Robert F. Kennedy Jr. calls for wider access to US health data for research and AI

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the US health secretary, called for medical and lifestyle information to be linked and made more accessible to government and outside researchers, with AI used to search the data. His remarks at a September 28 health data summit matter to patients because the proposed wider access could involve records of care, prescriptions, insurance claims and immunizations. The Guardian reported his remarks on September 29.

Kennedy presented the approach as a way to study chronic disease and vaccine safety. He said researchers should be able to examine whether food, chemicals, vaccines and other environmental or lifestyle exposures contribute to illness. Those are questions he wants the data to address, not findings established by the summit.

What Kennedy wants connected

Kennedy said a person's health information should follow them wherever they go, according to the Guardian. He cited information from doctor visits and exercise alongside insurance claims and electronic health records. He described Medicaid data as useful for research and Medicare as a large source of information about older Americans and people with disabilities.

He also pointed to Food and Drug Administration systems that can link claims and electronic records for safety monitoring, and to commercial platforms that combine claims, prescriptions, laboratory results and health records. Kennedy said state datasets reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are inconsistent. Connecting immunization, clinical, laboratory, pharmacy and claims data, he argued, would offer a longer view of an individual's health.

AI and vaccine research

Kennedy said federal officials are already using AI to process health data. He claimed it could reduce work that once took years to seconds. The Guardian's account establishes that he made the claim; it does not provide an independent assessment of that speed or show whether faster searches produce reliable research results.

He listed research topics he said federal officials were examining, including comparisons between vaccinated and unvaccinated people, aluminum adjuvants, the timing of hepatitis B vaccination, and influenza, COVID-19 and HPV vaccines. He also described work on vaccination during pregnancy and later childhood outcomes. The reporting supplies no study protocols or results for those projects, so the topics should not be read as evidence of a link to any health outcome.

Kennedy said the administration had created an autism registry and launched studies of diet, electromagnetic fields, screen time and vaccines. He said officials wanted health data to be ready for access by hundreds of external researchers. No timetable, list of accessible fields or eligibility rules for that broader plan was reported.

Existing access and unanswered safeguards

Kennedy criticized access to the Vaccine Safety Datalink, saying he could not obtain its data after 2002 and calling its system unworkable. The CDC describes the datalink as a collaboration with healthcare organizations, established in 1990, that uses electronic health records to monitor vaccine safety. The agency says member-site researchers check records weekly for specified adverse events and investigate when a signal threshold is crossed.

The CDC says researchers outside the datalink network can request data from published studies through public-use datasets and a sharing program that requires a proposal and review. Its access page identifies two public-use datasets related to thimerosal exposure and autism or neuropsychological outcomes. That is access to specified material, not a general release of all patient records. The published rules alone do not settle Kennedy's account of his own access.

The stakes of wider sharing extend beyond research speed. Axios reported in June that GuardDog Telehealth admitted in a consent agreement to obtaining patient records under false pretenses and selling data to lawyers seeking class-action clients. That case concerns a separate data-sharing arrangement; it does not establish that Kennedy's proposed approach has caused a breach. It does show why the terms governing access and permitted uses matter.