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Health Economy Trends, New Galaxies, and Tiny Model Breakthroughs
October 16, 2025
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Together with
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“We find that inspiring use of technology goes a lot further than requiring use of technology.”
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Abridge VP of Partner Experience Reba Schenk
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Healthcare isn’t exactly known for speed, and few companies have broken into the industry with faster adoption, scale, and impact than Abridge. In the latest episode of the DHW Show, we get a taste of Abridge’s recipe for success from their head chef of partner experience, Reba Schenk. Tune in to hear the strategies behind some of the fastest healthcare SaaS deployments in history, plus real stories and tactics from the health systems putting Reba’s approach to work.
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Trilliant Health just released its 2025 Trends Shaping the Health Economy Report, delivering a uniquely holistic perspective on the healthcare market through the lens of supply and demand.
Here’s the state of play. Health expenditures are growing faster than the rest of the economy, and they’re projected to represent 20.3% of GDP by 2033.
- The U.S. spends more and gets less than peer nations, which might have been tolerable when our federal debt was at $800B in 1980, but definitely isn’t now that it’s at $37T.
What levers can we pull? This year’s 115 page analysis looks into six macro trends driving the healthcare economy, and underlines each of them with concrete stories from real-world data.
- 1) Affordability concerns are reshaping demand. Medical prices are up 54.5% since 2009, and they’re pressuring patients and employers to weigh their options – especially when rates for an inpatient procedure can vary as much as 7x within the same facility depending on the payor (p. 19).
- 2) Stakeholders are slow to adapt to demographic trends. Mortality rates among adults aged 18-44 have been rising as the fertility rate falls, shrinking the share of Americans with employer-sponsored coverage (p. 22).
- 3) Specialty care intervention is incentivized over primary care prevention. In 2024, behavioral health visits rose 11.4%, while primary care visits declined 5.6%, marking the first time behavioral health utilization surpassed primary care (p. 43).
- 4) Fraud, waste, and abuse are pervasive. The share of high-complexity ED visits has risen sharply, increasing from 36.6% to 47.8% of visits between 2018 and 2024, underscoring the financial impact of upcoding (p. 57).
- 5) Alternative therapies are accelerating. GLP-1 utilization increased 745% from 2018 to 2023, while bariatric surgery volumes were flat to declining, illustrating how high-margin procedures face growing competition from medications (p. 86).
- 6) If the industry won’t deliver value, the government will. Federal programs have consistently failed to bend the cost curve (MSSP savings are less than 1% of Medicare spending), and there’s mounting political pressure for top-down structural reform (p. 89).
The Takeaway
The U.S. healthcare system is at a crossroads. As Trilliant put it so nicely, the choice for all health economy stakeholders is whether to implement “radical change from the inside” or “to be subjected to such change by external forces.”
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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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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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- It’s Innovaccer’s Galaxy, We’re Just Living In It: Innovaccer’s space-themed overhaul is hitting escape velocity with the launch of Galaxy, a unified AI platform for payors to manage risk adjustment and quality. Galaxy leverages Innovaccer’s specialized AI agents to automate everything from chart retrieval and coding to predictive STARS analytics, helping ensure compliance in a rapidly changing reimbursement landscape. For anyone keeping count, that’s the third major launch in the last six months after Comet and Gravity.
- The Geography of Payor Enrollments: Medallion published a gem of a report mapping out how payor enrollment timelines vary by state. The 2025 Geography of Payer Enrollments Report analyzed 64k+ enrollment records to uncover how long it takes providers to get billable, finding that the national median turnaround time is 60 days. The slowest states reach up to 196 days (sorry Delaware), while the quickest states are onboarding providers in under 40 days (shoutout to Maine and Hawaii). The full report is a quick read with some great heat maps, state-by-state breakdowns, and strategies to reduce delays through automation.
- Oura Super-Mega Round: Oura officially secured its widely rumored mega-round, locking in $900M at about an $11B valuation. The smart ring Oura confirmed that it’s sold over 3M rings in the last 12 months, and is now on pace to generate $1B+ in revenue by the end of the year (double the $500M it posted in 2024). The funding will accelerate AI / product innovation as it continues focusing on combining hardware with subscription revenue (now 20% of the overall pie) ahead of a hotly expected IPO in the not-too-distant future.
- Wolters Kluwer + Lumeris: Wolters Kluwer Health followed up the grand debut of its UpToDate Expert AI by joining forces with Lumeris to bring AI-driven clinical decision support straight to primary care physicians. The launch of UpToDate Connect allows digital health companies to embed content from UpToDate directly into their products, and Lumeris is among the first to spearhead the integration through its Tom Primary-Care-as-a-Service platform. The result? PCPs can make faster, more informed decisions without leaving their regular workflows.
- Tiny Model Breakthrough: Since all AI news is now healthcare news, Samsung just dropped a game-changer in the world of small models. A new paper introduced the Tiny Recursive Model (TRM), a microscopic yet wildly powerful 7M parameter model that notched 44.6% on the ARC-AGI-1 benchmark, beating top rivals that are nearly 10,000x larger like Gemini 2.5 Pro (37.0%), OpenAI o3-mini (34.5%), and DeepSeek R1 (15.8%). Most LLMs have over a trillion parameters running in a datacenter the size of a football field, whereas TRM is small enough to run on edge computing devices like much of the hardware already at the bedside.
- Nabla Builds Momentum Through athenahealth: Nabla showcased why meeting healthcare orgs at their existing tech stack is a better route than forcing outside tech on them. Since joining athenahealth Marketplace this time last year, over 30 provider groups have integrated Nabla’s ambient AI assistant with their athenaOne EHR, allowing them to slash documentation time and after-hours charting. Nabla’s EHR-agnostic approach has given it one of the broadest footprints in ambient AI, spanning 15+ integrations across major platforms like Epic, Cerner, NextGen, and Greenway Health.
- R1 Acquires Phare: RCM juggernaut R1 acquired Phare Health, which offers AI solutions for inpatient coding and clinical documentation improvement. R1 plans to fold the startup into its R37 AI lab, the innovation boiler room it launched earlier this year with Palantir. Phare bolsters R37 with expertise in tackling the most complex inpatient coding cases using an AI engine that builds “a holistic fingerprint” of the patient journey and cross-references it with guidelines and coding policies.
- Digital Health M&A Boom: The amount of acquisitions we’ve been covering made it seem like M&A was roaring back, and an analysis from STAT confirmed the suspicion. Through the first three quarters of 2025, the number of digital health mergers and acquisitions has already leapfrogged the totals for each of the previous two years. Much of the increase has been driven by the rise of AI and larger players scooping up smaller ones, but private equity and a wave of startups running out of runways are also driving it higher.
- Surescripts Teams Up With Arcadia: Surescripts is bringing its new First-Fill Abandonment solution to provider orgs through the Arcadia data platform. By helping providers notice when patients don’t fill a new prescription in near real-time, First-Fill Abandonment allows them to remove barriers to starting therapy and initiate quicker interventions to improve adherence. Sounds like one of the best ways to make sure patients get that script besides sending them two feet away to a pharmacy vending machine.
- Monitoring AI with AI: What’s the best way to find out if your AI algorithm is working as intended? How about using another AI algorithm. Stanford researchers recently presented their Ensembled Monitoring Model, a framework to monitor commercial AI algorithms. EMM estimates confidence in AI calculations in real time and without ground truth labels or access to internal AI components. In addition to testing AI models, EMM can be used to stratify cases by confidence in the original AI model’s prediction.
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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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Achieve Ambient AI Scale With Abridge
According to a new report from MIT, 95% of generative AI implementations fail. At Abridge, we have helped 150+ health systems scale ambient AI to tens of thousands of clinicians—many in a matter of weeks. For the first time ever, we are sharing those steep adoption curves at partners, along with impact metrics and testimonials from 19 health systems. If your ambient AI implementation isn’t scaling at speed, Abridge can help.
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- Start Getting Leads From ChatGPT and Google AI: If your healthcare company isn’t getting leads from ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews, it’s probably because your content isn’t optimized for AI search. Tely AI runs keywords and questions research, generates and publishes GEO content, and captures new leads – all on autopilot. Create your first article on us to start filling your pipeline with patients and partners from today’s lead sources.
- 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.
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