Certuma CEO Martin Varsavsky

Artificial Intelligence

Scribes Show Modest Impact at Major Academics

Ambient scribes are back in the spotlight after a new study in JAMA confirmed that they move the needle on productivity metrics, but the jury’s still out on whether that’s the best yardstick for success.

This was a big one. The study examined the impact of AI scribe use on over 1,800 clinicians at five major academic medical centers from 2023 to 2025.

• The academics: MGB, YNHH, UCSD, UCSF, UC Davis 
• The scribes: Abridge, Ambience, Microsoft DAX Copilot

Here’s what they found. Clinicians who used AI scribes:

• Saved 16 minutes of documentation time per eight hours of patient care 
• Saved 13 minutes of EHR time 
• Could see one additional patient every two weeks
• Saw no significant impact on EHR timeoutside of working hours

Usage patterns helped color in the story. While 1,800 AI scribe adopters is one of the largest samples out there, the 6,770 control clinicians were also offered scribes and opted not to use them.

• The biggest gains went to the biggest users. Clinicians who used the AI scribe for over 50% of visits experienced twice the reduction in EHR time and 3x the reduction in documentation time, yet only 32% of adopters fell into this bucket.

What’s counted? What matters? This isn’t the first study we’ve covered that scores AI scribes based on metrics that researchers can easily measure (EHR time, visits), which isn’t necessarily the same as the metrics that matter most to patients or clinicians.

• Although this study solidifies that scribes can cut documentation time, the question now is if that time gets reinvested in ways that improve care and outcomes for patients.

• The results also confirm that the mechanism of action for scribes reducing burnout isn’t through time savings, but it’s still unclear whether it’s from having a couple more moments to take a deep breath throughout the day or from reallocating the extra minutes to things that feel valuable.

The Takeaway

This study offers the most definitive real-world data yet that AI scribes have a modest impact on productivity metrics, but it also confirms that cleaner notes aren’t the only key to improving healthcare experiences.

Start Practicing With a Partner

What began with notes now supports the work that surrounds them. From conversations to clinical questions and follow-ups, Heidi brings the full clinical day into one platform. See why clinicians across the country are making Heidi their trusted AI Care Partner.

Get a Front Row Seat to Health AI

AI isn’t just changing healthcare, it’s completely redefining it. Join the innovators making it happen at the Digital Health & AI Innovation Summit to explore the future of AI with 150+ speakers that are already shaping what comes next across providers, payors, pharma, and beyond. Grab a front row seat to healthcare AI at DHAI 2026 in Boston on June 8-9th.

The Wire

• Certuma’s FDA-Approved AI Doctor: Certuma raised $10M of seed funding to fuel the development of the first FDA-approved AI doctor. The upcoming AI doctor will initially be targeting a list of 25 common medical conditions that take up a lot of primary care doctors’ time but are treated with a standard protocol, such as urinary tract infections and sore throats. Definitely a big vision, but Certuma CEO Martin Varsavsky has a track record of big visions that are now worth over $1B. Forbes just ran a solid profile with all the details.

• Abridge Clinical Decision Support: Abridge is officially rolling out clinical decision support, backed by trusted evidence from UpToDate and “shaped by the conversation in the room.” Unlike isolated clinical evidence solutions that aren’t familiar with the patient, Abridge surfaces information that’s relevant to the clinical picture as it forms in real time – incorporating medical histories, medications, and other context the moment it comes up. We got a stellar demo at ViVE for anyone looking to see the new evidence engine in action.

• Governing the Tip of the AI Iceberg: A great editorial in NEJM AI makes the case that health systems are focused on governing the tip of the AI iceberg, yet the slow pace of adoption is what’s pushing physicians to risky tools beneath the surface. AI governance in health systems was designed to assess AI tools for specific use cases, which allows their potential harms to be measured and mitigated. That approach fails for general-purpose LLMs because the range of risks varies depending on how physicians are using it. The end result is that the governance process designed to make sure clinicians are using safe tools is now the very reason they’re using unsafe tools.

• Penguin Introduces Gwen: Penguin Ai took the lid off Gwen, its new “Build-Your-Own AI Platform” for care operations. Gwen allows healthcare organizations to design, deploy, and scale digital workers across administrative workflows, similar to the Agent Factory that Epic debuted at HIMSS. It also ships with a library of more than 100 pre-built clinical digital workers covering HCC retrospective coding, prior authorization intake, clinical documentation summarization, and eligibility verification.

• Stedi Series C: Stedi landed $50M of Series C funding to accelerate the expansion of its claims clearinghouse in the wake of a big growth year. The announcement touts a 6x increase in customers and a 7x increase in billed transactions year-over-year, and Stedi is apparently now processing more than a billion claims and eligibility transactions annually. It’s only been seven months since Stedi closed its $70B Series B, but it needed to fill up the gas tank after processing more transactions in February alone than in the entire first half of 2025.

• Ovatient Launches Compass: Ovatient expanded its support for the RHT program with the launch of Compass, a comprehensive digital health platform built on Epic that lets states easily deploy a virtual-first model to help rural patients access care. As $50B in RHT funding sweeps across the country through 2030, Compass provides the scaffolding to responsibly invest in telehealth with reporting and outcomes measurement baked in from the start. It’s structured as a tiered platform that includes Compass Core (virtual primary care, urgent care, and integrated behavioral health), Compass Connect (extends Core into employer and payor markets), and Compass 360 (combines Core and Connect).

• Consumers Turn to AI Health Advice: Rock Health’s latest Consumer Adoption Survey found that consumers are quickly adopting AI to manage their health on their own terms. A third of U.S. adults have now used AI chatbots for medical advice – double last year’s figure – and 64% are using them at least weekly or more. About 59% are searching for treatment options, 56% are asking about symptoms, and 55% are investigating medications. The key growth drivers have been speed and convenience, with 65% citing AI’s ability to deliver instant answers and nearly 1 in 5 pointing to barriers accessing traditional care.

• Quiet Cuts at Public Companies: The American workforce has the healthcare industry to thank for a huge chunk of its job growth over the last five years, but a new analysis from STAT shows that isn’t because of large, for-profit companies. Annual filings from 50 of the largest publicly traded healthcare companies – hospitals, pharma, medical device firms, and payors – revealed that many have been cutting jobs that haven’t been previously reported. Elevance is one example, cutting 7,000 people in 2025 despite netting $5.7B on nearly $200B of revenue. The eight largest publicly traded payors and health services companies collectively shed over 20k jobs just last year.

• K Health and Hartford Launch Patient GPT: K Health and Hartford HealthCare teamed up to unveil PatientGPT, a “24/7 AI bridge” to the clinical care team. Patients can access PatientGPT within their Hartford patient portal or app to get personalized education and guidance grounded in their own health data, with the option to connect directly to a clinician through HHC 24/7 virtual care or schedule an in-person primary care or specialty appointment if needed. HHC said it designed the combination of targeted education and streamlined care access will eliminate the “dead end” experience often associated with standalone chatbots.

• Atlantic + Artera: Atlantic Health shared some impressive results after deploying Artera’s AI Agents to guide patients through the colonoscopy prep journey. Preparing for a colonoscopy involves complex multi-day steps that contribute to high no-show rates, so the agents helped move inconsistent, manual reminders to a standardized, AI-driven experience. Within the first 30 days, 43% of patients contacted by the AI Agent successfully answered the phone and verified their identity, 39% confirmed their appointment, and 7% had questions answered about their procedure.

Medical Transcription That Gets Terminology Right

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Abridge Named #1 Best in KLAS – Again

KLAS just named Abridge #1 Best in KLAS for Ambient AI for the second year in a row. The recognition was based on direct customer feedback from the nation’s largest and most complex health systems, which gave Abridge the highest overall satisfaction score and A+ ratings across Culture, Loyalty, Relationship, and Value. Discover why Abridge is the market-leading AI platform for clinical conversations.

The Resource Wire

• 8 Keys to Gain an AI Edge in VBC: As value-based care models evolve and competition intensifies, healthcare leaders are seeking practical strategies to improve performance across risk, quality, and financial outcomes. Head over to Navina’s roundup of eight key insights from VBC leaders to learn how aligning AI-powered tools with organizational priorities and clinician needs can help secure a measurable competitive edge in value-based care.

• BPM Pro 2 Delivers Data When It’s Needed Most: BPM Pro 2’s built-in questionnaires capture patient context alongside each blood pressure reading, reducing manual outreach and follow-ups. See how BPM Pro 2 is equipping care teams with actionable information upfront, and helping streamline workflows and prioritize interventions where it’s needed most.

• State of Payor Enrollment and Credentialing: Over half of provider orgs are losing revenue due to credentialing delays – with many missing out on over $1M annually. Medallion’s new report unpacks the forces quietly undermining operational and financial performance, and how leaders across the industry are addressing them. Head over to the full report to get insights tailored to your role and org type.

• How MUSC Health Is Bringing Care Closer to Home: MUSC Health teamed up with Ovatient to accomplish a simple goal: ensure access to care isn’t determined by a ZIP code. A third of South Carolina residents live in rural areas, but travel barriers don’t make preventative care any less crucial. See how Ovatient’s virtual-first approach is improving access to urgent care, primary care, and integrated behavioral health and reducing leakage – without MUSC providers doing the heavy lifting.

The Industry Wire

1. Hit with federal cuts, states scramble to raise funds for Medicare.
2. Bipartisan bill would give CMS more flexibility on physician reimbursement. 
3. UnitedHealthcare launches Avery generative AI companion. 
4. Feds tell hospitals to limit processed food for patients. 
5. Most Americans say Trump Administration should do more on health.
6. HHS layoffs in 2025 left agency in disarray.  
7. Federal program targeting fraud boosts whistleblower incentives. 
8. CDRH staff dealing with “heavy workloads” in wake of job cuts. 
9. West Virginia tackles prior authorizations after patient’s death.
10. Arkansas psychiatrist charged with drugging, abducting patients.

Qualified Health CEO Dr. Justin Norden

Artificial Intelligence

Qualified Raises $125M to Build AI Infrastructure

In an era of isolated AI pilots, Qualified Health is building the infrastructure to connect the dots.

AI is the star of enterprise transformation. Health systems are looking to deploy and scale AI across their entire organization, and Qualified just raised $125M of Series B funding to make sure every new agent fits into a cohesive constellation.

The core platform has four distinct layers:

• A data foundation that turns the EHR and external sources into an AI-ready bedrock.
• A layer that lets hospitals build and deploy AI tools without always starting from scratch.
• A layer that turns those tools into AI apps and agents deployed directly into workflows.
• A layer that keeps governance, monitoring, and evaluation at the center of everything.

Qualified doesn’t leave AI to chance. It embeds forward-deployed product leaders alongside health system teams to identify high-priority needs, deploy solutions quickly, and iterate based on actual feedback in the trenches.

That has a couple of major benefits:

• AI solutions are purpose-built for specific operational problems rather than mass market appeal.  

• The tight feedback loop allows Qualified to iterate faster than it would be able to with a traditional implementation cycle, which shortens the timescale needed to improve its deployments and demonstrate a measurable impact.

The proof is in the pudding. At the University of Texas Medical Branch, Qualified reportedly generated a $15M measurable run-rate impact within the first six months.

• That’s an eye-popping number to get on record, and it apparently stemmed from “a real willingness to dive deep” alongside UTMB clinical teams to deploy multiple assistants and automated workflows.

• Qualified already supports systems representing about 7% of U.S. hospital revenue, and the next chapter is about deepening those partnerships and scaling responsibly.

• Big ambition also means big competition, and Qualified will be up against everyone from Innovaccer to Epic if it wants to become healthcare’s AI platform of choice.

The Takeaway

Hospitals aren’t looking to AI for incremental improvement. They’re looking to AI to transform how they deliver care, and Qualified just landed another $125M to be the infrastructure that makes that possible.

Get a Front Row Seat to Health AI

AI isn’t just changing healthcare, it’s completely redefining it. Join the innovators making it happen at the Digital Health & AI Innovation Summit to explore the future of AI with 150+ speakers that are already shaping what comes next across providers, payors, pharma, and beyond. Grab a front row seat to healthcare AI at DHAI 2026 in Boston on June 8-9th.

Abridge Named #1 Best in KLAS – Again

KLAS just named Abridge #1 Best in KLAS for Ambient AI for the second year in a row. The recognition was based on direct customer feedback from the nation’s largest and most complex health systems, which gave Abridge the highest overall satisfaction score and A+ ratings across Culture, Loyalty, Relationship, and Value. Discover why Abridge is the market-leading AI platform for clinical conversations.

The Wire

• Adonis Lands $40M: Adonis landed $40M of Series C funding to boost hospital bottom lines with AI-driven revenue cycle management. The platform ingests billing data to surface the underlying issues causing claims to get denied, then automatically carries out tasks to recover revenue like researching denials and preparing appeals. Mount Sinai’s VP of RCM told MedCity News that Adonis stood out because of its dual approach that pairs AI agents with an intelligence platform that delivers continuous visibility into accounts receivable, allowing staff to focus on “less whack-a-mole and more precision targeting.”

• OpenEvidence Coding Intelligence: OpenEvidence became the latest AI high-flyer to jump on the medical coding train after launching Coding Intelligence to help capture missing reimbursement. The new tool within the Visits platform automatically generates CPT, ICD-10, and E/M codes from visit notes, including supporting rationale based on the latest clinical guidelines. OE has been pedal-to-the-metal rounding out Visits since its debut in August, and every new capability continues to blur the line between GenAI search, RCM, and ambient documentation. 

• The Big Get Bigger: A KFF analysis found that one or two health systems control the entire inpatient healthcare market in nearly half (47%) of U.S. metropolitan areas. KFF also confirmed that the big keep getting bigger – as we saw with Sutter’s acquisition of Allina just last week – and most metropolitan hospital markets (80%) either became less competitive from 2015 to 2024 or were controlled by one health system over that entire period. Almost all metro areas (97%) now have a highly concentrated hospital market that exceeds FTC/DOJ antitrust levels.

• Doctronic Gets a Hat Trick: Doctronic closed a $40M Series B to advance its AI for autonomous clinical decision-making, marking its third fundraise in less than a year. The round brings Doctronic’s total funding to $65M in the wake of it becoming the first AI to legally renew prescriptions in the U.S. The startup’s core offering is an AI chatbot that talks to patients about symptoms and health concerns before transferring them to a telehealth call with a clinician for $39. The announcement mentions that Doctronic is now generating $10M+ ARR, which the napkin math suggests would be about 21k visits per month – a number that some smart folks are finding hard to believe.

• Story Health Trial Results: New results from the VITAL-HF trial showed that digital interventions can be a valuable tool for optimizing guideline-directed medical therapy for heart failure patients. Researchers randomized 178 participants with stable heart failure to receive either usual care or Story Health’s remote HF platform that includes connected BP cuffs/scales, personalized medication titration between visits, and health coach support. At six months, the intervention group saw average HF medical therapy scores increase 2 points on a 12 point scale (5.2 to 7.2), significantly higher than the 1.4 point increase in the usual care group (4.8 to 6.2).

• Thesis Series A: Thesis Care landed $45M in Series A funding to expand its AI clinical capacity platform. By combining AI agents with an in-house team of “clinicians-in-the-loop,” the platform automates complex care management workflows from start to finish, with the AI looping in Thesis’ own clinical experts if needed rather than disrupting existing staff processes. Thesis already has several partnerships with large provider orgs like U.S. Heart & Vascular across primary and specialty care, but it sounds like the new capital will help it lean in on hospitals and health plan care teams.

• Patients Hide AI Use: A Zocdoc survey showed that patients who use AI for health advice frequently hide it from their doctor. One in five patients have hidden AI use from a physician, even though 77% of physicians report positive feelings about their patients using AI. Another interesting highlight was that 88% of patients feel confident after consulting AI, despite only 28% trusting it to be accurate.

• Advocate Agent Factory: Advocate Health is gearing up to deploy four clinical AI prototypes developed using Epic’s new Agent Factory platform. The North Carolina-based health system used Agent Factory to run an agile sprint for complex pharmacy order verification and infusion charting preparation, which resulted in the four prototypes that it plans to put into production this summer. Not one to stop at a handful of new agents, Advocate also announced that it’s launching the country’s largest hospital drone delivery network to deliver prescriptions, lab specimens, and medical supplies using Zipline drones.

• Translucent Closes $27M: Translucent capped off the funding frenzy with a $27M Series A funding round to help provider orgs understand their finances. The platform gives “every operator a personalized AI analyst” to help translate the data buried in their spreadsheets into actionable performance insights. Translucent’s been busy since raising its $7M seed round late last year, and it’s now helping improve margins through real-time financial data at orgs like Northwestern Medicine and Duly Health and Care.

• The GLP-1 Effect: New research from Trilliant Health showed how drastically GLP-1s have reshaped anti-obesity prescribing. From 2018 to 2021 (prior to the approval of Wegovy in June 2021), patient volume for anti-obesity therapies increased just 16.4%, then went on to jump 94.5% from 2021 to 2024. The shift was especially notable in women ages 18-44, with non-GLP therapies accounting for 96.1% of prescriptions in 2018, but declining to 37.3% by 2024 as GLP-1s took over.

Making the Case for AI

Healthcare organizations have a lot to gain from implementing AI that can enhance coding accuracy and quality metrics, but securing buy-in from leadership is a crucial first step. Check out Navina’s new guide by Dr. Michael S. Barr to see exactly how to demonstrate clear financial benefits, ROI potential, and alignment with organizational priorities to help ensure AI projects are successful.

Best Practices for Value-Based Obesity Care

Healthcare executives focused on value-based obesity care need actionable guidance, and that’s exactly what they’ll find with Withings’ new best practices. By leveraging connected health data to measure outcomes and optimize resources, care teams can improve long-term patient engagement and success, while still being cost effective. Get the best practices today.

The Resource Wire

• State of Payor Enrollment and Credentialing: Over half of provider orgs are losing revenue due to credentialing delays – with many missing out on over $1M annually. Medallion’s new report unpacks the forces quietly undermining operational and financial performance, and how leaders across the industry are addressing them. Head over to the full report to get insights tailored to your role and org type.

• How MUSC Health Is Bringing Care Closer to Home: MUSC Health teamed up with Ovatient to accomplish a simple goal: ensure access to care isn’t determined by a ZIP code. A third of South Carolina residents live in rural areas, but travel barriers don’t make preventative care any less crucial. See how Ovatient’s virtual-first approach is improving access to urgent care, primary care, and integrated behavioral health and reducing leakage – without MUSC providers doing the heavy lifting.

• From Transcription to Clinical Insight in One API: AssemblyAI is the voice platform behind the voice platforms. Combine speech-to-text, PHI redaction, and LLM-powered summarization in a single API call that lets you generate SOAP notes, referral letters, and clinical summaries automatically. Start building with AssemblyAI today.

The Industry Wire

1. Justice Department sues NewYork-Presbyterian in latest hospital antitrust case.
2. Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case.
3. White House delays CDC director nomination.
4. Advertising to doctors – okay or not?
5. 10M people could lose Medicaid coverage due to new rules.
6. House Democrats accuse CMS official of misleading Congress under oath.
7. HHS and CMS form healthcare advisory committee.
8. Stryker restores most manufacturing after cyberattack.
9. Stakeholders react to White House national AI policy framework.
10. Express Scripts gets hit with class action lawsuit for racketeering.

Google Research Scientist Mike Schäkermann

Artificial Intelligence

Google AMIE Shines in First Real-World Study

The gap between benchmark scores and real-world performance has been the theme of the year in AI research, so Google was right on cue with its first prospective clinical trial for AMIE using actual patients. 

Meet the Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer. AMIE is Google’s flagship “medical AI researcher,” and it teamed up with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center to gauge performance in real clinical workflows.

• 100 patients completed an AMIE interaction before their primary care visit, with AMIE taking medical histories and equipping patients with potential diagnoses to discuss with their PCP.

• PCPs received the transcript, summary, and AMIE’s management plan prior to the visit. All interactions were monitored live by physicians trained to intervene if safety criteria weren’t met.

AMIE got a gold star. Not only were there zero safety stops across all 100 interactions, patients reported that their attitudes toward AI significantly improved after chatting with AMIE.

• AMIE’s differential included the correct final diagnosis in 90% of cases (per chart review 8 weeks post-encounter), with 75% top-3 accuracy.

• PCPs using AMIE reported increased visit preparedness in 75% of cases, as well as potential behavior change in nearly 60%.

• The quality of AMIE’s differential diagnosis and management plan appropriateness was similar to PCPs, although PCPs won on management plan practicality and cost-effectiveness.

Other findings were less obvious. PCPs had the chart, the physical exam, and the pre-visit transcript, yet AMIE still matched them on differential quality and management safety without taking a single peak at the EHR.

• That speaks to the ceiling (or lack there-of) for structured AI history-taking, and shows that AI is gearing up to improve patient care in more ways than just making predictions.

• The fact that PCPs reported better visit preparedness and potential behavior change in over half of cases also highlights how AI can augment – not just replace – clinical reasoning.

The Takeaway

The distance between the bench and bedside is getting shorter, and Google’s AMIE results suggest that conversational AI in primary care is closer to reality than most people might think.

VBC 202: Intro to VBC and Risk Adjustment

Navina and Out-of-Pocket teamed up to create VBC 202, a three-part online course for anyone looking to build or scale value-based care programs. Watch the first session on-demand to learn why VBC emerged, how policy shapes provider behavior, and the fundamentals of risk, quality, and financial performance. Gary Pilling II joins as the guest instructor to dive into risk adjustment basics, including RAF scoring, HCC coding, and the CMS-HCC V28 model.

Scale RPM With BPM Pro 2

BPM Pro 2 is the next generation of cellular blood pressure monitors, empowering care teams to scale remote patient monitoring and streamline operations. Discover why leading providers are choosing BPM Pro 2 to collect highly precise measurements and enrich data with Patient Insights from their daily lives.

The Wire

• Heidi Hardware: Heidi just went where few (if any) clinical AI software companies have gone before: clinical AI hardware. The launch of Heidi Remote gives clinicians reliable audio capture without relying on a phone or a laptop, which should be a welcome capability in settings where hands are in high demand like the ED. Heidi Remote transcribes patient sessions offline, stores them securely on the small clip-on device, then syncs to Heidi whenever the user is back in range. Not a bad way to follow up a flurry of conference announcements.  

• Death, Taxes, Consolidation: Few things are certain in healthcare, but hospital mega-mergers are one of them. Sutter Health is acquiring Allina Health, and the California-based system pledged to invest $2B in Allina’s Minnesota and Wisconsin operations. Sutter said that combining its AI platform development with Allina’s expertise in med-tech and engineering will position it as a national leader in improving patient and provider experiences through new tech. The combined organization will account for $26B in revenue across 39 hospitals, 88k employees, and 400 care sites.  

• FC Most Innovative Companies: Fast Company released its annual Most Innovative Companies List, highlighting businesses across all industries “that are doing things differently.” Healthcare surprisingly only had two companies rank in the top 50 (grats to Abridge and Cresilon), and if you zoom in on just the AI companies Abridge ranked third overall behind a couple of tiny startups called Google and Anthropic. The full list is definitely worth checking out even if just for its great startup overviews hiding behind the article icon next to their names.

• Overly Agreeable Models: New research out of Stanford was raising eyebrows after showing that clinicians can easily steer LLMs toward harmful decisions. The study evaluated 21 top reasoning models (including GPT-5, Claude Opus 4.5, Gemini 3) on differential diagnosis and next-step recommendations using 61 NEJM cases and 92 real-world clinician-AI interactions. Adversarial clinician input (a plausible-but-wrong differential, no correct final diagnosis) caused a significant drop in diagnostic accuracy for 14 of the 21 models, with an average impact of -5.4 percentage points.

• Turquoise Series C: Turquoise Health hauled in $40M of Series C funding to become the operating system for healthcare contracts and payments. The platform has come a long way since we first covered Turquoise while the ink was still drying on CMS’ original transparency requirements, and it’s now taking a two-pronged approach to dissolving administrative waste. Clear Rates synthesizes files, claims data, Medicare benchmarks and other relevant pricing signals into a single rate for every payor-provider combination. Contracts then leverages AI to tag every rate and provision across a customers’ contract portfolio to help quickly find contract details, compare performance, and model negotiation scenarios in a few clicks.

• PCPs Are Key for Chronic Care: A Milbank Memorial Fund report underscored the importance of having a usual source of care, particularly when it comes to managing chronic diseases. Using data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, the report found that nearly all adults (95.5%) with a regular PCP received preventive services for chronic conditions, compared to just 67.6% of those without a regular PCP. The starkest contrasts were seen with blood pressure checks (95.5% vs. 67.6%), cholesterol screening (89.2% vs. 56.7%), mammograms (83.8% versus 54.2%), and colon cancer screening (79% versus 59.5%).

• Reimagine Care Remi Upgrades: Virtual oncology provider Reimagine Care debuted “a major evolution” of its Remi assistant, including deeper AI-powered patient understanding and expanded safeguards. Remi is designed to support cancer patients between visits and help oncology care teams respond to treatment concerns earlier. The AI overhaul gives Remi the ability to analyze complex messages (like when patients report multiple symptoms at once) and translate them into structured insights that help route patients through appropriate clinical pathways.

• GLP-1s Post-MI: The GLP-1 revolution has officially moved into the acute care setting. An analysis of over 280k patients without diabetes showed that initiating tirzepatide (Zepbound/Mounjaro) within 14 days of a heart attack or stroke significantly improves two-year clinical outcomes. While the study found no difference in total major adverse cardiac events, patients on early tirzepatide therapy experienced a significantly lower risk of heart failure hospitalization, acute kidney injury, and recurrent ischemic stroke.

• Parallel Lands $20M: Parallel landed $20M of Series A funding to tackle administrative waste with AI agents (definitely the flavor of the year for young digital health startups). Instead of requiring hospitals to replace existing systems, Parallel runs as an AI layer on top of them, navigating software exactly like a human would. That enables it to quickly automate repetitive tasks across coding, billing, and admissions, while also allowing it to be up and running within a week.

• Deepfake Images Fool Radiologists: It’s no secret it’s getting harder to tell the difference between real and AI-generated content – and that extends to medical imaging. In an experiment in Radiology, a panel of 17 radiologists had trouble differentiating real radiographs from AI-generated deepfakes. When presented with a set of 154 images, only 41% recognized that some were synthetically created. When asked to differentiate real images from fakes, they had mean accuracy of 75%, illustrating the challenge that could occur in identifying malicious use of deepfakes.

State of Payor Enrollment and Credentialing

AI is changing the way that healthcare leaders tackle provider network management. Medallion’s latest report breaks down the biggest challenges, emerging trends, and how automation is transforming the landscape. Get the insights you need – read the full report today.

The Virtual-First Difference at MetroHealth

When the MetroHealth System needed a scalable solution to help its patients access care, it turned to Ovatient’s virtual-first care platform. Ovatient allows its partners to offer fully coordinated telehealth - including urgent care, primary care, and integrated behavioral health – all built on Epic. Discover how MetroHealth’s virtual-first approach is keeping its patients connected to high-quality care whether they’re at home, at work, or on the go.

The Resource Wire

• Medical Transcription That Gets Terminology Right: AssemblyAI’s clinical speech-to-text model was purpose-trained on medical terminology, pharmaceutical names, and industry acronyms. That means it performs the best where it counts the most. 66% fewer missed medical terms. BAA + SOC 2 Type II. Real clinical environments. See why AssemblyAI is the trusted Voice AI infrastructure for healthcare solutions.

• Abridge & Availity Redefine Payer-Provider Synergy: Abridge is teaming up with Availity to redefine payer-provider synergy at the point of conversation. The collaboration aligns Abridge’s evidence-aware intelligence with Availity’s real-time health information network to create a first-of-its-kind prior authorization experience, with a shared understanding between patients, providers, and payers. Find out how Abridge and Availity are extending conversational intelligence across the revenue cycle.

The Industry Wire

1. White House unveils AI legislative framework.
2. AHA amplifies FBI warning of Iranian hacks via Telegram app.
3. Healthcare roles least and most vulnerable to AI.
4. NYC Health + Hospitals reports major data breach.
5. Cleveland Clinic expands hospital-at-home program.
6. CMS unveils new pediatric care model.
7. CHS to offload 9 hospitals for more than $1.2B.
8. The 54 medications listed on TrumpRx.
9. FTC strikes agreement with CVS over PBM market manipulation.
10. Bon Secours Mercy Health names new Chief AI Officer.

CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz on final rule to phase out faxes.

Artificial Intelligence

How to Build Patient Trust in Medical AI

AI might move at the speed of trust, but new research in JAMA Network Open shows that trust only moves at the speed of accuracy.

The study had a solid setup. To determine the factors currently driving patient trust in AI, researchers presented 3,000 U.S. adults with a pair of hypothetical AI-assisted visits for a moderate-risk rash. 

• Each visit had six randomized attributes, such as whether or not a doctor was present, how well the AI performs relative to human clinicians, and various AI governance mechanisms.

• Participants chose their preferred visit, rated their trust in the diagnosis, and explained their choice with a single-sentence explanation for their choice. Here’s a good example of the potential visits. 

AI performance came out on top by a wide margin. Respondents cared more about how well the AI performs than FDA approval, governance, and even having a doctor in the room.

• The biggest difference came from AI performing better than a specialist, which increased the likelihood of choosing that visit by 32.5%.

• AI performing at the same level as a specialist boosted visit preference by 24.8%, slightly more than having AI that performs as well as a general practitioner (19.1%).

• Having an actual doctor present surprisingly only swayed visit preference by 18.4%.

Governance factors also moved the needle. They just didn’t move it much.

• FDA approval for the AI increased visit preference by a modest 11.1%.
• Mayo Clinic AI certifications apparently carry just as much weight – also coming in at 11.1%.
• Local hospital certifications for the AI only gave visits a 7.8% lift.

AI data quality was important. It just wasn’t as convincing as AI performance. 

• AI that had nationally representative training data boosted visit preference by 11.9%, but it was interesting to see that disclosing bias in the training data had no effect versus not providing any data details.

The written explanations told the same story. Respondents cited AI performance and clinician involvement as the primary reasons for their choices, with many of them expressing comfort with AI as a tool – but not as a standalone decision-maker.

The Takeaway

Widespread AI adoption requires patient trust, and this study did a great job highlighting the specific areas that should be prioritized for building it.

The Perfect Moment for Digital Health

With expanded support for remote care, digital health is positioned to play a central role in new value-based care models. Check out this overview from Withings Health Solutions to learn how connected technologies can help reduce preventable events, while also improving care quality.

State of Payor Enrollment and Credentialing

AI is changing the way that healthcare leaders tackle provider network management. Medallion’s latest report breaks down the biggest challenges, emerging trends, and how automation is transforming the landscape. Get the insights you need – read the full report today.

The Wire

• Final Rule on Faxes: CMS just took a major step toward swapping out fax machines and snail mail for electronic claims transactions. The “groundbreaking final rule” establishes the first-ever HIPAA-adopted standards for healthcare claims attachments, enabling the electronic exchange of supporting documentation such as medical records, imaging, visit notes, and lab results. It also includes new requirements to ensure electronic signatures are safe and authenticated, but ended up cutting the prior authorization attachment standards that were in the originally proposed rule.

• Conduit Raises $17M: Conduit Health closed $17M of Series A funding to expand its vertically-integrated model for insurance-covered home medical supplies. Accessing durable medical equipment like wheelchairs and hospital beds still usually requires a weeks-long process of navigating a fragmented system of providers, payors, and suppliers. Conduit is aiming to replace that system with a single platform that can handle clinical evaluation, coverage navigation, and fulfillment from start to finish.

• Stryker Gets Struck: Stryker announced that its internal Microsoft environment was recently hit with a cyberattack linked to the war in Iran. The attack reportedly didn’t compromise any of Stryker’s products or result in disruptions at U.S. hospitals, but it will likely cause delays with order processing, manufacturing, and shipping. Cybersecurity was already top of mind for healthcare organizations, but this retaliatory attack confirms the increased risk that several advisory groups have been warning about.

• Fewer Healthcare Bankruptcies: A report from Gibbons Advisors found that healthcare bankruptcies declined for a second consecutive year, with “just” 45 filings in 2025. That’s down 21% from 2024, and the report noted that the bulk of last year’s bankruptcies occurred during the first quarter as we continue reverting toward the pre-pandemic mean. Hospital filings were notably up 60% in 2025 (from five to eight cases), although the pharmaceutical and senior care sectors continued to account for nearly half of all healthcare bankruptcies.

• Qualified Series A: Qualified Health is raising $100M in Series A funding to become the go-to platform for healthcare AI evaluation and implementation. The AI boom has sparked demand from health systems looking for better ways to establish effective governance around new solutions, which is exactly what Qualified set out to provide when it launched last year. The infrastructure platform serves as guardrails for active AI governance and continuous monitoring of algorithm performance.

• New York Looks to Ban AI Medical Advice: A new bill in New York is grabbing headlines after proposing strict limits on AI responses in licensed professions like healthcare. The legislation would ban LLMs from providing “substantive responses” related to medicine and psychology, as well as other fields such as law, dentistry, and engineering. It would also allow users to sue AI developers if their product oversteps in those areas, which seems like it’s walking a fine line between protecting consumers from unregulated advice and cutting them off from a rapidly growing new resource for accessible information.

• Lumeris Launches Ask Tom: Lumeris expanded its AI-powered primary care platform with a new Ask Tom analytics capability that gives health systems conversational access to enterprise insights. Tom acts as an embedded care team member that aggregates data from disparate sources into a 360-degree view of patients and populations. Users can now use plain English to Ask Tom for recommendations on how to improve access, capacity, and coordination.

• Heart Health is Still Unaffordable: As part of a JACC special issue, investigators examined data from 4k adults with various forms of cardiovascular disease and found that patient contributions to health plan premiums plus spending on cardiovascular-related care and medicines increased from $4.8k to $5.3k from 2007 to 2022. That increase was driven by a rise in premiums ($3.3k to $3.9k), with 34% of patients using more than 10% of their income on those premiums.

• HIMSS Reports Attendance of 24k: HIMSS reported attendance of 24k at its 2026 annual conference in Las Vegas. While that keeps HIMSS in the realm of the largest U.S. medical conferences, it continues a slow slide in attendance that’s persisted since the pandemic. Attendance at HIMSS 2025 (also Las Vegas) was estimated at 28k, while HIMSS 2024 in Orlando drew some 30k people. The last show before the pandemic – HIMSS 2019 – drew about 43k attendees to Orlando.

The Virtual-First Playbook: Rural Health

Rural healthcare is in crisis. More hospital closures, less access, and wider care deserts for essential services like primary care and behavioral health. Get Ovatient’s Virtual-First Playbook for Rural Health Transformation to see how your organization can leverage funding from new programs like the RHT to build enduring systems of care.

Medical Transcription That Gets Terminology Right

AssemblyAI’s clinical speech-to-text model was purpose-trained on medical terminology, pharmaceutical names, and industry acronyms. That means it performs the best where it counts the most. 66% fewer missed medical terms. BAA + SOC 2 Type II. Real clinical environments. See why AssemblyAI is the trusted Voice AI infrastructure for healthcare solutions.

The Resource Wire

• Abridge & Availity Redefine Payer-Provider Synergy: Abridge is teaming up with Availity to redefine payer-provider synergy at the point of conversation. The collaboration aligns Abridge’s evidence-aware intelligence with Availity’s real-time health information network to create a first-of-its-kind prior authorization experience, with a shared understanding between patients, providers, and payers. Find out how Abridge and Availity are extending conversational intelligence across the revenue cycle.

• 8 Keys to Gain an AI Edge in VBC: As value-based care models evolve and competition intensifies, healthcare leaders are seeking practical strategies to improve performance across risk, quality, and financial outcomes. Head over to Navina’s roundup of eight key insights from VBC leaders to learn how aligning AI-powered tools with organizational priorities and clinician needs can help secure a measurable competitive edge in value-based care.

The Industry Wire

1. Scientists’take on psychedelic antidepressant hype.
2. What to know about the new Alzheimer’s blood tests.
3. An unexpected organ could play a role in longevity.
4. One in ten 2025 ACA enrollees no longer has coverage. 
5. 10k Corewell Health nurses authorize labor strike.
6. Providence considers offloading health plan.
7. 23 health systems in the black for 2025.
8. MedArrive acquires tech assets from Inbound Health.
9. Perplexity launches consumer-focused AI health tool.
10. Verily lands $300M to fuel AI, separates from Alphabet.

American College of Cardiology CIO Ami Bhatt on making clinical AI mandatory.

Artificial Intelligence

Microsoft Dragon Copilot Gets AI Upgrades

Microsoft might have had the biggest presence at the biggest health IT conference, and it made sure all the lights in Las Vegas were on Dragon Copilot. 

Unify. Simplify. Scale. Microsoft’s theme at HIMSS was all about making Dragon Copilot a one-stop-shop for information within clinical workflows. It debuted several new capabilities at the show:

• Integrated medical content from trusted sources
• Partner-powered AI apps and agents
• Proactive ICD‑10 specificity suggestions
• Expanded role-based experiences for physicians, nurses, and radiologists

Partnering is quicker than building. Rather than developing every Dragon Copilot capability in-house, Microsoft has been leaning on outside partners to round out the platform.

• Dragon Copilot’s clinical evidence feature is a prime example. It brings medical content and other relevant contextual information in-workflow, all curated through new partnerships with Wolters Kluwer, Elsevier, and other vetted sources.

Microsoft Marketplace fills the gaps. It allows users to add AI partner apps directly into their Dragon Copilot workflows. Picture a modular side panel with insights from folks like: 

• Regard – surfaces comorbidities and relevant diagnoses 
• Canary Speech – analyzes voice biomarkers for mental health conditions
• Humata Health – automates prior authorization processes for clinicians 
• Atropos – generates personalized real-world evidence 
• Optum – identifies potential coverage issues and supports claims processing 

All roads lead to scribes. When Microsoft first acquired Nuance for $20M back in 2022, it was its second largest acquisition ever behind LinkedIn, and the core offerings were radiology report automation, dictation, and transcription (with humans still pulling a ton of weight).

• The product formerly known as Dragon Ambient eXperience is now the backbone of Dragon Copilot, and it’s been adding features at a breakneck pace.

• Microsoft is looking to make Dragon Copilot everything, everywhere, all at once, and so far new partnerships have been the key to making that happen.

The Takeaway

As every digital health company rushes to add scribing to their platform, the OG scribe is rushing to add everything else. Now it just needs to maintain a unified user eXperience.

State of Payer Enrollment and Credentialing

Over half of provider orgs are losing revenue due to credentialing delays – with many missing out on over $1M annually. Medallion’s new report unpacks the forces quietly undermining operational and financial performance, and how leaders across the industry are addressing them. Check out the full report to get insights tailored to your role and org type.

The Virtual-First Difference at MetroHealth

When the MetroHealth System needed a scalable solution to help its patients access care, it turned to Ovatient’s virtual-first care platform. Ovatient allows its partners to offer fully coordinated telehealth - including urgent care, primary care, and integrated behavioral health – all built on Epic. Discover how MetroHealth’s virtual-first approach is keeping its patients connected to high-quality care whether they’re at home, at work, or on the go.

The Wire

• Stryker Unveils SmartHospital: Stryker made waves with the unveiling of its new SmartHospital Platform through a newly formed business unit called Smart Care. The platform is positioned as a complete operating system for smart hospitals, serving as the connective tissue between all of the hardware, software, and staff. It combines ambient sensors, the Engage alarm-filtering engine, Sync Badge devices, and virtual nursing workflows – the culmination of its recent M&A streak that included AI virtual care company Care.ai and communication platform Vocera.

• Google Partnership Powwow: Google Cloud kicked off a string of partnerships with CVS Health, Highmark Health, Humana, Quest Diagnostics, and Waystar. The collaborations embed Gemini-powered agentic AI across a wide range of operations, with Waystar announcing that it’s already helped prevent 15B denials and CVS launching an entirely new Health100 subsidiary built from the ground up on the foundation. Health100 is CVS’ latest effort to prove that it can succeed in the health tech arena, which we’ll find out when it rolls out its AI-native consumer engagement platform to deliver proactive experiences across any pharmacy, provider, or health plan that patients are already using.

• Modifying LLMs for Mental Health: A study in Nature Medicine was making the rounds on socials after showing that Limbic’s “cognitive layer architecture” can improve off-the-shelf foundation models for mental health use cases. Researchers randomized 227 participants to have “therapy-like” conversations with text agents that were powered behind-the-scenes by either human therapists, standalone foundation models, or foundation models with Limbic on top. A panel of clinicians grading the chats found that the LLMs using Limbic’s cognitive layer significantly outperformed both the human clinicians and the standalone LLMs, although it’s worth noting that real patients aren’t told that they’re evaluating therapy agents and should talk about made up scenarios.

• Summit Teams Up With Navina: Multi-specialty and primary care provider Summit Health is rolling out Navina’s AI-powered clinical intelligence platform to equip its physicians with a complete clinical picture of their patients at the point of care. Navina’s AI engine draws on data across EHRs, clinical notes, labs, claims, and external records to deliver the evidence-based recommendations needed to succeed in value-based care. Expect to see more partnerships like this one given the 2027 Medicare Advantage Advance Notice’s shift toward encounter-linked, clinically-substantiated documentation.

• Surescripts Highlights Interoperability: Surescripts released its always-excellent Annual Impact Report to unpack the latest trends in e-prescribing and prescription benefits. Key takeaways from this year’s report were that interoperability looks like it finally reached a tipping point, with the Surescripts network clocking 30.5B health data transactions in 2025 – up 12.3% YoY – as well as nearly a billion real-time prescription benefit responses across 973K prescribers. That’s in line with HHS’ recent announcement that 500M records have now been exchanged throughTEFCA.

• Verily + Samsung: Verily is bringing Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 8 onto its Pre precision health platform to provide an integrated solution for generating evidence and monitoring real-world populations. The joint offering is geared toward accelerating research for life sciences and government agencies by combining advanced health analytics with consumer-grade wearable data. Samsung’s been leading in on similar partnerships since it acquired Xealth last June.

• Talkdesk CXA Enhancements: Talkdesk debuted a Complex Scheduling tool to help patients access specialty appointments. The specialized capability within Talkdesk’s CXA platform uses agentic AI to reduce delays and optimize physician capacity in contact centers and clinics. Rather than automating isolated tasks, Complex Scheduling orchestrates workflows across AI agents, human staff, and backend systems to streamline end-to-end processes from inquiry to completed care.

• Cognosis Encounter Sensing: Cognosos upgraded its RTLS portfolio with encounter-sensing tags designed to improve compliance and automate data capture during patient interactions. The disposable patient wristbands generate time-stamped data that feeds directly into the EHR without the need for fixed infrastructure. They can also be used for core real-time location services like monitoring engagement between patients and their beds or hospital staff and medication units.

• Docs Adopt AI, Despite Qualms: A new Doximity survey shows AI making inroads with U.S. physicians. Of the 3.2k physicians surveyed, 54% reported they were currently using AI in their practice, and 37% on a daily basis. They’re also being cautious, with 71% citing concerns about the technology’s accuracy, although only 5% said they aren’t interested in AI at all. Among the 15 specialties in the poll, neurologists had the highest AI adoption rate (64%), followed by gastroenterologists (61%) and internists (60%).

• VSee Robot Heads to Hospitals: VSee introduced “the world’s first autonomous telehealth AI robot” that’s purpose-built for hospitals. The VSee Robot might not be as cute as Moxi from Diligent Robotics, but the chassis allows it to leverage LiDAR to navigate hospital hallways independently for use cases like virtual rounding, supply/medication deliveries, or specialist coverage in the ED. The underlying VSee AI Workflow Engine gives health systems instant access to 100+ clinical AI tools that can tap into their existing IT infrastructure.

Medical Transcription That Gets Terminology Right

AssemblyAI’s clinical speech-to-text model was purpose-trained on medical terminology, pharmaceutical names, and industry acronyms. That means it performs the best where it counts the most. 66% fewer missed medical terms. BAA + SOC 2 Type II. Real clinical environments. See why AssemblyAI is the trusted Voice AI infrastructure for healthcare solutions.

Abridge Named #1 Best in KLAS – Again

KLAS just named Abridge #1 Best in KLAS for Ambient AI for the second year in a row. The recognition was based on direct customer feedback from the nation’s largest and most complex health systems, which gave Abridge the highest overall satisfaction score and A+ ratings across Culture, Loyalty, Relationship, and Value. Discover why Abridge is the market-leading AI platform for clinical conversations.

The Resource Wire

• 8 Keys to Gain an AI Edge in VBC: As value-based care models evolve and competition intensifies, healthcare leaders are seeking practical strategies to improve performance across risk, quality, and financial outcomes. Head over to Navina’s roundup of eight key insights from VBC leaders to learn how aligning AI-powered tools with organizational priorities and clinician needs can help secure a measurable competitive edge in value-based care.

• BPM Pro 2 Delivers Data When It’s Needed Most: BPM Pro 2’s built-in questionnaires capture patient context alongside each blood pressure reading, reducing manual outreach and follow-ups. See how BPM Pro 2 is equipping care teams with actionable information upfront, and helping streamline workflows and prioritize interventions where it’s needed most.

The Industry Wire

1. People don’t need to buy a meningitis vaccine.
2. Mass AI job replacement? Not in healthcare.
3. Highmark’s pharmacy partnership with Free Market Health.
4. Stopping GLP-1s raises risk of heart attack, stroke and death.
5. Medicinal cannabis doesn’t help anxiety or depression.
6. Colorectal cancer deaths rise in the US for people under 50.
7. Highmark Health, BCBS Kansas City affiliation moves ahead.
8. Health insurance bankruptcies ticked up in 2025.
9. Sutter Health and Allina Health want to unite.
10. Physicians still concerned about AI accuracy amid rapid adoption.

Endeavor Health System Medical Director Dr. Nadim Ilbawi

Heidi has been taking this year’s conferences by storm, so we swung by the HIMSS booth to wrap up the show in style with their Chief Medical Officer Dr. Simon Kos. Check out the full interview to see the latest enhancements to the Heidi platform, and get a sample of their secret recipe for doubling the world’s clinical capacity.

Artificial Intelligence

Infinite Healthcare, What’s It Worth?

Healthcare is one of the few industries where rising usage is treated as a failure, and a16z just published some solid arguments for why that framing might be completely backwards.

Everybody wants to be healthy. The demand for services that help people get and stay healthy is almost limitless, but the supply has always been limited by clinician time and cost.

• AI balances the equation. It expands our capacity to provide care and drives down its marginal cost, and a16z makes the case that AI opens the door for us to consume an effectively unlimited amount of proactive care – consistent coaching, continuous monitoring, and earlier interventions.

Health is invaluable. As it stands today, when a payor sets reimbursement for a medical service, the rate assumes a certain volume to assess the overall budget for that service.

• Price x Quantity = Total Medical Expense

• If AI sends the quantity of the service through the roof while holding the price constant, the total medical expense would skyrocket.

The question isn’t how to avoid this. It’s “what do we get for it?” 

• Half of all U.S. health expenditures go to 5% of the population, and AI that helps avoid hospitalizations or acute events can generate huge savings from a few patients.

• Healthier people are also more productive. If AI can help just 1% of the 160M workers in the U.S. work an additional year because they’re healthy, that’s worth $260B in GDP.

How do you price AI for abundant consumption? In a world with truly proactive AI-driven care, delivering more care earlier is what actually bends the cost curve. Pricing shouldn’t punish usage.

a16z looks to other industries as good examples for healthcare:

• Telecom used to charge for voice and data by the minute because network capacity was scarce, but pricing shifted to unlimited plans as infrastructure improved. Usage went up significantly, but the total market value grew alongside consumption.

• Music followed the same arc. iTunes sold songs one at a time. Spotify sold access instead. People started listening to more songs, and consumer surplus expanded.

The Takeaway

As AI expands care capacity and access, consumption naturally increases. Affordable access leads to explosions in usage, and business models shift to subscriptions over per-unit pricing. Other industries have made the transition before, and a16z thinks it might be healthcare’s turn.

The Virtual-First Difference at MetroHealth

When the MetroHealth System needed a scalable solution to help its patients access care, it turned to Ovatient’s virtual-first care platform. Ovatient allows its partners to offer fully coordinated telehealth - including urgent care, primary care, and integrated behavioral health – all built on Epic. Discover how MetroHealth’s virtual-first approach is keeping its patients connected to high-quality care whether they’re at home, at work, or on the go.

From Transcription to Clinical Insight in One API

AssemblyAI is the voice platform behind the voice platforms. Combine speech-to-text, PHI redaction, and LLM-powered summarization in a single API call that lets you generate SOAP notes, referral letters, and clinical summaries automatically. Start building with AssemblyAI today.

The Wire

• Microsoft Copilot Health: Microsoft Copilot just became the latest GenAI assistant to get a healthcare overhaul after the launch of Copilot Health, a dedicated space where users can get answers grounded in their own medical history. Copilot Health’s headlining feature is the same as ChatGPT Health and Claude for Healthcare – patients can surface health insights by bringing together their records from over 50k provider orgs (via HealthEx), data from 50+ wearables (including Apple Health & Oura), and comprehensive lab results (courtesy of Function). A unique bonus is that Copilot Health also connects to real‑time U.S. provider directories, allowing users to easily find doctors that match their specialty, location, and coverage needs.

• MedPAC Annual Report: MedPAC’s always-anticipated and always-lengthy annual report to Congress estimated that the federal government will overpay Medicare Advantage plans by $76B this year. The $615B that the government is expected to send to MA plans in 2026 is about 14% more than it would be paying if those members were in fee-for-service Medicare. MedPAC pinned the primary drivers behind the overpayments on the usual suspects like favorable selection and coding intensity, while also recommending that Congress blunt 2027’s provider rate cuts by 0.5 percentage points (from -2.2% to -1.7%).

• Que Pasa Amigo: Amigo AI locked in $11M of Series A funding to accelerate its “digital residency” platform for clinical AI. The startup builds AI agents that interact directly with patients across clinical use cases like triage and care navigation, taking a safety-first approach that trains every agent across millions of simulated scenarios modeled on a practice’s unique population before ever seeing a real patient. The results speak for themselves: Amigo has completed over 3M autonomous patient encounters with a 100% safety pass rate in the six months since our first deep dive on their strategy.

• AI Ambition vs. Execution: Kyndryl’s Healthcare Readiness Report highlighted a new challenge that’s emerging as healthcare organizations accelerate AI adoption: how to safely move from experimentation to enterprise-wide impact. The report uncovered a widening gap between ambition and execution, with 76% of orgs reporting that they have more AI pilots than they can scale. Over half (55%) are concerned about keeping pace with evolving policies and regulations, and just 30% feel prepared to adapt to regulatory change.

• UHS Acquires Talkspace: Hospital operator United Health Services scooped up Talkspace for $5.25 per share ($835M all-in) as it looks to expand its outpatient behavioral health services. UHS noted that Talkspace’s network of 6,000 therapists would help address slower-than-expected growth in its outpatient behavioral health business, and that the younger membership base with a skew toward commercial coverage was an ideal fit. Talkspace expected to end the year with $280M in revenue, so the 3x multiple was probably music to investors’ ears given the bumpy rise that the company has been on since its SPAC public market debut in 2021.

• Medbridge Occupational Health: Medbridge introduced a new Occupational Health Pathway to address the most significant causes of work-related musculoskeletal issues. The pathway initially provides three tracks for “industrial athletes,” with each focused on the unique needs of high-risk workers who most commonly experience repetitive motions and physically demanding tasks. The tracks can be done either live or virtually, and can be deployed through advanced primary care, health systems, and private practice resources to give employers and employees a healthy variety of options. 

• Physician AI Use Doubles: The AMA’s 2026 Physician Survey on Augmented Intelligence shows that AI use among doctors has doubled as confidence builds in the technology. The survey data found that more than four in five physicians (81%) are using AI in their practices, up from just 38% in 2023. The average number of use cases per physician now stands at 2.3 (up from 1.1 three years ago), with the most common uses of AI centered on medical research summarization and clinical care documentation. More than three-quarters of docs now believe AI improves their ability to care for patients, and they’re most bullish on its expected impact for diagnostic accuracy and work efficiency.

• Digitally Guiding Antihypertensive Therapy: New research in JACC suggests that expanding access to digital health data (like home blood pressure and wearables metrics) significantly increases the likelihood of prescribing antihypertensive therapy for elderly patients. While factors like frailty and history of falls typically drive clinical inertia, the study found that remote monitoring gives doctors the reassurance needed to pursue aggressive hypertension targets. Additionally, pill burden proved to be a critical barrier, with nearly half of physicians favoring intensive treatment only if delivered via low-tablet regimens.

Abridge & Availity Redefine Payer-Provider Synergy

Abridge is teaming up with Availity to redefine payer-provider synergy at the point of conversation. The collaboration aligns Abridge’s evidence-aware intelligence with Availity’s real-time health information network to create a first-of-its-kind prior authorization experience, with a shared understanding between patients, providers, and payers. Find out how Abridge and Availity are extending conversational intelligence across the revenue cycle.

Clinician-First Copilot for Value-Based Success

Navina’s AI copilot brings clinical intelligence directly to care teams, turning fragmented data into actionable insights that transform value-based workflows from the back office to the point-of-care. Designed for and loved by physicians, Navina’s Best in KLAS AI reduces missed diagnoses while improving quality metrics and risk adjustment accuracy. Discover how practices are leveraging Navina to enhance VBC performance and improve the clinician experience.

The Resource Wire

• The Perfect Moment for Digital Health: With expanded support for remote care, digital health is positioned to play a central role in value-based models. Check out Withings’ latest overview to learn how connected technologies can help reduce preventable events while improving care quality and efficiency.

• State of Payor Enrollment and Credentialing: Over half of provider orgs are losing revenue due to credentialing delays – with many missing out on over $1M annually. Medallion’s new report unpacks the forces quietly undermining operational and financial performance, and how leaders across the industry are addressing them. Head over to the full report to get insights tailored to your role and org type.

The Industry Wire

1. Dr. Oz touts agentic AI for healthcare at HIMSS 2026. 
2. Cardiac groups say statins could start as young as age 30.
3. Shadowy advocacy group linked to Medicare Advantage comments.
4. Hospitals shift from experimenting with AI to justifying its cost.
5. Is the Trump administration backing away from “vaccine reform?”
6. TV show’s hospital ransomware attack reveals cybersecurity threat.
7. Are payors loosening purse strings for prior authorization?
8. Arizona cardiologists settle charges of unnecessary vein ablations. 
9. Whoops gears up for IPO with heavy hiring.
10. Silicosis lung disease hits workers in countertop industry.

Penguin Ai CEO Fawad Butt

Digital Health Wire’s been getting its steps in at HIMSS this week. Here’s a first-hand look at some of the biggest announcements live from the exhibit hall, and make sure to stay tuned for a bonus round from the last day of the conference.

• Arcadia CEO Michael Meucci on agentic care management.
• Amazon Web Services CMO Dr. Rowland Illing on Amazon Connect Health.
• Innovaccer CEO Abhinav Shashank on healthcare automation.

Digital Health

HIMSS 2026 Recap and Major Announcements

Viva Las HIMSS. The world’s largest healthcare IT conference officially has its swagger back.

The themes at HIMSS might have rhymed with the themes at ViVE, but the conversations were definitely louder – mainly because the exhibit hall was packed with attendees.  

Agentic AI has moved from promises to receipts, and measurable ROI is now mandatory for the pitch decks that want to make it to the top of the pile.

It’s also becoming increasingly clear that health systems aren’t looking for quick fixes to old problems. They’re looking for long-term partners to lean on as they navigate a technology landscape that’s shifting faster than ever.

Without further ado, here’s our roundup of the biggest announcements from HIMSS26:

• Abridge rolled out its enterprise-grade AI platform for clinical conversations across WVU Medicine, the largest health system (and private employer) in West Virginia. It turns out that balancing decision support with clinician control resonates just as much at rural systems as it does at the most complex academic medical centers in the country.

• Amazon brought Health AI to the biggest patient acquisition channel in the world: Amazon.com. The new Health AI agent can answer questions, manage prescription renewals, and even book appointments. Better yet, over 200M Prime members can use it to get five direct message care visits with a One Medical provider on the house. Not a bad way to follow up last week’s big news and one of the best interviews at the show.

• athenahealth introduced athenaConnect to deliver a single access point for external health systems, pharmacies, and labs looking to connect with the 170k+ providers using athenaOne. The intelligent interoperability layer brings together integration solutions that bridge the EHR to outside partners as it looks to improve care coordination across local markets.

• Artera showcased its latest AI Agents for patient access workflows, which recently got the nod as Best in KLAS for Patient Communications. The agentic AI wave has helped grow Artera into the trusted access partner at over a thousand provider orgs, and it now supports over 2B patient communications annually.

• Cognosos upgraded its RTLS portfolio with encounter-sensing tags designed to improve compliance and automate data capture during patient interactions. The disposable patient wristbands generate time-stamped data that feeds directly into the EHR without the need for fixed infrastructure.

• Epic previewed its no-code Agent Factory, a visual builder that lets health systems create and deploy custom AI agents directly within their EHR. This could end up tightening Epic’s golden handcuffs on health systems if it catches on, and it also probably means that selling workflow automation agents just got even harder at 40% of U.S. hospitals.

• Google Cloud kicked off a string of industry partnerships with CVS Health, Highmark, Humana, Quest Diagnostics, and Waystar. The collaborations embed Gemini-powered agentic AI into a wide range of operations, with Waystar announcing that it’s already helped prevent 15B denials and CVS launching an entirely new Health100 subsidiary built from the ground up on the foundation.

• Innovaccer unveiled a new AI-powered solution within Flow by Innovaccer that codes 80% of encounters autonomously in seconds, tackling coder shortages, revenue leakage, and rising cost per encounter. We got the full scoop on Flow Capture straight from the top.

• Meditech released its own native AI scribe for physicians and nurses. Welcome to the party, it’s still pretty fun even though everyone else got here last year.

• Microsoft made its presence felt with new Dragon Copilot capabilities that were front-and-center on the showfloor. The biggest enhancements included a huge suite of new AI partner apps spanning from RCM to CDS, and expanded role-based experiences for docs, nurses, and radiologists. More on this one next week.

• PointClickCare launched Discharge Intel, an AI-powered solution designed to give health plans timely clinical intelligence within 24 hours of hospital discharge. Discharge Intel is PCC doing what PCC does best, eliminating manual processes and manilla envelopes from transitions of care.

• RevSpring expanded its agentic AI capabilities for patient billing support, natural language payments, and real-time staff guidance for financial conversations. Not one to rest on its agents’ laurels, RevSpring also unveiled RevSpring Prime to help scale membership-based care models for direct-to-employer and direct-to-member programs.

• Salesforce expanded Agentforce Health with six new AI agents built to act as a 24/7 administrative layer to automate high-stakes tasks that previously stalled treatment. The lineup includes agents for Referrals & Assessments, EHR Writeback, Claims & Coverage, Rural Health, Epidemiology Analysis, and Hospital Operations.

• Snowflake released research revealing that 77% of healthcare orgs are already investing in agentic AI. Two-thirds have adopted, are piloting, or plan to implement new AI agents within the next 12 months, and the vast majority of leadership teams (85%) report that improving data interoperability is a higher priority than it was two years ago.

• Stryker made waves with its new SmartHospital Platform through a newly formed business unit called Smart Care, serving as the connective tissue between all the hardware, software, and people inside of hospitals. It combines ambient sensors, the Engage alarm-filtering engine, Sync Badge devices, and virtual nursing workflows – the culmination of its recent M&A streak that included AI-enabled virtual care company Care.ai and communication platform Vocera.

• Surescripts released its always-excellent Annual Impact Report to unpack the latest trends in e-prescribing and prescription benefits. Key takeaways from this year’s report were that interoperability looks like it finally reached a tipping point, with the Surescripts network clocking 30.5B health data transactions in 2025 – up 12.3% YoY – as well as nearly a billion real-time prescription benefit responses across 973K prescribers.

• Talkdesk debuted a Complex Scheduling tool to help patients access specialty appointments. The specialized capability within Talkdesk’s CXA platform uses agentic AI to reduce delays and optimize physician capacity in contact centers and clinics.

• Verily is bringing Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 8 onto its Pre precision health platform to provide an integrated solution for generating evidence and monitoring real-world populations. The joint offering is geared toward accelerating research for life sciences and government agencies by combining advanced health analytics with consumer-grade wearable data.

• Vital debuted Vital Guard, an AI-driven solution that combs through clinical documentation and radiology reports to flag incidental findings that were uncommunicated, then closes the loop with auditable, asynchronous patient outreach. That means less malpractice exposure, and more downstream revenue.

• VSee introduced “the world’s first autonomous telehealth AI robot” that’s purpose-built for hospitals. It leverages LiDAR to navigate hospital hallways independently for use cases like virtual rounding, supply/medication deliveries, or specialist coverage in the ED.

• Zoom announced a string of healthcare updates to create a more unified “AI-first ecosystem.” Zoom Contact Center is now available in Epic Toolbox to eliminate app switching, Clinical Note added deeper Epic integrations, and Zoom Workplace for Frontline is getting new capabilities for  urgent messages and faster handoffs.

Even notoriously slow industries can cover a ton of ground in 12 months, so stay tuned for deeper dives into some of these announcements next week. 

Shoutout to all the old friends, new readers, and great sushi hosts that made our trip to Vegas so amazing.

Clinician-First Copilot for Value-Based Success

Navina’s AI copilot brings clinical intelligence directly to care teams, turning fragmented data into actionable insights that transform value-based workflows from the back office to the point-of-care. Designed for and loved by physicians, Navina’s Best in KLAS AI reduces missed diagnoses while improving quality metrics and risk adjustment accuracy. Discover how practices are leveraging Navina to enhance VBC performance and improve the clinician experience.

Abridge Named #1 Best in KLAS – Again

KLAS just named Abridge #1 Best in KLAS for Ambient AI for the second year in a row. The recognition was based on direct customer feedback from the nation’s largest and most complex health systems, which gave Abridge the highest overall satisfaction score and A+ ratings across Culture, Loyalty, Relationship, and Value. Discover why Abridge is the market-leading AI platform for clinical conversations.

The Wire

• Advanced Machine Intelligence Raises $1B: Digital health’s first nine figure seed round just went to Advanced Machine Intelligence, the AI research lab founded by Meta’s former chief AI scientist Yann LeCun. AMI is putting the bulk of its crisp $1.03B into developing “world models,” which stand to mark a significant leap forward in AI safety for high stakes settings like healthcare. Former Nabla CEO Alex LeBrun will be steering AMI from the helm, and the ambient AI platform that he was instrumental in building will have exclusive first access to the emerging technologies that come out of his new company. 

• Solo Agents Don’t Scale: One clinical AI agent should be able to scale. It doesn’t, at least according to a new study in npj Health Systems. Researchers tested leading LLM agents under mixed clinical workloads of 5 to 80 tasks (retrieval, extraction, dosing), with either a single agent handling all the tasks or a multi-agent orchestrator assigning each task to a dedicated worker. The single agents plummeted from 73.1% accuracy with 5 tasks to just 16.6% with 80 tasks, while the multi-agent system topped 90.6% accuracy with 5 tasks and held strong at 65.3% with the largest workloads – despite using 65x fewer tokens in the process. “At health-system scale, architecture matters.”

• Sword Pulse Debut: Sword Health took the lid off Sword Pulse, its grand debut within the cardiometabolic care segment. Sword Pulse is an always-on AI solution built to support hypertension, prediabetes, type 2 diabetes, high cholesterol, and weight management in a single integrated experience. Does this mean Sword just jumped into the GLP-1 arena? Yes it does. Does this mean an IPO is coming up? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

• How People Use Copilot for Health: Microsoft AI’s 2025 Copilot Usage Report wrapped some interesting numbers around how people are using Copilot for health questions. The biggest standout from over half a million conversations was how AI queries differ from traditional search, with 1 in 5 people looking for customized answers for their specific symptoms, test results, or chronic conditions. About 1 in 7 health conversations weren’t even about the user themselves, which was linked to a growing “sandwich generation” that’s caring for both their children and parents while turning to AI for help navigating it all. 

• Quantum Acquires CirrusMD: Healthcare navigation company Quantum Health acquired CirrusMD to bring physician-led virtual care to its broader employer navigation offering. CirrusMD connects members with a doctor in under 60 seconds for comprehensive virtual primary care and urgent care services, including annual wellness visits, weight management, women’s health, and behavioral health support. The move arrived after Quantum scooped up data analytics firm Embold Health last year.

• LLM Lands Breakthrough Status: RecovryAI emerged from stealth last week after receiving FDA breakthrough designation for its patient-facing GenAI chatbot that helps with recovery for joint replacements. LLMs push the envelope of the FDA’s traditional validation methods, and the agency has yet to authorize a device that relies on the tech. STAT has a great breakdown of how RecovryAI’s submission (expected in Q3) might offer hints about the FDA’s approach to regulating LLM-based medical devices.

• Papa Plus Launch: Companion care pioneer Papa announced its new Papa Plus program to integrate its in-home visits with robust quality metrics. The new program will see Papa Pals provide their usual member-directed support for health-related social needs, while also supporting plan-directed tasks to advance quality objectives with targeted members in the home. That includes scheduling and accompanying members to annual wellness visits to close gaps in care, providing support after a hospital discharge, or helping members use telehealth to improve access.

• Humana Pushes Into Value-Based Cardiac Care: Humana entered new partnerships with Karoo Health, US Heart and Vascular, and Chamber Cardio as it leans in on value-based cardiac care for Medicare Advantage members. Building on its existing collaboration with CVAUSA’s Novocardia, the program combines around-the-clock support, remote patient monitoring, and coordinated care teams to incentivize evidence-based cardiac care management and improve outcomes for chronic heart conditions across 16 states and D.C.

Best Practices for Obesity Care in the GLP-1 Era

Healthcare leaders need scalable, evidence-based approaches as obesity care evolves in the GLP-1 era. Withings rounded up its practical best practices from real-time biomarker tracking to value-based data strategies that help care teams improve adherence, tailor interventions, and deliver accountable, high-impact care. Get the best practices here.

State of Payer Enrollment and Credentialing

Over half of provider orgs are losing revenue due to credentialing delays – with many missing out on over $1M annually. Medallion’s new report unpacks the forces quietly undermining operational and financial performance, and how leaders across the industry are addressing them. Check out the full report to get insights tailored to your role and org type.

The Industry Wire

1. Healthcare AI agents spreading faster than evidence.
2. Can medical evidence keep up with AI developments?
3. Startup Radial to put $500M to work for AI-funded science.
4. Should healthcare execs rediscover their “pandemic mindset”?
5. Primary care docs team up to boost market power.
6. How physicians can preserve their “soft skills” for patients.
7. Pressure on rural hospitals sparks innovation.
8. Tenet sees success with commercial rate updates. 
9. AHA says hospital expenses rose 7.5% in 2025.
10. Stryker cyberattack linked topro-Iran hacking group.

AWS Applied AI Solutions SVP Colleen Aubrey

Clinical AI models are accelerating in capability, but evidence of their true impact remains limited. The ARISE Network’s State of Clinical AI report is the most complete review we’ve seen of a field that’s moving faster than its evaluation practices, and two of the clinicians that made it happen – Dr. Peter Brodeur and Dr. Liam McCoy – take us through their top takeaways on the latest episode of the Digital Health Wire Show.

Artificial Intelligence

Amazon Health Connect Sends AI to the Back Office

If the competition for the back office was already hot, it’s a certified wildfire after last week’s debut of Amazon Health Connect. 

Amazon is pitching Amazon Connect Health as a purpose-built agentic AI solution for the administrative work that gets in the way of care. That’s definitely not fun to read for all the companies that had the same tagline on their booth at ViVE.

It comes with five capabilities straight out of the box: 

• Patient verification
• Appointment scheduling 
• Pre-visit summaries
• Ambient documentation
• Medical coding 

What’s the core use case? AWS Director of Healthcare AI Naji Shafi says it’s the entire patient journey.

• When a patient calls to book an appointment, Amazon Connect Health answers immediately, confirms their identity, checks their coverage, and lines up the visit while they’re still on the line.

• Before the visit, it reviews their complete medical history across care settings, then surfaces previsit insights like active conditions or trends that might be relevant to closing care gaps.

• During the visit, it drafts clinical notes for provider review in real-time, with every detail linked back to the moment in the conversation where it was discussed.

• After the visit, it generates patient-friendly summaries and the medical codes needed for billing, allowing the visit to be payor-ready and submitted within minutes.

But wait, there’s more. Amazon Connect Health integrates natively with Epic, and connects to 100+ EHRs and 35+ HIEs through data integration partners like Redox.

• It’s also built entirely on AWS HealthLake, the cloud giant’s FHIR data repository that’s now getting new agentic capabilities to help convert records into standard formats.

Early users love it. Amazon One Medical was the perfect sandbox for polishing Amazon Connect Health in clinical settings before opening it to outside partners. It shows in the results.

• UC San Diego Health is saving a minute per call, diverting 630 hours a week from patient verification to direct support, and slashed call abandonment by 30%.

• Netsmart’s EHR supports more than 1,300 community provider orgs, and it saw ambient documentation adoption skyrocket 275% – and better staff retention as a result.

The Takeaway

There were already tons of agentic AI solutions competing to automate healthcare’s administrative waste, and now there’s one that’s bankrolled by the biggest bookstore in human history. It’s a crowded space, but $1 trillion per year is also enough bloat to go around.

Abridge Named #1 Best in KLAS – Again

KLAS just named Abridge #1 Best in KLAS for Ambient AI for the second year in a row. The recognition was based on direct customer feedback from the nation’s largest and most complex health systems, which gave Abridge the highest overall satisfaction score and A+ ratings across Culture, Loyalty, Relationship, and Value. Discover why Abridge is the market-leading AI platform for clinical conversations.

The Perfect Moment for Digital Health

With expanded support for remote care, digital health is positioned to play a central role in new value-based care models. Check out this overview from Withings Health Solutions to learn how connected technologies can help reduce preventable events, while also improving care quality.

The Wire

• Clinical AI Has More Studies Than Evidence: The largest systematic review to-date of LLMs in clinical medicine was just published in Nature Medicine, and despite an “overwhelming” amount of research, there’s still an underwhelming amount of evidence. A whopping 4,609 peer-reviewed clinical LLM studies were counted between 2022 and 2025 – roughly 3.2 papers per day – yet only 1,048 used real patient data and only 19 were randomized trials. Most addressed simulated scenarios (1,857) or exam-style tasks (1,704), and 25% had sample sizes under 30. 

• PHTI Gives High Marks to Digital GI: PHTI’s sixth digital health category assessment just dropped, and virtual gastrointestinal care solutions marked the first time the firm noted a substantial reduction in healthcare spending. Digital solutions for IBS and IBD netted thousands of dollars per engaged member (compared to a few hundred in other categories), while also improving symptoms and boosting quality of life. That should give purchasers plenty of reason to act, but it’s also worth noting that PHTI’s estimates were only a fraction of what GI companies promote.

• WovenX + IGA: In other digital GI news, WovenX Health is expanding access to timely specialty care through a new partnership with Idaho Gastroenterology Associates. The WovenX platform integrates directly into IGA’s clinical operations and EHR, delivering OnDemand GI Visits that connect patients with GI-trained clinicians in minutes and seamlessly routed them for follow-up care. It also provides Fast Track Colonoscopies that use a digital intake to identify patients eligible to proceed directly to screening, opening up visit slots for patients with more complex needs.

• Americans Turn to Doctors Over AI: A Gallup poll found that just 16% of Americans turn to AI chatbots for health advice, with most still relying primarily on their own physicians. Nearly three-quarters of U.S. adults (73%) said they turn to their regular doctors for medical information, a large lead over other sources like the websites of medical authorities (53%), friends or family who are medical professionals (33%), and books (17%). It’s unclear how to square this with OpenAI’s recent report that showed 40M people use ChatGPT for health advice on a daily basis.

• Ease Series A: Ease Health emerged from stealth with $41M of Series A funding to build an AI-native operating system for behavioral health practices. About 1 in 5 Americans now receive behavioral health services, but most providers still run on “patchwork stacks” with a legacy EHR, a separate intake tool, a disconnected billing system, and workarounds holding it all together. Ease consolidates the whole workflow – intake, care, and billing – onto a single AI platform capable of supporting the entire team.

• LLMs Only as Good as Training Data: GenAI is quickly populating medical records with synthetic content, and a new preprint on arXiv suggests that could be creating a feedback loop that puts model accuracy at risk. Researchers analyzed 800k synthetic medical data points and found that models trained on AI-generated content rapidly converge toward generic outputs. Rare but critical findings like pneumothorax and effusions vanished from the outputs, while demographic representations skewed heavily toward middle-aged males. Yet another example of why healthcare is too complex to just toss wrappers on off-the-shelf LLMs.

• Hello Heart and the ACC: Hello Heart partnered with the American College of Cardiology as part of a new initiative to evaluate its cardiovascular monitoring and coaching technology. The ACC will assemble an independent clinician workgroup to determine the quality and applicability of Hello Heart’s technology for clinician reporting and EMR integration. Hello Heart also joined the ACC’s Industry Advisory Forum in a bid to contribute to future public policy and AI integration into cardiovascular care.

• UnityAI Autonomous Workforce: UnityAI brought in $8.5M of Series A funding to build an autonomous AI workforce designed to run core healthcare operations like patient scheduling, follow-ups, and referrals. The platform goes “beyond voice AI agents into fully autonomous operations,” ensuring patient demand and provider supply are continuously aligned. UnityAI’s agents not only allow practices to scale their aforementioned patient-facing processes, but also their staffing operations like capacity optimization, shift management, and PTO.

• Maternal Mortality Momentum: The latest figures from the CDC show that maternal mortality just dropped to its lowest level since 2018. Maternal mortality fell from 18.6 deaths per 100k live births in 2023 to 17.9 in 2024, about a 4% improvement year-over-year. A separate CDC analysis showed that the trend could be at risk of reversing due to fewer pregnant patients receiving early prenatal care. First-trimester prenatal care initiations have dropped 4% since 2021, compared to a 12% increase for second-trimester initiations and a 16% jump in third-trimester initiations.

• Open-Source AI Platform Launches: An open-source federated platform to support the collaborative development of AI algorithms by different institutions was launched by the AI Centre for Value Based Care and deepc. The FLIP project enables multiple institutions to access large volumes of deidentified data for training AI algorithms and maintaining patient privacy while keeping data in secure local environments. FLIP is being positioned as an alternative to centralized, vendor-controlled AI research platforms.

State of Payer Enrollment and Credentialing

Over half of provider orgs are losing revenue due to credentialing delays – with many missing out on over $1M annually. Medallion’s new report unpacks the forces quietly undermining operational and financial performance, and how leaders across the industry are addressing them. Check out the full report to get insights tailored to your role and org type.

VBC 202: Intro to VBC and Risk Adjustment

Navina and Out-of-Pocket teamed up to create VBC 202, a three-part online course for anyone looking to build or scale value-based care programs. Watch the first session on-demand to learn why VBC emerged, how policy shapes provider behavior, and the fundamentals of risk, quality, and financial performance. Gary Pilling II joins as the guest instructor to dive into risk adjustment basics, including RAF scoring, HCC coding, and the CMS-HCC V28 model.

The Industry Wire

1. Oracle lays off thousands due to AI datacenter pressure.
2. HHS gets serious on information blocking enforcement.
3. TrumpRx falls short of promises one month in.  
4. Americans trust scientists over federal agencies.
5. Mayo Clinic rides admissions gains to higher net revenue.
6. Mystery emerges about Epstein’s involvement in Harvard genetics study.
7. MUSC Health acquires primary care group for $111M.
8. Who owns ambient AI documentation errors?
9. AI models aggressively prescribe opioids to marginalized groups.
10. Medical schools update their approach to nutrition education.

Anterior CEO Abdel Mahmoud, MD

Payors

Anterior Closes $40M to Take AI to the Largest Plans in the Country

The AI race between payors and providers is healthcare’s Kentucky Derby, and Anterior just closed $40M to help turn the dark horses into the frontrunners.

Anterior uses AI to ease the back-office burden on health plans. It started with a laser focus on prior authorizations, translating huge amounts of unstructured data into the information that’s actually needed to make quicker decisions.

• When Anterior helps payors deploy AI in their clinical and operational workflows, it doesn’t just dump a bunch of models on them and disappear into the sunset.

• It embeds its own clinicians and engineers alongside the platform to support its partners, optimize accuracy, and drive a measurable impact.

Trust is a differentiator. Payors are a cautious crowd, and they aren’t exactly known for trusting new friends with their critical workflows. 

• Anterior’s clinicians are its secret sauce. They make up about 40% of the company, and many of them have even started contributing directly to the platform’s code base.

• This hands-on support why partners build trust, and that hard-earned resource is what allowed Anterior to take the same tech underpinning its prior auth tools and expand it to other workflows.

New partners lead to new proof points. New proof points lead to new use cases. 

• Anterior’s early successes – from both its people and technology – have allowed it to quickly land and expand into areas like payment integrity and risk adjustment. 

• Since closing its $20M Series A in June 2024, Anterior has deployed its AI across major payors like Geisinger Health Plan, and worked alongside enterprise technology partners like HealthEdge to build out key strategic integrations.

• The platform now supports orgs representing over 50M covered lives, and the fresh funds will help it use those case studies to pry open the door to the biggest national plans in the business.  

The Takeaway

Anterior’s earliest partners had to gamble on an unproven platform without any real-world evidence to back it up. Now, the proof is in the success stories, and Anterior just landed another $40M to go after the largest and most risk-averse payors in the country.

The Perfect Moment for Digital Health

With expanded support for remote care, digital health is positioned to play a central role in new value-based care models. Check out this overview from Withings Health Solutions to learn how connected technologies can help reduce preventable events, while also improving care quality.

State of Payor Enrollment and Credentialing

AI is changing the way that healthcare leaders tackle provider network management. Medallion’s latest report breaks down the biggest challenges, emerging trends, and how automation is transforming the landscape. Get the insights you need – read the full report today.

The Wire

• Health Gorilla Files to Dismiss Epic Lawsuit: Health Gorilla filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit that Epic slammed it with earlier this year, which accused it of enabling third parties to improperly access patient data by asserting it was for treatment. The motion argues that Epic’s complaint alleges at most that Health Gorilla should have been more suspicious of third party users, rather than acting with actual knowledge of any misconduct. “Instead, it relies on ‘red flags’ and allegations that HG ‘should have’ discovered the fraud, and circular reasoning that an alleged failure to vet constitutes knowledge.”

• Mayo Clinic Platform Beats EHRs: A study in npj Health Systems suggests that Mayo Clinic Platform is better at supporting clinical research than traditional EHRs. Although the Rochester-based authors might be a little biased, they used four research projects to demonstrate Platform’s advantages across cohort identification, RWE generation, and AI model development. Those included its availability to external researchers, built-in analytics tools, and data harmonization for cross-organization comparisons.

• Withings + 9amHealth: Withings Health Solutions added another link to its chain of new partnerships with virtual cardiometabolic care provider 9amHealth. The collaboration will give 9amHealth members access to Withing’s Body Pro 2 cellular scale to measure BMI and BPM Pro 2 blood pressure monitor to support safer prescribing and stronger engagement throughout their weight management journeys. The announcement coincided with World Obesity Day on March 4, and Withings shared that it’s now supported over 500k obesity care patients in the last five years.

• Redesign Spark: The digital health incubator that brought you Calibrate and DUOS just expanded access to its industry expertise following the launch of Redesign Health’s five-week accelerator for AI-native startups. The new Redesign Spark program is designed to take builders from “healthcare-curious to launch-ready,” with hands-on mentorship, playbooks, and research tools to guide founders from exploration to a launch-ready thesis. The cherry on top is that graduates will be able to pitch their thesis to Redesign for potential funding.

• Don’t Have a Stroke With MA Coverage: Stroke patients in Medicare Advantage plans are less likely to be directed to highly rated rehab facilities than those in traditional Medicare. A JAMA Network Open study looked into post-acute treatment of 44k seniors hospitalized for ischemic stroke between 2021 and 2022. Compared to Medicare beneficiaries, the MA stroke patients were significantly less likely to be discharged to a high-quality SNF, whether they were non-dual-eligible (OR 0.82) or dual-eligible (OR 0.56). Non-dual-eligible MA beneficiaries were also less likely to receive care from high-quality home health agencies (OR 0.71).

• CLEAR Reaches Mount Sinai: CLEAR is rolling out its CLEAR1 platform at Mount Sinai Health System to give patients and employees a single, secure identity across the entire ecosystem. The academic medical center serves hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers every year through seven hospitals, 400+ outpatient sites, and 600+ research labs – a ton of touchpoints even before counting the leading school of medicine. CLEAR1 lays the groundwork for a seamless identity experience across all of the above, whether checking in for care or accessing tools to support it.

• Care Continuity Debuts CarePath IQ: Care Continuity debuted CarePath IQ to give health systems better visibility into follow-up care plans, navigation pathways, and provider handoffs – both inside and outside the network. Blind spots that get created when patients are treated away from their system are a major driver of avoidable events (not to mention missed revenue), so CarePath IQ enables providers to identify care gaps and coordinate follow-ups at the patient level, from referral to specialist visit to downstream procedure. It’s built on Care Continuity’s core navigation intelligence platform, but is now available as a standalone solution.

• Telehealth Stabilizes in Primary Care: A new analysis from Epic Research found that telehealth use in primary care has come back down to earth from its pandemic-highs, and has been remarkably stable since then. Data from 411M primary care visits showed that telehealth accounted for over 8% of encounters in July 2022, and just under 6% by October 2025 – representing about a 30% utilization decrease. Since 2023, telehealth’s share has remained stable at 6-7%, “suggesting a new steady state in the balance between virtual and in-person care.”

• Canvas Plugin Assistant: Canvas Medical announced the launch of Canvas Plugin Assistant (CPA) to effectively eliminate any coding skill requirements needed to customize the Canvas EMR platform or build agents on top of it. CPA was made possible by combining the Canvas SDK with Claude-powered Agent Skills, and early users have already been taking full advantage of the feature. Vida Health was reportedly able to spin up 214 interactions across seven plugins in less than 24 hours, a task that could easily take a developer months.

• Artisight + Epic MyChart Bedside TV: Artisight integrated Epic MyChart Bedside TV with its smart hospital platform, transforming in-room televisions into an Epic-aware hub for inpatient care and engagement. The integration lets providers use existing hardware to change room temperature, lower curtains, document care, and launch virtual nursing or interpreter services directly within Epic. Cleveland Clinic is already signed on to be the first system with the new capabilities, expanding on a prior partnership with Artisight and Microsoft to enable ambient AI to run on a single NVIDIA GPU.

VBC 202: Intro to VBC and Risk Adjustment

Navina and Out-of-Pocket teamed up to create VBC 202, a three-part online course for anyone looking to build or scale value-based care programs. Watch the first session on-demand to learn why VBC emerged, how policy shapes provider behavior, and the fundamentals of risk, quality, and financial performance. Gary Pilling II joins as the guest instructor to dive into risk adjustment basics, including RAF scoring, HCC coding, and the CMS-HCC V28 model.

Abridge Named #1 Best in KLAS – Again

KLAS just named Abridge #1 Best in KLAS for Ambient AI for the second year in a row. The recognition was based on direct customer feedback from the nation’s largest and most complex health systems, which gave Abridge the highest overall satisfaction score and A+ ratings across Culture, Loyalty, Relationship, and Value. Discover why Abridge is the market-leading AI platform for clinical conversations.

The Industry Wire

1. Breaking down the healthcare talk in Trump’s State of the Union.
2. Claude back online after “unprecedented demand” from DoD clash.
3. New rules for ACA plans would shift more healthcare costs to Americans.
4. Oracle faces executive exodus in health division.
5. Rural patients bypass local hospitals but get lower quality care elsewhere.
6. FDA plans bonuses for scientific staff that speeds up drug reviews.
7. Behind the scenes of a hospital’s 9-day cyberattack response.
8. Football is (still) bad for your head.
9. 2 dead, 2 wounded during multiple hospital shootings in Wisconsin.
10. States move to limit access to HIV treatment.