Month: December 2025

8VC’s Vision for Healthcare AI in America

Posted on by Jason Barry

8VC just dropped its Vision for Healthcare AI in America, and it’s the best roadmap we’ve seen for removing the barriers between AI and its potential to transform medicine.

Great cakes have three layers, maybe four. Before 8VC shared its recipe for how AI can help fix things, it laid out the four main ingredients that it’ll be working with.

  • Level 0: Administrative – AI that supports providers in the back office. Example: AI scheduling agents, scribes.
  • Level 1: Assistive – AI that assists clinicians but doesn’t diagnose, treat, or triage, or prescribe medications to patients. Example: AI coaches, navigators.
  • Level 2: Supervised Autonomous – AI that does all the things that Level 1 doesn’t, with decisions supervised by a clinician. Example: AI medication management.
  • Level 3: Autonomous – AI that diagnoses, treats, triages, or prescribes medications completely on its own. Example: fully-autonomous triage lines.

Now for the vision. Most healthcare AI solutions currently live on Level 0. They’re creating real value for providers, but they aren’t going to steer the Titanic away from the iceberg.

  • 8VC thinks the other levels might, but not unless we remove the legal barriers that are preventing our innovators from innovating.

Level 1. These solutions exist today, but assistive AI care models are being held back by a lack of broadly billable CPT codes for the services they render.

  • Solution: Implement value-based reimbursement for assistive AI care models. 8VC describes a CMMI model with durable codes and case rates, which sounds like something most payors would be lining up to lobby for.

Level 2. All autonomous AI is considered Software as a Medical Device by the FDA, but the current performance bars are set too high. Driving tests don’t need to be F1 races.

  • Solution: Align FDA approval benchmarks with real-world standards, not hypothetical ideals. LumineticsCore is a good example – the FDA required the tool to catch at least 85% of diabetic retinopathy cases, but most ophthalmologists land between 33-77%. 

Level 3. Only a few policy changes are needed to open the door to Level 3 once we get to Level 2, the biggest of which is defining AI as a type of practitioner that’s eligible for reimbursement.

  • Solution: Amend the Social Security Act to allow Medicare reimbursement for licensed AI. As it stands today, even if CMS created a code for a Level 3 service, it would still be illegal for Medicare to pay an AI company instead of the supervising physician.

The Takeaway

AI is going to have to level up if we want to transform healthcare experiences, costs, and ultimately outcomes. 8VC thinks we can get there if we let our builders build, and it even gave us a blueprint for getting out of our own way.

Rock Health: Innovation at the Turn of 2026

Posted on by Jason Barry

Rock Health is wrapping up the year in style by updating its Innovation Maturity Curve with the hottest trends of 2025 and sharing its predictions for what lies ahead.

The curve uses three major data points to plot innovation:

  • Research volume – gauges the potential of a topic through PubMed publications.
  • Venture funding – tracks investment as a leading indicator of commercial interest.
  • Partnership activity – uses industry partnerships as a proxy for commercial traction.

The pace is picking up. Here’s a look at the categories that defined the year:

Longevity (Maturity Score: Developing) – Companies are pushing past one-off diagnostics to see whether personalized baselines can anchor ongoing care. Function Health just hauled in a massive $298M Series B for its “operating system for human health,” and other players like Hone Health have started expanding their models with in-home services.

  • Keep an eye on: How much will insights on hormones or heart health translate into adjustments that patients actually act on? Rock Health expects this segment to hinge on turning long-arc patterns into timely guidance that’s both credible and valuable.

Mental Health Chatbots (Maturity Score: Emerging) – Some AI chatbots might be shutting down, but just as many are doubling down. Slingshot burst onto the scene with $93M to build “the world’s first foundation model for psychology,” and incumbents like Spring Health have even started launching bots to evaluate the safety of other bots.

  • Keep an eye on: Regulatory scrutiny is intensifying as states begin banning AI-driven therapy. Some startups might be able to navigate the roadblocks, but Rock Health thinks others might pivot to lower-risk territory like keeping patients engaged between visits.

Health Benefits 2.0 (Maturity Score: Emerging) – OOP spending continues to climb, while employers just notched the steepest benefit cost increase in 15 years. Those pressures cracked a window for non-traditional models to gain traction, such as ICHRA frontrunners Thatch and Venteur.

  • Keep an eye on: The benefits pressure cooker is heating up in 2026, which means this category isn’t going anywhere. As more costs shift to consumers, Rock Health anticipates the benefits experience to start looking even more like a set of adjacent marketplaces rather than a single plan.

The Takeaway 

Digital health is moving faster than ever, and AI is only going to keep accelerating innovation. Rock Health’s full report is well worth checking out for more details on these categories and other up-and-coming segments like wearables (smart rings are especially hot), precision medicine (digital twins had a big year), and climate health (think allergies and air pollution).

Artera Raises $65M and Hits Nine-Figure CARR

Posted on by Jason Barry

Patient communications still feel stuck in the Dark Ages, which is why Artera.io just raised $65M to flip on the AI-powered floodlights.

We need to work on communication. Healthcare’s “communication crisis” can be traced back to a couple distinct challenges.

  • Outdated Infrastructure – Despite all the press releases bludgeoning us with “cloud-native” marketing copy, most providers still rely on legacy on-premise systems that cause administrative headaches with clunky integration requirements.
  • Too Many Fish in the Sea – There’s been an explosion of new vendors since the start of the pandemic. Many of them have the technical expertise to securely communicate sensitive patient information. Many of them don’t.

One part engagement, one part infrastructure. Artera tackles these issues the only way any self-respecting innovator would in 2025: AI agents. 

  • Harmony is the baseline infrastructure. The platform orchestrates agents, texts, and emails to solve any patient access problem under the sun – from scheduling and reminders to intake and payments.
  • The AI agents are the boots on the ground. Artera has generative AI Agents to tackle voice and text conversations, rules-based Flows Agents to automate routine tasks, and staff Co-Pilots for admin support and insights.

Experience makes all the difference. Unlike the fresh crop of LLM-era comms startups, Artera has a decade of experience and conversations with 200M unique patients, which has put it within arms reach of $100M in contracted ARR.

  • The new kids on the block are hungry and well-funded, but Artera has a trove of training data to differentiate its agents and a wide distribution network that already trusts them with their patient relationships.
  • Artera still has to prove that a 10-year head start is worth more than being “AI-native,” but it has over 1k health systems, FQHCs, and federal agency customers to help it make its case.

The Takeaway

The patient’s experience depends on the vendor’s experience, and Artera has more time in the communication trenches than almost anyone else. That’s already translated to nine-figure success, but the growth funding should only add gas to the fire.

AI Scribes Aren’t Productivity Tools, Yet

Posted on by Jason Barry

The first randomized controlled trials for ambient AI have finally arrived, and NEJM AI just gave us the strongest evidence yet that scribes deliver… minimal time savings.

The first study was a mixed bag. UCLA researchers assigned 238 physicians across 14 specialties to one of two scribes – Microsoft DAX and Nabla – or usual care for two months.

  • Nabla ended up saving about 23 seconds per visit, while DAX shaved off a whopping 5 seconds (which wasn’t even statistically significant).
  • Both scribe groups did however report less burnout and reduced cognitive burden than the usual care controls.

The second study told a similar tale. Physicians at the University of Wisconsin that used Abridge’s AI scribe for 6 weeks trimmed their daily documentation time by 22 minutes.

  • Still not a world-changing difference, but the UW physicians also saw significant positive improvements in work exhaustion and well-being.

But wait, there’s more. While those studies didn’t go as far as to suggest a cause for the lackluster time savings, a separate well-timed study from Navina offered a possible mechanism.

  • Scribes capture clinical conversations. Those conversations only inform a piece of the note, and those notes are only a piece of the workflow.
  • Navina found that incorporating patient medical histories into ambient documentation dramatically improves both note completeness and quality, which also seems like a great way to help physicians avoid lengthy manual chart reviews to fill any remaining gaps.

Then why do scribes get rave reviews? That’s a mystery that’s still up for debate.

  • It’s worth noting that “average time savings” include plenty of physicians who barely used the scribe. UCLA only had about a third of physicians pick up the tools, while UW was close to a best-case scenario at 71%.
  • It’s also possible that physicians enjoy not having to hold the visit in their head until they can finish their note, and getting rid of that burden is as magical as actual time savings.

The Takeaway

Not everything that can be measured matters, and not everything that matters can be measured. AI scribes might not be productivity tools quite yet, but physicians are clearly finding plenty of reasons to love them until they get there – even if more time isn’t one of them.

Curative Hits Unicorn Status With Series B Raise

Posted on by Jason Barry

Few COVID testing companies made it past the pandemic. Even fewer pivoted to a new model and found success. Only one became a payor with a unicorn horn. Curative.

Curative is reimagining health benefits, without OOP costs. It also landed $150M of Series B funding and a $1.3B valuation from investors that seem confident it can pull it off. 

  • When the end of the pandemic brought Curative’s testing days along with it, the leadership team began looking for the highest impact way to focus its expertise (and freshly-lined pockets).
  • They opted for hard work over an easy next chapter, and decided to go after the area “with the most leverage to really change healthcare” – spinning up their own payor.

The idea was simple. 

  • The majority of payor costs are driven by a small slice of expensive members.
  • The tiny amount of preventative care that gets done hardly helps to prevent that.
  • This is also a capital-intensive segment with a bit of a PR problem (to put it lightly).
  • That means startups might be able to make a dent, if they can find the resources.

The execution is harder. Curative decided that the best way to put its COVID coffers to use was to find a way to drive the preventative care that can actually balance the payor equation.

  • Long story short, it pulled it off, and the breakthrough raised plenty of eyebrows. “No copays. No deductibles. No…really.”

There’s always a catch. The only thing Curative members need to do to eliminate their OOP costs is complete an annual baseline visit within 120 days of their plan’s start date.

  • Turns out that’s a pretty good incentive. Most members complete the visit, allowing them to use their “Zero Card” to have Curative cover OOP costs for providers in their network (including office visits, behavioral health, and even some specialty services).

The math checks out. The baseline visits allow Curative to meet its members, understand their needs, and set their health journeys on the right path. 

  • That’s led to a 20% lift in primary care engagement, a 30% reduction in hospitalizations, and 40% lower drug costs within a year of a group joining the plan.
  • Since making the big pivot less than three years ago, Curative has scaled to over 1,200 employer clients and 165k+ members. It’s also hit profitability in the process.

The Takeaway

The payor market is long overdue for some good ol’ fashioned innovation, which sometimes looks as simple as getting people to engage with their care. Curative made it happen, and it’s armed with $150M to take the model nationwide.

The ATA Makes the Case for Telehealth

Posted on by Jason Barry

The American Telemedicine Association just teamed up with nine major U.S. health systems to deliver one of the most comprehensive looks at Medicare telehealth utilization to date, and the numbers look good for virtual care.

The analysis of 1.67M Medicare beneficiaries from 2019 to 2023 found that telehealth is primarily a substitute for in-person care, replacing office visits rather than adding new ones.

  • Despite the pandemic fueling a 31x increase in telehealth use at the health systems, Medicare patients averaged just 0.25 additional visits per year.
  • The real-world operational data shows that 74% of those telehealth visits were a substitute for in-person care.
  • Not too surprising, except that the CBO has that substitution rate pegged at 30%.

Real-world evidence beats theoretical models. The findings offer a window into how telehealth is embedded in everyday care – with real workflows and patients – suggesting that actual substitution patterns might be a ways away from current budget modeling assumptions.

  • The analysis spanned academic medical centers, integrated pay-viders, and rural hospitals – all showing that telehealth was a substitute during both the pandemic and “steady-state operations” in 2023.
  • Each of the systems also saw costs remain stable or decrease with telehealth adoption, with one of the rural systems avoiding 2,551 patient transfers and saving $8.1M from sidestepping referrals and transportation costs
  • That not only suggests that virtual care is still beneficial post-pandemic, but it might also have lower federal costs than currently forecasted.

The clock is ticking. Medicare telehealth reimbursement flexibilities are set to expire January 30th, and the ATA hopes that these results will inform policy discussions ahead of the deadline.

  • “This data represents the current state under a patchwork policy environment. We’re just scratching the surface of what health systems could achieve with predictable legislative frameworks that let us build infrastructure to serve patients regardless of who’s paying the bills.”

The Takeaway

Most qualitative evidence already told us that telehealth is convenient for patients and clearly a substitute for in-person care. The ATA just provided the quantitative data to back that up.

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