Medicare has never paid for a wellness app, a wearable, or a chronic-care coaching platform on its own terms — until now. In April, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) confirmed it had accepted more than 150 providers and digital health companies into its new ACCESS Model, a payment program that launches this July and runs for 10 years. For an industry that has spent a decade building tools without a reliable route to reimbursement, this is the door opening.

It's also, for most of the companies walking through it, a door they've never opened before.

What the ACCESS Model actually pays for

ACCESS stands for Advancing Chronic Care with Effective, Scalable Solutions — a model run by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) that gives participants recurring monthly payments for using digital health technology to manage Medicare beneficiaries with chronic conditions, including diabetes, chronic kidney disease, hypertension, anxiety and depression.

The catch is in the payment structure. Under the model's Outcome-Aligned Payments, companies only earn their full reimbursement when patients hit defined health outcomes — for example, a participant managing hypertension must help a patient lower their blood pressure by a set threshold to collect full payment. Base rates are modest, reportedly running from roughly $7.50 to $35 per beneficiary per month depending on the clinical track. This isn't a usage-based subscription fee model. It's pay-for-performance, administered by the federal government, at Medicare scale.

Who's already in the room

The accepted cohort mixes hospital-affiliated groups and community health centers with a much larger share of tech-enabled care companies and virtual care startups. Named participants include Noom, the weight management company; Verily, Alphabet's life sciences arm; and Whoop, the wearable maker — none of which were built as Medicare businesses. Companies that missed the initial window still have a path in, with later applications considered for a January 2027 start.

The gap nobody's commercial deck accounts for

Here's the detail that matters most for hiring: most of the accepted organizations have never previously served Medicare beneficiaries, according to CMS. Before they can collect a dollar, they need to enroll in Medicare Part B as providers or suppliers where required, meet CMS licensure, data privacy and security standards, and stand up outcomes-reporting infrastructure that can withstand federal scrutiny.

That's a fundamentally different operating model than the one most digital health commercial teams were built for. A company that has spent years selling B2B2C through employers or D2C through app stores now needs people who understand Medicare enrollment, payer contracting, and outcomes-based reimbursement — skill sets that live in market access, health economics and outcomes research (HEOR), and regulatory/compliance functions, not in growth marketing.

What this means for hiring in the next 12 months

Expect three roles to get harder to fill and more expensive to get wrong:

Market access and payer strategy leads who've actually navigated CMS enrollment and value-based contracting will be in high demand from companies that have never needed that expertise in-house before. Outcomes and clinical evidence teams will need to prove — with defensible data — that their tool moves the specific metric CMS is paying on, whether that's blood pressure, A1C, or a depression screening score. And compliance and regulatory affairs hires will need to bridge digital health's move-fast culture with Medicare's documentation-heavy requirements around privacy, security and licensure.

For companies that get this right, ACCESS is a 10-year, federally backed reimbursement pathway that has eluded digital health for years. For companies that treat it as a commercial afterthought, the outcomes-based payment structure will expose the gap quickly — and publicly, given CMS's own oversight of the model.

The talent question is now a timing question

The organizations best positioned heading into launch aren't necessarily the ones with the most sophisticated technology — they're the ones building commercial, market access and outcomes-reporting capability alongside it. If your team is newly navigating Medicare for the first time, the war for that specific mix of talent — people who speak both "digital health" and "CMS" fluently — has already started.

44 International specializes in connecting life sciences and MedTech companies with the talent that scales with them. If your organization is building out commercial, market access, or outcomes-reporting capability for Medicare's ACCESS Model, let's talk.

Sources: Emily Olsen, "CMS accepts more than 150 providers, digital health firms for ACCESS model," Healthcare Dive, April 14, 2026. CMS ACCESS Model Accepted Applicants, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.