Tag: hlth

Hard to believe that was already Digital Health Wire’s fourth trip to HLTH – a few more flights out to Vegas and we might be getting close to “legacy media” status.

The more the conversations change, the more they stay the same. Last year’s “Be Bold” theme and LLM mania gave way to tales from healthcare’s “Heroes and Legends” and an AI agent avalanche.

The industry is still facing most of the same challenges, but it was amazing to see how quickly new innovations are compounding in the solutions that it’s using to conquer them.

Here’s our (non-exhaustive) roundup of some of those solutions from the expo hall:

• Arbital Health debuted its Merlin AI value-based care assistant built to make actuarial analysis transparent and actionable. Merlin AI interprets complex risk contract data, explains performance drivers, and instantly recommends next best steps.

• Abridge is bringing CDS into the flow of clinical conversations through a partnership with Wolters Kluwer. The UpToDate integration adds to a white-hot October for Abridge, which already included heavy-hitter roll outs at UPMC and Northwell.

• Brook.ai hauled in $28M of Series B funding to expand its personalized remote care platform to more patients and conditions. Providers can get up and running on the platform in 30 days with no CapEx required, and the results in the announcement speak for themselves. More to come on this one next week.

• Cedar debuted an aptly named Cedar Cover enrollment tool to make sure patients aren’t caught in the rain when the dark cloud of Medicaid cuts gets here. Cedar Cover’s key capabilities include Medicaid enrollment, proactive renewal, and denials resolution.

• Ellipsis Health is teaming up with NVIDIA to leverage its Parakeet ASR model and build out the AI infrastructure supporting Sage, an emotionally intelligent AI care manager that expands staffing capacity through proactive patient engagement.

• GE HealthCare is collaborating with The Queen’s Health Systems and Duke Health to advance the development of its upcoming AI-driven hospital operations solution. The solution will leverage insights from both systems and the 500+ hospitals using Command Center to surface actions for improving care quality, patient flow, and resource utilization. 

• hc1 unveiled hc1 IQ to deliver precision insights that transform lab data into life-saving action. hc1 IQ unifies lab, clinical, and supply chain data into a single AI-powered platform to produce enterprise-wide intelligence for improving outcomes.

• IntelePeer launched a SmartAnalytics Starter Pack that gives providers the most approachable entry-point we’ve seen to the AI agent ecosystem. It includes one patient engagement automation from IntelePeer’s menu, along with real-time dashboards and call analysis to drive immediate operational improvements.

• League introduced League Agent Teams to its AI-first consumer experience platform. The multi-agent system guides users through complex health journeys using a suite of AI agents fine-tuned for specific tasks and an orchestration layer to coordinate them.  

• Lorikeet debuted a healthcare-specific extension for its Team of Agents (deja vu, definitely one of the biggest themes at HLTH), which coordinates actions across multiple agents to call vendors, text doctors, and take action to “actually solve customer issues.”

• Nabla debuted Nabla Connect, a plug-and-play module that enables any EHR to seamlessly integrate ambient AI. Nabla already has one of the widest EHR footprints in the space, and CEO Alex LeBrun gave us the live walkthrough of how Nabla Connect extends that foundation to smaller EHRs looking to unlock the same capabilities.

• Optum took the lid off its Optum Real claims system that delivers instant coverage validation. The multi-payor platform enables real-time data exchange between payers and providers, allowing any issues to be intercepted at the point of submission.

• Penguin Ai is joining forces with UPMC Enterprises and leveraging its Ahavi data platform to validate new AI models in a secure testing environment. Ahavi will allow Penguin to refine its Small Language Models for real clinical use cases like record summarization and prior auth optimization.

• Solera Health showcased its Precision Insights Suite for AI-driven cost containment and care navigation. The two core components include Precision Intercept, which identifies patients at risk of significantly increasing costs within a year, and Precision Navigate, which delivers personalized provider recommendations based on similar patients.

• Suki launched a nursing-focused AI consortium with several leading health systems and AvaSure on the inaugural roster. The consortium will co-develop Suki for Nurses while integrating ambient AI capabilities into AvaSure’s virtual care platform.

• Vital announced the launch of Vital Urgent Care, an AI-powered platform that provides patients in urgent care settings with real-time updates, wait times, and personalized guidance – without requiring a single download or additional staff bandwidth.

• Wellsheet is rolling out across Ascension to give providers a unified view of previously overlooked data. The “GenAI front-end” allows care teams to access patient-specific EHR data on a single screen, accelerating diagnoses and clinical decisions.

• Withings Health Solutions unveiled best practices for obesity care management programs built on a decade of partnerships across the segment. Those include: (1) continuous monitoring for real-time adjustments, (2) on-device communications, (3) data-driven outcome tracking, (4) addressing comorbidities, (5) measuring more than traditional BMI metrics. All great practices for maternal health as well!

Welcome to all the fresh faces scrolling through DHW for the first time, and shoutout to all the long-time readers we caught up with at the show – the OGs have officially been here longer than a lot of the exhibitors have existed!

We picked up as many announcements as we could carry, but if we missed anything exciting and you don’t see it below, hit reply and let us know what to circle back on next week.

That’s a wrap on HLTH 2024, and the showfloor was every bit as electric as outside on the Vegas strip.

Over 12k attendees made the trip out to Sin City, and they all had the same two things on their minds: Busta Rhymes and artificial intelligence.

The blind excitement of 2022 and the hallucination trepidation of 2023 gave way to calculated strategies on using AI to deliver results for patients, platforms, and everyone in between.

It was also refreshing to see the good ol’ fashioned innovation happening outside of the Cirque du Chatbots, and we rounded up the biggest announcements from the exhibit hall to help keep them all straight:

• Artera overhauled its Harmony platform with a string of new features and an AI agent dynamic duo for Staff (translation, predictive text for patient comms, message shortening, EHR-integrated conversation summaries) and Insights (no-show reports and engagement analysis).

• Blue Shield of California partnered with Salesforce to streamline the prior authorization process by co-developing a tool that’ll allow physicians and patients to receive PA answers in near-real-time during visits. 

• Caregility is doubling Lee Health’s virtual acute care infrastructure to nearly 1,000 patient rooms by building on its existing fleet of telehealth wall systems and carts with additional APS200 Duo dual-camera devices.

• CHAI – The Coalition for Health AI – published its draft frameworks for certifying independent Health AI Assurance Labs and standardizing the output of these labs with CHAI Model Cards, which are pretty much a “nutrition label” for AI solutions.

• CirrusMD is making physician-first, on-demand healthcare available to over 55k for-hire-vehicle drivers in New York State through a new collaboration with The Black Car Fund.

• Clarify Health joined forces with Prealize Health to help payors and providers anticipate utilization trends and proactively allocate resources. The fresh faces in Clarify’s C-suite also send a pretty clear signal that it sees market consolidation on the horizon and wants in on the M&A action.

• CopilotIQ merged with Biofourmis to create “the first end-to-end platform” for delivering in-home care from pre-surgery to acute, post-acute, and chronic condition management. Massive news that we’ll be circling back on next week.

• GE HealthCare launched an AI Innovation Lab to accelerate progress across areas like clinical decision-making, cancer recurrence predictions, and model training for medical imaging.

• Healthie and Zocdoc are now able to access and update each other’s calendars using all the latest availability and booking information.

• HealthSnap unveiled its new Principal Care Management program that delivers disease-specific pathways to patients with complex chronic conditions, enabling providers to comply with CMS requirements for PCM through automated eligibility reporting, care coordination, and tailored treatment plans.

• Luma debuted the next iteration of its Patient Success Platform with the introduction of its LLM-powered Spark solution, which unlocks new capabilities like automated fax processing and “patient-facing omnichannel concierge” (AKA conversational phone chat).

• Oracle Health debuted an end-to-end payments solution that handles gateway routing, processing, and acquiring under a single agreement, as well as a separate medical claims processing product dubbed Oracle Health Clinical Data Exchange.

• Solera Health shared key findings from its new report showing that strategically supplementing in-person care with a multi-condition virtual care network could lead to a 2.3%-3.1% reduction in total cost of care. It was great kicking off the show with Solera diving into the details.

• Spring Health took the lid off its Specialty Care solution that provides rapid access to intensive treatment for acute behavioral needs, addressing the harsh fragmentation within the mental health system by supporting 50+ conditions through a single platform.

• Suki is bringing its AI documentation capabilities to Zoom’s telehealth platform, marking the startup’s second partnership along the same vein after teaming up with Amwell earlier this year.

• Upfront is now live on the athenahealth Marketplace, bringing its suite of patient engagement solutions within closer reach of more providers.

• Withings Health Solutions announced the launch of the BPM Pro 2, the first cellular blood pressure monitor to collect patient-reported outcomes and empower remote care programs to scale. Easily one of the best demos we’ve ever seen.

• Wolters Kluwer Health showcased the integration of UpToDate within Abridge’s ambient AI platform that allows draft clinical documentation to include direct links to the latest, evidence-based recommendations.

We had a blast catching up with everyone at HLTH, and want to give a warm welcome to all of our new readers we met at the show! Stay tuned for deeper dives into many of these in next week’s Digital Health Wire.