Curative Co-Founder & CTO Isaac Turner

When Greece needed a partner to build AI front doors to its healthcare system, it turned to Sword Health. In the latest episode of the Digital Health Wire show, we sat down with Sword Intelligence Head of Strategy & Product Rik Renard to unpack how Sword evolved from virtual physical therapy to an AI powerhouse, the company’s unique team structure, and what it takes to pull off one of the largest AI deployments ever.

Payors

Curative Hits Unicorn Status With Series B Raise

Few COVID testing companies made it past the pandemic. Even fewer pivoted to a new model and found success. Only one became a payor with a unicorn horn. Curative.

Curative is reimagining health benefits, without OOP costs. It also landed $150M of Series B funding and a $1.3B valuation from investors that seem confident it can pull it off. 

• When the end of the pandemic brought Curative’s testing days along with it, the leadership team began looking for the highest impact way to focus its expertise (and freshly-lined pockets).

• They opted for hard work over an easy next chapter, and decided to go after the area “with the most leverage to really change healthcare” – spinning up their own payor.

The idea was simple. 

• The majority of payor costs are driven by a small slice of expensive members.
• The tiny amount of preventative care that gets done hardly helps to prevent that.
• This is also a capital-intensive segment with a bit of a PR problem (to put it lightly).
• That means startups might be able to make a dent, if they can find the resources.

The execution is harder. Curative decided that the best way to put its COVID coffers to use was to find a way to drive the preventative care that can actually balance the payor equation.

• Long story short, it pulled it off, and the breakthrough raised plenty of eyebrows. “No copays. No deductibles. No…really.”

There’s always a catch. The only thing Curative members need to do to eliminate their OOP costs is complete an annual baseline visit within 120 days of their plan’s start date.

• Turns out that’s a pretty good incentive. Most members complete the visit, allowing them to use their “Zero Card” to have Curative cover OOP costs for providers in their network (including office visits, behavioral health, and even some specialty services).

The math checks out. The baseline visits allow Curative to meet its members, understand their needs, and set their health journeys on the right path. 

• That’s led to a 20% lift in primary care engagement, a 30% reduction in hospitalizations, and 40% lower drug costs within a year of a group joining the plan.

• Since making the big pivot less than three years ago, Curative has scaled to over 1,200 employer clients and 165k+ members. It’s also hit profitability in the process.

The Takeaway

The payor market is long overdue for some good ol’ fashioned innovation, which sometimes looks as simple as getting people to engage with their care. Curative made it happen, and it’s armed with $150M to take the model nationwide.

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.

Nabla’s Marketing Team is Hiring!

If you’re based in NYC and passionate about improving the practice of medicine, Nabla is looking for a Marketing Operations Associate to help it do just that. Nabla’s ambient AI assistant streamlines the workflows that get in the way of the human connection at the heart of healthcare. They’re on the hunt for a new operational backbone for their marketing team, so apply here if that sounds like you.

The Wire

• CMS Unveils ACCESS Model: CMS introduced a new 10-year model that’ll kick off next year for Original Medicare. The optional ACCESS model – Advancing Chronic Care with Effective, Scalable Solutions – is designed to expose more beneficiaries to tech like telehealth, RPM, and wearables. Although details are still sparse, we know that ACCESS focuses on outcomes over volume, and reimbursement will be aligned with successfully managing conditions along four tracks: early metabolic disease (ex. hypertension), cardio-kidney-metabolic disease (diabetes, CKD), chronic MSK pain, and depression.

• Healthcare 30 Under 30: Forbes put out its perpetually headline-grabbing 30 Under 30 list for healthcare, and at first glance it actually looks like a pretty well-rounded list. It includes the usual suspects like high-flying startup founders (shoutout to Assort Health co-founders Jeffery Liu & Jon Wang) and clinicians (grats to Mass General’s Sara Sakowitz), but also includes a wide range of researchers working on interesting projects such as a pacemaker that weighs 1/50th of a gram (UChicago’s Pengju Li) and AI that helps radiologists interpret scans 40% faster (Northwestern’s Jonathan Huang).

• Hims & Hers Acquires YourBio: Direct-to-consumer powerhouse Hims & Hers acquired YourBio Health, developer of the TAP painless blood sampling device. YourBio will allow Hims to provide seamless at-home blood samples for its members, eliminating the need for them to make road trips to labs for blood draws (and removing one of the clunkiest barriers between its patients and their prescriptions). The move arrives as the DTC telehealth market catches fire with new competition and services.

• Dangers of Smartphones: New research out of UPenn confirmed what many parents already know: smartphones aren’t great for their kid’s health. The researchers analyzed data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, which assessed brain development in 10,588 children from 2016 to 2022 – the largest long-term study of its kind (we’d hope so considering it received over $290M from the NIH). Kids who had a smartphone by the time they were 12 years old had 62% higher odds of insufficient sleep, 40% higher odds of obesity, and 31% higher odds of depression than those who didn’t own one.

• LCMC Chooses Nabla: LCMC Health selected Nabla to power its systemwide ambient AI implementation – fully integrated with Epic – for over 2,800 clinicians and 1.5M+ annual patient visits. The New Orleans-based system spans eight hospitals, an urgent care network, and affiliated physician practices providing comprehensive and specialty care. In LCMC’s own words, the difference wasn’t just the reliability of Nabla’s AI assistant, but the “strength of the team and partnership behind it” that helped “implement something truly tailored to our organization.”

• Sword Heads to Greece: Sword Health is growing far beyond its roots in virtual physical therapy, and the Greek government just enlisted it to build Europe’s first AI front doors to healthcare for more than 10M citizens. The partnership is helmed by Sword Intelligence, the AI Care Management division in charge of bringing Sword’s internally successful AI projects to new partners and use cases, such as care triage and navigation in Greece. We were also lucky enough to have Sword Intelligence Head of Product Rik Renard break down the full partnership on the latest episode of the DHW Show.

• Northwell and K Health Form JV: Northwell Health formed a new joint venture with clinical AI pioneer K Health to expand primary care access for patients across New York. The duo’s just-launched Northwell Primary Care Now platform leverages K Health’s AI Medical Chat to collect symptom information from patients, organize it for Northwell physicians, and facilitate either virtual or in-person appointments as needed. By integrating K Health with its existing infrastructure and having AI tackle some capacity constraints, Northwell can now provide “high-quality primary care directly to patients whenever and wherever they need it.”

• House Passes HaH Extension: The U.S. House of Representatives just passed a bill that could end up extending hospital-at-home waivers for another five years. The Hospital Inpatient Services Modernization Act would continue the CMS waivers through September 2030, versus their current expiration date that’s a few short weeks away in January. The legislation has been drawing widespread support from the American Hospital Association and a coalition of 52 health systems. 

• Yara Shuts Down: Mental health chatbot Yara AI is shutting down after reaching the realization that startups aren’t the right vehicle to bridge the gap between “what AI can safely do and what desperate people need.” Yara CEO Joe Braidwood shared on LinkedIn that this gap “isn’t just a technical problem, it’s an existential one” that startups will have a hard time solving in the face of mounting regulations and unlimited liability. If there’s a silver lining to the story, it’s that Yara open-sourced its collection of AI prompts to help people get better support from general-purpose LLMs.

• WHO Recommends GLP-1s: The WHO officially issued its first guideline recommending GLP-1s – AKA liraglutide, semaglutide, tirzepatide – as part of comprehensive obesity treatment for adults. The recommendation was based on “moderate-certainty evidence” and stressed the need for equitable access, affordability, and person-centered care that combines the drugs with behavioral therapy and healthy environments. That said, the WHO also emphasized that medication alone won’t solve an obesity crisis that’s currently affecting over 1B people globally.

Enrollment Timelines, State by State

Provider enrollment delays are shaping access to care, revenue timelines, and even workforce strategy. Ever wonder how they’re impacting organizations near you? Check out Medallion’s 2025 Geography of Payor Enrollments to see state-by-state enrollment times, how delays are compounding workforce shortages, and why you should factor this into your 2026 planning.

Using AI to Democratize Performance Data

You’re tracking clinical performance metrics – HACs, LoS, FCOTS, and more – but does tracking translate to better patient care? Tune in to C8 Health’s expert roundtable on December 10th to learn how leading institutions leverage AI to bring quality data to the bedside. Plus: See how this approach saved UTMB Health over $109k in three months. Grab your spot here.

The Resource Wire

• Ambient ROI – New Metrics From Health Systems: While Abridge’s value is clear from its rapid adoption and positive clinician feedback, discerning CMIOs, CIOs, and CFOs also require longitudinal and more precise impact measurement, including of operational and workflow processes. With a new ROI methodology, that’s what Abridge delivers for its partners. See how four health systems are using this new tool to measure ROI at a deeper level than ever before. Download here. 

• Supporting Sustainable GLP-1 Weight Loss With Withings: Leading digital health companies and health systems are supporting safe and sustainable GLP-1 weight loss with Withings Health Solutions. See how care teams are using Withings’ suite of remote patient monitoring solutions to prevent muscle loss, combat plateaus, and drive better outcomes for their patients.

The Industry Wire

1. Short-term exchange subsidies extension eyed as obstacles persist.
2. CDC’s vaccine advisers meet to question long-used vaccines.
3. Amazon to boost healthcare research with $50B AI investment.
4. Medicare Advantage commission cuts fight with states intensifies.
5. Trump admin repeals Biden-era nursing home staffing mandate.
6. HHS seeks input on HIPAA security rule.
7. CVS agrees to $38M settlement in insulin fraud case.
8. Hospitals sue to block HHS 340B rebate pilot.
9. New health system launches in Oklahoma.
10. CHS offloads ambulatory lab businesses to Labcorp for $194M.