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Garner Mega-Round, OE Goes Enterprise, and Why the Bubble Must Burst
February 12, 2026
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Together with
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“If you want to spot an inflection point, you need to be an anthropologist of healthcare. That’s the best way to see trends early.”
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Rock Health Founder Halle Tecco
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Halle Tecco is a digital health rockstar. She’s an entrepreneur, an investor, and the founder of the one-and-only Rock Health. Now she’s adding DHW Show Guest to her resume after joining us to discuss Massively Better Healthcare, her new book that distills 15 years of lessons into an essential guide for leaders who want to leave healthcare better than they found it. Check out the full episode.
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This year’s been good for the unicorns, and care navigation startup Garner just became the latest member of the herd after closing $118M of Series D funding at a $1.35B valuation.
Show us the incentives and we’ll show you the outcomes. Garner’s proprietary provider-ranking engine helps patients find the best doctors for their needs, then creates financial incentives to actually go and see them.
- The engine runs on de-identified data from over 320M patients, which gives Garner the evidence it needs to identify doctors that produce the best outcomes and lowest costs.
- Every metric answers an important question. Which doctors follow the latest research? Who avoids unnecessary procedures? Who gets patients healthy the fastest?
Those top providers put up some impressive stat lines.
- 75% fewer complications
- 60% fewer hospitalizations
- 3x greater adherence to medical guidelines
Garner takes it a step further. Instead of the usual services-heavy care navigation strategy, Garner’s engine has the incentives for real behavior change baked in.
- When employees choose a top provider, Garner picks up the tab – copays, deductibles, and even some procedures.
The end result speaks for itself. Garner’s clients see a 12% average reduction in total healthcare spending, and their healthy employees are happy employees.
- Garner already works with 700 organizations reaching 2.5M members, and revenue was up 130% last year as employers increasingly look beyond traditional approaches to combat rising costs.
What’s next? The fresh funds were earmarked for bolstering the provider-ranking engine, scaling AI navigation capabilities, and growing its team to keep up with demand.
The Takeaway
If data on complication rates and hospital readmissions can help identify the best physicians, then it should also be able to reduce overall costs. Seems like a sound thesis, and Garner just scored another $118M to prove it.
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Best Practices for Obesity Care in the GLP-1 Era
Healthcare leaders need scalable, evidence-based approaches as obesity care evolves in the GLP-1 era. Withings rounded up its practical best practices from real-time biomarker tracking to value-based data strategies that help care teams improve adherence, tailor interventions, and deliver accountable, high-impact care. Get the best practices here.
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State of Payer Enrollment and Credentialing
Over half of provider orgs are losing revenue due to credentialing delays – with many missing out on over $1M annually. Medallion’s new report unpacks the forces quietly undermining operational and financial performance, and how leaders across the industry are addressing them. Check out the full report to get insights tailored to your role and org type.
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- OpenEvidence Enters the Enterprise: Sutter Health is working with OpenEvidence to bring evidence-based insights into uncharted territory for the white hot AI developer: physician workflows within Epic. The partnership will allow Sutter physicians to find the latest guidelines and clinical evidence without leaving their EHR, marking an important milestone along OE’s journey from a crowd-favorite tool in the “AI shadows” to a bonafide enterprise solution at the bedside. If the fight over evidence at the point-of-care wasn’t already official, it definitely is now.
- Why The Bubble Must Burst: A great viewpoint in the latest Health Affairs explores why the healthcare AI bubble needs to burst, and why the industry should be hoping that it happens soon. The authors point to three critical issues that could make a bigger bubble more dangerous than a pop: (1) “zombie algorithms” where failed AI vendors don’t shut down cleanly, (2) an “innovation winter” where AI investments starve out other innovations, and (3) an “evidence vacuum” where real research doesn’t come until after deployments.
- Luffu Debut: The co-founders of Fitbit launched a new company called Luffu to help families and caregivers keep track of each other’s health. Luffu is developing an “intelligent family care system” that will leverage a smartphone app and complementary wearables to monitor changes and provide AI-driven guidance. It’s still too early for the press release to have many other details outside of the fact that Luffu is a nod to “lufu,” the Old English word for love.
- Medicaid is Haunted: A Health Affairs study showed that nearly a third of Medicaid-enrolled doctors don’t actually deliver any care to Medicaid beneficiaries. The analysis showed that although the vast majority of physicians were enrolled in Medicaid during 2021, almost 28% were “ghost providers” that didn’t treat a single patient. Another 10% treated less than ten patients, while the remaining 62% did the heavy lifting of actually treating the Medicaid population. Ghost providers varied widely by specialty, with psychiatrists ranking as the most spooky (40% ghosts) and PCPs ranking as the least (<10% ghosts).
- Optum Prior Auth Tools: Optum rolled out a pair of new AI prior auth tools to help streamline submissions and accelerate approvals. Digital Auth Complete, powered by Humata, embeds AI-enabled features directly into the EHR, eliminating 45% of manual provider touches by gathering required materials and submitting requests automatically. InterQual Auth Accelerator lets payors tailor automation from AI-guided reviews to fully automated approvals while maintaining human oversight.
- athenahealth Links With b.well: athenahealth and b.well are joining forces to let patients aggregate their health records in the b.well app and instantly share them with providers via a QR code. The new point-of-care workflow supports athenahealth’s commitment to “kill the clipboard” alongside the CMS Health Tech Ecosystem. It sounds like the new capability will be widely available later this year, with more interoperability initiatives following close behind it.
- GenAI Data Violations Double: Netskope’s latest Cloud Threat Report shows that generative AI is as much of a security liability as it is a productivity tool. The report found that GenAI-related data violations more than doubled over the past year, with the average org now logging 223 incidents per month where employees give sensitive or regulated data to AI tools. Over half (54%) of incidents involve regulated data (personal, financial, or healthcare), and 47% of GenAI users have personal AI accounts that create a huge blind spot for traditional controls.
- Biofourmis Singapore Scandal: The former CEO of Biofourmis just got slapped with a massive fraud scandal involving the Singapore Ministry of Health. According to a scoop in The Straits Times, the ex-CEO is facing seven different charges, including falsifying accounts, forging documents, and good ol’ fashioned fraud. That includes ordering his staff to falsify invoices showing that Biofourmis Singapore had delivered over $16M of remote monitoring services to the MOH between 2021 and 2022. Definitely not looking good.
- Commure Pro Debut: Commure unveiled its new Commure Pro clinical intelligence platform to unite its existing capabilities – ambient AI, autonomous coding, charge capture, CDS – under a single umbrella. Commure Pro is built on a unified data repository to connect disparate workflows across all of its different use cases. Each of the capabilities can still be deployed independently, but there’s nothing like a nice marketing wrapper to get more orgs to deploy them all at once.
- Are AI Overviews a Health Risk? The Guardian issued a warning that Google’s AI Overviews could pose a public health risk due to the fact that they’re often summarizing inaccurate search results. A study of health-related searches found that the AI Overviews lean heavily toward unverified facts in Google’s video content, namely the millions of hours of footage getting uploaded to YouTube by random users on a daily basis. The confident authority of the AI Overviews is making experts concerned that users will accept them at face value, which seems safe to assume at this point.
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Episode-Based Care: Making TEAM Work
The TEAM model represents one of the largest mandatory reforms in Medicare history, and forward-thinking perioperative leaders are leaning into it. Join C8 Health for a fireside chat exploring how episode-based care is reshaping quality improvement – and why the orgs succeeding under TEAM are treating it as a catalyst for transformation, not just a regulatory checkbox. Grab your spot here.
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Clinician-First Copilot for Value-Based Success
Navina’s AI copilot brings clinical intelligence directly to care teams, turning fragmented data into actionable insights that transform value-based workflows from the back office to the point-of-care. Designed for and loved by physicians, Navina’s Best in KLAS AI reduces missed diagnoses while improving quality metrics and risk adjustment accuracy. Discover how practices are leveraging Navina to enhance VBC performance and improve the clinician experience.
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- 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.
- Next Generation Ambient Technology 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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