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Omada IPO, More Pain for UnitedHealth, and OpenEvidence Steps on the Gas
June 9, 2025
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Together with
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“Channel partnerships, if done right, can be very successful. Sales cycles are long for healthcare, and for startups, channel partnerships allow you to ‘skip the line’ and acquire customers more quickly in the early stages. But the wrong channel partner is just as bad as the good channel partner is beneficial, so you need to select partners who are top in their class.”
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Wheel CEO Michelle Davey
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“The fastest-growing platform for doctors in history” continues to step on the gas, and OpenEvidence is reportedly on the verge of notching a $3B valuation after inking a deal to bring JAMA Network journals to its AI medical search engine.
The multi-year content agreement will make full-text articles from the American Medical Association’s JAMA, JAMA Network Open, and 11 specialty journals available directly within the OpenEvidence platform.
- OpenEvidence’s medical search engine helps clinicians make decisions at the point of care, turning natural language queries into structured answers with detailed citations.
- The model was purpose-built for healthcare using training data from strategic partners like the New England Journal of Medicine, which joined the platform through a similar deal earlier this year.
The Disney+ content strategy has arrived in healthcare. OpenEvidence compares its approach to streaming services that drive subscriptions through exclusive movies.
- If a physician wants information from top journals to support decision making, they’ll either have to get it straight from the source or use OpenEvidence, just like how anyone who wants to stream Moana needs to go to Disney+.
- The kicker is that OpenEvidence is available at no cost to verified physicians, and advertising generates all of the revenue.
The blueprint is working like a charm. OpenEvidence has over 350k doctors using its platform plus another 50k joining each month, and it’s apparently close to raising $100M at a $3B valuation just a few months after closing its $75M Series A.
- It’s rare to find hockey stick growth in digital health, and OpenEvidence is a good reminder that many areas of healthcare change slowly… then all at once.
- It also isn’t too surprising to hear that VC’s like Google Ventures and Kleiner Perkins are lining up to fund a company with a similar ad-supported business model to Doximity – one of the only successful healthcare IPOs since the start of the pandemic.
The Takeaway
Content is king, and OpenEvidence is locking in partnerships to make sure its platform is wearing the crown. The results have been speaking for themselves, but healthcare’s genAI streaming wars are just getting started.
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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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- Omada Nails Its Debut: The good times are finally rolling for digital health IPOs, and Omada just became the second company in as many weeks to nail its public market debut. Omada followed in Hinge’s footsteps by pricing at the top of its range, opening at $23/share and raising $150M in the process. As Omada continues weaving AI throughout its platform and building evidence behind its GLP-1 behavior change programs, the stock could have plenty of room to run if it can flip the switch to profitability. The S-1 included a net loss of $9.4M in Q1, a nice improvement from $19M a year ago.
- Leaked Memo at UnitedHealth: A confidential briefing from UnitedHealth accidentally landed in the hands of STAT, adding more salt to the wound after an already brutal start to the year. The leaked memo was meant to prepare United leadership for hot seat questions during its recent shareholder meeting, including scripted answers for topics like newly reinstalled CEO Stephen Hemsley’s huge compensation package, sudden hikes in deductibles for life-saving medications, and its aggressive MA coding policies. Notably absent from the prep? A single mention of helping patients.
- LLM Racial Bias in Mental Health: New research in npj Digital Medicine suggests that LLMs generate worse behavioral health treatments when given data on a patient’s race. Researchers fed four models (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and NewMes-15) 10 psychiatric patient cases representing five diagnoses under three conditions: race-neutral, race-implied, and race-explicitly stated. Psychologists evaluating the responses found that the LLMs often proposed inferior treatments when race was explicitly or implicitly indicated, though diagnostic decisions demonstrated minimal bias.
- H1 Acquires Veda: Health tech conglomerate H1 just added Veda Data Solutions to its quickly growing portfolio, marking its second acquisition this year after picking up Ribbon Health back in January. By combining Veda’s provider data solutions for health plans with H1’s clinical insights and global reach, there should be a massive market of potential customers as H1 pieces together its “end-to-end provider data platform for directories, networks, rosters, credentialing, and provider data management.”
- Climbing Cost of Coverage: The latest Milliman Medical Index showed that healthcare costs for the average person increased 6.7% in 2025, and the cost of covering a family of four through an employer-sponsored health plan now stands at $35,119. That’s up nearly 200% over the past two decades, driven by a steep increase in pharmacy and outpatient care costs, which climbed 286% due to the growing complexity of procedures handled outside of the hospital. Employers are still shouldering 58% of employees’ health care costs, but that’s only been trending downward since 2005.
- Amwell Co-Founder Launches Aileen: Amwell Co-Founder Dr. Roy Schoenberg is starting the next chapter of his entrepreneurial journey by launching Aileen.ai “to help us care for our aging parents.” Dr. Schoenberg stepped down from his role as Amwell’s chief executive in 2024 to focus on providing AI companionship to seniors, and watching The 2 Minute Story of Aileen is the best way to see how he plans to bring grace back to aging.
- Healthcare Workforce Bounces Back: The healthcare workforce appears to be bouncing back after hitting rock bottom during the COVID-19 pandemic. A JAMA research letter documents how the number of healthcare jobs fell 6.9% from Q4 2019 to Q2 2020, but by Q3 2024 was only down 0.2% relative to predicted levels. For point of reference, non-healthcare employment fell 11.4% and 2.9%, respectively. Hospitals and skilled nursing facilities are still experiencing shortages, while physician offices have recovered more quickly.
- ArcheHealth Seed Funding: ArcheHealth locked in $6.7M of seed funding to equip more hospitals with detailed insights into the actual costs of delivering patient-level care. The AI-based platform analyzes de-identified clinical, financial, and operational data to highlight process inefficiencies and reduce costs (e.g. in labor, supplies, and drugs), with the end goal of driving scalable margin improvements.
- The Toll of Heart Failure: A recent analysis in EHJ wrapped some numbers around the economic toll of heart failure. The meta-analysis of 32 studies found that heart failure’s estimated economic burden was $284B across 179 countries in 2021, including $136B in direct treatment costs and $147B in indirect costs. While highly developed countries accounted for the most absolute spending, less developed countries spent a higher percentage of GDP on HF (8.85% vs. 3.03%). It’ll be interesting to see these studies include more recent data given GLP-1s’ cardiovascular benefits.
- R1 Launches R37 AI Lab: R1 RCM landed a growth investment from Khosla Ventures on the heels of launching its R37 AI lab, which was co-developed alongside Palantir to develop agentic AI for revenue cycle automation. R1 says that it’s already working with 94 of the top 100 U.S. health systems to handle 180M annual payor transactions, and R37 is the next step in its strategy to apply agentic AI across its ecosystem.
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Why McFarland Clinic Tapped Nabla to Support Clinicians
As Iowa’s largest physician-owned multi-specialty group, McFarland Clinic needed a partner that could help deliver high-quality, coordinated care across a wide range of specialties. Find out why McFarland tapped Nabla to reduce documentation burden and bring time and presence back to the patient encounter, all within their Epic workflow.
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Transforming Remote Blood Pressure Monitoring
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- Ambient AI That Delivers Real ROI – 11% wRVU Increase: Riverside Health has partnered with Abridge to address clinician burnout and improve patient experiences. Abridge’s more accurate documentation has also supported a significant increase in the health system being appropriately compensated for care delivered. Learn more about how Riverside Health saw ROI in multiples from more accurate documentation here.
- Navina AI “May Be Essential for Thriving” in VBC: Innovation lab Phyx Primary was left with only 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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