The clipboard was invented in 1921. It made its way into medical settings in 1928. Nearly a century later, it remains one of the most common pieces of technology in healthcare, and patients are still filling out the same forms, from memory, at every single visit.

That's the problem the CMS Kill the Clipboard initiative is trying to solve. And it's one we've signed on to help fix.

What the Initiative Actually Is

In mid-2025, CMS launched the Kill the Clipboard pledge as part of its broader Health Tech Ecosystem, calling on EHR vendors, health app developers, providers, and innovators to replace fragmented, repetitive intake processes with something that actually works for patients.

The pledge is straightforward: empower patients to retrieve their health records and share them with providers at the point of care, using QR codes or Smart Health Links. Walk into a clinic, scan your phone, and everything your doctor needs is already there. No clipboards. No faxes. No logging into three different portals.

Over 60 healthcare organizations have signed on, including Apple, Google, Samsung, CVS Health, UnitedHealth Group, Zocdoc, and b.well Connected Health as early adopters. Consolidate Health is now among the pledgees.

Why This Resonates With Us

Patient data access sits at the core of everything we do at Consolidate Health. We were founded on the belief that patients have a fundamental right to access their health information, and that the infrastructure to exercise that right should be simple, reliable, and available to any application that needs it. The Kill the Clipboard initiative applies that same belief to one of the most friction-filled moments in healthcare: the intake process.

Think about what actually happens when a patient fills out a clipboard form. They're being asked to recall, from memory, a complete account of their medical history, current medications, allergies, and recent procedures. Most people can't do this accurately. They forget medications, approximate dates, and omit conditions they don't think are relevant. The provider gets an incomplete picture before the visit even starts.

Meanwhile, all of that information already exists, documented and structured, in the patient's medical record. Asking patients to transcribe it by hand onto a form is one of the stranger inefficiencies in a system full of them.

What Progress Looks Like

The initiative is already producing real results. b.well Connected Health demoed its FHIR-native platform with Samsung Health at HIMSS earlier this year, giving Samsung Galaxy users access to a complete health history directly from their phone. Apple users can share health records with participating apps through existing iPhone functionality. Several organizations are actively building QR-based workflows so providers can incorporate patient-authorized information into their existing clinical systems.

Real workflows, in production, being used today. The momentum is genuine.

That said, the challenges are worth naming honestly. QR code and Smart Health Links infrastructure isn't yet widely integrated into most health systems. Provider workflows need to change. Front desk staff need training. EHRs need places to store and display patient-shared data. Identity verification adds complexity. And patient adoption drops quickly when apps are too complicated to use.

Deven McGraw of Citizen Health described the approach as closer to how tech companies operate, spending less time in the planning phase and moving more quickly to building, testing, and working out the kinks. That's a meaningful shift from how healthcare typically approaches new infrastructure, and it's part of why there's cautious optimism that this time things might actually move.

Where We Fit

Our role in this ecosystem is the data layer. When a patient wants to pull their records into an app and share them at the point of care, that data has to come from somewhere. It lives in EHR systems: Epic, Cerner, athena, eClinicalWorks, NextGen, Flatiron, and others. Getting it out in a clean, normalized, usable format is the infrastructure problem we've spent years solving.

Applications building for Kill the Clipboard workflows need patient-authorized access to clinical data across those systems, and that's exactly what our API provides. One integration, normalized data, patient authorization built in.

The Bigger Picture

Kill the Clipboard is, at its core, about returning control of health information to the people it belongs to. Patients shouldn't have to reconstruct their medical history from memory every time they see a new provider. They shouldn't be the ones responsible for bridging the gap between fragmented systems. Their data should follow them, securely and with their consent, wherever they need it to go.

That's the future we're building toward, and this pledge is one concrete step in that direction.