Support Act Roundtable: Remarks from Secretary Kennedy

I'm pleased to welcome Secretary Kennedy, co-chair of the Great American Recovery Initiative, to our discussion on how technology can unlock better outcomes and access to care for Americans struggling with mental health or the disease of addiction. Under Secretary Kennedy's leadership, HHS has a clear mission to follow gold standard science to end chronic diseases like addiction, to lower the cost of health care, and to help the American people live healthier and happier lives. The Secretary's work on dietary guidelines alone is a historic reset of federal nutrition policy with a clear, common-sense message, eat real food. At 72 years old, Secretary Kennedy is a picture of health and clearly practices what he preaches. I feel like I don't look so good sitting next to the man. However, for today's discussion, the Secretary's openness about his personal experience with addiction is a testament to the power of recovery. I have no doubt that the millions of Americans struggling with addiction could not have a better champion leading HHS than Secretary Kennedy. With that, please join me in welcoming Secretary Kennedy. Thank you all very much. Thank you for being here. I want to thank the Office of National Coordinator for Health IT, Tom Keene, for convening this meeting. I also want to be grateful to my co-chair, Katherine Burgum, who's been amazing, and to Patrick Kennedy, my cousin I know was here earlier and who spent his life thinking about addiction and how to address it. He's been an invaluable source of wisdom to all of us here since I came into office, and to all of you providers, developers, advocates, and public servants who are doing this work on the ground. We're here to focus on behavioral health, mental illness, and substance abuse, where failure has immediate and sometimes fatal consequences. Nearly 50 million Americans struggle with addiction across the country. Families are dealing with depression, anxiety, substance use disorders that often disrupt their lives, and too often we now are in a really a malaise, a spiritual malaise, where the highest cause of death to our teenagers is suicide. And too often our system is not helping, making those battles harder. The air is fragmented, data is siloed, providers lack critical information, patients fall through gaps that should not exist, and we're not going to accept that anymore. We're acting to fix it by improving coordination, enforcing accountability, and aligning the system around the patient. That starts with making health data work the way it should, secure, lawful, and available in real time to the patients and to the providers who he wants to provide it to. A patient walks into a clinic, the provider should focus on care, not on chasing records across a disconnected system. I go to recovery meetings every day, and I hear stories often of addicts who've been to 20, 30, 40, 50 different rehabs, and each one, and that's just a feature of this disease, the people tend to relapse and they tend to move around, and when that happens, the new treatment facility is starting afresh in many cases. It doesn't have the benefit of the medical records across time for that individual, and as a result of that, they're not allowed, they're not able to align treatment with things that other people have learned about the individual. And earlier this year, I signed a new regulation, 40 CFR Part 2, which will include law enforcement records in that health data. Those are private, remain private, but when the addict, the recovering addict, the treated addict, choose to share them, important things for the treatment personnel to understand and provide him the highest level of treatment, and that kind of coordination is critical to treatment, it's critical for all of us. Today, too many clinicians are forced to make decisions without a complete picture. This is inefficient and it's dangerous. The technology to solve that issue already exists. What's been missing is execution, and that's what we are driving now. Providers should have seamless access to all the information they need. Patients should control their own data, who sees it, how it's used, when, and that's informed consent, and without that, there's no trust, and without the trust, the system doesn't work. And as all of you know, the first step toward recovery is honest and rigorous honesty. And in order to measure whether the patient, whether the addict is being honest, very helpful, we see his entire track record. We're also pushing innovation directly into behavioral health. Where it has lagged for too long, through a $20 million initiative with SAMHSA, the Office of National Coordinator has launched pilot programs across the country to test new data sharing standards and strengthen integration between behavioral and physical health care. These pilots will produce the evidence we need to set stronger standards to refine our policies and scale whatever we find works to scale it nationwide. And we're already seeing that in progress in Florida, programs are connecting housing and job support services with mental health and substance use providers, recognizing that recovery depends on stability and not just treatment. In Massachusetts, public health officials are improving how we track substance use trends so that we can respond faster and more effectively. And in Connecticut, new electronic consent rules for giving patients greater control over how sensitive information is shared, all still enabling providers to deliver coordinated care. These are practical solutions, and they point the way forward. Better data will lead to better decisions and better outcomes. At the same time, we're expanding access to care. Public health has already transformed how services are delivered, especially in rural and underserved communities. It removes that barrier of distance and time that once required hours of traveling time can now happen in a single session over the cell phone or computer. And for many Americans, that difference will determine whether they get care at all. As all of you know, people who are addicted go through cycles of readiness to get help and then resistance to it. And it's critical that we can reach them in those little points of time where they've hit a bottom, they're ready to surrender, and they're ready to do whatever they need to do to get sober. I said some nice things about you. We're also advancing the careful use of artificial intelligence. AI can reduce administrative burden, eliminate redundancy, and support clinical decision making so providers can spend less time on paperwork and more time on patients. This agency has done more, I think, than anybody, maybe with the exception of the CIA or Pentagon, to drive AI into all of our functions in this agency, the diagnostics, the patients care, the record keeping, fraud detection, all of those different things. And we've recruited an extraordinary group of, I wouldn't call them nerds, but I'd say people from Silicon Valley who are very, very smart about AI and are really transforming this agency in the way that we deliver health care. And all of those things that we're doing in physical health are also applicable to mental health and addiction. AI can reduce administrative burdens, eliminate redundancy, and support clinical decision making so that providers spend less time on paperwork and more time with their patients. Used correctly, these tools will not replace physicians, but they're going to support them, and they're going to enable them to be more effective. This afternoon's discussion is about building those bridges forward. People who can build it are in this room right now. They're not working in theory. You're building systems that connect platforms that function and tools that are going to give us results for the future. And our role here at HHS is clear, which is to set the standards, enforce the law, remove barriers, and support innovation, and support all of you who are trying to improve the quality of care for addicts and for people who suffer from mental illness. We have the tools now, and we have the data. This is an inflection point, generational inflection point in history where people are frightened of AI with good reasons, but there's huge hope that we can use AI to actually reach people. There's so much fragmentation and alienation in our society today and isolation that ultimately is the cause of addiction. Addiction is a disconnection, and we need to figure out ways to restore a sense of community and restore interpersonal relationships. And as unlikely as it seems, you can use AI to do that. It can drive us apart, or it can bring us together, and we're trying to make sure that to optimize its use in bringing human beings together as a healing tool rather than a tool of control or domination. We have the expertise at this agency. We've recruited extraordinary people to do this. We're open to every kind of notion. There's nothing partisan about this issue. There's no such thing as Republican children or Democratic children. The people that we brought into this agency are every stripe. We want to solve this problem. We want to make a difference. We want to change the way that addiction is treated, and we want to find new paths to healing our country and ending this spiritual malaise and bring us all together again. So I want to thank all of you for the thought and energy and the personal devotion that you've put into this mission, and to tell you that we are here to help you. We want to listen to every good idea and figure out if there's a way we can do that. So thank you all very much for coming here today. Thank you for your commitment. MR. Secretary Kennedy, I want to thank you for your remarks, and I think that the Americans who suffer from substance use disorder and mental illness could have no better an advocate in the office of the Secretary than yourself. And thank you for everything you do. MR. Thank you. Thank all of you for being here. MR. Thank you.