New Health Record System Aims to Make Sharing Info Easier, Trump Says

Key TakeawaysA new system will let Americans share health records more easily through appsThe plan also uses AI to help patients understand health info between doctor visitsPrivacy experts are concerned about protection of personal health data.FRIDAY, Aug. 1, 2025 (HealthDay News) — President Donald Trump has introduced a new effort to help Americans more easily share their health records with doctors, using new technology and artificial intelligence (AI) tools.“Today the dream of easily transportable, electronic medical records finally becomes a reality,” Trump said during a White House event with leaders from major tech companies, including Google, Amazon, Apple and OpenAI.The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will oversee the new system, which is designed to let people upload medical records and use QR codes to share health and insurance details with health care providers.Patients could also use AI assistants to help understand medical information and get help between doctor visits, officials said.Trump said the new system could help people with conditions like diabetes and obesity manage their care.Many health providers already allow patients to schedule appointments and view test results online. But the new system would go a step further by reducing paperwork and allowing patients to share records across providers without repeating forms.“The system will be entirely opt-in, and there will be no centralized government-run database, which everyone is always concerned about,” Trump said, as reported by The New York Times. “People are very, very concerned about personal records. They want to keep them very quiet, and that’s their choice.”But privacy and tech experts raised questions about how safe the system would actually be.“It’s not something that can be done overnight without changing existing regulations and resolving the tension with existing laws,” Peter Jackson, a privacy lawyer in Los Angeles, told The Times.The federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) limits how personal health information can be shared.For example, technology firms that work directly with providers and insurance companies fall under federal privacy laws. But, The Times reported, makers of third-party apps that are not affiliated with a provider or insurer do not if someone voluntarily shares private medical information.David Holtzman, a retired privacy expert, said much of the technology already exists and that past federal efforts to set up similar systems “have proven to be ineffective," The Times reported.What’s unclear, he added, is whether patients using third-party apps would have their data protected.Amy Gleason, a former health care executive who now leads the Department of Government Efficiency, told The Times that patients could use QR codes to share medical information and get help from an AI tool that would “fill in the gap between visits," adding that the AI would not replace doctors.More informationThe U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has more on your personal health records.SOURCE: The New York Times, July 30, 2025.What This Means For YouA new system aims to make managing health records easier and more connected. But it is important for patients to understand what might happen to their private information..Sign up for our weekly HealthDay newsletter