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Nabla, Sword Mental Health, and the Shakeup at Amazon
June 19, 2025
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Together with
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“We’ve never met two physicians who agree on the best way to do something very basic, like documenting. And so we think a good tool should be very easy to customize.”
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Nabla CEO Alex LeBrun
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Healthcare’s “zero-screen future” is looking closer than ever after Nabla locked in $70M of Series C funding to put AI agents to work restoring the human connections at the heart of the industry.
Ambient AI is hot, but Agentic AI is hotter. The round follows a wave of adoption across U.S. health systems as Nabla sets its sights on growing beyond its roots in ambient documentation.
- Nabla’s AI assistant is now used by 85k clinicians across 130+ healthcare orgs, ranging from FQHCs and rural hospitals to academic medical centers and national providers.
- In the past six months, Nabla’s grown its Live ARR by over 5X (meaning its annual recurring revenue from clients that have already gone-live, not “contracted” revenue, and definitely not annual run rate).
The key to Nabla’s success has been its ability to deliver highly personalized AI experiences without compromising on reliability, and the fresh funds will help build out an Adaptive Agentic Platform that brings that same ethos to new use cases:
- Proactive Coding Agent – a real-time coding assistant that flags billing issues and surfaces compliance nudges.
- Context-Aware Agent – strengthens existing support for patient summaries and pre-charting with direct EHR commands and the ability to initiate orders.
- Custom Care Setting Agent – adds new capabilities for nurses and inpatient teams to bring tailored support to frontline workers.
The Agent Era has arrived. The days when every ambient scribe demo got a standing ovation are long gone, and health systems are looking for AI that can automate increasingly complex workflows (or better yet, generate revenue that justifies its cost).
- Nabla clearly got the memo, but so did competitors like Abridge, Ambience, and Suki – all of which are actively working to add coding and other new features to their platforms.
- The race is on, and the entire healthcare industry – patients and providers alike – should be better off because of it.
The Takeaway
Nabla’s been making quick progress toward some ambitious goals, and agentic AI just raised the goalpost even higher. In the words of CEO Alex LeBrun, “Our mission: bring agentic AI to clinicians in a safe, compliant, and ethical framework. The journey? 1% done.”
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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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Why Health Systems Are Reevaluating Earlier Ambient AI Choices
A third of health systems are now implementing AI, but not all AI technologies are equivalent. Learn about why and how three health systems – UNC Health, Tanner Health, and MaineHealth – decided to reevaluate earlier ambient AI choices and ultimately choose Abridge. Read more here.
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- Amazon’s Healthcare Shakeup: Amazon is breaking up its Amazon Health Services division into six new business units following an exodus of executives in the first half of the year. The new units include: (1) One Medical Clinical Care Delivery, (2) One Medical Clinical Operations, (3) Amazon Health Services Strategic Growth, (4) AHS Store, Tech and Marketing, (5) AHS Compliance, and (6) AHS Pharmacy. The overhaul was reportedly designed to simplify the organizational structure, and wasn’t prompted by the loss of key execs like former One Medical CEO Trent Green.
- Sword Hits $4B Valuation: Sword Health just raised $40M at a $4B valuation, which is about a billion dollars above the total market cap of long-time MSK competitor and short-time public company Hinge Health. The funds were earmarked for expanding into mental healthcare, which makes more sense than it might seem at first glance given how common chronic pain is with MSK patients. Sword already made its first move with the launch of Mind, an AI “therapist” supported by human professionals designed to turn episodic talk therapy into continuous, data-driven care.
- Reviewing Fake Research: An interesting study in JAMA Network Open found that many systematic reviews now include retracted studies from paper mills, AKA journals that pump out low quality research to help academics game the job market. Out of 200k systematic reviews published between 2013 and 2024, 0.15% incorporated retracted paper mill articles into the evidence synthesis. Although that’s a small slice of the overall pie, the share has been increasing over time, and the authors stressed the need for new automated screening tools to detect continued citation of retracted articles.
- Zorro Series A: Benefits administration platform Zorro hauled in $20M of Series A funding to give more employers easy access to Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangements, better known as ICHRAs. Zorro helps employers set a budget and allocate employee stipends that can be used to get personalized health coverage, while also equipping employees with an AI decision engine to compare hundreds of plans and tailor the best bundle to meet their needs.
- Americans Losing Sleep: Americans lost the equivalent of 120 nights of sleep over the last five years, which isn’t great news for their long-term health outcomes. That’s from a new study of nearly 1.3M Withings users that found Americans lost 32 minutes of sleep per night, or 24 fewer nights of sleep per year. People with the lowest cardiovascular mortality risk slept 27.6 minutes more per night than those with the highest risk, while obese participants slept 21 minutes less than those with a normal BMI.
- Notable + MUSC: Notable added to its string of recent partnerships by expanding deeper into MUSC Health, which has apparently been a happy customer since their first go-live in 2021. MUSC serves patients through 16 hospitals and 830+ care locations across South Carolina, and Notable’s AI platform will be automating additional workflows to improve scheduling, voice notifications, and revenue cycle functions.
- Leaders Eat Last: Halle Tecco just published a great look at digital health founders’ remaining company ownership at exit… and it isn’t much. The S-1s from 34 digital health companies (64 people including the co-founders) that have filed to go public since 2019 showed that over two-thirds of founders (69%) owned less than 5% of their company at exit, with nearly all of the equity going toward raising capital or building out their teams. Another quarter of founders were able to hold onto 5%-20%, and just five people in the entire analysis managed to maintain over 20% ownership.
- Quantum Acquires Embold: Quantum Health acquired data analytics firm Embold Health to bolster its care navigation platform with “proprietary physician-level analytics” and an AI-powered provider recommendation engine. The acquisition will reportedly be a significant AI upgrade to Quantum’s Real-Time Intercept (RTI) and provider engagement capabilities, while forming a combined company serving more than 8M members.
- Home Health Agencies Quit Telehealth: New research revealed that home healthcare agencies are quitting telehealth, with a fifth of the agencies that implemented the service during the pandemic already discontinuing it by 2024. The survey of 791 home health agencies showed that telehealth adoption climbed from just 7.2% in 2021 to a peak of 64.9% in 2022. Since then, 19% have stopped offering telehealth, mostly because home health patients tend to be older, less tech savvy, and prefer face-to-face visits to virtual interactions.
- Allina Launches Alli: Allina Health announced the launch of Alli, a voice agent for patient engagement powered by SoundHound’s conversational AI platform. Alli manages routine tasks like appointment scheduling and patient inquiries, answering calls within Allina’s Customer Experience Center and integrating directly with its EHR so that it can instantly authenticate callers and deliver personalized support.
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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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Ambient AI That Delivers Real ROI
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.
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- Elevate 2025 – Medallion’s Virtual Conference Returns Sept 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.
- What Nurses Are Teaching Us About Ambient AI: Nurses are the backbone of healthcare, and their tools need to keep up with the growing complexity of their roles. For nurses, documentation isn’t just about compliance – it’s how they track key observations, ensure care continuity, and support billing. Nabla’s ambient AI is already helping 8,500 nurses streamline documentation and reclaim time for patients across 30+ orgs. See what Nabla’s building for the fast-paced needs of nursing workflows.
- Supporting Sustainable GLP-1 Weight Loss With Withings: Leading digital health companies and health systems are supporting safe and sustainable GLP-1 weight loss with Withings Health Solutions. See how care teams are using Withings’ suite of remote patient monitoring solutions to prevent muscle loss, combat plateaus, and drive better outcomes for their patients.
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