Alliance for Connected Care Urges HHS to Modernize Payment and Regulation to Support Responsible AI-Enabled Care

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Alliance for Connected Care Urges HHS to Modernize Payment and Regulation to Support Responsible AI-Enabled Care

Washington, DC — The Alliance for Connected Care today submitted formal comments to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in response to the AI in Clinical Care Request for Information, calling for a modern, modality-agnostic regulatory and payment framework that enables responsible adoption of artificial intelligence in care delivery.

The Alliance recommends that HHS use its authority and work with Congress and states to advance the following objectives:

Strengthen virtual care foundations for AI-enabled care.
- Recognize AI-enabled care as a natural evolution of connected care, not a new kind of care in need of unique policy or regulatory solutions.
- Clear the decks on longstanding barriers to telehealth and remote patient monitoring that will be equally burdensome to the expansion of AI-enabled care.
- Avoid repeating the policymaking mistakes made in other digital health areas, where narrow allowances later hampered patient access.
Allow the integration of AI-enabled care into existing medical services, when clinically appropriate
- Pursue regulatory and reimbursement changes that allow for modality-agnostic care delivery to facilitate the expansion of AI-enabled care.
- Circumvent barriers like time-based reimbursement to the expansion of AI-enabled care.
- Further grow AI-enabled care delivery in models based on outcomes, where these changes can be made most easily.
- Enable innovative “regulatory sandboxes” that create AI regulatory relief pathways that allow for temporary exemptions from regulation, subject to rigorous due diligence, safety constraints, and narrowly scoped use cases at the state and federal level.

“AI has the potential to expand clinical capacity, strengthen patient engagement, and improve outcomes — but only if federal policy keeps pace,” said Chris Adamec, Executive Director of the Alliance for Connected Care. “We urge HHS to focus on outcomes, accountability, and program integrity while removing outdated telehealth-era barriers that limit innovation.”

“Patients are already turning to AI tools outside the medical system,” Adamec added. “Federal policy should empower clinicians to responsibly deploy these capabilities within the physician–patient relationship — not allow care to fragment outside of it.”

Read the full letter here or below: