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InACCESSible, StackAI, and Masimo Gets Acquired
February 19, 2026
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Together with
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“Clinical AI can now perform real medical work. But in fee-for-service medicine, becoming more efficient can actually reduce revenue. That creates a paradox: the better AI gets, the harder it is to adopt responsibly.”
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UpDoc CEO Sharif Vakili
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Administrative friction is one of healthcare’s biggest bottlenecks, and StackAI is equipping providers with the AI tools they need to break through it. Check out StackAI’s exclusive DHW profile to see how you can build and deploy AI agents that automate complex workflows – from patient outreach to prior authorizations – without writing a single line of code.
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The wait for CMS’ new ACCESS model payment rates is finally over, but the debate over whether or not they’re financially viable is just getting started.
Advancing Chronic Care with Effective, Scalable Solutions. ACCESS was designed to move more Medicare beneficiaries away from fee-for-service toward outcomes-driven models.
- The program’s core mechanism for accomplishing that is Outcome-Aligned Payments (OAP), a per-beneficiary annual allowed amount to cover integrated care management for chronic conditions.
- The end goal is to get more tech-forward companies to lean in on Medicare by rewarding them for using technology to improve patient outcomes.
That goal might be hard to reach. Here are the annual OAPs by clinical track and care period:
- Early Cardio-Kidney-Metabolic (eCKM) – $360 initial, $180 follow-on
- Cardio-Kidney-Metabolic (CKM) – $420 initial, $210 follow-on
- Musculoskeletal (MSK) – $180 initial, N/A follow-on
- Behavioral Health (BH) – $180 initial, $90 follow-on
Those numbers present some real challenges. They’re considerably lower than expected, and many of the companies that had already announced plans to participate are now being forced to reevaluate the decision.
- For the sake of comparison, Medicare’s average annual Part B spending for a diabetic patient is around $700 under fee-for-service.
- Asking providers to deliver comprehensive, tech-enabled care for half of that is a tall order, especially for services-heavy companies with humans in the loop.
- Companies with an AI-first approach and an established patient pipeline might perform better, but even then the rates are so low that they’ll likely do little to motivate new entrants to Medicare given the infrastructure needed to comply with the program and achieve the desired outcomes.
The Takeaway
CMS has made it clear that it’s going to start taking bigger steps to control costs, but it also has to find rates that actually encourage companies to participate. Striking that balance is an unenviable task, but the initial consensus seems to be that ACCESS missed the mark.
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Abridge & Availity Redefine Payer-Provider Synergy
Abridge is teaming up with Availity to redefine payer-provider synergy at the point of conversation. The collaboration aligns Abridge’s evidence-aware intelligence with Availity’s real-time health information network to create a first-of-its-kind prior authorization experience, with a shared understanding between patients, providers, and payers. Find out how Abridge and Availity are extending conversational intelligence across the revenue cycle.
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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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- Danaher Acquires Masimo: Biotech giant Danaher is acquiring Masimo for $9.9B, which values the patient monitoring company at $180 per share – about a 40% premium above its last close. The move makes Danaher the proud owner of a device portfolio that’s best known for blood-oxygen monitoring inside hospitals, although Masimo has recently been making more waves in the consumer-tech pool after a federal jury ordered Apple to fork over $634M for infringing on its patents with the Apple Watch.
- StackAI Agentic Automation: Manual workflows are the death by 1,000 faxes, and StackAI just gave us an exclusive overview of how healthcare orgs are automating them away with agentic AI. From scheduling and care coordination to referrals and prior auths, AI agents can now tackle some of the most complex clinical and operational workflows. StackAI shares its full agentic AI breakdown and top use cases on our website.
- Pros and Cons of LLM Reports: A study in European Radiology showed that LLM-produced radiology reports are easier for patients to read, but that comes with its own drawbacks. Researchers drafted patient-friendly versions of 60 reports using three LLMs, the ubiquitous ChatGPT-4o, and the open-sourced Llama-3-70B and Mixtral-8x22B. The robo-reports were deemed 4x more readable and nearly 3x more understandable, but the two open-sourced LLMs also had a 10% higher likelihood of making a critical error that could harm patients. The Imaging Wire unpacked all the juicy details.
- Rainfall Series A: Rainfall Health locked in $15M of Series A funding to support hospitals impacted by CMS’ new TEAM model. The new model incentivizes hospitals to deliver quality outcomes across the five highest-spend surgical procedures: lower extremity joint replacement, spinal fusion, coronary artery bypass graft, major bowel procedures, and hip/femur fracture treatment. Hospitals apparently stand to gain 20% more revenue if they can deliver, and Rainfall’s platform acts as a single blueprint for navigating compliance and ensuring they can.
- Ambience Expands Chart Awareness: Ambience expanded Chart Awareness across its ambient intelligence platform to help health systems better synthesize clinical data for care and coding. Instead of generating notes from a single conversation, Ambience analyzes the patient’s full longitudinal record of prior diagnoses, labs, imaging, and past notes to generate more robust summaries and identify diagnostic trends. That value proposition apparently resonated with Houston Methodist, which just announced that it’s rolling out Ambience enterprise-wide.
- Rural Healthcare Challenges: A national survey from Zyter highlighted the top healthcare challenges for rural communities, and the areas where new programs like the RHT will face the greatest pressure to deliver. The responses showed that 54% of rural residents cite long wait times as a top challenge to healthcare quality, 53% believe their community doesn’t have enough providers, and 44% say it takes longer to get an appointment than it did three years ago. Nearly half (49%) now have to travel 10 to 25 miles for routine care, and even more (55%) still prefer in-person visits over telehealth.
- WellBeam + Compassus: WellBeam is teaming up with Compassus to replace manual post-acute workflows with real-time collaboration at the point of care. The partnership will see WellBeam’s interoperability platform power secure data exchange between Compassus’ acute care teams and its home health and hospice providers. The initial deployment will connect more than 12k physicians across 33 states, with plans to expand nationwide later this year.
- ACO Adoption: The latest CMS figures show that enrollment in Medicare accountable care organizations continues to climb, with an estimated 14.3M beneficiaries aligned with an ACO as of last month. That’s up about 4.4% from last year, reflecting strong adoption for both the MSSP and newer models like ACO REACH. CMS approved 134 new or returning MSSP applications this year, bringing total participation to 511 ACOs and over 700k providers.
- Rippl in the Harbor: Harbor Health scooped up Rippl to bolster its VBC platform with dementia care. Harbor’s integrated payvidor approach combines clinical care with coverage to align outcomes, affordability, and holistic support across a long list of conditions. That list now includes behavioral health and dementia care thanks to Rippl’s in-home treatments for seniors.
- GLP-1s vs. Bariatric Surgeries: New data from Cedar Gate Technologies confirmed the inverse relationship between GLP-1 usage and bariatric surgeries. CGT’s database of millions of commercially insured members across the country found that bariatric surgeries declined by 13% YoY, alongside a 67% increase in members taking a GLP-1. Other interesting findings were that bariatric surgery patients were overwhelmingly female (80.5%), compared to the more even split seen with GLP-1s (56% women vs. 44% men), and that 70% of GLP-1 patients were over 50, compared to just 34% of bariatric surgery patients.
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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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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. Watch the on-demand recap of C8 Health’s recent fireside chat to explore 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.
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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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