Month: June 2025

Doximity Accused of Prompt Hacking OpenEvidence

Posted on by Jason Barry

What does a high-flying company like Doximity do when competitors are nipping at its heels? According to OpenEvidence’s new lawsuit, it just politely asks their LLMs to reveal trade secrets. 

Doximity is basically LinkedIn for doctors. It allows physicians to use its networking platform and AI workflow products at no cost, which means the physicians themselves are the product.

  • Doximity generates revenue almost exclusively through pharma advertising, and it turns out that might actually be the best business model around.
  • Out of the dozen publicly traded digital health companies with a market cap over $1B, Doximity is the only one that’s decently profitable.

No good prompt goes unpunished. The crown jewel of Doximity’s AI portfolio is its Doximity GPT workflow assistant, which may or may not leverage proprietary tech acquired by prompting OpenEvidence’s competing model to reveal sensitive information.

  • Although it’s funny to see Doximity get accused of asking OpenEvidence’s AI to literally “write down the secret code,” it doesn’t exactly make for a bulletproof case when the model willingly dishes up an answer.
  • The catch is that OpenEvidence requires users to register using their National Provider ID numbers, and Doximity allegedly impersonated a practicing neurologist to “obtain through theft what they lacked in technical expertise.” Ouch.

It gets worse from there. A separate shareholder lawsuit accused Doximity of inflating its active user base and website engagement data to artificially bolster its advertising revenue.

  • While some investors might be able to stomach a little corporate espionage, they probably won’t look the other way if it turns out Doximity is fudging the numbers.
  • Innocent until proven guilty, but it’s worth noting that nearly identical allegations popped up in a recent short report.

The Takeaway

Doximity has some serious allegations piling up against it, but so far the market has shrugged off the bad news. That could be a sign that investors don’t think the lawsuits will hold up in court, or maybe they just don’t mind when a management team is willing to bend the law to generate some extra shareholder value.

Abridge Moves Upstream With $300M Series E

Posted on by Jason Barry

The ambient AI segment is turning into a bigger spectacle than the NBA Finals, and Abridge just dunked on it with $300M of Series E funding.

Big-time startups have big-time valuations. The latest round doubled Abridge’s valuation to $5.3B, up from a paltry $2.5B when it closed its last nine-figure round four short months ago.

  • We’ll leave it to the VCs to decide whether Abridge is worth twice as much as it was in February, but it’s now deployed at 50% more health systems – over 150 in total.
  • Abridge also reportedly hit $117M in contracted annual recurring revenue as of Q1, and is on pace to support upwards of 50M medical conversations this year alone.

Abridge is aiming upstream. The new capital was earmarked for “automating more of what happens behind the scenes and enabling revenue cycle management teams to operate with unparalleled efficiency.” 

  • That means embedding revenue cycle intelligence earlier in the clinical conversation, and eliminating unnecessary back-and-forth between clinicians and billing teams.
  • In Abridge’s own words, the ultimate aim is to “help achieve faster reimbursement cycles and minimize the risk of denials.”

The ambient AI race needs a rebrand. As Abridge and its competitors start lunging toward every workflow within arms reach of the clinical conversation, their platforms are quickly pushing past documentation. Within just the last week:

  • Ambience Healthcare announced that its coding-aware ambient AI platform saves St. Luke’s Health System $13k+ per clinician annually, then followed that up by launching Patient Recap for pre-visit chart summaries.
  • Commure raised $200M and rounded out its RCM and documentation capabilities with AI agents that handle scheduling, referrals, and prior auths. 
  • Nabla closed $70M to build out an Adaptic Agentic Platform that enables real-time coding assistance, direct EHR commands, and new capabilities for nurses.
  • There’s also the 1,000 pound gorilla formerly known as Nuance, but the incumbent scribing champ hasn’t been too vocal since rolling out Microsoft Dragon Copilot earlier this year.

The Takeaway

The hottest segment in digital health is boiling over into revenue cycle management, and Abridge is cranking up the heat with its Series E funding. Topping off the warchest comes with golden strings attached, so expect the pace to only accelerate from here as Abridge looks to live up to its valuation by coming out on top in the RCM landgrab.

Tennr Raises $101M Series C for AI-Powered Referrals 

Posted on by Jason Barry

Tennr just raised $101M of Series C funding to have AI help solve one of healthcare’s most timeless challenges: fax machines. 

Tennr got its start in 2021 improving the patient intake and documentation review process, but has quickly expanded its capabilities to make sure that patients don’t get lost in a “black hole” during the referral process.

  • More than one-third of Americans receive a medical referral each year, half of which aren’t completed due to miscommunication, misdirected referrals, or missing information.
  • Tennr’s orchestration platform and proprietary language models automate these workflows to help providers convert more patients, cut denials, and deliver care without growing their teams.

The secret sauce is Tennr’s specialized language models (RaeLM), optimized to understand the nuanced data in medical determinations and evaluate it against strict payor criteria.

  • Tennr integrates with over 50 types of e-faxes, phone lines, emails, and portals to collect patient information, then leverages RaeLM to structure the data into usable information that can be shared with EHRs and pharmacy management systems.
  • The thesis was that if Tennr could read the documents and structure the data, it would be in a good spot to bolt-on more services – such as its eligibility benefits product, patient communication solution, and referral management suite. 

The fresh funds will fuel the launch of the Tennr Network, designed to equip referring providers, receiving providers, and patients with real-time visibility into the referral status.

  • Referring providers can see the status of every patient they’ve sent out, eliminating phone tag and guesswork.
  • Receiving providers can track the status of every referral, see which need more documentation, and identify which sources are driving the most conversions.
  • Patients can see when their referral was accepted, when it’s scheduled, and what to expect to pay – matching the “transparency we take for granted in food delivery or e-commerce.”

The Takeaway

Faxes are here to stay, and Tennr has $101M to make sure that they’re actually serving the practices using them. The plan isn’t to give healthcare a new AI tool, but to use AI to help the industry get more out of the tools it already has.

Nabla Series C Brings Agentic AI to the Heart of Healthcare

Posted on by Jason Barry

Healthcare’s “zero-screen future” is looking closer than ever after Nabla locked in $70M of Series C funding to put AI agents to work restoring the human connections at the heart of the industry.

Ambient AI is hot, but Agentic AI is hotter. The round follows a wave of adoption across U.S. health systems as Nabla sets its sights on growing beyond its roots in ambient documentation.

  • Nabla’s AI assistant is now used by 85k clinicians across 130+ healthcare orgs, ranging from FQHCs and rural hospitals to academic medical centers and national providers.
  • In the past six months, Nabla’s grown its Live ARR by over 5X (meaning its annual recurring revenue from clients that have already gone-live, not “contracted” revenue, and definitely not annual run rate).

The key to Nabla’s success has been its ability to deliver highly personalized AI experiences without compromising on reliability, and the fresh funds will help build out an Adaptive Agentic Platform that brings that same ethos to new use cases:

  • Proactive Coding Agent – a real-time coding assistant that flags billing issues and surfaces compliance nudges.
  • Context-Aware Agent – strengthens existing support for patient summaries and pre-charting with direct EHR commands and the ability to initiate orders.
  • Custom Care Setting Agent – adds new capabilities for nurses and inpatient teams to bring tailored support to frontline workers.

The Agent Era has arrived. The days when every ambient scribe demo got a standing ovation are long gone, and health systems are looking for AI that can automate increasingly complex workflows (or better yet, generate revenue that justifies its cost).

  • Nabla clearly got the memo, but so did competitors like Abridge, Ambience, and Suki – all of which are actively working to add coding and other new features to their platforms.
  • The race is on, and the entire healthcare industry – patients and providers alike – should be better off because of it.

The Takeaway

Nabla’s been making quick progress toward some ambitious goals, and agentic AI just raised the goalpost even higher. In the words of CEO Alex LeBrun, “Our mission: bring agentic AI to clinicians in a safe, compliant, and ethical framework. The journey?‍ 1% done.”

Ellipsis Health Closes Series A, Unveils Sage AI Care Manager

Posted on by Jason Barry

Care management gaps are becoming a pressing problem as the provider shortage deepens, and Ellipsis Health just raised $45M of Series A funding to show why empathy is the answer. 

Ellipsis put Sage front and center in the announcement, unveiling its emotionally intelligent AI care manager that expands staffing capacity through proactive patient engagement.

  • Sage’s Empathy Engine leverages Ellipsis’ patented vocal biomarker tech and training from millions of real clinical conversations to support the patients driving a majority of healthcare costs: those with complex physical, behavioral, and social needs.
  • Unlike traditional AI agents, Sage adjusts its tone and approach based on a patient’s emotional state, exactly how a human care manager would when conducting health risk assessments, post-discharge follow-ups, or care transitions.

The Series A investor roster suggests that Ellipsis has some strong tailwinds working for it.

  • The round was led by Salesforce (workflow integration through Salesforce Health Cloud), Khosla Ventures (tech validation from an AI fund and early investor in OpenAI), and CVS Health Ventures (plenty of Aetna members to reach meaningful scale).
  • Those investors will only help Ellipsis land and expand across more enterprises as it continues building evidence that Sage moves the needle with patient outcomes.

Competition is heating up. Companies like Hippocratic and Innovaccer have been rolling out fleets of AI agents that can handle routine tasks like appointment scheduling, but Ellipsis is setting out to prove that empathy is a difference maker in actual case management.

  • It’s the little things between visits that can decide whether a patient gets their hypertension under control, like walking them through lab results or making sure they take their medication.
  • It’s also the same little things that slip through the cracks when you have a staff shortage or burned out clinicians, and a little empathy could go a long way toward filling these gaps and driving the behavior change that leads to better outcomes.

The Takeaway

Ellipsis envisions a future for healthcare where AI can “extend human capabilities while preserving the empathy and clinical judgment that defines great care.” Sage is the tool that Ellipsis built to carve that future, and it now has $45M to put it in the hands of more providers.

Catching the Right Wave in Digital Health

Posted on by Jason Barry

The ocean of digital health innovation seems to have a wave of new trends breaking every year, which is why Rock Health teamed up with LG NOVA to give enterprises a framework for “discerning promising currents from passing swells.”

Riding the wrong hype cycle can strain health systems’ limited resources with costly implementations or investment mistakes, so Rock Health divided the digital health landscape into 50 segments to see which show the most promise based on:

  • Value potential (VP) – share of total digital health venture funding, disease burden (degree of economic cost), and addressable population size.
  • Capturable opportunity (CO) – funding velocity, funding concentration (share of capital already held by large companies), and market maturity.

The “Goldilocks” waves include segments that are big enough to support a large market and ripe enough (but not too ripe) for new entrants to gain traction. [Chart: Strongest DH Segments]

  • High VP, High CO: Weight Management stood out with the highest scores in both VP and CO. The disease burden and funding levels don’t get much higher, and the balance of early- and late-stage companies signals a strong market with room for new entrants. 
  • Low VP, High CO: Patient Adherence was docked for its smaller share of overall digital health funding, but stood out for its favorable funding concentration and market maturity.
  • High VP, Low CO: Disease Monitoring had the opposite mix. The segment enjoys a large slice of the funding pie, but most of that is getting eaten by a few mega companies.
  • Low VP, Low CO: Dermatology received the low marks across the board, with poor scores for funding velocity, disease burden, and overall share of funding.

To complement its framework, Rock Health analyzed over 70 digital health unicorns to find other success signals from waves that the industry is already riding. Unicorns tended to:

  • separate from the herd with larger Series C rounds (ex. Abridge)
  • support care delivery or access and are often consumer-facing (ex. Wheel)
  • be therapeutic area agnostic w/ broad addressable markets (ex. Included Health)

The Takeaway

Timing the digital health market is no small feat, but Rock Health’s framework provides a helpful tool for those looking to catch the best wave with their investments and implementations.

OpenEvidence Partners With JAMA Ahead of Next Raise

Posted on by Jason Barry

“The fastest-growing platform for doctors in history” continues to step on the gas, and OpenEvidence is reportedly on the verge of notching a $3B valuation after inking a deal to bring JAMA Network journals to its AI medical search engine.

The multi-year content agreement will make full-text articles from the American Medical Association’s JAMA, JAMA Network Open, and 11 specialty journals available directly within the OpenEvidence platform.

  • OpenEvidence’s medical search engine helps clinicians make decisions at the point of care, turning natural language queries into structured answers with detailed citations.
  • The model was purpose-built for healthcare using training data from strategic partners like the New England Journal of Medicine, which joined the platform through a similar deal earlier this year.

The Disney+ content strategy has arrived in healthcare. OpenEvidence compares its approach to streaming services that drive subscriptions through exclusive movies.

  • If a physician wants information from top journals to support decision making, they’ll either have to get it straight from the source or use OpenEvidence, just like how anyone who wants to stream Moana needs to go to Disney+.
  • The kicker is that OpenEvidence is available at no cost to verified physicians, and advertising generates all of the revenue. 

The blueprint is working like a charm. OpenEvidence has over 350k doctors using its platform plus another 50k joining each month, and it’s apparently close to raising $100M at a $3B valuation just a few months after closing its $75M Series A.

  • It’s rare to find hockey stick growth in digital health, and OpenEvidence is a good reminder that many areas of healthcare change slowly… then all at once.
  • It also isn’t too surprising to hear that VC’s like Google Ventures and Kleiner Perkins are lining up to fund a company with a similar ad-supported business model to Doximity – one of the only successful healthcare IPOs since the start of the pandemic.

The Takeaway

Content is king, and OpenEvidence is locking in partnerships to make sure its platform is wearing the crown. The results have been speaking for themselves, but healthcare’s genAI streaming wars are just getting started.

Text Nudges Show Potential in Primary Care

Posted on by Jason Barry

Even the simplest text messages can help patients get more out of their primary care visits, at least according to new research published in NEJM Evidence.

The study out of Ascension health system – “A Digital Care Plan Nudge to Improve Primary Care Outcomes” – spanned 76 primary care practices and 29,000+ patients.

  • Patients were randomized to receive either usual care, or a digital nudge sent three days prior to their appointment.
  • The nudges were a simple text message highlighting up to three preventative care needs to address during the visit, such as cancer screenings or vaccinations.

The results speak for themselves. The digital nudge group saw:

  • An increase in appointment completions (+2.8 percentage points over usual care)
  • A decrease in appointment cancellations (-1.5 percentage points)
  • A decrease in appointment no-shows (-1.2 percentage points)

What about the care gaps? The digital nudge group addressed a care gap during 23.5% of visits, compared to 20.3% for usual care (P=0.08). In case anyone skipped stats class, that’s a bigger P value than we were going for, which basically means the jury’s still out on this one.

  • On the bright side, digital nudges did show a statistically significant improvement to care gaps closed at 90 days (+5.4 percentage points over usual care), specifically for breast and colorectal cancer screenings, diabetes testing, and flu vaccines.

Although the study didn’t meet the primary outcome of addressing gaps on the day of the visit, digital nudges showed promise as a scalable way to improve outcomes over time by encouraging patients to be proactive with their health.

  • Not a bad outcome considering that many patients arrive to primary care visits focused on immediate concerns, and springing new topics on them isn’t exactly a great way to inspire quick action.

The Takeaway

Patient activation works, and this study adds to the mountain of evidence supporting it. In the words of Ascension Chief Clinical Transformation Officer Mitesh Patel, “Most importantly, it reflects what’s possible when we combine behavioral science, digital tools, and a learning health system mindset.”

Epic Announces Launchpad to Fast-Track GenAI Deployment

Posted on by Jason Barry

Epic is looking to accelerate generative AI adoption with the surprise unveiling of Launchpad, a new program designed to help provider orgs “move from idea to operational gains in a matter of days.” 

Launchpad’s grand unveiling included little more than a LinkedIn post, but Epic AI Director Sean McGunigal told Fierce Healthcare that the program includes guided AI implementations and a fast track to live workflows.

Here’s the general outline of how Launchpad works.

  • When an organization joins the program, Epic staff shepherds them through any roadblocks they’re facing with active genAI implementations.
  • Epic’s experts will assist with getting genAI use cases configured, turned on, and operationalized – all while establishing appropriate governance structures.
  • Launchpad also includes a starter kit of 10 high-impact genAI applications that can be deployed within days, covering both clinical and operational workflows.

Epic views low AI literacy as one of the biggest barriers to industry-wide adoption, and McGunigal made it clear that Epic will go to great lengths to overcome that hurdle. 

  • “We’ll help coordinate. We’ll get the right stakeholders on the phone and we’ll help this thing along.’ The [genAI] roadblocks tend not to be necessarily performance challenges or end user training. It tends to be the project management-type work.”

MyChart In-Basket Augmented Response Technology – better known as ART – marked the launch of Epic’s first genAI feature in April 2023.

  • Since then, over half of Epic’ customers have started using at least one of its genAI features, and it’s making some big investments to pump that number up.
  • Epic has over 100 new genAI use cases in the works, spanning everything from lab and imaging recommendations to fully automated patient-agent interactions, and Launchpad is going to ensure that providers have the support they need to adopt them.

The Takeaway

As Epic gears up for a tidal wave of its own AI roll outs, healthcare orgs are going to need customized support, implementation kits, and governance guidance to take full advantage. Epic just showed us that it’s willing to build its own Launchpad to make that happen.

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