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HLTH 2025 Recap and Major Announcements
October 23, 2025
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Together with
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“‘AI-powered platform for healthcare transformation.’ Cool. So is literally everyone else here. What if your tagline actually said what you do? No ‘coordination.’ No ‘quality.’ No ‘AI.’ Just the problem you solve and who you solve it for.”
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Health Tech House Founder Brett Jansen
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DHW was in Vegas this week recording rapid fire interviews with some of healthcare’s finest. Tune in to learn about this year’s biggest trends and announcements straight from the exhibit hall at HLTH.
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Hard to believe that was already Digital Health Wire’s fourth trip to HLTH – a few more flights out to Vegas and we might be getting close to “legacy media” status.
The more the conversations change, the more they stay the same. Last year’s “Be Bold” theme and LLM mania gave way to tales from healthcare’s “Heroes and Legends” and an AI agent avalanche.
The industry is still facing most of the same challenges, but it was amazing to see how quickly new innovations are compounding in the solutions that it’s using to conquer them.
Here’s our (non-exhaustive) roundup of some of those solutions from the expo hall:
- Arbital Health debuted its Merlin AI value-based care assistant built to make actuarial analysis transparent and actionable. Merlin AI interprets complex risk contract data, explains performance drivers, and instantly recommends next best steps.
- Abridge is bringing CDS into the flow of clinical conversations through a partnership with Wolters Kluwer. The UpToDate integration adds to a white-hot October for Abridge, which already included heavy-hitter roll outs at UPMC and Northwell.
- Brook.ai hauled in $28M of Series B funding to expand its personalized remote care platform to more patients and conditions. Providers can get up and running on the platform in 30 days with no CapEx required, and the results in the announcement speak for themselves. More to come on this one next week.
- Cedar debuted an aptly named Cedar Cover enrollment tool to make sure patients aren’t caught in the rain when the dark cloud of Medicaid cuts gets here. Cedar Cover’s key capabilities include Medicaid enrollment, proactive renewal, and denials resolution.
- Ellipsis Health is teaming up with NVIDIA to leverage its Parakeet ASR model and build out the AI infrastructure supporting Sage, an emotionally intelligent AI care manager that expands staffing capacity through proactive patient engagement.
- GE HealthCare is collaborating with The Queen’s Health Systems and Duke Health to advance the development of its upcoming AI-driven hospital operations solution. The solution will leverage insights from both systems and the 500+ hospitals using Command Center to surface actions for improving care quality, patient flow, and resource utilization.
- hc1 unveiled hc1 IQ to deliver precision insights that transform lab data into life-saving action. hc1 IQ unifies lab, clinical, and supply chain data into a single AI-powered platform to produce enterprise-wide intelligence for improving outcomes.
- IntelePeer launched a SmartAnalytics Starter Pack that gives providers the most approachable entry-point we’ve seen to the AI agent ecosystem. It includes one patient engagement automation from IntelePeer’s menu, along with real-time dashboards and call analysis to drive immediate operational improvements.
- League introduced League Agent Teams to its AI-first consumer experience platform. The multi-agent system guides users through complex health journeys using a suite of AI agents fine-tuned for specific tasks and an orchestration layer to coordinate them.
- Lorikeet debuted a healthcare-specific extension for its Team of Agents (deja vu, definitely one of the biggest themes at HLTH), which coordinates actions across multiple agents to call vendors, text doctors, and take action to “actually solve customer issues.”
- Nabla debuted Nabla Connect, a plug-and-play module that enables any EHR to seamlessly integrate ambient AI. Nabla already has one of the widest EHR footprints in the space, and CEO Alex LeBrun gave us the live walkthrough of how Nabla Connect extends that foundation to smaller EHRs looking to unlock the same capabilities.
- Optum took the lid off its Optum Real claims system that delivers instant coverage validation. The multi-payor platform enables real-time data exchange between payers and providers, allowing any issues to be intercepted at the point of submission.
- Penguin Ai is joining forces with UPMC Enterprises and leveraging its Ahavi data platform to validate new AI models in a secure testing environment. Ahavi will allow Penguin to refine its Small Language Models for real clinical use cases like record summarization and prior auth optimization.
- Solera Health showcased its Precision Insights Suite for AI-driven cost containment and care navigation. The two core components include Precision Intercept, which identifies patients at risk of significantly increasing costs within a year, and Precision Navigate, which delivers personalized provider recommendations based on similar patients.
- Suki launched a nursing-focused AI consortium with several leading health systems and AvaSure on the inaugural roster. The consortium will co-develop Suki for Nurses while integrating ambient AI capabilities into AvaSure’s virtual care platform.
- Vital announced the launch of Vital Urgent Care, an AI-powered platform that provides patients in urgent care settings with real-time updates, wait times, and personalized guidance – without requiring a single download or additional staff bandwidth.
- Wellsheet is rolling out across Ascension to give providers a unified view of previously overlooked data. The “GenAI front-end” allows care teams to access patient-specific EHR data on a single screen, accelerating diagnoses and clinical decisions.
- Withings Health Solutions unveiled best practices for obesity care management programs built on a decade of partnerships across the segment. Those include: (1) continuous monitoring for real-time adjustments, (2) on-device communications, (3) data-driven outcome tracking, (4) addressing comorbidities, (5) measuring more than traditional BMI metrics. All great practices for maternal health as well!
Welcome to all the fresh faces scrolling through DHW for the first time, and shoutout to all the long-time readers we caught up with at the show – the OGs have officially been here longer than a lot of the exhibitors have existed!
We picked up as many announcements as we could carry, but if we missed anything exciting and you don’t see it below, hit reply and let us know what to circle back on next week.
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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.
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Withings and Babyscripts Tackle Maternal Health
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- Open Evidence Lands Another $200M: OpenEvidence waited until HLTH week to steal the spotlight with $200M of Series C funding, just three months after raising its last $210M. The AI clinical decision support engine now boasts a valuation of $6B, not too shabby for a company that got its start in 2021. Investors apparently aren’t very hard to come by when you’re adding 65k clinicians per month, and OpenEvidence will now look to give its VCs a happy ending by expanding beyond CDS with its new Visits ambient AI solution.
- Dirty CHAI? The Coalition for Health AI was squarely in the crosshairs of Deputy HHS Secretary Jim O’Neill and FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary after the duo accused the trade group of being an “unethical syndicate” that stifles innovation. The hitpiece in the Washington Examiner makes the case that businesses don’t have a great track record of regulating themselves (CHAI includes a wide range of health systems / tech companies / academics), and says that asking a Big Tech-backed coalition to govern AI is like “putting Boeing in charge of airline safety.”
- Scribes Work Fast: A recent study in JAMA Network Open found that ambient AI scribes don’t take long to have a huge impact on burnout. Over the course of just 30 days, AI scribe use slashed burnout among 263 clinicians (six different health systems) from 51.9% to 38.8%, while reducing after-hour documentation time by nearly an hour per week. Not the biggest study we’ve covered, but these are still some eye-popping numbers.
- Samsung Completes Xealth Acquisition: Samsung officially completed its acquisition of Xealth, first announced back in July as a way to integrate data from its consumer wearables with actual care delivery. Xealth already has a network of over 500 U.S. hospitals leveraging its connected care platform, which is about as strong of a foothold as Samsung could ask for as it looks to bridge its home health monitoring capabilities (courtesy of Galaxy Watches and Rings) into provider workflows.
- Hyro is Hauling: Hyro locked in $45M to protect health system contact centers with “a strong shield” of conversational AI agents. When a patient calls in looking for help with tasks like booking an appointment or refilling a prescription, Hyro’s agents either automatically complete the task or hand it off to a human along with full context. A nice list of systems are already leveraging Hyro to manage high call volumes, including Intermountain, Bon Secours Mercy, and Hackensack Meridian.
- Climbing Coverage Costs: New data from KFF found that average family premiums for employer coverage climbed to nearly $27,000 in 2025, with workers covering about $6,900 of it. That’s a 6% increase over last year, easily outpacing both inflation (2.7%) and wage growth (4%). Over 150M Americans rely on job-based coverage, and KFF’s analysis makes it obvious why the health coverage debate has been a core contributor to the ongoing government shutdown.
- MGB Bridges Care Gaps With K Health: It’s always great to see digital health pop up on the TV, especially when it’s CBS News covering a partnership like Mass General Brigham and K Health. Waitlists for a new PCP can take years to get through, which is why MGB leveraged K Health’s clinical AI to bridge the gap by launching Care Connect. The app gives patients around-the-clock access to virtual primary care with an AI-driven intake that collects relevant info and produces physician-ready charts to optimize the visits. Becker’s also recently put out a nice summary of the model.
- AMA Center for Digital Health and AI: The AMA launched the Center for Digital Health and AI to put physicians at the “center” of shaping and implementing new technologies. The Center is designed to help healthcare orgs and digital health companies tap into the full potential of AI by embedding physicians throughout the product development lifecycle, ensuring that the tech fits into existing workflows and is comfortable for clinical end-users.
- Catching Biased Documentation: A study out of Mount Sinai analyzed 50k ED medical and nursing notes to see whether GPT-4 can detect and revise biased language. The LLM accurately flagged four types of bias (discrediting, stigmatizing, judgmental, and stereotyping), achieving 95.5% sensitivity and 85.7% specificity compared with human review. There were several modifiable factors associated with biased documentation, including overnight shifts (+37% higher likelihood of bias), high ED utilization (3x higher), and substance use presentations (3x higher).
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Under the Hood of Navina’s AI
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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.
- 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.
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