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Innovaccer Acquires Story, Distressed Lemonaid Stand, and FDA Cracks Down on Ads
September 22, 2025
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Together with
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“Healthcare doesn’t change through dashboards alone. It changes when data and AI power completely new clinical models.”
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Innovaccer CEO Abhinav Shashank
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Innovaccer kicked off a shopping spree instead of chasing an IPO, and virtual specialty care platform Story Health just became the latest startup to get crossed off the acquisition list.
Innovaccer’s been busy. It spent years building the technical infrastructure to make healthcare actually work, and it’s now acquiring the pieces to show what’s possible with that foundation.
- That includes picking up Humbi AI (actuarial intelligence), Cured (healthcare marketing/CRM), and Pharmacy Quality Solutions (pharma-payor performance tech).
- It also means equipping more healthcare orgs with its new solutions like Gravity (connects nearly every data input into a single source of truth to scale AI adoption) and Comet (an AI-powered access center with a name so good that Epic had to steal it).
Here come the agents. Story’s cardiovascular health platform is designed to shift care from episodic visits to continuous management that can move the needle on value-based outcomes.
- The platform combines AI-driven clinical pathways, advanced medication workflows, and human-led coaching to deliver industry-leading results across heart failure and other chronic conditions.
- Innovaccer will be using Story as its first scaffolding to “pioneer agentic care augmentation,” where EHR-integrated AI agents will help specialty care teams with non-clinical tasks and engage patients between visits.
There’s more on the way. Innovaccer recently revealed that it has “two to three additional acquisitions planned in the coming months,” and that hospital administration and revenue cycle management are both major focus areas.
- Although Hinge and Omada helped crack open the digital health IPO window, Innovaccer’s business is quickly evolving, and it still has the freedom to make longer-term plays in the private markets.
- Answering to public shareholders wouldn’t exactly offer Innovaccer any more freedom, and it’s using its unrestricted range of motion to take advantage of private markets that “have never had the kind of depth they have today.”
The Takeaway
We love to see a good crossover story. Innovaccer didn’t just acquire Story to improve outcomes for its patients, it acquired it to scale those outcomes to patients everywhere – and we shouldn’t have to wait long to see another chapter that takes the same playbook to a new specialty.
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- Distressed Lemonaid Stand: Bambu Ventures and Innova Capital Partners picked up telehealth company Lemonaid Health from the rubble of 23andMe’s bankruptcy proceedings for $10M. 23andMe originally acquired Lemonaid for $400M back in 2021, but a massive data breach and the DNA-testing giant’s downfall opened up a window for private equity to swoop in a steal the distressed asset. The first priorities after the acquisition will be to expand Lemonaid’s on-demand telehealth services and online pharmacy to make it easier for patients to take advantage of them.
- Digital Divide in AI: The ASTP published a report showing that 71% of non-federal acute care hospitals were using predictive AI last year (up from 66% in 2023), but there’s a persistent “digital divide” in adoption. Most health system-affiliated hospitals (86%) were leveraging AI to forecast areas such as inpatient health trajectories in 2024, compared to just 37% of independent facilities. Among hospitals using any form of predictive AI, the most striking growth was for use cases like billing (up 25 percentage points to 51%), scheduling (up 16pp to 67%), and identifying high-risk outpatients to inform follow-up care (up 9pp to 87%).
- FDA Cracks Down on Drug Ads: The FDA just fired off over 100 warning letters to drugmakers and care providers for misleading advertisements. Most of those letters (nearly 60) ended up in the inboxes of companies like Hims and Hers that offer compounded versions of GLP-1s, which aren’t FDA approved despite what their ads are leading consumers to believe. Recent research suggests that 37% of websites marketing compounded GLP-1s either explicitly state or imply that the drugs are approved, but it remains to be seen how the FDA plans on following through with the warnings in the wake of laying off 3,500 employees.
- Doximity Countersues OpenEvidence: The legal feud between OpenEvidence and Doximity keeps heating up after Doximity countersued OpenEvidence for defamation and false advertising. OpenEvidence first sued Doximity in June, alleging that their executives committed “brazen corporate espionage” by impersonating physicians to prompt hack their LLMs into revealing trade secrets. Our coverage of the original lawsuit has all the details, and it’ll be interesting to see if any of the accusations end up in the defamation bucket.
- Hospitals Getting Less Transparent: PatientRightsAdvocate.org found that fewer hospitals are posting prices despite the ongoing transparency push. The just-released report showed that 43% of the hospitals posted fewer actual prices in September compared to the same time last year, and 236 of the 2,000 hospitals reviewed still haven’t listed any dollar-and-cents prices on their websites. Overall, only ~15% of hospitals had “sufficient disclosure” of prices, meaning over half of the negotiated charges were expressed in a dollar amount.
- Adonis Acquires Caduceus: Adonis acquired CaduceusHealth to bolster its AI orchestration platform for revenue cycle management with some “proven operational expertise.” Adonis’ AI proactively prevents denials and improves RCM efficiency, while Caduceus supports thousands of providers across 35 states with fully outsourced, U.S.-based solutions for RCM staffing, coding, and analytics. Both companies operate heavily within the athenahealth ecosystem, ensuring that providers will be able to take advantage of the combined platform without sacrificing their existing investments.
- PHTI Mixed Review for Virtual OUD Solutions: The latest digital health segment review from the Peterson Health Technology Institute concluded that virtual offerings for opioid use disorder are just as effective as usual care, and may even help increase retention during treatment. That said, PHTI wasn’t convinced that virtual OUD treatments reduce overall healthcare costs, and argued that the solutions don’t actually increase the number of patients receiving medication-based care.
- Doctronic Lands $20M: Doctronic landed $20M of Series A funding to expand the reach of its AI-driven virtual care both directly to consumers and through new partnerships with payors and health systems. The platform’s core differentiator is “a fundamentally unique agentic architecture” paired with real clinical oversight, which allows it to deliver personalized health guidance in minutes and provide seamless access to licensed physicians via video visits for just $39.
- Goodbye Health Coverage: New data from the U.S. Census Bureau indicates that the percentage of Americans without health coverage hit 8.2% in 2024, up from 7.9% the year prior. The uninsured rate increased for all ages in 18 states and the District of Columbia, which the report pins on a drop in public health coverage, most notably the expiration of pandemic-related Medicaid provisions. In 2024, the uninsured rate spanned from a low of 2.8% in Massachusetts to a high of 16.7% in Texas.
- Ending Clinician Burnout Global Summit: The fourth annual Ending Clinician Burnout Global Summit is kicking off on November 6th, and it’s welcoming Nabla as the title sponsor to drive conversations around sustainable workforce strategies. The two-day virtual summit emphasizes collaborative approaches that move beyond individual wellness interventions, with leaders from institutions like Mayo Clinic, Duke Health, and Johns Hopkins Medicine sharing the stage to discuss systemic solutions to the burnout crisis. Learn more or grab a spot here.
- The Hidden Costs of Anxiety: Despite the fact that only 14% of people with health coverage have been diagnosed with anxiety, an Evernorth claims analysis found they account for 27% of total healthcare costs. That translates to $13.9B in medical, behavioral, and pharmacy expenses each year. Outside of the spending impact, anxiety is a major driver of lost productivity due to absenteeism and turnover. Employees with anxiety are twice as likely to feel burned out, and 43% of all burned out employees plan to leave their job within a year – over double the rate of those that aren’t burned out.
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