Tag: digital health

It’s the final day of HIMSS 2025 in Las Vegas, and although the exhibitors are still diligently manning their stations, most of the announcement cards have already been dealt and it’s time to round up the biggest stories from the show.

HIMSS centered around the familiar themes of digital transformation, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and workforce development, but the single biggest trend landed at the intersection of all four: agentic AI.

The industry is embracing AI agents everywhere from the bedside to the contact center, and it was amazing to see how quickly last year’s hallucination worries gave way to what feels like a pedal-to-the-metal approach to new AI rollouts. 

You would have been hard pressed to find a dozen booths in the exhibit hall that didn’t mention AI, and the same could be said about the announcements from the show.

HIMSS 2025 major announcements, launches, and partnerships:

• 1upHealth debuted the latest release of its 1up Platform, which introduces a modern lakehouse architecture designed to scale with healthcare’s growing data needs and improve control over real-time management and analytics. Check out our interview with CEO Andrew Boyd for the full overview.

• Arcadia is bringing its longitudinal patient data to League’s CX platform to let healthcare orgs deliver individualized health recommendations and activate consumer engagement through AI and behavioral science. CEO Michael Meucci shares all the details.

• eClinicalWorks can now connect and exchange data with PointClickCare applications in long-term and post-acute care settings to support remote and bedside physician encounters.

• Elsevier expanded its flagship ClinicalKey AI clinical decision support solution through new workflow integrations with Epic and DrFirst’s iPrescribe platform, not to mention the launch of a dedicated mobile app.

• Google Cloud rolled out new GenAI capabilities in Vertex AI Search for healthcare, including a multimodal search feature called Visual Q&A that ingests tables, charts, and diagrams to build a more comprehensive view of patient health.

• InterSystems debuted its IntelliCare AI-powered EHR that includes an AI assistant to enable natural language commands, automatic patient history summarization, real-time note generation, and prepopulated billing codes.

• Kontakt.io bolstered its Responsive Care Operations platform with Kio Agents, which help prioritize day-to-day management of patient flow, assets, and nurse staff while forecasting potential bottlenecks and dynamically redistributing resources in real-time.

• Medallion enhanced its automated credentialing and compliance capabilities to support Joint Commission standards with electronic privileging workflow management and automated submission of privileging applications to partner hospitals.

• Microsoft took the lid off Dragon Copilot, an AI assistant that combines the natural language voice dictation of Dragon Medical One with the ambient listening capabilities of DAX Copilot to support everything from documentation and after-visit summaries to referral letters and clinical evidence summarization.

• Notable released the next generation of its Flow Builder, which rounds out the solution with a new Builder Assistant for AI-powered workflow creation, intuitive visualizations of data flowing through the automations, and granular role-based access controls.

• Rush University System for Health expanded its partnership with Suki and will be deploying the AI clinical documentation assistant system-wide, allowing clinicians across 28 specialties to generate patient summaries and simplify coding.

• RevSpring unveiled SeatMate, an AI assistant that guides customer service reps with intelligent scripting, infuses every conversation with patient insights, and enhances self-service through conversational chat capabilities.

• Salesforce debuted Agentforce for Health, a library of pre-built agent skills to streamline tasks like benefits verification, clinical trial recruitment, provider search & scheduling, care coordination, and customer service.

• Surescripts released its 2024 Annual Impact Report, highlighting its Touchless Prior Authorization capabilities that helped patients get medications faster by reducing the average time to approve a prior auth from over an hour to just 34 seconds.

• symplr launched the first of many AI solutions coming to its symplr Operations Platform, a symplrAI Evidence Analysis chatbot designed to accelerate clinical research and streamline the medical device and technology decision-making process for health plans.

• Talkdesk revealed its AI Agents for Healthcare, which not only automate common patient and member inquiries, but can also schedule appointments, verify benefits or prior auths, and manage prescription refills in any language.

• TigerConnect announced the general availability of its TigerConnect Pre-Hospital solution that streamlines a wide range of EMS, ED, and transfer workflows to improve patient throughput and outcomes (think better prep for patient arrival and digitized transfer coordination).

• Withings published an analysis of 3.4M smart scale users, finding that 38% of people classified as “overweight” and 2% classified as “normal” on the BMI scale actually have an unhealthy amount of fat – based on their body composition analysis – and should seek further screenings (6% of those with an “obese” BMI actually had a healthy body composition and should be considered “healthy”).

• Wolters Kluwer Health is integrating UpToDate with Microsoft Copilot Studio to deliver patient-specific, evidence-based medical content through Microsoft Dragon Copilot ambient listening and other point of care workflows.

• Zoom announced the public beta of Zoom Workplace for Clinicians, building on its partnership with Suki to automatically generate visit notes for both virtual and in-person appointments by simply clicking on the ‘Clinical Notes’ icon in the Zoom Workplace app.

We hope that everyone had an awesome time if you made it to Vegas, and welcome all of our new readers that we met at the show. Stay tuned for a deeper dive into some of these announcements next week.

CB Insights unveiled its annual Digital Health 50 rankings of the most promising private digital health startups, and this year’s list certainly included many of the industry’s brightest stars.

Here’s the methodology / our disclaimer: The final cut was selected from a pool of 10k+ applicants based on “proprietary metrics” – Commercial Maturity and Mosaic Scores – along with data on partnerships, growth stats, and market adoption. (CB Insights is of course happy to share this data with its customers, but promises that being one of them doesn’t land you a spot on the list.)

With that out of the way, here’s a look at the Digital Health 50 (high-res version):

It’s tough to compare this list to last year’s given the ever-evolving categories and methodology, but CB Insights called out four key themes for the latest cohort:

• AI is becoming foundational infrastructure: 36 of the 50 companies are building AI products, ranging from operational automation high-flyers like Laguna to specialized healthcare LLMs like Hippocratic AI. No surprises here.

• Workflow efficiency is a key priority: 19 of the companies are streamlining administrative or clinical tasks, spanning document processing startups (Tennr) to ambient AI heavyweights (Abridge). These players seem like an obvious inclusion, but the same could be said last year when ambient AI was nowhere to be found.

• Diagnostic innovations dominate: 11 companies comprised this year’s largest category, developing next-gen diagnostics across imaging (Airs Medical), pathology (Proscia), and non-invasive diagnostics (Alimetry). Diagnostics was in a three-way tie with Clinical Intelligence and Virtual Care, although the categories have some hazy boundaries. 

• More specialized platforms: Virtual and hybrid care representation doubled in this year’s cohort, reflecting the shift from general telemedicine toward condition-specific virtual models in areas like mental health (Talkiatry) and cancer care (Resilience).

The Takeaway

Lists like these never fail to get pushback because of the methodology or glaring exclusions, but this year’s cohort feels pretty well aligned with the high momentum names that keep popping up in our own coverage. Major congrats to the companies that were included.

The “move fast and break things” motto might work wonders with consumer products, but a new editorial in npj Digital Medicine makes a compelling case that healthcare needs to flip that paradigm on its head and co-create with clinicians to “sync fast and solve things.”

The editorial argues that healthcare practitioners (HCPs) should play an active role in driving digital health innovation, as opposed to being passively “consulted” so that developers can tout the fact that their product is backed by clinicians.

• The breakneck pace of digital innovation in the wake of the pandemic has outpaced the inclusion of HCPs in the co-creation of new solutions, leading to a fight-or-flight response where clinicians are reluctant to adopt said solutions to defend their traditional responsibilities. Separate research seems to back that up.

• If new tools lack product insight and buy-in from HCPs, they’re significantly more likely to be doomed to clinical irrelevance, as showcased by a recent analysis that found 44% of digital health companies have a clinical robustness score of 0 out of 10.

Although it isn’t an earth-shattering revelation that HCPs have a solid grasp on the exact workflows needed to inform clinically relevant solutions, the authors offer three considerations for shifting from “passive” to “active” co-creation.

• First, financial incentives alone aren’t enough to ensure busy clinicians can engage in meaningful co-creation. The most important incentive that companies can offer clinicians is time, particularly by delivering a product that can optimize workflow efficiency or help deliver quicker treatments.

• Second, the article stresses a need to embed digital health technologies in clinical curricula so that HCPs can learn about not just using these new tools, but also translating their experience into better-informed products.

• Lastly, the authors lay out why there’s a role for regulators to mandate that HCPs participate in digital health innovation, and suggest that payors and legislators consider augmenting their approval processes by requiring HCPs be involved in the development of new solutions to serve as a proxy for their clinical safety and efficacy.

The Takeaway

Healthcare clearly isn’t the best sandbox to “move fast and break things,” but this article is an important reminder that “sync fast and solve things” shouldn’t mean trading clinician input for speed. While passive co-creation might help with the marketing materials, giving clinicians an active role in product development is the only way to ensure their experience is reflected in digital innovation.

It’s rare that a mid-year trend roundup qualifies as the biggest story of the week, but it’s also rare that they’re as stellar as the one that former HHS policy leader Paul Mango just released.

Mr. Mango served juicy takes on three of the biggest trends shaking up the industry:

Trend #1) Payor transformation has been full-speed-ahead as payors seek success in managing beneficiaries with chronic conditions by developing their own disease management platforms (not to mention new arcs of growth help justify their climbing P/E ratios).

• Evernorth is now 80% of Cigna’s total revenue and a whopping 68% of its profit – mostly as the result of its Express Scripts acquisition in 2018. In the first half of the year, Evernorth grew 29% while Cigna as a whole grew 4%.

• United was obviously an early mover into non-health plan assets, but Optum is now the key growth driver for the entire enterprise. United Healthcare remains Optum’s largest client (accounting for two-thirds of its revenue), but Optum now represents 25% of UNH’s total revenue and 49% of its profit (thanks in large part to OptumRx).

Trend #2) Provider tailwinds are adding up as several key performance measures improve simultaneously, including higher volume, increased acuity for inpatients, and lower labor costs. 

• HCA just posted same store revenue up 10% due to a combination of the aforementioned tailwinds. ACA exchange volume was up 46% (total commercial volume rose 12.5%), and contract labor costs were down 25%.

• Even Community Health Systems, whose performance has lagged other national hospital chain operators, saw a 3.2% increase in admissions and a 4.7% bump to same store revenue. CHS axed contract labor costs by 39% year over year.

Trend #3) Medicare Part D upheaval has been emanating from the Inflation Reduction Act, which will take full effect on the 1st of next year.

• Mango boils down the IRA’s impact on Part D as such: it shifted the economic burden from beneficiaries who are heavy consumers of prescription drugs to the payors issuing the plans. 

• Medicare Part D has been around for twenty years and during that time the combination of the beneficiary’s premium and government’s subsidy only rose to $64.28. “The impact of the IRA in one year’s time will cause that to rise to $179.45.

The Takeaway

Where is all this payor transformation heading, especially as providers increasingly view them as competitors? Will health systems sustain their momentum, or is recent performance a reflection of pent-up pandemic demand? All eyes will be on next quarter’s numbers to find out, and you’ll be the first to know when we see them.

The power trio of Mayo Clinic, Epic, and Abridge are joining forces to bring the magic of generative AI to the “scaffolding of the healthcare system” – nurses.

The new solution will work similar to Abridge’s core ambient documentation tools for physicians, but optimized specifically for the unique complexity of nursing workflows.

• Whereas physician conversations usually involve capturing the medical history and patient’s story, nurses are also performing and documenting tasks like vitals collection or turning patients to avoid bed sores.

• This data all ends up in different places within the EHR, and requires a new user experience to work backwards from.

Mayo Clinic nurses are at the center of the collaboration.

• The development team is engaging with them directly to ensure the new solution meets the needs of all nursing and patient care workflows along with regulatory requirements for ambient solutions.

• Nurses will also help prioritize the workflows where the tool will have the highest impact, and will be “instrumental” in designing and testing the overall solution.

Epic’s involvement will allow the tool to integrate seamlessly into its EHR and inpatient nursing workflows, another sign that the company is all-in on quickly advancing its GenAI roadmap.

• It also represents one of the most significant efforts to stem from the Epic Workshop program announced last year, which features third-party vendors co-developing technology with Epic. 

The combination of Abridge’s AI stack, Epic’s development, and Mayo Clinic’s nursing expertise should help accelerate the development cycle, and the health system is looking to get the tool in the hands of nurses before the end of the year.

The Takeaway

Nurses perform a massive breadth of activities in fast-paced environments, and they’re grappling with the same documentation-driven burnout as the rest of the industry. Toggling between patient duties, documentation, and staff communication is a demanding use case for ambient AI, but this team appears to have all the pieces it needs to make it happen.