CMS launches office of health technology to drive AI adoption
WASHINGTON, UNITED STATES — The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has created the Office of Health Technology and Products (OHTP), centralizing artificial intelligence strategy, interoperability, and digital product development under a single organizational roof.
According to a report from MedTech Dive, the move signals a structural commitment to treating federal healthcare technology as a unified platform rather than a patchwork of legacy systems.
Eight groups drive CMS tech transformation
The OHTP was officially established June 9, 2026, with organizational changes taking effect by end of June.
Amy Gleason, CMS Deputy Administrator and Chief Product Officer, leads the office — bringing a background spanning nursing, the U.S. Digital Service, and health technology product leadership.
“It’s still too hard for patients to get their information, and it’s still too hard for doctors to get the right information,” Gleason said in public remarks on CMS’s technology priorities.
The OHTP consolidates eight operational groups — open-source development, standards and interoperability, product development, claims modernization, identity services, and the Digital Service at CMS — under one organizational structure.
The new office operates separately from CMS’s existing Technology, Coding, and Pricing Group, which handles traditional medical device coding and payment decisions. The structural separation signals that digital infrastructure and AI strategy now warrant their own organizational home.
CMS targets AI access and interoperability
CMS’s 2026 technology agenda centers on two priorities: advancing an interoperability framework and expanding app-based tools for Medicare patients — covering diabetes and obesity management, conversational AI, and digital check-in systems to replace paper intake forms.
“We’re really trying to challenge the industry to do things more in a tech manner — you do iterative development and build quickly, and if it doesn’t work, you throw it away early,” Gleason said.
The OHTP’s portfolio spans NPPES and PECOS provider directory infrastructure, Medicaid and CHIP technology modernization, open standards development, and enterprise-wide AI strategy — consolidating functions previously distributed across multiple CMS offices.
The office builds on CMS’s 2025 Health Tech Ecosystem initiative, designed to accelerate digital health adoption across Medicare and Medicaid.
For the healthcare outsourcing sector — which supports provider enrollment, credentialing, Medicaid eligibility processing, and claims administration across the same CMS-governed systems — the OHTP’s interoperability and AI modernization push directly reshapes the regulatory and data environment those services operate in.
Outsourced healthcare operations teams that have long worked within CMS data and compliance frameworks are among the first to feel — and support — the shift.
