Several top tech companies such as Google, Amazon, Oracle, Microsoft, IBM and Salesforce have vowed to remove barriers which prevent customers from accessing their personal mHealth data whenever they need it. The announcement was made at the Blue Button 2.0 Developer Conference held in Washington D.C.

Seema Verma, administrator of The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) said, “Imagine all of that data aggregated in one place; Imagine if you could combine that with your genetic information, and that you would have the ability to take that information and give it to researchers, give it to your doctors?”

Last week, CMS released an updated on their new version of Blue Button 2.0, an open API tool which would enable around 53 million Medicare beneficiaries to access five years’ worth of their data.

Mark Scrimshire, who leads the Blue Button 2.0 announced, “We’re trying to create this ecosystem where app developers can go and create tools that are really useful for beneficiaries and hopefully for the wider patient population.” 

Seema Verma further added, “CMS is leading to support MyHealthEData by releasing more data and taking action to drive interoperability and patient control of their data; We are calling on (the) industry to follow our lead and step up to the challenge. It’s time for the rest of the industry to do its part. I have called on insurers to begin releasing claims data as we did with Blue Button 2.0 and make data available to patients.”