Healthcare IT is entering a new phase. For years, government agencies focused on digitizing records, modernizing legacy systems, and improving data exchange. Now, those investments are becoming the foundation for more advanced capabilities utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) to reduce administrative burden and more holistically inform decision-making.
The federal government has introduced a number of programs and policies to speed the secure adoption of next generation technologies across the healthcare spectrum.
Show Me the Money
The Leading Edge Acceleration Projects (LEAP) is an annual grant program run by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT to advance the interoperability of healthcare data and systems. 2026 funding is concentrated in three areas:
- Advancing standards-based agentic AI technology to improve clinical care and enable further AI-related innovation.
- Expand on the API monitoring capabilities of existing open-source tools
- Develop tools that assess laboratory data quality and improve the adoption and use of standard codes by small, independent laboratories.
Interoperability is a common thread through the LEAP funding, challenging industry to develop and adhere to standards that will enable data and systems to work together across organizations.
Building a Data Super Highway
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) oversees the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA), a set of rules and standards that establishes a nationwide network for securely exchanging health information. It is intended to help scale electronic health information exchange nationwide to ensure that all stakeholders have access to electronic health information when and where it is needed. In practice, this will ensure that a patient can be seen at one facility and have their full records transferred to another unrelated provider seamlessly and digitally.
TEFCA recently added officials from the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), the Social Security Administration (SSA), and the Indian Health Service to its governing council, expanding the input and potential scope of TEFCA’s use. The governing council monitors health data exchanges, reviews potential updates to TEFCA, and helps resolve disagreements regarding health information sharing.
The SSA’s intent in joining TEFCA is to improve and speed up disability benefits processing. The agency’s participation in TEFCA has enabled Epic, the largest electronic health record vendor for U.S. hospitals, to connect to SSA. This sort of interoperability can reduce disability claims processing times by up to 50% for patients in health systems nationwide.
Similarly, the CPSC announced it will update its National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, a tracking system for consumer product-related injuries, utilizing the common framework provided by TEFCA.
Since increased ease in data-sharing raises concerns about protecting the highly sensitive data held by health organizations, security must be built in and demonstrable.
Securing the Data
The Health and Human Services Department’s health technology ecosystem initiative is an effort coordinated with leading healthcare and technology companies to make personal medical data more accessible to U.S. consumers via digital devices. Focused on ensuring that patients have access to the information they need to make health decisions, this initiative aims to develop secure, interoperable, standards-based, and AI-enabled medical records systems and tools.
This initiative launched in July 2025 with an initial 60 companies and has grown to 800 pledged participants. Participating companies have committed to ensuring that tools developed use secure digital identity credentials and are in line with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ data-sharing criteria.
For more on health IT technology and policy, check out these resources from GovWhitePapers and GovEvents:
- Can Technology Deliver a Lean, Mean Veteran-Serving Machine? (white paper) – This research report examines how the Department of Veterans Affairs can improve operational efficiency through targeted healthcare technology modernization rather than large-scale system replacement.
- Buyer’s Guide for Healthcare (white paper) – This guide explores how healthcare organizations can modernize care delivery while improving security, interoperability, and operational efficiency. Designed for healthcare executives, IT leaders and public health agencies, the guide examines technologies supporting clinical systems, patient engagement, healthcare analytics, AI, cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure and enterprise operations.
- HHS 2030 Summit 2026 (October 19-20, 2026; Oklahoma City, OK) – Health and Human Services (HHS) leaders are operating at a pivotal moment—one defined by immediate pressure and long-term opportunity. This event allows leaders to step back from daily pressures, engage in meaningful peer dialogue, and connect forward-looking ideas to real operational challenges.
- 30th DoW/VA & Government Health IT Summit (October 20-21, 2026; Washington, DC) – Senior leaders, leading experts, and strategic decision makers from across the VA, DHA, DoW, federal government, and relevant industry stakeholders convene for in-depth discussions on the evolving health IT landscape. This event will highlight how health IT is transforming care delivery, improving patient engagement, and advancing the interoperability, accessibility, and resiliency of Veteran and military healthcare.
Search GovWhitePapers and GovEvents to find even more information on the future of health IT.
