By Robert McGreevy, Daily Caller News Foundation | August 01, 2025
President Donald Trump’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is partnering with tech giants and healthcare conglomerates to form a broad new online medical database, the administration announced Wednesday.
The CMS Digital Health Tech Ecosystem will include a national healthcare directory, data sharing networks and partnerships with a wide collection of private corporations.
“Today the dream of easily transportable electronic medical records finally becomes a reality,” Trump announced in a Wednesday press conference. “With today’s announcement we take a major step to bring healthcare into the digital age.”
Apple, Google, Samsung, Amazon, OpenAI, Anthropic, Oracle, and supplement company Noom are among the private sector collaborators that Trump announced will be participating.
The close ties with Big Tech spooked privacy and medical freedom advocates, already perturbed by a previous announcement from Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. regarding wearable health monitors.
“Trump’s new ‘Digital Health Tech Ecosystem’ includes all the usual suspects: OpenAI, Amazon, Apple, Google… because nothing says ‘healthcare revolution’ like handing your medical data to Big Tech, right? What could possibly go wrong?” content creator Jason Bassler asked on X.
Another creator, popular commentator Health Ranger, called the system a “kill switch.”
Trump, however, appears to be aware of those concerns as he addressed them directly.
“The system will be entirely opt-in and there will be no centralized, government-run database, which everyone is always concerned about,” Trump said.
HHS also rejected the notion.
“The CMS digital health ecosystem is not a centralized government database. As CMS has made clear, the ecosystem is a framework to support secure, standards-based data exchange between existing health systems, with privacy and patient control at its core. The goal is to empower patients and providers, not to collect or centralize personal health data. All activities remain compliant with HIPAA and federal privacy protections,” an agency spokesperson told the Daily Caller.
Kennedy touted the technological innovation, comparing potential outcomes for Indonesia, which he lauded as a country that has rapidly increased the lifespan of its people.
“There are two major innovations that allowed them to achieve that extraordinary outcome and one of those was to disincentivize people from eating processed foods,” Kennedy said, outlining the country’s program where they paid citizens to eat healthy and penalized them for eating processed foods.
“The other innovation that really transformed Indonesia,” Kennedy continued, “was allowing people control of their individual health records.”
Kennedy explained that Indonesia’s leaders introduced him to the public health application they use which “shows your height, your weight, your blood type, your BMI, your cardiac markers, your diabetes markers, your cholesterol, and any kind of individualized treatments.”
“So if you go to a doctor in another town, he doesn’t do what we have to do here, which is to sit there with a clipboard and a fax machine in order to get your health records,” Kennedy said.
During the press conference, Trump’s crypto czar, David Sacks, touted the ability of artificial intelligence (AI) to diagnose diseases and stressed the importance of getting more data into AI systems.
“The key here is the unlocking of the data because the more data that AI has, the better it performs,” Sacks said.
The program is being spearheaded by Dr. Oz and his chief CMS deputy Amy Gleason.
Robert McGreevy is a reporter at the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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