Mario Aguilar covers technology in health care, including artificial intelligence, virtual reality, wearable devices, telehealth, and digital therapeutics. His stories explore how tech is changing the practice of health care and the business and policy challenges to realizing tech’s promise. He’s also the co-author of the free, twice weekly STAT Health Tech newsletter. You can reach Mario on Signal at mariojoze.13.

On Wednesday, over 60 health tech companies signed a pledge orchestrated by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to make health data-sharing easier and to build apps for patients to access and act on their health data. CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz said in a press release that the agreement signals a coming “paradigm shift in the U.S. healthcare system.”

Some of the biggest names in health care and technology agreed to the pledge, including Amazon, Apple, Google, OpenAI, Epic, Microsoft, CVS Health, and UnitedHealth Group.

By signing the pledge, health tech companies promised that they will work collaboratively to deliver results on developing “trusted, patient-centered and practical data exchange” in the first quarter of 2026. Specifically, the proposal creates a new category of “CMS Aligned Networks” that meet the agency’s new “Interoperability Framework” criteria, which include the use of up-to-date data-sharing standards.

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