Tech Companies On Board With White House Plan to Ease Healthcare Record Keeping

“Today the dream of easily transportable, electronic medical records finally becomes a reality,” Trump said at a White House event, the New York Times reports. He was joined at the event by leaders of more than 60 companies involved in the effort, including Google, Amazon, and OpenAI, and representatives from major hospital systems such as the Cleveland Clinic. The records-sharing system will be overseen by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

The system will be voluntary, Trump said, and is meant as a replacement for the current system in which patients often must submit copious and redundant paperwork when seeing different providers.

“The system will be entirely opt-in, and there will be no centralized government-run database, which everyone is always concerned about,” Trump said, per the Times. “People are very, very concerned about personal records. They want to keep them very quiet, and that’s their choice.”

Some privacy and technology experts raised concerns, however, over the announcement’s lack of details, however, such as how users’ private health data will be protected, and how the record-sharing system will align with existing data protection laws, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

“There are enormous ethical and legal concerns,” Georgetown law professor Lawrence Gostin told ABC News. “Patients across America should be very worried that their medical records are going to be used in ways that harm them and their families.”

Others noted that Congress might need to act for the plan to be implemented. “It’s not something that can be done overnight without changing existing regulations and resolving the tension with existing laws,” Peter K. Jackson, a cybersecurity and privacy lawyer in Los Angeles told the Times.

Although Trump vowed that the data would not be centralized with the government, some experts were also skeptical that the government would be completely out of the loop.

The federal government has done little to regulate health apps or telehealth programs, Jeffrey Chester at the Center for Digital Democracy said, per ABC. He also noted that Trump’s Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has pushed for more use of technology in healthcare, including wearables that could monitor patients continuously.

Trump was joined at Wednesday’s announcement by Amy Gleason, acting administrator of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which has collected vast amounts of personal data on Americans held by government agencies with the aim of eventually combining it in a central government database, further fueling concerns over the health information plan.

“This scheme is an open door for the further use and monetization of sensitive and personal health information,” Chester said.