On Thursday morning, the last day of the annual HIMSS (Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society) conference, held this year in Las Vegas, Nevada, the president and CEO of HIMSS, Hal Wolf III, conversed with Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). They were joined by Amy Gleason, acting administrator of U.S. DOGE, and Kimberly Brandt, CMS's deputy administrator and COO.

The discussion centered on CMS’s transformative technological overhaul aimed at improving healthcare efficiency and empowering patients. Dr. Oz emphasized the need for better quality care to reduce costs and highlighted the opening of a new Salt Lake City office this summer to attract tech talent.

“[W]hat we're doing is so important to the future of our country; we have a real crisis,” Dr. Oz told the HIMSS audience. “It's a wonderful time to be in government, and not just because stuff's getting done, but it's because people aren't able to block you as readily, and technology is ready for you if you're in healthcare.”

Amy Gleason discussed the CMS health tech ecosystem, aiming to improve interoperability and patient access to data. “We also want to help providers make sure they have the right data they need for care coordination, and improve some of the trust issues there, and get some new use cases like payment and operations, so we can start taking some of the cost out of the system.” Also, she said, “We spend over $6 billion a year on wasted time just trying to validate who providers are, where they practice, what license they have, and what insurance they take.”  The plan is to combine CMS and provider information to get real-time updates.

Kimberly Brandt highlighted what she said was the $300 billion lost annually to waste, fraud, and abuse, of which $100 million was in CMS. She mentioned the new Fraud Detection Operations Center, nicknamed the Fraud War Room, which, according to CMS, stopped $1.8 billion in inappropriate payments.

The discussion also touched on AI's potential to revolutionize healthcare, particularly in rural areas, and the importance of trust in AI applications. “Rural healthcare,” Dr. Oz remarked, “is not just about rural healthcare. When you give $50 billion to the rural healthcare system, what they learn is translatable to urban healthcare.”

“We have such a wonderful opportunity to use technology to be a deflationary, stabilizing force, to allow improved care, better quality, and for that reason, across the board, allow us to fulfill our missions as Americans that we'd be shameful if we didn't take it.” Dr. Oz said in closing.