CMS Turns to Industry to Drive Interoperability, Health Tech Innovation

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is focusing on creating long-lasting industry partnerships to enable its Health Technology Ecosystem and improve access to innovative health tech solutions, the agency’s Senior Advisor for Technology Alberto Colon Viera said during the AFCEA Bethesda Health IT Summit in Bethesda, Maryland, on Wednesday. Through this modernization, CMS aims to lower barriers to adopting emerging tools like artificial intelligence to drive efficiency.

CMS announced its Health Technology Ecosystem in July as part of its Making Health Tech Great Again initiative. The project calls on health care industry leaders to voluntarily align around a shared framework to tackle historical challenges with legacy infrastructure and disconnected data. More than 60 companies — including Amazon, Anthropic, Apple, Google and OpenAI — pledged to collaborate with the agency in the first quarter of 2026.

The ecosystem focuses on two key areas: promoting a CMS Interoperability Framework to improve information sharing between patients and providers and increasing the availability of personalized tools to better inform patients health decisions. CMS aligned network partners voluntarily commit to the interoperability framework requirements and help lead the way in setting standards for a modern health data exchange.

“We’re thinking about the ecosystem holistically … the CMS interoperability framework basically brings all the actors together,” said Colon Viera. “We want to know how can we work together as an industry to tackle these challenges, and this means companies across industry [will be] coming together to discuss how standards should be enabled or grow.”

Creating Sustainable Relationships with Industry Partners

CMS’s Office of Information Technology (OIT) Deputy Director Lee Ann Crochunis said at the event that industry solutions need to be built with agency needs in mind, while also recognizing that those needs will change in the future.

“[Industry] needs to be building a solution that’s for today’s needs, but with an eye to the future … get those kinds of solutions in front of us,” said Crochunis.

Relationships between industry and government should adapt as agencies find new and innovative ways to deliver on mission operations. CMS OIT Acting Director of the Infrastructure and User Services Group Wade Zarriello said the agency is not focused on making transactional relationships with industry, but instead building long-lasting partnerships.

“We’re looking for partnership and long-term collaboration … and it really is helpful when a vendor or partner puts in the time to understand CMS business and bring actual solutions to the table versus products,” Zarriello added.

Building an AI-Enabled Health Technology Ecosystem

CMS leaders said strengthening the Health Technology Ecosystem will enable the agency to adopt AI and other emerging technologies to tackle fraud, waste and abuse and drive efficiency. The agency is focusing on upskilling its workforce to leverage AI to improve workflows, Colon Viera said, adding AI applications are intended to augment the workforce, not replace it.

“[Employees are] supercharging themselves with [AI] tools to be more productive, to ask the right questions and to take a stab at the hardest problems,” Colon Viera said. “Something [we need to] think about is how to engage with the workforce in a way that conveys these tools are an arsenal or a toolkit.”

CMS has 82 AI use cases across its enterprise, and generative AI tools account for 35% of use cases, Crochunis said.

The agency’s Director of the Investigative and Business Analytics Division Bethany Messick said AI has helped data analytics and systems groups swiftly tackle waste, fraud and abuse. By bringing together CMS investigators, policy experts and other partners, Messick said the team created AI models to identify suspicious behavior and detect bad actors through real-time data analytics.

“Our program has been pretty successful so far. We’ve kept $203 million in the bank and kicked out 50 bad actors,” said Messick.