The Trump administration’s big year in health tech

Mario Aguilar covers technology in health care, including artificial intelligence, virtual reality, wearable devices, telehealth, and digital therapeutics. His stories explore how tech is changing the practice of health care and the business and policy challenges to realizing tech’s promise. He’s also the co-author of the free, twice weekly STAT Health Tech newsletter. You can reach Mario on Signal at mariojoze.13.

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The Trump administration made big moves to promote artificial intelligence and other technology use across the federal health department and remove barriers to AI adoption by hospitals, providers, and patients. The bulk of these actions are deregulatory and seek to achieve specific goals by nudging industry in the right direction. The whole STAT Health Tech team looked back at the year in Trump health tech policy and what lies ahead in a new story here.

As if to help us prove our point, ASTP/ONC, the government’s top health IT regulator, dropped an anticipated proposed rule Monday, looking to eliminate 34 certification criteria for electronic health record software and updating seven others. Among regulations facing the axe are “model card” transparency requirements introduced by the Biden Administration for clinical decision support tools baked into EHRs. This just went into effect at the beginning of this year. Read more from Casey Ross on this latest news.