events were absent from the hospital’s incident reporting system, and another 16% lacked proper documentation. The watchdog found that staff usually didn’t make a recording because they either didn’t consider the event harmful (46%) or because it wasn’t standard practice to capture them (18%).

• Aetna Launches Care Paths: Aetna debuted a new Care Paths AI-driven app to help members tackle common health challenges. Care Paths currently supports diabetes, joint health, and maternity care, equipping users with a unified view of their benefits and personalized recommendations for wellness programs related to their condition. CVS announced earlier this year that it was committing $20B to improve its consumer experience, and this is one of the first launches to stem from the investment.

• USPSTF On the Chopping Block? HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is reportedly mulling changes to the USPSTF that could include firing all 16 members of the advisory panel and replacing them with his own picks. USPSTF consists of clinicians who volunteer for the panel to provide guidance on preventive care issues like screening, and payors must cover USPSTF-recommended exams without requiring patient co-pays. Medical groups like the AMA have gone on record opposing any change to the current USPSTF panel.

Next Generation Ambient Tech and Agents

The ambient AI transformation is already sweeping across health systems, reducing administrative burdens and improving patient outcomes. So, what’s next? Tune into this on-demand session to learn how systems like Carle Health and Denver Health are leveraging Nabla to eliminate Pajama Time and build a future where agentic AI unlocks true workforce sustainability.

Supporting Sustainable GLP-1 Weight Loss With Withings

Leading digital health companies and health systems are supporting safe and sustainable GLP-1 weight loss with Withings Health Solutions. See how care teams are using Withings’ suite of remote patient monitoring solutions to prevent muscle loss, combat plateaus, and drive better outcomes for their patients.

The Resource Wire

• How Do You Know Your Ambient AI Is Working? Not all ambient AI is created equal. That’s why Abridge developed a scientifically validated approach to evaluating ambient AI efficacy for clinicians, which is used by a majority of its 150+ enterprise partners to make crucial decisions around adoption and scale. The Abridge Clinician Survey has also been leveraged in numerous peer-reviewed research studies and will be featured in several upcoming publications. Learn more. 

• Navina Ranks #1 Best in KLAS for Clinician Digital Workflow: KLAS ranked Navina’s AI copilot #1 for Clinician Digital Workflow in its 2025 Best in KLAS report. Navina’s AI copilot empowers the entire workflow from the exam room to the back office with a holistic solution for improving outcomes, physician satisfaction, and performance under value-based care. Discover why Navina is the market-leading clinical intelligence platform.

The Industry Wire

1. Humana raises outlook as it navigates high medical costs.
2. Tariffs on European medicines could cost drugmakers billions.
3. Elevance names former Cencora CEO to board.
4. Dr. Oz’s view on digital tech in healthcare.
5. US Senate confirms Susan Monarez as CDC director.
6. FDA’s top vaccine official Vinay Prasad out after 3 months.
7. Medicare Part D premiums likely to increase next year.
8. Astrana Health CEO on value-based care letdowns.
9. UVM Health lays off dozens.
10. HCA hit with $2.9M settlement over nurse TRAP agreements.