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Everyone Wants Digital Health, Microsoft Upgrades, and Verily Medical Advice
October 20, 2025
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Together with
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“If the U.S. healthcare system were its own economy, it would be the third largest in the world.”
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Mr. Not Boring Packy McCormick
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What better way to kick off HLTH week than with a new survey from the Peterson Health Technology Institute showing that healthcare decision-makers are still hungry for new solutions?
PHTI’s 2025 State of Digital Health Purchasing Survey showed that health plans, employers, and health systems are all investing heavily in digital health, but spending patterns are starting to diverge.
- The headlining stat: 61% of health plans and 44% of health systems plan on increasing digital health spending in the coming year, compared to just 14% of employers.
Employer spending has leveled off. Two-thirds of employers plan to hold spending steady as they maintain their current suite of solutions.
- In contrast, health plans and health systems are ramping up to offer a wider variety of solutions (81%) and keep up with patient engagement (77%).
- The top priorities across the board? Improve access, reduce costs, and strengthen user experiences, especially in areas like diabetes, mental health, and primary care.
Purchasers are more hawk-eyed than ever… especially when it comes to their contracts. Nearly half of purchasers are already using performance-based contracts, and the majority plan to use them in the next year.
- 73% of contracts now have a duration under two years – up from 59% last year – leaving a short window for solutions to prove their value.
- Short-term contracts, annual portfolio reviews, and a laser focus on engagement and ROI are the new normal. Building long-term relationships hinges on demonstrating both.
Vetting isn’t getting any easier. When comparing vendors, employers (66%) are more likely than health plans (23%) and health systems (42%) to cite cost as the deciding factor.
- Payors and providers both prioritize a proven track record above cost, but the report points to other ways to gain an edge.
- Although performance-based contracts are gaining traction, few purchasers are satisfied with their current models, and they’re looking for vendors that can offer either better outcome thresholds or attribution methods.
The Takeaway
Health plans, employers, and health systems all still have an appetite for new solutions, and PHTI just gave vendors a way to stack their decks with more data on each of their unique priorities.
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Withings and Babyscripts Tackle Maternal Health
Babyscripts is teaming up with Withings Health Solutions to tackle the leading cause of maternal mortality in the U.S. – hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, including preeclampsia. Learn how remote patient monitoring with BPM Pro 2 is helping Babyscripts keep mothers safe through personalized support when they need it most.
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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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- Dragon Copilot Upgrades: Microsoft unleashed a flurry of announcements around fine-tuning Dragon Copilot for nurses while significantly expanding the AI clinical assistant’s partner ecosystem. Outside of launching several new capabilities tailored specifically for nursing workflows (documentation, insights, task automation), Microsoft announced a long string of new integrations with partner apps and agents directly within Dragon Copilot. We counted 16 in total, ranging from OpenEvidence (CDS) and Regard (RCM) to Press Ganey (patient experience) and Artisight (smart hospital-enabled contactless documentation).
- Verily’s Handing Out Medical Advice: Verily is launching a new Verily Me app that provides users with complementary health guidance from clinicians based on their medical records. The no-cost model isn’t for philanthropy: Verily plans to funnel the data into its new Lifelong data registry, then market it to pharmaceutical companies with user consent. The health advice will probably have to be pretty spectacular to get people to turn over their sensitive info to a company with such close ties to Big Tech and Google.
- SonderMind AI Suite: SonderMind just unveiled the SonderMind AI Suite, a set of clinically-backed tools geared toward improving the client-provider relationship and providing support between sessions. The suite gives clients a 24/7 clinical companion to reinforce insights, track progress, and provide motivation, while equipping providers with AI-enabled assistance for visit prep, treatment plans, and session takeaways. The launch builds off SonderMind’s recent debut of AI Notes, which uniquely guarantees that its claims are all 100% ready for submission.
- Ascension Partners With Wellsheet: Ascension is rolling out Wellsheet’s GenAI front-end to optimize patient care and close critical care gaps across the system. Wellsheet gives doctors a new lens to view previously overlooked data, allowing care teams to access patient-specific EHR data in under 30 seconds on a single screen while accelerating diagnoses and clinical decisions. A recent KLAS study showed that Wellsheet was putting up some impressive savings numbers at Ascension prior to the system-wide roll out.
- Sustainable CCM With Cadence: NEJM Catalyst just published a peer-reviewed case study that shined a flattering spotlight on Cadence’s Remote Patient Care model as a scalable standard of care for chronic condition management. The study outlines how over 2,500 Providence patients achieved stronger outcomes, lower costs, and higher satisfaction through Cadence’s fully EHR-integrated model that’s also sustainable under existing reimbursement. The results include a 43% increase in blood-pressure control, 107% increase in heart-failure patients on guideline-directed therapy, and $203 PMPM reduction in total cost of care.
- Redox Joins Forces With Kno2: Redox and Kno2 formed a strategic alliance to create one of the largest healthcare data exchange networks in the U.S., spanning 160k+ provider orgs and over 40B annual transactions. The alliance was designed to give healthcare orgs access to nationwide interoperability through a single connection instead of maintaining hundreds of custom integrations, and it looks like they accomplished just that. The alliance represents 75% of health systems and 80% of providers across nearly every EHR across the country.
- Hello Heart Adherence AI: Hello Heart took the lid off Nia, an AI heart health assistant for improving medication adherence. Nia provides 24/7 support, medication guidance, personalized insights, and evidence-based information through the natural language chat interface we’ve come to know and love.The assistant works alongside Hello Hearts connected pill box and licensed pharmacists to help patients stay on top of their meds and prevent costly hospitalizations.
- IHI Health Equity Framework: The Institute for Healthcare Improvement culminated two years of research with a new health equity framework aimed at eliminating disparities that adversely affect historically underserved groups. The four steps outlined in the paper include: (1) identify a health equity focus area, population, and metrics; (2) determine stratification attributes and calculate metrics for all attribute values; (3) select reference points; (4) quantify and characterize health disparities.
- Caregility + Drexel: Caregility is teaming up with Drexel University to better prepare nursing students for the growing use of smart room tech and AI in healthcare. As virtual nursing becomes an increasingly critical component of care delivery, Drexel is launching new programs that provide students with hands-on experience using Caregility-powered tools, applications, and workflows to simulate engaging with patients virtually.
- Lapsi Ambient AI Stethoscope: Even smart stethoscope vendors can’t stay away from the ambient AI rush, and Lapsi Health just unveiled Keikku 2.0 with medical scribing capabilities. Keikku 2.0 combines all the bells and whistles of traditional smart stethoscopes – sound amplification, noise cancellation, advanced analytics – with ambient AI that creates SOAP notes for approval. Convenient for doctors that really hate pulling their phones out of their pockets to record a conversation.
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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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- What’s It Really Like Partnering With Abridge? Abridge is now deployed across 200+ health systems in the U.S. and will support more than 55 million healthcare conversations this year. But what is it really like to partner with Abridge? Hear directly from Abridge customers in this new video.
- 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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