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Layer, SonderMind Expansion, and Apple’s AI Doctor
April 3, 2025
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Together with
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“It’s not just about being valuable, it’s also about being operationalized. Clinicians are often very good at figuring out what the right diagnosis is if they have the right information for the patient… so it’s really about surfacing that information at the right time.”
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Layer Health CEO David Sontag
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The healthcare AI momentum isn’t showing any signs of letting up, and chart review automation startup Layer Health just added another $21M to the segment’s quickly growing venture total.
Layer’s AI platform leverages LLMs trained on longitudinal patient data to automate data abstraction for the medical chart reviews that underpin a wide range of clinical and administrative workflows, including:
- Quality Reporting & Clinical Registries – extracting data from clinical registries and quality measurement programs to improve accuracy and ensure compliance
- Hospital Operations & Revenue Cycle – enhancing clinical documentation integrity and coding processes to optimize reimbursement and reduce denials
- Clinical Decision-Making & Patient Care – providing physicians with real-time insights that synthesize a patient’s full medical history to support personalized treatments
- Clinical Research & Real-World Data – accelerating patient cohort identification for research studies and improving real-world evidence generation
Chart review has been a longstanding challenge for most health systems, which can spend upwards of $6M per hospital on personnel costs for care quality data reporting.
- At the same time, this data represents an invaluable resource for unifying care data with clinical and financial outcomes, enabling treatment decisions to be mapped to their real-world impact.
Flare Capital Partners’ investment memo for Layer laid out how the clinical registries that map chart information to direct outcomes have historically been hamstrung by their unstructured source data.
- Abstracting this data into a usable format is a time-consuming manual process, and most technological fixes have usually only involved automating small parts of it.
- By combining the reasoning ability of large language models with the cost-efficiency of small language models, Flare believes that Layer can capture a major slice of the multi-billion dollar care quality reporting market (plus another chunk of the life sciences sector’s growing appetite for real-world data).
The Takeaway
Surfacing insights from medical charts requires peeling back countless layers of structured and unstructured data, which makes it particularly well-suited for both AI solutions and ambitious startups like Layer that are bringing them to market.
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Abridge Proven to Reduce Burnout, Increase Clinician Satisfaction
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Top Systems Scale Primary Care With K Health
Leading health systems are turning to K Health’s AI-driven primary care solution to give their patients access to high-quality care with wait times measured in hours, not months. Find out why K Health is the only clinical AI company partnering with top systems to scale fully integrated primary care experiences.
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- SonderMind Expands Nationwide: Behavioral health unicorn SonderMind is now available in all 50 states after a major expansion push over the last year. SonderMind’s integrated platform brings together therapy, psychiatry (now live in 27 states), and patient-facing digital tools under one roof. Unlike competitors that rely on just referral or provider directory models, Sondermind delivers both in-person and virtual therapy through a national network of 12k+ licensed clinicians, while also offering an app that walks patients through self-guided care and helps connect them to providers that accept their insurance.
- Apple’s AI Doctor: Apple is gearing up for its biggest healthcare push yet after leaking fresh details leaked around its upcoming “AI doctor.” Bloomberg got the scoop on Project Mulberry, Apple’s codename for a major overhaul to its Health app that’ll turn wearable device data into “tailor-made recommendations about ways to improve health.” The update could be coming as soon as this time next year, and it’ll be interesting to see if it can avoid some of the past missteps that have prevented the Apple Watch from living up to its goal of becoming “a medical lab on your wrist.”
- Hospitals Perform Ahead of Medicaid Cuts: Nonprofit hospitals that ended their fiscal year in the first half of 2024 saw a notable improvement in financial performance, notching a 1.2% median operating margin after recording -0.5% margins the year before. Fitch’s analysis chalked the gains up to a median revenue lift of 9.1% on the back of better patient volumes and payor contract negotiations, partially offset by “persistent” labor pressures that pushed wage expenses up by 6.9%. The question now is whether hospital performance can be sustained if Medicaid cuts start landing.
- Taxo Lands $5M: Medical coding startup Taxo launched with $5M in seed funding to add a healthcare-specific “reasoning engine” to existing models from OpenAI and Anthropic. Taxo told TechCrunch that its system is trained on hard-to-access healthcare data that makes it difficult for others to scrape overnight, although details were sparse beyond that. The reasoning trend in AI recently gained traction with the rise of Chinese LLM DeepSeek, which was able to generate comparable results to leading models at a fraction of the development cost.
- AvaSure Acquires Nurse Disrupted: AvaSure picked up virtual nursing platform Nurse Disrupted to support health systems in search of scalable solutions to enhance care across both hospital and home-based settings. This marks AvaSure’s second M&A move in less than a year after acquiring Ouva’s smart hospital room tech last July, and Tufts Medical Center will be collaborating to help streamline the integration of Nurse Disrupted into AvaSure’s broader platform.
- Overtime Puts Patient Safety at Risk: A study from George Washington University reached the unsurprising conclusion that an overreliance on contract nurses and overtime shifts isn’t great for patient safety. Data on 70 hospitals from the start of 2019 through the end of 2022 (AKA peak-pandemic staffing constraints) showed that safety thresholds were exceeded for both agency staffing (by 140%) and overtime use (by 64%), which was linked to a sharp increase in pressure ulcer incidence – a telling AHRQ patient safety indicator. Excess agency staffing was associated with a 6.4% increase in pressure ulcer incidence, while excess overtime was tied to a 2.1% uptick.
- Silna Series A: Silna Health landed $27M in Series A funding (technically $5M was from an unannounced seed round) to help tackle “America’s prior authorization crisis.” The AI-powered revenue cycle management platform operates within eight different payor portals, which has reportedly allowed it to reduce the time it takes to complete pre-visit processes (prior auths, benefits checks, eligibility verifications) from 30 minutes to 30 seconds for over 50k patients.
- Oura Advisor Launch: Oura officially rolled out its Oura Advisor, which offers personalized health guidance based on the user’s smart ring data. The new health feature follows hot on the heels of Oura’s $200M Series D that included a $75M investment from Dexcom – catapulting its valuation to $5.2B. Over the past year, Oura’s been making a string of acquisitions to support its large user base along more parts of their health journey, picking up both Sparta Science (data analytics) and Veri (glucose monitoring and meal timing insights).
- ATA Action Acquires DTA: The American Telemedicine Association’s ATA Action advocacy group acquired the Digital Therapeutics Alliance, which as the name suggests supports developers of software-based medical treatments. Former DTA CEO Andy Molnar will now lead ATA Action’s new Advancing Digital Health Coalition, which is designed to align DTA’s policy efforts with the telemedicine association’s wider health tech agenda.
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The First 30 Days: What to Expect With AI
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- The State of Payer Enrollment & Credentialing: Rising costs, slow automation, and evolving regulations are creating new challenges for credentialing and enrollment. Medallion’s latest report uncovers the biggest trends shaping the future – and how AI and automation are driving change. Don’t fall behind – get the full report now.
- Carle Health Goes All-In on Nabla: Nabla Copilot is rolling out at Carle Health after a successful pilot saw a majority of participating clinicians slash their documentation time by over an hour. The full case study has everything you need to know about how Nabla’s customization features, Epic integration, and ease of use are bringing joy back to medicine for Carle’s clinicians.
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