Lumeon Chief Growth Officer Greg Miller

Digital Health

The 45 Best Digital Health Newsletters, Influencers, and Podcasts for 2023

We’re dedicating today’s top story to the people and publications that we rely on to find the most interesting digital health stories from across the web. Assuming that you already subscribe to Digital Health Wire, these are the 45 other newsletters, websites, and podcasts to follow if you want to keep up with the latest and greatest in healthcare.

Although we stay on top of all the mainstream outlets and digital health journals, some of the best content is usually found just off the beaten path. We’re a newsletter, we love newsletters, so we’re kicking things off with our favorite healthcare newsletters. 

• Out-of-Pocket – These aren’t in any particular order… but OOP’s at the top for a reason.
• Health API Guy – Our go-to for How to Win Friends and Integrate Systems.
• Health Tech Nerds – One part DH community. One part newsletter. All fantastic.
• X = Primary Care – Wide-ranging insights that keep PCPs at the center.
• Dem Dry Bones – Never fails to bring new takes to the table.
• Hospitalogy – Healthcare business breakdowns that you won’t find elsewhere.
• Healthcare Huddle – Always delivers a deep dive on the topic du jour.
• Second Opinion – Who doesn’t love a good journalist turned VC success story?
• Hick-Picks – The series on payor plumbing made us instant fans.
• The Frontier Psychiatrists – All over the place in the best possible way.
• STAT Health Tech – The digestible gateway to the rest of STAT’s coverage.
• Digital Thoughts – Product management musings from a reformed pharmacist.
• Differential Diagnosis – Asking the hard questions about the industry’s biggest trends.
• Acute Condition – Everything from manufacturing to unbundling physicians.
• Wah’s Wonderful War Room – Few and far between but always worth the wait.

When we’re done rounding up the headlines from the major news sites and back out of our morning newsletter rabbit hole, we can count on finding more fresh perspectives from these specialty publications and blogs.

• The Imaging Wire (of course)
• Cardiac Wire (of course)
• a16z
• Health Populi
• The Keckley Report
• Home Health Care News
• Behavioral Health Business
• Rock Health
• Telecare Aware
• Vator News 

These days most of our favorite content isn’t published, it’s tweeted. These all-stars are the ones doing the tweeting. (With sample tweets for your viewing pleasure.)

• Rik Renard – @rikrenard
• Morgan Cheatham – @morgancheatham
• Nikhil Krishnan – @nikillinit
• Alyssa Jaffee – @AlyssaJoyJaffee
• Jay Parkinson MD, MPH – @jayparkinson
• Blake Madden – @B_Madden4
• Stuart Blitz – @StuartBlitz
• Andy Mychkovsky – @healthcareandy
• Jan-Felix Schneider – @jfschneidr
• Sanjula Jain, PhD – @sanjula_jain
• Julie Yoo – @julesyoo
• Chris Hogg – @cwhogg
• Erin Brodwin – @erinbrodwin
• Jessica DaMassa – @jessdamassa
• Dhruv Vasishtha – @dvasishtha

And finally, the podcasts that let our ears take over when our eyes are tired from all the blogs and tweets. We have a soft spot for founder interviews, B2B trends, and long form conversations.

• Vital Signs – If you’ve had a hard time finding a great healthcare pod, this is it.
• Pear Healthcare Playbook – Stellar interviews with movers and shakers.
• The Virtual Shift – True thought leadership on the shifting virtual care landscape.
• HIT Like a Girl Pod – Holding up a mic to the rockstar women of healthcare.
• Bright Spots in Healthcare – A relentlessly sunny gaze on healthcare’s success stories.

It’s a lot to keep up with, but if you want the best digital health news out there, these sources will do more than get you started. You can also subscribe to Digital Health Wire and we’ll do the heavy lifting for you:)

PS – This list could easily have been a top 100, so if there’s a publication or news source that we’re crazy for not including, hit reply and let us know!

Selecting Your Drug Database and CDS Solution

Do your providers need easy access to real-time drug knowledge and clinical decision support? Explore Synapse Medicine’s complete guide to drug database advantages, use cases, challenges, and factors to consider when selecting the right solution for your organization.

Clinical Documentation Integrity For VBC

The growing use of risk-adjusted reimbursement in outpatient settings means clinical documentation needs to keep up, or health systems risk leaving revenue on the table. Check out Nuance’s new blog to learn how shifting reimbursement models make clinical documentation excellence more important than ever, and how AI can help you achieve it.

Patient-Centered Design for Diabetes Care

Glooko’s recently overhauled Mobile App makes it easier than ever for diabetes patients to organize, log, visualize, and share their data. Head over to this conversation with Glooko’s product and design team for a behind-the-scenes look at how patient-centered design is improving diabetes outcomes.

The Wire

• TympaHealth Series A: London-based startup TympaHealth closed a $23M Series A round to fund the US expansion of its handheld solution that allows hearing tests that normally require specialists in purpose-built clinics to be performed in more care settings. Tympa currently serves ~28k patients per month in the UK, and is now aiming to provide an easier route to hearing tests in the US market as hearing aids become more widely available thanks to new FDA rules.

• Nurse Turnover Report: The 2023 NSI RN Staffing Report showed that the average turnover cost for a staff RN spiked 13.5% to $52k between 2021 and 2022. RNs in telemetry (27.1%), step down (23.7%), and the ED (21.7%) have consistently seen the highest turnover, important stats to keep an eye on considering each percent increase in RN turnover costs the average hospital $380k per year.

• ClaimsXten Becomes Lyric: Seven months after being sold to private equity for $2.2B as part of Change Healthcare’s acquisition by UnitedHealth Group, claims editing software giant ClaimsXten Portfolio announced its own changes. The company announced its rebrand as Lyric, and welcomed former Elevance Health and Carelon Digital Platforms exec Raj Ronanki as its new CEO. ClaimsXten’s former CEO, Carolyn Wukitch, will remain as Lyric’s COO.

• Confessions of a Hospital CFO: Dr. Eric Bricker put up a great video on the Confessions of a Hospital CFO – specifically Pullman Regional CFO Steve Febus – that gave a candid look at some topics that are usually kept out of the spotlight. There’s a lot packed into the 10-minute video, but a couple highlights were the discussion about healthy patients being bad for business and why Pullman bought a Da Vinci surgical robot to attract a urologist to their hospital.

• GPT-4 in Medicine: A special report in NEJM gave us what might be our best look yet at the benefits, limits, and risks of GPT-4 as an AI chatbot for medicine. The paper is worth reading for a well-rounded overview of the tech in its current state, which boils down to promising results in medical diagnostics, patient care, and medical education, but raises several ethical, legal, and security concerns that still need to be ironed out.

• Cleveland Clinic + Genetech: Cleveland Clinic is partnering with Genetech to launch a neurological telehealth program to improve access to care for high risk patients and those living in rural areas. Neurology practices saw one of the highest uptake rates for ambulatory telemedicine (nearly half of total visits) during the start of the pandemic, and Cleveland Clinic is pushing ahead with the new program after a 2022 research collaboration with Genentech showed promising results among 200k patients with conditions such as MS, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s.

• Return-to-Normal Brings Mixed Performance: An article in the Wall Street Journal highlighted how healthcare’s return-to-normal is great news for medical device makers and hospitals, but less so for payors. Looking at recent stock performance, med device manufacturers like Abbott and Intuitive Surgical, as well as provider orgs like HCA and Tenet, have begun notching significant gains. Payors haven’t been as lucky, with a tougher environment for MA plans and increased scrutiny of PBM businesses feeding into investor anxiety.

• Rural Hospitals Electronic Info Exchange: An analysis from the US Government Accountability Office suggests that TEFCA might be helping small and rural providers overcome barriers to exchanging health information at the rate of their larger, urban counterparts. While the use of electronic exchange among small and rural hospitals still lags other hospitals, the gap is narrowing. This chart does a nice job breaking down the numbers.

• egnite Flags LAAC-Eligible AF Patients: Cardiology digital health startup egnite Health announced the addition of a new module for its flagship CardioCare solution that identifies atrial fibrillation patients with higher risks of stroke and bleeding who might be eligible for left atrial appendage closure (LAAC) therapy. The module scans over 1,700 hospital codes to identify AF patients who might have better outcomes with LAAC instead of blood thinners, allowing care teams to expedite referral and treatment.

• WellSky Adds CarePort Enhancements: WellSky is introducing new capabilities to its CarePort suite of care transition solutions to help providers develop tailored care plans and connect patients to the most appropriate care after leaving the hospital. The enhancements equip discharge planners, care managers, and care coordinators with “enhanced intelligence” at the point of discharge to give them better insight into the patient’s clinical data and past post-acute care utilization within their current workflows.

Medallion Unites Family Care Center’s Credentialing Process

As Family Care Center set out to expand its behavioral health services, it needed a scalable provider credentialing solution so that its staff could keep focusing on patient care. Find out how Medallion’s CAQH-integrated platform helped Family Care Center onboard its providers faster by letting them complete their applications in two days instead of two weeks.

Clear Arch Health Reduces Readmissions at Altru

When Altru Health System set out to reduce hospital readmissions, it turned to Clear Arch Health to find the solution. Learn how Clear Arch Health’s complete RPM platform and clinical monitoring system helped Altru lower readmissions while improving post-acute care quality.

A Flexible Prescription for Nurses

connectRN was founded to give nurses “radical flexibility,” with schedules that are crafted around their lifestyles, priorities, and personal needs. Check out connectRN’s feature in Fast Company to see how the future of healthcare is being built together with nurses.