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2026 Crystal Ball Compilation, PE Power Plays, and UnitedHealth Turnaround
January 5, 2026
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Together with
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“This momentous year will be nothing, if not, dramatic. Loud villains, quiet heroes, and villains masquerading as heroes. And underlying it all, a spirit of revolution and change.”
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SCAN Group CEO Dr. Sachin H. Jain
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Welcome back to the first Digital Health Wire of 2026! The healthcare industry doesn’t take any days off, but we hope our readers managed to catch a break over the holidays to recharge for the big things to come in the new year.
The past few weeks have had plenty of fortune tellers predicting what those big things will be, so we’re kicking off the year with a compilation of the clearest crystal balls.
Let’s get right into it.
CommonSpirit Health – Five Health Tech Predictions for 2026, Dr. Minal Shah
- Favorite Forecast: In 2026, AI projects without strategic alignment are heading straight to the pilot graveyard. When organizations chase what’s possible instead of what’s strategic, they burn human capital on change efforts that never scale to real impact.
- Big Idea: “Platform vs. point solution is a false dichotomy – and I think we’re asking the wrong question. The real question isn’t which approach to take. It’s whether we’ve done the hard work of understanding what the organization actually needs before we choose a path forward. That means moving from ‘what can we do with AI?’ to ‘what should we be doing with AI?’”
Out-of-Pocket – Out-Of-Pocket’s 2026 Predictions, Nikhil Krishnan
- Favorite Forecast: Intellectual property lines will be drawn for AI. We’ve already seen a ton of legal battles around copyrights, but the dealmaking is just getting started.
- Big Idea: “Healthcare has a TON of companies that have copyrights and IP ownership over critical parts of healthcare information. OpenEvidence for example has signed several agreements with medical societies, NEJM, etc. Who will the AMA partner with for CPT codes? Which companies will the EHRs partner with to license their data?”
Second Opinion – Healthcare in 2026, Christina Farr & Annalisa Merelli
- Favorite Forecast: The largest digital health companies will start flocking to CMS’ new ACCESS program to find a better business model in Medicare, while also duking it out for a slice of the available rural health funding.
- Big Idea: “There’s no question digital health companies will be the beneficiaries, particularly given that the executive and policymaker running Medicare – Chris Klomp – has an entrepreneurial background and formerly sat on the board of venture-backed Maven Clinic.”
Becker’s – How the AI conversation will change in 2026, Zachary Lipton
- Favorite Forecast: Clinical decision support has been trapped in a frustrating middle zone for years: better than manually searching guidelines, but worse than talking to a specialist. CDS will finally start evolving beyond search with contextual awareness.
- Big Idea: “This is the year CDS evolves past glamorized search. Next-generation CDS will reason jointly over medical literature, the patient’s record and current visit context, helping clinicians apply knowledge, not just retrieve it.”
Forbes – 10 Healthcare Industry Predictions For 2026, Sachin Jain
- Favorite Forecast: Healthcare’s AI revolution will hit speed bumps. While AI has shown considerable promise for relatively straightforward uses like ambient dictation, its application in other domains will be more challenged and problematic.
- Big Idea: “Agentic AI holds significant promise, but legacy operators will be slow to change deeply ingrained processes, values, and attitudes. AI snake-oil salespeople (fueled by venture capitalists chasing outsized returns) have flooded the zone, a phenomenon that is sure to fuel false starts and threaten the pace and depth of true organizational change in the short-run.”
Hospitalogy – 8 Predictions for Healthcare 2026, Blake Madden
- Favorite Forecast: In 2026, enterprise buyers will start demanding consolidation. The operational model shifts from “best of breed for each use case” to “who can orchestrate AI across our entire administrative and clinical workflow?”
- Big Idea: “This is where the Palantir playbook becomes relevant. The firm is already working with HCA and others to deploy AI infrastructure that spans clinical, operational, and financial domains. The value proposition isn’t any single algorithm. It’s the orchestration layer that ties disparate data sources into unified decision support.”
Notable – Healthcare’s pivotal year for AI transformation, Dr. Aaron Neinstein
- Favorite Forecast: New practices will be built from scratch around AI Agents to support panel sizes three to five times larger at equal or higher quality and dramatically lower cost. At the same time, human connection will take center stage again.
- Big Idea: “AI will handle pattern analysis and routine adjustments, so clinicians can shift from memorizing facts to focusing on meaning… Because of this, nurses, MAs, and care coordinators will move up the value chain, as they can spend more time on empathy, clinical judgement, and complex situations rather than administrative tasks.”
The Takeaway
Healthcare still has its fair share of challenges, but it has just as many tailwinds pushing it toward new solutions. Cheers to everyone making those solutions a reality in the new year.
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Next Generation Ambient Tech and Agents
The ambient AI transformation is already sweeping across health systems, reducing administrative burdens and improving patient outcomes. So, what’s next? Tune into this on-demand session to learn how systems like Carle Health and Denver Health are leveraging Nabla to eliminate Pajama Time and build a future where agentic AI unlocks true workforce sustainability.
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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.
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- PE Power Play: New Mountain Capital’s Matt Holt is leaving the PE firm to launch his own shop dubbed Thoreau, and he’s reportedly in talks to acquire five of the health tech assets that he’s spent the last few years rolling up. Thoreau could grow into a $30B healthcare IT juggernaut if the transactions close as planned. The big five targets includes: Datavant (health data exchange), Swoop (drug company marketing), Machinify (payment integrity), Office Ally (claims clearinghouse) and Smarter Technologies (end-to-end RCM platform formed by the merger of Access Healthcare, Thoughtful.ai, and SmarterDx).
- Telehealth Prescribing Extended: The DEA managed to sneak in a one-year extension for telehealth prescribing flexibilities a day before the January 1st deadline, allowing virtual providers to continue writing scripts for Class II-V controlled substances when they’ve never met the patient in person. This marks the fourth time the agency has kicked the can on a permanent fix as it continues weighing long-term solutions to keep controlled substances from being abused in the post-pandemic telehealth era. The extension also implements two other controlled substance final rules for buprenorphine prescribing and Veterans Affairs patients.
- Clinician Engagement is Key: Deloitte put out an interesting survey showing that clinicians view technology initiatives far more positively when they’re involved all the way from the design phase through implementation. Clinicians were 5x more likely to rate tech initiatives as effective if they were included throughout the entire process, which apparently only happens about 38% of the time. They were also twice as likely to rate these initiatives as effective when they have high trust in their organization’s executive leadership, yet only 15% of clinicians said they trust their execs to do right by workers.
- UnitedHealth Turnaround: UnitedHealth released results from a trio of hotly anticipated independent reviews and pledged to implement a number of business improvements related to problem areas that surfaced. The three primary fixes were related to UnitedHealthcare’s care review and approval processes, Medicare Advantage risk assessment / upcoding, and how Optum Rx passes discounts through to its clients. The reviews notably failed to include the smoking gun that many critics were hoping for: evidence that United is leveraging its market position to inflate profits and stifle competition.
- b.well Launches SDK for Health Agents: b.well Connected Health took the lid off the first Software Development Kit for health AI agents. The SDK is designed to help organizations pull ahead in the AI arms race by allowing them build agents that have access to 2.2M providers, 300+ health plans, and b.well’s complete ecosystem of pharmacy, lab, and device data. That connectivity enables agents to offer personalized guidance based on a patient’s complete medical history and take action on their behalf, such as scheduling appointments or transferring prescriptions.
- Digital Biomarker for Alzheimer’s: A pair of new studies out of Mass General Hospital and the Harvard Aging Brain Study suggest that Linus Health’s three-minute cognitive assessment is an effective early digital biomarker for Alzheimer’s disease. Linus’ AI-driven protocol detects subtle changes in how people draw, pause, and speak, which the research suggests can reliably signal hallmarks of Alzheimer’s like amyloid and tau pathology. The findings are the first demonstration of a true behavioral digital biomarker for the disease, offering a potential path to earlier detection as patients face growing specialist shortages and year-long waits for cognitive evaluations.
- Drive Raises $15M: Drive Health raised $15M to bridge the gap to a Series A later this year as it looks to expand the reach of Avery, its Google-powered agentic AI platform for care navigation. Avery automates well-defined units of work such as discharge orchestration, message triage, and follow-up outreach, operating under hospital-defined rules and risk caps. Healthcare AI-focused VC firm Vitalis Ventures led the round and reportedly brings “real operational depth, health-system experience, and the long-term vision needed to scale Avery responsibly.”
- ABA Therapy Boom: As the diagnostic criteria for autism continues shifting from a rigid definition to a broad spectrum, new data from Trilliant Health suggests that access to treatment is quickly expanding – along with the potential for overuse. The rate of autism diagnosis increased over 4x between 2000 and 2020, from 1 in 150 children to 1 in 31 children. Applied Behavior Analysis therapy visits also skyrocketed 267% from 2019 to 2024, with technician-administered protocol treatment (CPT 97153) accounting for the largest share of visits.
- Fisher-Titus + Luma: Fisher-Titus Medical Center is rolling out Luma Health’s patient access platform across 17 departments ahead of a systemwide expansion later this year. Luma’s consumer-grade self-scheduling, waitlist offers, and SMS engagement will help over 70k patients in northern Ohio get “easier access to world-class care close to home.” Fisher-Titus staff is expected to reclaim 300+ hours of manual phone calls every month through Luma’s SMS broadcasts alone.
- FDA Mulls Streamlined AI Review: The FDA is considering a petition that would streamline regulatory reviews for AI-powered medical devices. The proposed regulatory pathway would see companies that have already received AI-related 510(k) clearances comply with post-market requirements rather than submit fresh applications for every new product. The pathway would benefit developers with multiple AI algorithms, for whom filing multiple 510(k)s presents administrative and financial burdens. The FDA is actively taking comments on the petition.
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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? Watch the on-demand recap of C8 Health’s recent expert roundtable 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.
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10 Bold Predictions for Healthcare AI in 2026
If 2024 was the year of proof-of-concept and 2025 was the year of early adoption and scale, 2026 is shaping up to be something different. This year, AI will become expected infrastructure and simply part of how healthcare gets done. Read these 10 predictions from clinical leaders, health system executives, and researchers shaping the next phase of the field on how the AI conversation will change in 2026.
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- 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.
- 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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