The Trump administration and the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have announced plans to collaborate with major health and technology companies to enhance Americans’ access to their medical records.

More than 60 companies have signed onto the plan, dubbed the CMS Digital Health Ecosystem, including tech giants Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc., Anthropic PBC, OpenAI, Google LLC, Microsoft Corp. and Oracle Corp. They’ve pledged to “begin laying the foundation for the next generation of digital health ecosystem,” according to a press release Wednesday.

A full list of the organizations and companies signed onto the plan, called Early Adopters, can be found on the CMS website.

“For too long, patients in this country have been burdened with a healthcare system that has not kept pace with the disruptive innovations that have transformed nearly every other sector of our economy,” said CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz.

Participation in the new plan is voluntary, according to the administration, and the criteria include trusted, patient-centered, practical exchanges that will be accessible for all network types. This includes health information networks and exchanges, Electronic Health Records and tech platforms.

Although the effort seems grand, the administration and CMS did not outline any milestones, roadmap or timeline for the plan. The overview itself emphasizes that the initiative is “a movement, not a mandate,” something to bring these groups together to call the private sector to step up and enhance the lives of Americans.

Speaking at a press conference on Wednesday, President Donald Trump said, “The benefits to millions of Americans will be enormous. We will save time, we’ll save money, and most importantly, we’ll save lives.”

During the same press conference, officials emphasized that once deployed, the system would be “opt-in” only and there would be no centralized database.

Privacy issues still loom

However, as with any system that brings together technology interests and information sharing, there are privacy concerns to contend with. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, renowned for its advocacy of privacy and security in technology, raised concerns about the potential issues that could arise from granting big tech companies access to private medical data.

“Any initiative that proposes to collect sensitive data, particularly vast amounts of health information and medical records, must ensure that no one uses that information in ways people don’t expect,” Hayley Tsukayama, associate director of legislative activism at EFF, told The Register. “This goes double for partnerships between the government and private companies, which both have a bad track record for respecting people’s privacy.”

The U.S. government already regulates privacy related to health records with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, known as HIPAA, signed into law in 1996. It was a law designed to protect sensitive patient health information and ensure that individuals could maintain health insurance coverage when changing jobs. Additionally, it aimed to standardize electronic health information transactions to enhance efficiency and reduce costs.

Even with this legislation, health and technology companies still suffer from security breaches regularly that expose patients’ medical records and sensitive information. In 2025, Blue Shield of California notified roughly 4.7 million people that their protected health information was exposed to Google for years from a misconfiguration with the Google Ads service.

Noted security researcher Brian Krebs criticized the idea of handing big technology companies healthcare data, calling it an “extremely bad idea for health data security.”

“For starters, it does nothing to address the reality that healthcare companies in general have absolutely atrocious security practices and some of the leanest security budgets you’ve ever seen for large organizations trusted with such sensitive information,” Krebs said.

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