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Health IT Priorities, Qualtrics Acquires Press Ganey, and Pharmacy Kiosks
October 13, 2025
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Together with
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“Frontier models off the shelf aren’t good at health-specific tasks. There’s no evidence they’ll get good without the right company distilling the expertise of the world’s best experts into them. These partners need to own the outcome, so the viability of their organization only exists if the problems actually get solved. To underline that, it means software vendors need to go at risk.”
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Ambience Healthcare CEO Nikhil Buduma
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Payors and providers are fighting different operational battles, but they’re using the same two-letter weapon to come out on top: AI, you guessed it.
A joint report from Bain & Company and KLAS found that 80% of payors and 70% of providers now have an AI strategy in place, up from just 60% last year.
- Providers are up against structural workforce shortages and rising patient volumes, while payors are contending with higher medical loss ratios and more regulatory scrutiny.
- Bain and KLAS’ survey of 228 U.S. healthcare execs suggests that all signs point to one solution, and that’s deploying tech to improve margins.
Where are payors investing? Care coordination (57%) and utilization management (55%) were the top IT investment priorities for the second straight year.
- Payors place total cost of ownership, functionality, and scalability ahead of suite convenience, so best‑of‑breed is still the default buying motion.
- Plans are leveraging AI for everything from member engagement (35%) and enrollment (26%) to risk adjustment (26%) and prior auth automation (20%).
Where are providers investing? Revenue. Cycle. Management.
- Half of providers ranked RCM among their top IT priorities, placing it above clinical workflows (34%) and EHRs (32%).
- RCM = ROI. Accurate documentation and coding results in cleaner claims and fewer denials, which directly translates to higher revenue and lower expenses.
- It’s also a match made in heaven for AI automation, and RCM currently represents the four most common AI use cases: ambient documentation (62%), clinical documentation improvement (43%), coding (30%), and prior authorization (27%).
Here’s the kicker. Providers cite EHR integration and interoperability as their biggest pain points, so most of them prioritize their EHR vendors for new solutions.
- Only 20% of providers are primarily best-of-breed buyers, and two-thirds of Epic customers would choose an Epic option that’s “good enough” over a better competing product.
The Takeaway
It’s getting pretty hard to not be bullish on AI. There’s still plenty of uncertainty, but both payors and providers now seem to agree that inaction is the riskiest action.
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Join Nabla at Ending Clinician Burnout Summit
Nabla is partnering with the Ending Clinician Burnout Global Summit 2025 (Nov 6-7, virtual), a global community working together to reimagine healthcare and build lasting solutions to the clinician burnout crisis. This two-day event will bring together leading institutions like Mayo Clinic, Duke Health, and Johns Hopkins to design systemic changes that protect clinicians and strengthen patient care. Learn more and register here.
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10 Strategies to Expedite Provider Credentialing
Lagging provider credentialing workflows can create a wave of unexpected care delays and financial setbacks. Sidestep these pitfalls by tuning into Medallion’s recording of 10 Key Strategies to Expedite Provider Credentialing and see how your organization can keep a well-oiled team and patient care intact through the ever-evolving changes seen in healthcare.
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- Qualtrics Picks Up Press Ganey: Qualtrics acquired fellow performance-measurement giant Press Ganey Forsta for a cool $6.75B. Press Ganey has a network of over 41k healthcare orgs leveraging its experience data and benchmarking expertise, giving Qualtrics a massive surface area to start upselling its enterprise feedback and analytics suite. The acquisition sets the stage for a unified platform built around the patient, employee, and organizational experience, right in line with what Qualtrics laid out in its long-term strategy for moving deeper into regulated industries.
- DUOS Lands $130M: DUOS picked up $130M of growth funding to help seniors understand and manage their healthcare benefits. The AI-driven platform assesses members’ most pressing health-related social needs – such as food or transportation – then connects them to the resources they might not know are already available to them. The funding will allow DUOS to expand its services across Medicaid, Medicare Advantage, and ACA plans as seniors brace for a wave of confusing changes to many government plans.
- Everyone Hates ACA Cuts: A KFF poll showed overwhelming bipartisan support for keeping ACA tax credits in place, with 78% of U.S. adults favoring an extension. That includes almost all Democrats, the lion’s share of independents, and three in five Republicans. Despite the support, most Americans aren’t even unaware the credits are expiring, with 60% reporting that they’ve heard little or nothing about it. Seven in 10 marketplace enrollees say they would struggle to afford coverage if premiums nearly doubled, which is about what would happen if the subsidies aren’t renewed.
- Amazon Pharmacy Kiosks: Amazon is rolling out pharmacy kiosks at One Medical locations across Los Angeles, allowing patients to pick up prescriptions within minutes of their appointment. The kiosks stock common meds like antibiotics, inhalers, and blood pressure drugs, with inventory tailored to each office’s prescribing patterns. After a provider writes a prescription, patients scan a QR code at the kiosk and a remote pharmacist reviews the order before dispensing. Doesn’t sound like a bad way to address the fact that nearly a third of prescriptions in the U.S. never get filled.
- Microsoft’s Rural Hospital Lifeline: Microsoft threw rural hospitals a lifeline with the launch of its new AI claims denial navigator. The tech giant developed the tool in its Rural Health AI Innovation Lab as a way to help struggling providers handle denials more efficiently and receive appropriate reimbursement for their services. It’s now available on GitHub at no-cost to any provider org, from the smallest rural clinics to the largest urban hospitals.
- The New AI Playbook: DiMe debuted The Playbook: Implementing AI in Healthcare to support health systems looking to adopt and optimize AI responsibly. Developed alongside Google and over 30 partners across healthcare, tech, and policy, The Playbook provides a roadmap to scale AI solutions that improve outcomes while keeping equity and trust at the center. The resource also directly advances DiMe’s Healthcare 2030 vision, which their CEO Jenn Goldsack walked us through in the latest episode of the Digital Health Wire Show.
- Talkspace + Wisdo: Virtual mental health provider Talkspace acquired Wisdo Health, an AI-powered platform that matches members with trained peers who have shared lived experiences. Outside of their “aligned missions and philosophies,” Wisdo’s peer support platform will give Talkspace more touchpoints with patients between therapy and psychiatry visits, while also delivering more consistent progress updates through surveys and group coaching.
- Testing Agents in the EHR: Stanford recently released its new MedAgentBench healthcare benchmark to gauge whether AI agents can actually execute simple tasks in an EHR. Researchers asked leading models to complete 300 tasks in a simulated EHR with over 700k records, such as retrieving patient data or ordering medications. While the early results left room for improvement (Claude 3.5 ranked first and only succeeded with ~70% of tasks), most of the models have already gotten some major upgrades since the test was conducted, so it would be interesting to see where the latest generation stands.
- Oracle Health Connection Hub: Oracle Health launched Connection Hub to help health systems manage and share patient data through a single console. Connection Hub simplifies interoperability between hospitals, payors, and government agencies while providing consolidated views of data exchanges and detailed audit trails. The platform already connects with Oracle’s Clinical Data Exchange, Health Information Network, and the Social Security Administration, with future updates set to loop in labs, immunizations, and prescription data.
- CA Clamps Down on Private Equity: California is the latest state to enact tougher restrictions on private equity in healthcare after passing SB 351, which prohibits corporate investors from playing a role in medical decisions. SB 351 restricts investors from determining how many patients a clinician can see or which diagnostic tests are appropriate, and was drawn up in response to a growing body of evidence that links PE ownership to higher costs and lower care quality.
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What Is It Really Like Partnering With Abridge?
Abridge is now deployed across 200+ health systems across the U.S. and will support more than 55 million healthcare conversations this year. But what is it like to partner with Abridge? Hear directly from Abridge customers in this new video.
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Are You Invisible on AI Search?
Your next patient is asking ChatGPT. But unless your healthcare company has content that answers their questions, you won’t show up. Tely AI fixes this by analyzing your niche, identifying what patients and partners look for, and publishing expert-level content to make you visible on Google AI, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. Launch your AI agent in 5 minutes and get your first article on us.
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- Scale Remote Patient Monitoring With BPM Pro 2: BPM Pro 2 is the next generation cellular blood pressure monitors, empowering care teams to scale remote patient monitoring and streamline operations. Discover why leading providers are choosing BPM Pro 2 to collect highly precise measurements and enrich data with Patient Insights from their daily lives.
- Under the Hood of Navina’s AI: Navina’s AI engine harnesses over 600 proprietary algorithms to transform fragmented patient data into actionable clinical intelligence at the point of care. It’s shaped with the expertise of physicians to turn multiple data sources (EHR, HIE, claims, care gap files, etc.) into contextualized insights like suspected conditions or evidence for care gap closures – each linked back to the original source. Download the whitepaper to see examples of Navina’s AI in action.
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