Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called for a major expansion of health data collection and sharing across federal agencies and state systems during a Monday speech at a MAHA Institute event.

Kennedy described the initiative as essential to investigating the chronic disease epidemic affecting Americans. He argued that linking fragmented records from doctor visits, immunizations, lab results, pharmacy data, claims information, and even lifestyle factors like exercise would allow researchers and artificial intelligence tools to identify contributors such as diet, chemicals, vaccines, and environmental exposures.

"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.

The proposal builds on earlier efforts by the Trump administration to improve data access through Medicare and Medicaid programs, which cover hundreds of millions of lives including tens of millions of children. Kennedy highlighted these datasets as valuable for long-term studies.

The plan emphasizes giving individuals greater control over their personal records while making aggregated, de-identified information available to physicians, independent researchers, and government scientists. Sources would include state health information exchanges, electronic health records, laboratories, and commercial platforms.

Supporters frame the effort as part of the Make America Healthy Again agenda to modernize surveillance and uncover root causes of illness that prior systems have overlooked. Previous partnerships between the National Institutes of Health and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have already begun analyzing data from autistic enrollees to study diagnosis trends and outcomes.

Critics have raised privacy concerns about scaling access to identifiable records, though Kennedy's remarks stressed compliance with existing laws and individual consent mechanisms. The initiative aligns with broader administration goals of transparency and data-driven policy on public health issues.