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Cohere, Hinge IPO, and Are LLMs Medical Devices?
May 19, 2025
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Together with
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“The best prior auth is the one you never need to do.”
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DrFirst Chief Medical Officer Colin Banas
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Cohere Health just locked in $90M of Series C funding to keep doing what it does best, offloading painful prior authorization processes from humans to AI.
Cohere works with health plans and risk-bearing providers to automate prior auth workflows and accelerate time to care… or at least quicker denials.
- The platform’s “precision clinical insights” mean up to 90% of requests can be auto-approved, slashing administrative burden and opening up bandwidth for more collaboration between physicians and payors on critical cases.
- Cohere’s been moving quickly. It’s raised 200M since launching in 2019, and now processes over 12M prior auths for 600k+ providers annually.
As an early mover in the booming segment, Cohere is doing more than digitizing an outdated prior auth system.
- Its AI facilitates new ways for plans and providers to collaborate while incorporating the best clinical evidence / guidelines, an approach that seems to be working.
- Cohere boasts a 93% provider satisfaction rating, and is now setting its sights on other areas of the healthcare ecosystem.
The Series C funds will accelerate Cohere’s next phase of growth, which involves scaling up its Cohere Unify platform and adding a thick layer of AI paint to the entire portfolio.
- Cohere Unify not only streamlines payor-provider collaboration, but also modernizes utilization management by personalizing provider workflows and optimizing engagement with real-time performance data.
- These capabilities are the foundation for Cohere’s broader vision of transforming clinical decision-making, and it sounds like we won’t have to wait long to see them expand to new use cases like synthesizing records when multiple departments are involved.
The Takeaway
Prior authorizations are a pain, full stop. If Cohere can use its Series C to give clinicians more time practicing at the top of their license instead of going back and forth with payors, that seems like a great outcome all around.
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Introducing the Next Generation of Healthcare AI
The new Abridge Contextual Reasoning Engine powers end-to-end workflows, prior-note context, revenue cycle, orders, and more, transforming the healthcare experience for clinicians and patients. Watch this video that spells out the vision of how Abridge is using this new technology to revolutionize care delivery.
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Navina AI “May Be Essential for Thriving” in VBC
Innovation lab Phyx Primary was left with one conclusion after its independent evaluation of Navina’s AI Copilot: AI “may be essential for thriving” in value-based care. Physicians using Navina saw a 40% reduction in clinical review time, a 32% decrease in burnout, and lifted STAR quality ratings by 1.9 points. The experience scores were just the icing on the cake. Get the full report to learn more.
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- Hinge IPO Details: Hinge Health revealed that it’s moving forward as planned with its upcoming IPO, and targeting a valuation of up to $2.98B in the process. As the market regains its footing thanks to the de-escalation of tariff tensions, Hinge announced that it plans to raise $437M by offering 13.7M shares at between $28 and $32 each. Even at the optimistic end of that range, Hinge is looking at about a 50% valuation haircut compared to the $6.2B peak it reached through its Series E raise during 2021’s pandemic mania.
- Are LLMs Medical Devices? A thought-provoking Penn Medicine study prodded the FDA to enforce its own definition of medical devices. The study demonstrated that LLMs often produce outputs that qualify as clinical decision support – even when prompted not to do so – which would place them firmly in the FDA’s medical device bucket and require additional oversight. Most issues arose when prompts included time-sensitive scenarios like cardiac arrests, at which point one of the LLMs suggested placing an intravenous catheter. Maybe decent advice for a clinician, not exactly great for a helpful bystander.
- Two Chairs + Curative: A freshly inked partnership is bringing Two Chairs’ mental health services to Curative members across the country. Two Chairs comprehensive clinical model (therapy, psychiatry, care navigation, and PCP collaboration) delivers clinically meaningful improvement for 79% of patients, and will be uniquely offered with zero deductibles and copays to all Curative members that complete a Baseline Visit within 120 days of the plan’s effective date.
- Sprinter Raises $55M: Mobile care provider Sprinter Health raised $55M in Series B funding to expand its footprint beyond the 18 states it already serves. The CA-based startup helps health plans deliver in-home and virtual care to members through local Sprinters, W-2 employees cross-trained as medical assistants, community health workers, and phlebotomists. Sprinters are supported by a virtual team of NPs and specialists when additional needs arise.
- State and Science of Value-Based Care: A new report from NAACOS and Innovaccer shows that 64% of healthcare leaders expect to see more VBC-driven revenue in 2025, a sharp increase in confidence despite ongoing operational challenges. Of the 168 execs surveyed, 70% expressed growing optimism about AI’s role in enabling predictive analytics and scaling VBC strategies. On the other hand, 87% cited financial risk as the top barrier to adoption, followed by provider readiness (80%) and lack of interoperability (75%).
- DiMe Links With Elevance: DiMe and Elevance are teaming up to evaluate digital health software products following last year’s launch of the DiMe Seal, granted to solutions that pass a rigorous evaluation of usability, security, and evidence. The collaboration allows DiMe to further assess solutions with a clinical component thanks to evidence assessments conducted by Elevance Health. At a time when many systems are feeling overwhelmed with the influx of new tools, the DiMe Seal’s setting itself up to be a great way to lift solid products above the noise. You can learn more or apply for a DiMe Seal here.
- Hacking is Everywhere: A large study in JAMA Network Open wrapped some numbers around the skyrocketing prevalence of healthcare cyberattacks. After examining data breaches reported to the HHS between 2009 and 2024, the number of breaches impacting over 500 patient records spiked from 216 in 2010 to 566 in 2024. Hacking accounted for 81% of last year’s breaches, an unfortunately dramatic increase over just 4% in 2010. The number of patient records affected also grew from 6M to 170M over the same time period.
- Remote Monitoring Leadership Council: Eight digital health companies banded together to form the Remote Monitoring Leadership Council, an alliance aimed at sharing data and best practices to accelerate RPM adoption. The founding roster includes a star-studded list of remote monitoring players like Best Buy Health, BioIntelliSense, Cadence, CoachCare, CopilotIQ, Bioformis, HealthSnap, and Impilo. The RMLC is already working with the White House and Congress to identify low-hanging fruit initiatives to strengthen RPM-enabled care.
- Headway Integrated Care Launch: Headway debuted a new solution that allows PCPs to easily refer patients to behavioral health providers in its network. As one of the nation’s largest networks of insurance-accepting mental health providers, Headway offers patients first session appointments in an average of 4.9 days for talk therapy and 3.8 days for medication management, compared to brutal industry averages of 15+ days for talk therapy and 43+ days for psychiatric care.
- AI Trust Gap Divides Patients & Providers: Patients and providers have different levels of trust in medical AI, according to data from 1.9k providers and 16k patients included in Philips’ latest Future Health Index report. While 63% of providers believe that AI could improve patient outcomes, only 48% of patients agreed. AI optimism was higher among patients under 45 (66%) compared to older ones (33%), but building further trust in medical AI remains a key ingredient for successful adoption.
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Ensuring Compliance With Medical AI Scribes
AI scribes are transforming how providers document patient encounters, but new innovations come with new compliance risks. Head over to Playback Health’s quick-start guide to maintaining compliance in the age of AI, and see how Playback Health Pro is giving providers peace of mind with 100% data ownership, SOC 2 verification, and HIPAA-compliant encryption every step of the way.
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Elevate 2025: Medallion’s Virtual Conference Returns September 17
Now in its fourth year, Medallion’s annual conference is back – bringing together healthcare leaders to explore this year’s theme: Elevate the present. Reframe the future of healthcare. Hear from industry voices like Tom Lawry, author of Hacking Healthcare, UPMC Chief Medical Information Officer Robert Bart, and many more. Reserve your spot now.
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- Nabla Deepens Connections at Neighborhood: As one of the leading FQHCs in the country, Neighborhood Healthcare needed an AI partner with the flexibility to support nearly 100k patients from diverse backgrounds. Discover why Neighborhood chose Nabla’s ambient AI platform to ease documentation burden and enrich its patient-provider connections, including seamless EHR integration with eClinicalWorks, multilingual support including Spanish and Arabic, and templates for over 55 specialties.
- BPM Pro 2 – Unparalleled Reliability: BPM Pro 2 increases data reliability with two new features that ensure patients are taking their reading properly and prompting them to rest and retake it if their first reading was abnormally high.
- Create Efficient Primary Care Access With K Health’s Clinical AI: Keeping up with patient access feels like a losing battle? Hartford HealthCare, Cedars-Sinai, and Hackensack Meridian Health found a new approach. K Health partners with health systems to scale high-quality 24/7 primary care access without sacrificing quality. Learn how K Health’s peer-reviewed clinical AI and Virtualist model are transforming how leading systems deliver care.
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