Nationwide health data exchange framework TEFCA and the Trump administration’s Health Technology Ecosystem initiative are complementary efforts to boost data sharing — and aren’t in competition with one another, federal government officials said Thursday.
The Health Tech Ecosystem is a relatively new effort created by the CMS and HHS to ease health data exchange through partnerships with the private sector. The ecosystem, launched in July, also aims to increase the availability of digital tools, like products for chronic disease management and care navigation.
But the initiative shares some of the same goals with the existing government-led Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement, a framework for data exchange that went live at the end of 2023.
Officials said during the Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy’s annual meeting this week that the two initiatives are meant to be collaborative. The ecosystem should speed advancements in data exchange and benefit regulators, said Amy Gleason, acting administrator of the U.S. DOGE Service and strategic advisor to the CMS.
And innovations developed by the ecosystem, like work on digital identity and patient matching, could eventually be added to TEFCA, said Thomas Keane, assistant secretary for technology policy and the national coordinator for health information technology.
“We view the work that they’re doing in CMS as an accelerator. They can come up with solutions to problems that have long plagued network exchange,” he said.
The Trump administration has ambitious goals for the ecosystem aimed to help solve the healthcare sector’s pernicious data sharing challenges, though it was rolled out with few details on how it will ultimately function, experts told Healthcare Dive last year.
More than 650 companies have joined the initiative, up from over 60 when the program launched, Gleason said Thursday. At the end of March, the ecosystem plans to release early results of its work to build a national provider directory, including information on which data exchange networks providers participate in and how to connect to them, she said.
“It’ll be an iterative process. The very first, very baby version will be March 31 and focus on interoperability,” Gleason said.
TEFCA exchange has also accelerated, according to the ASTP. Nearly 500 million health records have been exchanged through the framework to date, increasing from around 10 million in January 2025, the agency said Wednesday.
