RFK Jr outlines plan to pool Americans’ health data

US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr has outlined a plan to link US health data and use AI to analyse medical and lifestyle information.

Kennedy said data held across government and healthcare systems should be connected and shared with independent researchers, with AI used to search for patterns linked to chronic disease.

Speaking at an event hosted by the Maha Institute, he said health information could be brought together to provide a fuller picture of individual health over time.

“We need to use America’s health data to determine whether the food we eat, the chemicals we encounter, the vaccines that we’re administering, the other environmental and lifestyle exposures are contributing in one way or another to the chronic disease epidemic,” Kennedy said.

His plans include linking data held by agencies including the Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

“Your health information should follow you wherever you go,” he said.

Kennedy said providers, insurers and technology companies were developing portable health record apps that could make records easier for individuals to access while also opening them to governmental and outside use.

He said Medicaid and Medicare records could be used to examine health outcomes over long periods.

FDA monitoring systems can link insurance claims with electronic health records for safety surveillance, while commercial platforms can combine claims, prescriptions, laboratory results and health records, Kennedy said.

He also argued that inconsistencies between state-level datasets limit their usefulness for analysing health trends at scale.

“Too many of those systems remain siloed and cannot give us the real-time information we need to understand health at scale,” Kennedy said.

He said wider access to state health data could connect immunisation records, clinical information, laboratory results, pharmacy data and insurance claims “to create a more complete picture of a patient’s health over a long period of time”.

Federal officials are already using AI to analyse health information, according to Kennedy.

“Studies that used to take years, you can do them literally in seconds. You can ask questions and you can get immediate answers, and that’s what we’re doing today.”

Kennedy said AI could identify patterns across large numbers of health records that would be difficult to detect manually.

“It can help researchers find patterns across millions of health histories that human beings could never find by reading those records one at a time,” he said.

He said current work includes studies examining diet, electromagnetic fields, screen time and vaccines in relation to illness.

Federal officials are also using vaccine safety systems, Medicaid and Medicare data to study health outcomes associated with vaccination, including vaccination during pregnancy and childhood outcomes.