Rock Health: Innovation at the Turn of 2026

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

The curve uses three major data points to plot innovation:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Takeaway 

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

Artera Raises $65M and Hits Nine-Figure CARR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Takeaway

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

AI Scribes Aren’t Productivity Tools, Yet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Takeaway

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

Curative Hits Unicorn Status With Series B Raise

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

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

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

The idea was simple. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Takeaway

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

The ATA Makes the Case for Telehealth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Takeaway

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

Function Lands $298M for Medical Intelligence

The face of the health membership movement is now worth $2.5B after Function landed $298M of Series B funding to prove that subscription care is here to stay.

Function is building an “operating system for human health.” The OS “fuses AI with medical expertise to empower 8 billion people to take control of their health and get ahead of disease.”

  • Translation: Function offers personalized nutrition and lifestyle recommendations based on a massive menu of lab tests that members can access for $365 per year.
  • Unlike most annual physicals that measure ~26 biomarkers, Function offers 160+ tests spanning from the heart and hormones to heavy metals and cancer signals.
  • It also doubled down with the acquisition of Ezra earlier this year, adding AI-guided full-body MRIs (for detecting cancers, endometriosis, strokes) and CT scans (for lung tumors, heart plaque, soft tissue damage).

The Medical Intelligence Lab takes the vision even further. Function just launched its Medical Intelligence Lab to unify all of its data – labs, imaging, wearables, and medical records – into a continuously learning model designed to reveal patterns and surface actionable insights.

The lab gives members immediate access to three new AI capabilities:

  • Private AI Chat – answers health questions with responses informed by member data.
  • Protocols – translate complex data into health plans with easy-to-follow steps.
  • Health Records – members can securely upload lab results, visit notes, and medical records to feed into Private AI Chat and Protocols.

The testing gold rush is here… but that might not be great for everyone. Research has shown that direct-to-consumer testing companies have a history of wading into murky waters, particularly misleading marketing and a lack of care continuity.

  • Function will have to prove that its benefits outweigh those risks, but hundreds of thousands of members are already voting with their wallets that the math checks out.

The Takeaway

Function will tell you that it isn’t just leading a new category, it’s setting the standard for how we understand, manage, and extend human health. If that turns out to be true, then $298M should go a long way toward proving it.

TrumpRx and the GLP-1 Land Grab

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.

U.S. Healthcare is an “Abominable Creature”

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then this chart from industry consultant Andrew Tsang might be worth a million.

America’s healthcare system is “An Abominable Creature.” That’s also the title of Tsang’s stellar blog post that meticulously maps out every dollar that flows through it.

  • The flows in the diagram represent $4.9T, but they’re also a glimpse at every medical decision that was made in the U.S. last year. Every diagnosis. Every birth. Every death.

The charts don’t just map spending, they map our decisions. We built the healthcare system brick by brick with the choices we made, and although they might have all made sense individually, the end result is a monster of our own design.

Decision 1 – Workers fund healthcare twice… or more [Chart 1]. 

  • Federal, State, and Local Taxes – $2.4T for Medicare, Medicaid, and public health.
  • Payroll Taxes – employers fund Medicare even though most employees aren’t 65.
  • Premiums – $688B gets deducted from paychecks for employer plans.
  • Out-of-Pocket Costs – Americans shell out another $506B when they actually get care.

Decision 2 – We look after our seniors [Chart 2]. 

  • Medicare accounts for $1T every year.
  • Nursing homes account for $218B every year.
  • Home health & hospice account for $100B (and 22% of all Medicaid spending).

Other Decisions – The full U.S. diagram can tell whatever story you want it to [Chart 3].

  • Treatment is more important than prevention – $100B goes to public health while $1.5T goes to hospital care annually.
  • Innovation is a bigger priority than price controls – $441B is spent on prescription drugs.
  • Repairing old age is better than investing in children – $120B goes to children’s health compared to $1T for Medicare.

The Takeaway

The U.S. healthcare system was pieced together through a long chain of isolated decisions, each one solving a specific problem at the time. Tsang just gave us a beautiful illustration of the end result: a kraken with countless tentacles that all seem to have a mind of their own.

Remote Monitoring Boosts Revenue, Access

Remote patient monitoring was in the crosshairs last week after UnitedHealthcare axed its coverage, but a well-timed study in Health Affairs suggests that the cuts are bad news for practices – and their patients.

Practice makes perfect. Although many studies have looked into how RPM affects patients, this might be the first study to quantify its impact on practices themselves.

  • Researchers at Columbia analyzed Medicare data from 754 primary care practices that adopted RPM between 2019 and 2021, then tracked outcomes through 2023.

20%. That’s how much the practices that adopted RPM increased Medicare revenue compared to similar practices that didn’t adopt it.

  • Most of that growth came directly from RPM billing, but a quarter of it stemmed from more outpatient visits and care management services. 
  • It’s worth noting that the RPM practices also saw a 2.7% uptick in provider headcount, but the authors pointed out that most of the revenue gains came from higher activity per clinician rather than the additional hiring.

Patients also came out on top. Despite concerns that RPM can take provider time and attention away from patients that don’t need it, the RPM practices also ended up seeing more patients overall.

  • Many of these patients had higher disease burdens or were dual-eligibles, which seems to indicate that RPM didn’t shift resources away from in-person visits.

Where does that get us? The authors concluded with a “cautious optimism” for RPM’s role in primary care, but warned that unchecked expansion could drive up costs.

  • They called for thoughtful reimbursement policies with evidence-based limits on monitoring duration and patient eligibility, pretty much echoing PHTI’s recent recommendations on the same topic.
  • PHTI agreed that RPM for use cases like hypertension can be very effective, but found that 40% of beneficiaries receiving RPM for blood pressure control are monitored longer than six months – well beyond what’s clinically effective.
  • That might be good for the bad actors seeking revenue above-all-else, but it’s horrible for Medicare, taxpayers, and the public perception of RPM.

The Takeaway

One bad apple doesn’t spoil the whole bunch, and just because there are bad actors in RPM, doesn’t mean we should throw it all away.

Fabric Continues Acquisition Spree With UCM

Fabric is back at it again with its fifth acquisition in less than three years, picking up telehealth provider UCM Digital Health to round out its virtual care portfolio.

Here’s a look at Fabric’s M&A journey since launching in 2023 to tackle capacity constraints:

  • May 2023 – Fabric nabs Zipnosis from Bright Health to expand into asynchronous care.
  • Jan 2024 – Fabric scoops up GYANT to provide an AI-entry point to its services.
  • June 2024 – Fabric acquires MeMD and its 30k payor/employer partners from Walmart.
  • Sept 2024 – Fabric broadened its provider network by acquiring TeamHealth VirtualCare.
  • Nov 2025 – Fabric leans in on payors and employers with UCM Digital Health.

End-to-end platforms are built brick-by-brick. Fabric got its start by bringing consumer mobile app experiences to the ER, but it’s quickly expanded into new verticals and use cases.

  • The acquisition spree has grown Fabric into a comprehensive access and experience platform backed by its own medical group, which allows it to streamline virtual-first care for patients across the country.

Fabric’s Hybrid AI is the connective tissue. It automates routine processes to make all the M&A pieces fit together, while also streamlining care coordination and clinical decision support to make its providers more efficient. 

  • By reducing provider work time to just 89 seconds for asynchronous visits, Fabric enables faster treatments for patients and saves payors up to $17 per member per month – all while maintaining outcomes on par with in-person care.

What’s the end result? Salvaging MeMD from the rubble of Walmart’s telehealth business already gave Fabric a strong foothold in the payor/employer market, and UCM will deepen its impact.

  • UCM adds another 400 payor and employer customers to the mix. They’ll transition to the Fabric platform and reap the benefits of its national provider network and polished patient experiences.
  • That brings Fabric’s total client roster to over 75 health systems, 30k employers, and more than 100M lives across all 50 states. Not too shabby for a startup still looking forward to its third birthday.

The Takeaway

Fabric’s been acquiring and integrating new platform capabilities as fast as any digital health company out there, and the “buy-and-build” approach definitely seems to be working. They might be spinning a lot of plates, but they haven’t dropped one yet.

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