At Health Evolution’s 2025 Summit, Dr. Mehmet Oz made his first public appearance as CMS Administrator—just days after his Senate confirmation to the role.
In a fireside chat moderated by Andy Slavitt, General Partner, Town Hall Ventures; Former Acting Administrator, CMS, Dr. Oz gave the Health Evolution Community the very first inside look into four key focus areas he plans to prioritize as CMS Administrator.
1. Prioritizing transparency
Dr. Oz emphasized the importance of making CMS’ objectives clear and accessible.
“I want to be very transparent and clear about where we’re headed because the complaint I used to have as a physician is I didn’t know what CMS was going to do,” he said.
Rather than operating within a “black box,” Dr. Oz said he wants to “host the process” as CMS Administrator. “That means you tell people where you’re going, so they’re not surprised,” he explained.
2. Fostering partnerships
As CMS Administrator, Dr. Oz said he wants to focus on encouraging interactions between CMS and industry leaders to help drive change.
“I want to figure out how best to make it exciting for leaders to engage with us, to recognize that we have a generational opportunity to change the system that we’ve all accepted as it has been,” he said.
Dr. Oz acknowledged that many people are unhappy with the current state of U.S. health care, but said he holds a “fundamental belief that leaders really care” about improving the health care system.
“Because of that, we’ll be able to make some of the seismic shifts that I think need to happen in the health care system in this country,” he said.
3. Improving health outcomes and measuring ‘value’
Dr. Oz said he is “strongly supportive of population health” and focused on addressing drivers of poor health outcomes. He noted that value-based care initiatives can help to drive that work. “Value-based care allows us to take a holistic approach,” he said. “The way that we pay for services and how we use that to incentivize certain behaviors and stimulate investment from health care leaders is going to be mission critical,” he added.
However, Dr. Oz noted that it is often difficult to measure the impact of value-based care initiatives. “Oftentimes, the things that we believe would lead to greater value don’t result in meaningful changes,” he said. “And if it’s meaningful, it should be measurable. So, we have got to either get better at measuring or more insightful about the kinds of things that make a difference.”
In addition to pursuing measurable interventions, Dr. Oz noted that CMS has an opportunity to encourage lifestyle changes aimed at improving outcomes.
In particular, he called out the role nutrition and exercise play in preventive medicine. “If two thirds of all the money we spend is for chronic illness and most chronic illnesses are accelerated or worsened with lifestyle decisions, we should be spending some effort on this,” he said.
4. Incentivizing innovation
While there are myriad challenges currently facing the health care system, Dr. Oz said he believes “we are able to change what seems to be a daunting reality.”
According to Dr. Oz, leveraging technology will be a vital part of driving meaningful change. “Technology can allow us to have a multiplier effect on whatever we want to do,” he said.
Dr. Oz said connecting with leaders in the artificial intelligence (AI) space is one of his top priorities. “We’re going to need to make it easier for AI to succeed,” he said.
Dr. Oz identified critical building blocks that need to be in place to help advance this work. For example, “we have to make the data that’s out there readily available,” he said, and to do that, “we have to have a mechanism for that data once it’s available.”
To that end, Dr. Oz said one of his key focus areas is encouraging and incentivizing both “incumbents and insurgents” to create innovative solutions.
“I want to make sure we have an honest, aggressive, free market system that is safely supporting the best ideas, so they rise to the top,” Dr. Oz said. He encouraged, “So, if you have good ideas, go get some money and develop them. And if you have money, find good ideas to support and allow those things to prosper, because we’re actively looking for those opportunities.”
-written by Health Evolution’s Alyssa Paulsen
