In July 2025, CMS and the White House brought together healthcare and technology leaders to pledge adoption of the CMS Interoperability Framework and commit to building a patient-centric digital health ecosystem. It’s a landmark moment, but a pledge alone doesn’t shift care. For care teams, payers, and patients, the true test is execution. We see the CMS framework as a baseline where the industry must go further. Standards by themselves aren’t enough. Real progress happens when interoperability is invisible, seamless, and transformative in daily workflows.
The significance of the pledge is undeniable. More than 60 private-sector entities, across provider networks, payers, EHR vendors, and digital health platforms, have already committed to participate in the new CMS Interoperability Framework. For the first time in years, government agencies, payers, and technology companies are finally aligning around a shared vision to provide secure, real-time access to complete health information. This alignment validates what so many in healthcare already know: the status quo has failed patients and providers. Too often, care teams are forced to toggle between screens, hunt for missing information, and navigate outdated infrastructure that was built for billing, not for care. Patients struggle to access or share their own data, and innovators hit walls of proprietary lock-in that slow progress to a crawl.
The CMS Interoperability Framework is a step in the right direction. But while the policy milestone is encouraging, patients and clinicians will judge success by their daily experiences, not by signatures on a pledge. For a doctor in a primary care practice, interoperability means seeing a complete patient history, including diagnoses, medications, test results, and claims, within a single, uncluttered workflow. For a patient with chronic disease, it means secure control of their own health information and the ability to share their data with apps or care teams they trust. For payers, it means fewer faxes, fewer portals, and fewer duplicative processes, replaced instead by intelligent, automated workflows that save time and reduce waste.
The stakes are high. The U.S. healthcare system is estimated to waste at least $760 billion annually, roughly 25% of total spending, through inefficiencies in care coordination, administrative complexity, and low-value care. The 2024 CAQH Index alone found that manual administrative processes cost the industry about $90 billion per year, and moving toward automated workflows could unlock $20 billion in savings while saving 70 minutes per patient visit. In sum: the opportunity cost of inaction is enormous.
Getting to this reality won’t be simple. Technical barriers remain, from variability in FHIR implementations to the persistence of legacy EHR and payer systems that resist integration. Even when data can move, data quality and coding inconsistencies create friction. Beyond the technology, systemic issues loom large. Incentives between providers, payers, and vendors are often misaligned, with each side questioning whether open exchange benefits them. Concerns over privacy and liability slow adoption. And on the front lines, care teams rightly resist tools that add clicks or administrative burden without proving value fast.
That’s why the industry must treat the CMS pledge as a floor, not a ceiling. It is directionally important, but it cannot be the destination. Execution requires partners who can translate standards into daily practice, who can make interoperability feel effortless rather than mandated. That’s where Vim comes in.
At Vim, our mission is to bridge the gap between promise and reality. We embed interoperability directly into provider and care team workflows, so relevant information and needed functionality shows up exactly when and where it’s needed. We act as an enabler, connecting payers, providers, and developers on shared infrastructure while leaving room for innovation at the edges. We operationalize collaboration: aligning incentives, working side-by-side with data sources, providers and EHR vendors, striving to provide value to all stakeholders through improvements in closing quality and care gaps, provider satisfaction, and patient outcomes.
Equally important, our marketplace lowers the barriers to entry for innovators. Developers can build solutions and easily deploy them across the ecosystem securely and at scale. These solutions help shape the industry by creating rails that everyone can trust and build on, as opposed to patching legacy systems one connection at a time. We look forward to seeing the industry shift from incremental progress to acceleration.
The CMS pledge is a lighthouse, useful for direction but not sufficient alone. The industry must shift from rhetorical commitment to real-world execution. CMS drew the roadmap, and we here at Vim are building infrastructure that is looking not only to comply with this roadmap, but also accelerate interoperability in a way care teams can learn to trust, so that patients can benefit, and innovators can build on.
