Category: Digital Health

The Rise of the Generalist-Specialist

Posted on by Jason Barry

Healthcare’s tidy hierarchy of specialties was formed by cognitive necessity. The corpus of medical knowledge is too massive for a single person to master and the clinical workforce was organized around it, but a new article in Health Affairs says it might be time for a redesign if AI removes that constraint.

AI is scaling specialist-level knowledge. Leading models are coasting through Board exams and polishing their clinical capabilities, which the authors argue will quickly scale specialist-level knowledge to the point where most specialty care can be delivered by PCPs.

  • They coined the term “generalist-specialists” for a new category of doctors that transcends narrow specialty definitions.

Clinical expertise is increasingly democratized. The authors see a future where AI-augmented clinicians can manage the full constellation of patients’ chronic conditions within disease-based domains rather than organ-specific specialties. They give a few examples:

  • Cardiometabolic Diseases – combines cardiology, endocrinology, and nephrology
  • Infectious & Inflammatory – rheumatology, infectious disease, & gastroenterology
  • Primary Care: spans OB/GYN, internal medicine, and pediatrics.

That could have some major benefits. Instead of shuffling a diabetic patient between an endocrinologist, cardiologist, and nephrologist, a generalist-specialist could manage the full cardiometabolic picture.

  • That means fewer handoffs, faster diagnoses, and lower co-pays. It would also unlock a ton of specialty capacity for the patients that need it most.
  • Consolidating care under fewer clinicians would also be a tailwind for value-based care, although it would likely increase utilization in a fee-for-service world by converting deferred, fragmented, or incomplete care into a cohesive billable treatment.

AI isn’t the only barrier to making that happen. Everything from med schools and malpractice standards to credentialing and referral systems would need to be completely overhauled.

  • The generalist-specialist vision also assumes that specialists will be on board with either becoming quasi-PCPs or upskilling to ultra-complex care. Definitely not a given.
  • Patient safety concerns also go without saying, but the AI will probably be pretty decent by the time we have cardio-endocrin-nephrologists putting together the care plans.

The Takeaway

AI could easily bring specialist knowledge to generalist fingertips, but if overworked PCPs are going to start also being OB/GYNs it will take more than a fancy LLM to get there.

Why AI Vendors Struggle to Compete With EHRs

Posted on by Jason Barry

Anyone who has ever tried selling AI into health systems will tell you that it’s tough to compete with EHRs, but a new article in JAMA makes the case that it’s actually gotten too tough – and it might be time for regulators to step in.

Most markets reward the best products. The healthcare industry has a funny way of preventing that from happening, and EHR vendor dominance is a textbook example.

  • EHRs hold advantages across infrastructure, workflow integration, procurement, and pricing that make it difficult for third-party tools to gain a foothold.
  • A 2025 Health Affairs study backed that up by showing that 79% of U.S. hospitals use AI models from their EHR vendor, compared to just 59% that use AI from third-party developers.
  • A Bain report drove the point home. Two-thirds of Epic customers said they’d pick a “good enough” Epic option over a better competing product.

These EHR advantages are a natural feature of the market. That said, it’s up to regulators to decide whether the status quo is serving patients and the overall healthcare system. The JAMA authors argue that it doesn’t, and offer three areas where targeted policy could level the playing field.

Infrastructure – Integrating AI tools into clinical workflows requires real-time data access and the ability to survive EHR upgrades intact, both of which are dramatically easier for EHR vendors – particularly as data fields get added or removed.

  • Potential Policy – Mandate broader API adoption so third parties can access EHR data on equal footing, and use existing EHR certification and interoperability frameworks to do it.

Workflow and Usability – The authors specifically flag EHR vendors’ edge in understanding the trade-offs of allocating limited screen real estate to new AI tools, something that’s harder for third parties to gauge from the outside looking in.

  • Potential Policy – Require EHR vendors to offer more robust developer sandboxes – similar to Apple’s iOS developer environment – so third parties can build and test without operating at a structural disadvantage.

Procurement and Pricing – Long-standing health system relationships give EHR vendors a streamlined path through procurement, as well as the leverage to “use pricing structures that incentivize adoption.”

  • Potential Policy – Although this is the hardest area for a policy fix, the authors suggest that improving transparency around AI performance could at least help health systems make more informed decisions regardless of where a tool comes from.

The Takeaway

EHRs are in a powerful position, and companies in powerful positions have a long track record of making life harder for their competition. Healthcare is too important of an industry to not have the best products rise to the top, and this article offers some sound strategies to make sure that stays possible.

Rock Health Q1: Capital Continues Concentrating

Posted on by Jason Barry

Spring is finally here, and Rock Health’s Q1 funding recap shows that the investing landscape is definitely looking greener than last year.

Digital health startups raised $4B on the dot. That’s a whole billion higher than Q1 2025, although the gains were far from evenly distributed.

Here’s Q1 2026 by the numbers:

  • Digital health funding totaled $4B across 110 rounds (vs. $3B and 122 rounds last year).
  • Average round size climbed to $36.7M (highest since Q4 2021).
  • Rock Health counted 12 mega-rounds over $100M.

That last bullet defined the quarter. A dozen companies accounted for 59% of all capital deployed in Q1, one of the highest concentrations Rock Health has ever seen.

  • Round sizes have consistently increased every quarter since 2024, and there haven’t been this many nine-figure checks in a quarter since the pandemic peak in 2022. 
  • Whoop landed $575M at a $10B valuation, Verily raised $300M as it steps out from under Alphabet’s umbrella, and OpenEvidence’s fundraising blitz added another $250M.

The check sizes only tell half the story. One of the reasons why startups are raising bigger late-stage rounds is because they’re waiting longer to go public. 

  • Hinge and Omada broke the ice, but all it took was a little “geopolitical uncertainty” to spook investors and close the IPO window right behind them.
  • If the rest of 2026 pans out like the first quarter, we’d see close to 50 mega-rounds, almost double last year’s count.

AI is now the operating environment. The tech has become so ubiquitous that Rock Health said it will no longer be using “AI-enabled startups” as a distinct category in its funding reports.

  • The broader market remains bullish on the value of AI, but if everyone has it then it stops being a differentiator.
  • The AI startups successfully raising are the ones moving earliest into complex use cases, like Doctronic’s prescribing pilot in Utah or Qualified Health’s governance platform for health systems.

The Takeaway

Q1 mostly brought more of the same. Investors are active but selective, and the chasm between the Davids and Goliaths isn’t getting any smaller. AI is helping startups move faster than ever, but the rest of the year should help clarify whose momentum is actually durable.

HIMSS 2026 Recap and Major Announcements

Posted on by Jason Barry

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.

ViVE 2026 Recap and Major Announcements

Posted on by Jason Barry

Not even our second generational snowstorm of the year could stop ViVE Los Angeles from bringing the heat.

Agentic AI was the theme of the show, but it’s clear that category lines are only going to keep getting blurrier as agents break down the barriers to entry.

It felt like every startup had just finished supercharging their engine with the latest frontier models, and even though most healthcare orgs are open to adopting faster solutions to their problems, the toughest competition in the exhibit hall might have been buyer bandwidth.

As always, ViVE kept the spotlight on the innovation, so we’ll go ahead and follow their lead with our recap of the biggest announcements from the show.

  • athenahealth launched new agentic patient communication tools across its provider network, giving patients around-the-clock access to a virtual assistant at their doctor’s office that can help with tasks like answering basic questions or scheduling appointments.
  • Artisight integrated Epic MyChart Bedside TV with its smart hospital platform, transforming in-room televisions into an Epic-aware hub for inpatient care and patient engagement.
  • b.well Connected Health kept its hot streak going with bailey, a white-label health AI assistant. Orgs can embed bailey directly into their own apps to deliver modern patient experiences – finding care, managing medications, scheduling appointments, navigating benefits – without doing the heavy lifting of building the AI from scratch.
  • Canvas Medical showcased its new Canvas Plugin Assistant that effectively eliminates any coding skill requirements for customizing the Canvas EMR platform or building agents on top of it.
  • Care Continuity debuted CarePath IQ to give health systems better visibility into their patients’ follow-up care plans, navigation pathways, and provider handoffs – inside and outside the network.
  • CLEAR rolled out its CLEAR1 platform at Mount Sinai Health System to give patients and employees a single, secure identity across the entire ecosystem.
  • DiMe announced that CMS made the DiMe Seal a required on-ramp for digital health applications in the upcoming Medicare App Library, meaning they’ll have to complete a defined benchmark across evidence, security, and usability if they want to get in front of 86M beneficiaries.
  • Dock Health deployed its productivity platform at Mayo Clinic to streamline referral workflows and optimize operations across its cardiovascular, econsult, and specialty contract programs.
  • Fabric took the lid off Evo, a nationwide virtual care benefit that consolidates high-demand services into a unified experience: Urgent Care, Talk Therapy, Mental Health Med Mgmt, and Weight Loss.
  • Heidi was everywhere at this one. They scored a hat trick with the launch of a fully integrated Heidi Evidence tool that brings clinical evidence to workflows without any advertising baggage, the acquisition of UK-based clinical AI pioneer AutoMedica, and the debut of Heidi Comms to give care teams an AI partner for coordinating patient communications.
  • Hyro equipped its AI agents with clinically validated content and decision logic courtesy of WebMD Ignite, moving conversational AI flows beyond simple Q&As with guided actions like specialty routing and appointment scheduling.
  • Innovaccer joined forces with Allina Health Minneapolis Heart Institute to expand access to guideline-directed heart failure management from Story Health, its recently acquired virtual specialty care and patient monitoring platform that not-so-coincidentally has one of the best HF management programs in town.
  • Kontakt.io added to its flurry of new solutions with Patient Flow Agent, an orchestration agent that puts real-time operations signals from RTLS and the EHR in context so frontline caregivers can make the best decision for the patient and hospital. The RTLS component stands to unlock some big improvements for length of stay and delays, AKA revenue and experience.
  • Luma Health shared updates on its Operational AI platform that executes complex healthcare workflows from start to finish rather than optimizing isolated tasks. Over 50 health systems used Luma-powered AI workflows to save two million staff hours in 2025.
  • NewDays laid out its unique cognitive treatment platform that blends human and AI elements to help patients delay symptoms and preserve independence. The approach combines clinical assessments and psychotherapy with an AI companion named Sunny for exercises and support between visits. Their CIO Daniel is also awesome.
  • RevSpring debuted its first dedicated MCP server to give developers a grounding layer that connects AI models with data like provider quality, real-time availability, plan networks, and cost transparency – without the usual agent lag. The launch arrives as the ink is still drying on RevSpring’s acquisition of Trust Commerce.
  • TigerConnect took the lid off its new AI-powered Operator Console to replace legacy operator favorites (spreadsheets and Post-Its) with a cloud-native smart switchboard. Operator Console centralizes calls, code activations, and facility alarms in a unified interface, along with intelligent call routing and AI-recommended next best steps.
  • Wheel expanded its Horizon virtual care platform with a Clinical Action Layer that ingests patient and partner data (AI, wearables, labs, records), generates clinician-ready summaries, and intelligently routes patients into orchestrated workflows. It also debuted its new WheelX exchange that connects enterprises with the AI experiences built on Horizon.
  • Withings Health Solutions was showcasing its BPM Pro 2 connected blood pressure monitor and Body Pro smart scale, the dynamic device duo that MedStar Health is bringing to its Signature concierge medicine service to make the patient and provider experiences feel like consumer experiences. Their VP of VBC Patrick Sheehan also happens to be a fantastic interview.
  • Wolters Kluwer opened up its expert-curated medication data to AI developers with its Medi-Span Expert AI MCP that lets them easily spin up their own agentic AI workflows. Medi-Span’s safety guardrails have made it the go-to medication support for pretty much everybody that values accuracy over off-the-shelf convenience.

Many thanks to all of our awesome readers who caught us up on the latest and greatest at the show, and we’re looking forward to running it back at HIMSS in a couple weeks. Smash that reply button and let’s set something up!

ACCESS Might Be InACCESSible

Posted on by Jason Barry

The wait for CMS’ new ACCESS model payment rates is finally over, but the debate over whether or not they’re financially viable is just getting started.

Advancing Chronic Care with Effective, Scalable Solutions. ACCESS was designed to move more Medicare beneficiaries away from fee-for-service toward outcomes-driven models.

  • The program’s core mechanism for accomplishing that is Outcome-Aligned Payments (OAP), a per-beneficiary annual allowed amount to cover integrated care management for chronic conditions.
  • The end goal is to get more tech-forward companies to lean in on Medicare by rewarding them for using technology to improve patient outcomes.

That goal might be hard to reach. Here are the annual OAPs by clinical track and care period:

  • Early Cardio-Kidney-Metabolic (eCKM) – $360 initial, $180 follow-on
  • Cardio-Kidney-Metabolic (CKM) – $420 initial, $210 follow-on
  • Musculoskeletal (MSK) – $180 initial, N/A follow-on
  • Behavioral Health (BH) – $180 initial, $90 follow-on

Those numbers present some real challenges. They’re considerably lower than expected, and many of the companies that had already announced plans to participate are now being forced to reevaluate the decision.

  • For the sake of comparison, Medicare’s average annual Part B spending for a diabetic patient is around $700 under fee-for-service.
  • Asking providers to deliver comprehensive, tech-enabled care for half of that is a tall order, especially for services-heavy companies with humans in the loop.
  • Companies with an AI-first approach and an established patient pipeline might perform better, but even then the rates are so low that they’ll likely do little to motivate new entrants to Medicare given the infrastructure needed to comply with the program and achieve the desired outcomes.

The Takeaway

CMS has made it clear that it’s going to start taking bigger steps to control costs, but it also has to find rates that actually encourage companies to participate. Striking that balance is an unenviable task, but the initial consensus seems to be that ACCESS missed the mark.

Will Oracle Offload Cerner to Fund Datacenters?

Posted on by Jason Barry

The rumor mill was working overtime last week after a TD Cowen research note claimed that Oracle will have to offload Oracle Health – formerly known as Cerner – to fund its AI datacenter commitments.

It’s a tale of the times. A research note isn’t an official announcement, but the EHR market could be heading towards its biggest shakeup since Oracle first acquired Cerner in 2022.

  • The speculation revolves around Oracle’s massive $300B datacenter contract with OpenAI, which will apparently take $156B of capital expenditures to fulfill.
  • Add in contracts with Meta and Nvidia, and Oracle’s commitments swell to over $500B.

That’s a ton of CapEx. TD Cowen says Oracle will have to make some deep cuts to round up enough funds. That includes:

  • Selling Cerner to the highest bidder
  • Axing up to 30k jobs, about 15% of the current workforce
  • Exploring “bring your own chip” arrangements to lighten the load on Oracle’s books

Oracle’s back is against the wall. It’s already raised $58B in the last two months, and U.S. banks have started pulling back their lending.

  • Foreign banks are still supporting Oracle’s datacenter projects, but they’ve also raised their premiums to levels typically reserved for non-investment grade companies.
  • On top of that, Oracle is going to have a hard time recouping the $28B it just paid for Cerner. Since the acquisition, Cerner’s had a brutal VA implementation, a tough rollout with the DoD, and Epic’s been eating its lunch.

Who has deep enough pockets to acquire Cerner? It’s a short list.

  • Microsoft is a prime suspect. It’s already heavily invested in healthcare through Nuance and Azure, so an EHR could potentially create a compelling end-to-end cloud lineup for its existing customers.
  • Google and Amazon also probably wouldn’t mind having Cerner’s customer base as an anchor for their cloud ambitions. They both have full war chests and established healthcare ventures like Verily and One Medical, but they also share a track-record of expensive lessons in the industry. 

The Takeaway

Recent struggles aside, Cerner is one of healthcare’s true industry titans. It shaped decades of innovation and thousands of careers. Now it might end up as a line item to fund GPU clusters.

Crystal Ball Compilation: Digital Health in 2026 

Posted on by Jason Barry

Welcome back to the first Digital Health Wire of 2026! The healthcare industry doesn’t take any days off, but we hope our readers managed to catch a break over the holidays to recharge for the big things to come in the new year.

The past few weeks have had plenty of fortune tellers predicting what those big things will be, so we’re kicking off the year with a compilation of the clearest crystal balls.

Let’s get right into it.

CommonSpirit Health – Five Health Tech Predictions for 2026, Dr. Minal Shah

  • Favorite Forecast: In 2026, AI projects without strategic alignment are heading straight to the pilot graveyard. When organizations chase what’s possible instead of what’s strategic, they burn human capital on change efforts that never scale to real impact.
  • Big Idea: “Platform vs. point solution is a false dichotomy – and I think we’re asking the wrong question. The real question isn’t which approach to take. It’s whether we’ve done the hard work of understanding what the organization actually needs before we choose a path forward. That means moving from ‘what can we do with AI?’ to ‘what should we be doing with AI?'”

Out-of-Pocket – Out-Of-Pocket’s 2026 Predictions, Nikhil Krishnan

  • Favorite Forecast: Intellectual property lines will be drawn for AI. We’ve already seen a ton of legal battles around copyrights, but the dealmaking is just getting started.
  • Big Idea: “Healthcare has a TON of companies that have copyrights and IP ownership over critical parts of healthcare information. OpenEvidence for example has signed several agreements with medical societies, NEJM, etc. Who will the AMA partner with for CPT codes? Which companies will the EHRs partner with to license their data?”

Second Opinion – Healthcare in 2026, Christina Farr & Annalisa Merelli

  • Favorite Forecast: The largest digital health companies will start flocking to CMS’ new ACCESS program to find a better business model in Medicare, while also duking it out for a slice of the available rural health funding. 
  • Big Idea: “There’s no question digital health companies will be the beneficiaries, particularly given that the executive and policymaker running Medicare – Chris Klomp – has an entrepreneurial background and formerly sat on the board of venture-backed Maven Clinic.”

Becker’s – How the AI conversation will change in 2026, Zachary Lipton

  • Favorite Forecast: Clinical decision support has been trapped in a frustrating middle zone for years: better than manually searching guidelines, but worse than talking to a specialist. CDS will finally start evolving beyond search with contextual awareness.
  • Big Idea: “This is the year CDS evolves past glamorized search. Next-generation CDS will reason jointly over medical literature, the patient’s record and current visit context, helping clinicians apply knowledge, not just retrieve it.”

Forbes – 10 Healthcare Industry Predictions For 2026, Sachin Jain

  • Favorite Forecast: Healthcare’s AI revolution will hit speed bumps. While AI has shown considerable promise for relatively straightforward uses like ambient dictation, its application in other domains will be more challenged and problematic.
  • Big Idea: “Agentic AI holds significant promise, but legacy operators will be slow to change deeply ingrained processes, values, and attitudes. AI snake-oil salespeople (fueled by venture capitalists chasing outsized returns) have flooded the zone, a phenomenon that is sure to fuel false starts and threaten the pace and depth of true organizational change in the short-run.”

Hospitalogy – 8 Predictions for Healthcare 2026, Blake Madden

  • Favorite Forecast: In 2026, enterprise buyers will start demanding consolidation. The operational model shifts from “best of breed for each use case” to “who can orchestrate AI across our entire administrative and clinical workflow?”
  • Big Idea: “This is where the Palantir playbook becomes relevant. The firm is already working with HCA and others to deploy AI infrastructure that spans clinical, operational, and financial domains. The value proposition isn’t any single algorithm. It’s the orchestration layer that ties disparate data sources into unified decision support.”

Notable – Healthcare’s pivotal year for AI transformation, Dr. Aaron Neinstein

  • Favorite Forecast: New practices will be built from scratch around AI Agents to support panel sizes three to five times larger at equal or higher quality and dramatically lower cost. At the same time, human connection will take center stage again.
  • Big Idea: “AI will handle pattern analysis and routine adjustments, so clinicians can shift from memorizing facts to focusing on meaning… Because of this, nurses, MAs, and care coordinators will move up the value chain, as they can spend more time on empathy, clinical judgement, and complex situations rather than administrative tasks.”

The Takeaway

Healthcare still has its fair share of challenges, but it has just as many tailwinds pushing it toward new solutions. Cheers to everyone making those solutions a reality in the new year.

Rock Health: Innovation at the Turn of 2026

Posted on by Jason Barry

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

The curve uses three major data points to plot innovation:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Takeaway 

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

TrumpRx and the GLP-1 Land Grab

Posted on by Jason Barry

It’s a bad day to be a pharma middleman. The White House announced the launch of TrumpRx in 2026, kicking off a wave of cost reductions on some of the most popular drugs in the world. 

TrumpRx looks exactly like it sounds. Here’s the website.

  • The site will serve as a portal for patients to find the best rates on prescription medications, AKA “Most-Favored-Nation Pricing.” 
  • Unlike other billionaire-run pharma projects like Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company, TrumpRx won’t actually fulfill anything. 
  • Instead, it will send people to pharmaceutical companies’ direct-to-consumer sites to process orders, a strategy that Cuban applauded as having “no downside for anyone.” 

It gets better. TrumpRx was part of a broader initiative to lower drug costs for Americans, and included major partnerships with Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly to expand access to GLP-1s.

  • Novo’s Ozempic and Wegovy will be listed at $350 per month on TrumpRx, significantly lower than the $1k per month that many patients are used to.
  • The same goes for Lilly’s Zepbound, and both manufacturers agreed to list their upcoming oral GLP-1s at $150 “in the event that the FDA later approves them.” That seems pretty likely at this point.

What does pharma get out of it? Medicare coverage.

  • The “historic reductions” will enable Medicare and Medicaid to cover GLP-1s for adults with obesity, as opposed to confining coverage to those with diabetes or heart disease.  

Things snowballed from there. Novo revealed this week that it will immediately slash its GLP-1s to $349 on its DTC platform, with doses available at $199 for new patients.

  • GoodRx was quick to match them at $199 for the first two months, and Ro hopped on the same introductory bandwagon.
  • Omada also completely changed its tune within hours of the TrumpRx announcement and said that it will begin prescribing GLP-1s for the first time in 2026.

The Takeaway

The GLP-1 landscape just got tossed on its head, and the oral versions haven’t even come out yet. Drug manufacturers are already throwing down the direct-to-consumer gauntlet, but so far it looks like patients might actually come out on top.

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