CMS to Invest in Tech Talent to Strengthen Efficiency, Modernization

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services needs a skilled tech workforce and access to innovative tools to drive efficiency, according to Amy Gleason, strategic advisor to the agency.

“For CMS to be more efficient, one of the things we need is good tech talent. When I got to CMS, the estimate was there were 13 engineers at all of CMS. So obviously we have a lot of contractors that we work with, but inside CMS there were not very many engineers,” said Gleason, who also serves as the acting administrator of U.S. DOGE Service, Wednesday at the ACT-IAC Health Innovation Summit in Reston, Virginia.

She added that while the agency uses and relies on contractors, it’s important that CMS has its own “good tech talent” and that they have access to modern tools to be more efficient.

“We need to have that inside talent have knowledge about the programs. Too much in the government … we just say, ‘here contractor, build us this thing.’ And they aren’t there to know what’s going to work and not work,” she said. “And so it’s very inefficient to have this game of telephone going back and forth.”

In March 2025, the Department of Health and Human Services announced a restructuring that would eliminate 20,000 employees through a reduction in force and early retirements – an effort to comply with DOGE’s workforce optimization initiative. As a result, CMS decreased its workforce by roughly 300 employees, according to HHS.

Gleason also touched on initiatives CMS has already put in motion, including the CMS Health Tech Ecosystem, which aims to improve interoperability; Kill the Clipboard, an effort to streamline health data sharing between patients and providers using a QR code; and modernizing Medicare.gov to be more accessible for caregivers.

Andrés Colón Pérez, chief technology architect at CMS, attributed much of the agency’s internal efficiency to AI tools.

“We’re hearing from colleagues across the organization through quantitative and qualitative research that we’re saving anywhere from like five hours a week for their work,” he said. “And so this is allowing increased productivity for the organization.”

Andreas Schick, director within the Center of Drug Evaluation and Research at the Food and Drug Administration, said he’s seen less administrative “friction points” due to AI. He said his colleagues, even ones hesitant to use AI, have started seeing it as a resource for work reduction.

One possible roadblock to efficiency is when policy and processes don’t keep up with innovation, according to Capt. Victor Lin, a U.S. Navy clinical informaticist and family physician at the Defense Health Agency. Lin, who works on Digital Health Transformation at the War Department, said innovation requires “all hands on deck.”

“What really makes digital transformation successful, in my mind, is actually not the technology, it’s the process, the people, the governance, having engaged leadership, having buy in from the key stakeholders,” he said.