U.S. healthcare is on an unsustainable trajectory. Costs are growing at roughly 8% annually, while the broader economy grows at less than half that rate. As CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz warned, the country is at risk of becoming “a massive healthcare system with a small country attached.” Yet the exhibit halls at CES 2026 showcase technologies that, in every other industry, have driven down costs and improved consumer experiences.
In healthcare, that promise remains largely unrealized. Patients are often treated as “widgets” in a system that:
The core challenge is not a lack of innovation, but a lack of system-level redesign. CMS is now attempting to change that by rebuilding its technological infrastructure, reshaping incentives, and inviting the private sector to co-create a more interoperable, outcomes-driven health system.
CMS runs approximately $1.75 trillion in programs that touch tens of millions of Americans. Yet much of its core infrastructure still runs on 1970s-era COBOL code, optimized for batch processing, not real-time intelligence or value-based care. As CMS executive and former ER nurse Amy Gleason put it, the contrast between CES innovation and legacy Medicare systems is “astonishing.”
Gleason outlined three major priorities for modernizing CMS’s digital foundation:
The message to innovators is explicit: CMS is “open for business” and actively recruiting technology partners, both inside and outside government, to help build and operate this new infrastructure.
Despite two decades of regulation aimed at improving interoperability, healthcare has mostly “digitized old, bad processes.” Records still move by fax, CD, and printed paper. Patients must remember every provider they have ever seen just to assemble a partial medical history.
CMS is attempting to move beyond rulemaking toward a collaborative, ecosystem-based approach:
A critical innovation is shifting from location-based access to identity-based access. Rather than logging into dozens of separate patient portals, individuals will be able to use a single verified identity to:
The goal, in Gleason’s words, is straightforward: “Kill the clipboard, axe the fax, and ditch the disk.”
As CMS senior leader Chris Klump observed, technology in healthcare has generally been layered on top of existing services instead of replacing them. New tools are “always and”—human-read mammography plus computer-assisted diagnostics—so costs rise rather than fall. Meanwhile, in most other industries, competitive markets force outdated solutions to disappear as superior, cheaper options emerge.
CMS is targeting three levers to reverse this pattern:
This shift is part of a broader reorientation of Medicare’s payment priorities, including:
The underlying principle is that the most expensive thing in healthcare is bad care—poorly delivered services that must be redone, followed by costly complications. High-quality, technology-enhanced care should cost less, not more.
Both Oz and Gleason underscored that technology’s true potential lies in empowering people: patients, caregivers, and clinicians. Today’s system frequently expects patients to recall complex histories in moments of crisis and forces clinicians to spend hours on prior authorizations and documentation instead of care.
When data is liberated and made machine-readable, AI can fundamentally change that equation. Three promising use cases stand out:
Gleason’s own family story illustrates what is possible. Her daughter, long treated for a rare condition, was excluded from a clinical trial due to a presumed diagnosis of ulcerative colitis. By loading her full medical record into an AI tool, she received a different interpretation: her biopsies were consistent with microscopic lymphocytic colitis, not ulcerative colitis, making her eligible for a potentially life-changing CAR-T trial.
These tools are powerful—but only when they have access to accurate, comprehensive data under clear privacy and security safeguards. That is the foundation CMS is now trying to lay.
For this administration, digital health is both a moral and economic imperative. Great societies, as Oz noted, are judged by how they care for their most vulnerable. At the same time, healthier citizens are more productive; if every American felt well enough to work just one additional year, the impact would be measured in trillions of dollars.
By 2028, CMS envisions a healthcare system in which:
Realizing that vision will demand more than regulation. It will require technologists, entrepreneurs, clinicians, and policymakers to work together—treating CMS not as a distant payer, but as a platform partner. As the leaders on stage at CES emphasized, the engine is now running. The opportunity, and responsibility, for industry is to climb aboard and help steer it toward a more accessible, affordable, and human-centered healthcare system.