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Abridge, Novo Breaks Up With Hims, and “Voluntary” Prior Auth Reform
June 26, 2025
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Together with
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“Prediction: AI will collapse traditional medical specialties as we know them… Just as the stethoscope gave rise to cardiology, the operating microscope to neurosurgery, and the CT scanner to radiology as we know it, AI will redraw the boundaries of medical expertise. Some domains will converge. Others will splinter into new subspecialties defined not by organ systems, but by data fluency, workflow design, or model supervision.”
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Breyer Capital Partner Morgan Cheatham, MD
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VOTING IS NOW OPEN for the 2025 Top Leaders in Digital Health Awards
Thank you to everyone who took the time to nominate a digital health change maker! We had hundreds of amazing submissions, and your voices helped us narrow it down to the 80 Nominees with the most mentions.
Now it’s time for the final vote, and you each get 5 votes to celebrate the leaders moving healthcare forward!
- Voting Deadline: July 2nd
- Awards Announced: July 9th
Vote for a 2025 Top Digital Health Leader Here!
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The ambient AI segment is turning into a bigger spectacle than the NBA Finals, and Abridge just dunked on it with $300M of Series E funding.
Big-time startups have big-time valuations. The latest round doubled Abridge’s valuation to $5.3B, up from a paltry $2.5B when it closed its last nine-figure round four short months ago.
- We’ll leave it to the VCs to decide whether Abridge is worth twice as much as it was in February, but it’s now deployed at 50% more health systems – over 150 in total.
- Abridge also reportedly hit $117M in contracted annual recurring revenue as of Q1, and is on pace to support upwards of 50M medical conversations this year alone.
Abridge is aiming upstream. The new capital was earmarked for “automating more of what happens behind the scenes and enabling revenue cycle management teams to operate with unparalleled efficiency.”
- That means embedding revenue cycle intelligence earlier in the clinical conversation, and eliminating unnecessary back-and-forth between clinicians and billing teams.
- In Abridge’s own words, the ultimate aim is to “help achieve faster reimbursement cycles and minimize the risk of denials.”
The ambient AI race needs a rebrand. As Abridge and its competitors start lunging toward every workflow within arms reach of the clinical conversation, their platforms are quickly pushing past documentation. Within just the last week:
- Ambience Healthcare announced that its coding-aware ambient AI platform saves St. Luke’s Health System $13k+ per clinician annually, then followed that up by launching Patient Recap for pre-visit chart summaries.
- Commure raised $200M and rounded out its RCM and documentation capabilities with AI agents that handle scheduling, referrals, and prior auths.
- Nabla closed $70M to build out an Adaptic Agentic Platform that enables real-time coding assistance, direct EHR commands, and new capabilities for nurses.
- There’s also the 1,000 pound gorilla formerly known as Nuance, but the incumbent scribing champ hasn’t been too vocal since rolling out Microsoft Dragon Copilot earlier this year.
The Takeaway
The hottest segment in digital health is boiling over into revenue cycle management, and Abridge is cranking up the heat with its Series E funding. Topping off the warchest comes with golden strings attached, so expect the pace to only accelerate from here as Abridge looks to live up to its valuation by coming out on top in the RCM landgrab.
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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.
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Kennedy Community Health Finds RPM Success With Withings
When Kennedy Community Health needed a partner to support remote patient monitoring for its diverse patient population, it turned to Withings Health Solutions. See how Kennedy found success with its new program for uncontrolled hypertension using Withings’ RPM platform and connected devices, surpassing enrollment goals while unlocking better outcomes for its patients.
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- “Voluntary” Prior Auth Reform: After successfully lobbying to delay prior authorization reform for over a year, AHIP and dozens of U.S. payors announced a set of “voluntary” commitments to streamline the process. Here’s the commits, plus translations straight from Seth Glickman’s fantastic Substack: (1) adopt standards for electronic PA using FHIR APIs, aka “CMS is already requiring this by 2027, might as well take credit,” (2) reduce the volume of in-network authorizations, in other words “we demand millions of unnecessary PAs, so cutting a few should be a layup,” (3) ensure 80% of PAs are processed in real time, translation: “we’ll set the denominator… so we’ll hit this goal, no problem.”
- Novo Breaks Up With Hims: Hims & Hers stock took a 30% nosedive after Novo Nordisk broke off its GLP-1 partnership less than a week after a federal judge reaffirmed that the semaglutide shortage is over. Although Novo is still playing nice with other DTC partners like Ro and LifeMD, its investigation into Hims found that the telehealth provider never quite gave up on compounding its own semaglutide, no doubt because Hims had already invested heavily on building in-house compounding facilities. Shoutout to Hospitalogy for the great roundup of the meltdown.
- General Catalyst Gets Summa Approval: General Catalyst finally landed approval for its Summa Health acquisition from Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost… under 10 conditions. The acquisition was first announced back in January 2024 to give GC’s portfolio companies a sandbox for building the tech-enabled hospital of the future by supporting Summa’s acute, critical, outpatient, ED, and home care services. The conditional approval brings that future one step closer, assuming GC agrees to another $15M up front and pledges an additional $15M to Summa’s nonprofit foundation.
- Pharmacists Delivering Direct Care: New research in the American Journal of Health System Pharmacy found that pharmacists have been steadily providing more direct care to patients in hospitals over the last decade. The survey of nearly 250 hospitals showed that 3 in 4 U.S. hospitals assign pharmacists to provide direct care to most admitted patients, including prescribing, monitoring, and managing medications. A majority of hospitals reported that pharmacists manage direct care in high-intensity units like critical care (68.5%) and oncology (56.9%), while nearly half said the same for cardiology (48.5%), infectious disease (48.1%) and the ED (46.5%).
- The Clinic by Cleveland Clinic + Amwell: The Clinic by Cleveland Clinic is broadening the reach of its Cancer Concierge service by partnering with Amwell to connect more cancer patients with oncology subspecialists. Cancer Concierge expands on traditional virtual second opinions by offering advanced subspecialty reviews, insight into innovative treatments, educational content, and optional follow-up reviews. The Clinic VP Scott Schweiger walked us through the gameplan for this year during our interview at ViVE.
- Ascension Acquires AmSurg: Ascension officially acquired AmSurg from the ashes of Envision Healthcare’s bankruptcy, adding more than 250 ambulatory surgery centers across 34 states for nearly $4B. The move follows a bit of a rough patch at the non-profit health system, which just this week had its CEO announce his retirement to have Eduardo Conrado take over at the helm. The turnaround plan clearly involves leaning in on high margin service lines, even at the cost of over $15M per surgery center.
- FDA AI/ML Authorizations: The FDA has officially stopped updating its list of authorized AI/ML devices since the Trump administration took over, but a recent analysis of publicly available documents counted 167 new devices that have been authorized since the radio-silence began in September. That brings the total count of approved AI/ML devices to no less than 1,183, with the latest additions including solutions like Aidoc’s radiology-based triage for aortic dissection and Fitbit’s loss-of-pulse detection feature.
- Semler Pivots to Bitcoin: There’s a new nuclear option for digital health companies struggling to survive in the post-pandemic trenches: cryptocurrency. STAT laid out the whole playbook in its recent coverage of Semler Scientific, which scrapped its popular digital device that helps commercial payors screen Medicare Advantage members for a full-on pivot to Bitcoin speculation. The article dives deep on the perverse financial incentives at work in Medicare Advantage, and why Semler decided it would rather chase down Bitcoin gains than artery blockages.
- Wheel Expands With Amazon Pharmacy: Wheel’s white-labeled telehealth platform just got a major upgrade through an expanded partnership with Amazon Pharmacy that’ll bring same-day prescription delivery to select markets. The collaboration also equips patients and providers with a real-time view of medication costs and availability, which aims to improve the treatment adherence problems that arise from not knowing whether patients will be able to access their medications when they’re prescribed.
- Big Beautiful Job Loss: The Commonwealth Fund predicts that over one million jobs will be lost if proposed cuts to Medicaid and food assistance pass in Congress, including hundreds of thousands of healthcare positions. The new report estimates that 1.2M jobs could disappear by 2029 as funding reductions to safety-net coverage and SNAP assistance sweep across the country. Nearly half of those jobs (500k) would come from the healthcare industry alone, with fewer roles at hospitals, physician offices, and pharmacies. The overall impact would be comparable to increasing the unemployment rate by 0.8 percentage points.
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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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Abridge Fuels Next Phase of Ambient AI: RCM
The complexity of the revenue cycle creates friction that drives clinician burnout, delays reimbursement, and adds unnecessary administrative overhead. With $300 million in fresh funding from a16z and other leading investors, Abridge will embed revenue cycle intelligence earlier in the clinical conversation and eliminate the need for manual, delayed coordination between clinicians and billing teams. Learn more.
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- Navina Ranks #1 Best in KLAS for Clinician Digital Workflow: KLAS ranked Navina’s AI copilot #1 for Clinician Digital Workflow in its 2025 Best in KLAS report. Discover how Navina became the market-leading clinical intelligence platform by empowering the entire workflow from the exam room to the back office with a holistic solution for improving outcomes, physician satisfaction, and performance under value-based care.
- 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.
- 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.
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