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Infinite Healthcare, MedPAC, and Microsoft Copilot Health
March 16, 2026
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Together with
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“Clinicians are treading water, and the lifeboat is five feet away. ‘Trust me, swim over there’ – but we don’t have the energy, and we’re kind of afraid we’ll drown if we do.”
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Endeavor Health System Medical Director Dr. Nadim Ilbawi
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Heidi has been taking this year’s conferences by storm, so we swung by the HIMSS booth to wrap up the show in style with their Chief Medical Officer Dr. Simon Kos. Check out the full interview to see the latest enhancements to the Heidi platform, and get a sample of their secret recipe for doubling the world’s clinical capacity.
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Healthcare is one of the few industries where rising usage is treated as a failure, and a16z just published some solid arguments for why that framing might be completely backwards.
Everybody wants to be healthy. The demand for services that help people get and stay healthy is almost limitless, but the supply has always been limited by clinician time and cost.
- AI balances the equation. It expands our capacity to provide care and drives down its marginal cost, and a16z makes the case that AI opens the door for us to consume an effectively unlimited amount of proactive care – consistent coaching, continuous monitoring, and earlier interventions.
Health is invaluable. As it stands today, when a payor sets reimbursement for a medical service, the rate assumes a certain volume to assess the overall budget for that service.
- Price x Quantity = Total Medical Expense
- If AI sends the quantity of the service through the roof while holding the price constant, the total medical expense would skyrocket.
The question isn’t how to avoid this. It’s “what do we get for it?”
- Half of all U.S. health expenditures go to 5% of the population, and AI that helps avoid hospitalizations or acute events can generate huge savings from a few patients.
- Healthier people are also more productive. If AI can help just 1% of the 160M workers in the U.S. work an additional year because they’re healthy, that’s worth $260B in GDP.
How do you price AI for abundant consumption? In a world with truly proactive AI-driven care, delivering more care earlier is what actually bends the cost curve. Pricing shouldn’t punish usage.
a16z looks to other industries as good examples for healthcare:
- Telecom used to charge for voice and data by the minute because network capacity was scarce, but pricing shifted to unlimited plans as infrastructure improved. Usage went up significantly, but the total market value grew alongside consumption.
- Music followed the same arc. iTunes sold songs one at a time. Spotify sold access instead. People started listening to more songs, and consumer surplus expanded.
The Takeaway
As AI expands care capacity and access, consumption naturally increases. Affordable access leads to explosions in usage, and business models shift to subscriptions over per-unit pricing. Other industries have made the transition before, and a16z thinks it might be healthcare’s turn.
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The Virtual-First Difference at MetroHealth
When the MetroHealth System needed a scalable solution to help its patients access care, it turned to Ovatient’s virtual-first care platform. Ovatient allows its partners to offer fully coordinated telehealth - including urgent care, primary care, and integrated behavioral health – all built on Epic. Discover how MetroHealth’s virtual-first approach is keeping its patients connected to high-quality care whether they’re at home, at work, or on the go.
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From Transcription to Clinical Insight in One API
AssemblyAI is the voice platform behind the voice platforms. Combine speech-to-text, PHI redaction, and LLM-powered summarization in a single API call that lets you generate SOAP notes, referral letters, and clinical summaries automatically. Start building with AssemblyAI today.
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- Microsoft Copilot Health: Microsoft Copilot just became the latest GenAI assistant to get a healthcare overhaul after the launch of Copilot Health, a dedicated space where users can get answers grounded in their own medical history. Copilot Health’s headlining feature is the same as ChatGPT Health and Claude for Healthcare – patients can surface health insights by bringing together their records from over 50k provider orgs (via HealthEx), data from 50+ wearables (including Apple Health & Oura), and comprehensive lab results (courtesy of Function). A unique bonus is that Copilot Health also connects to real‑time U.S. provider directories, allowing users to easily find doctors that match their specialty, location, and coverage needs.
- MedPAC Annual Report: MedPAC’s always-anticipated and always-lengthy annual report to Congress estimated that the federal government will overpay Medicare Advantage plans by $76B this year. The $615B that the government is expected to send to MA plans in 2026 is about 14% more than it would be paying if those members were in fee-for-service Medicare. MedPAC pinned the primary drivers behind the overpayments on the usual suspects like favorable selection and coding intensity, while also recommending that Congress blunt 2027’s provider rate cuts by 0.5 percentage points (from -2.2% to -1.7%).
- Que Pasa Amigo: Amigo AI locked in $11M of Series A funding to accelerate its “digital residency” platform for clinical AI. The startup builds AI agents that interact directly with patients across clinical use cases like triage and care navigation, taking a safety-first approach that trains every agent across millions of simulated scenarios modeled on a practice’s unique population before ever seeing a real patient. The results speak for themselves: Amigo has completed over 3M autonomous patient encounters with a 100% safety pass rate in the six months since our first deep dive on their strategy.
- AI Ambition vs. Execution: Kyndryl’s Healthcare Readiness Report highlighted a new challenge that’s emerging as healthcare organizations accelerate AI adoption: how to safely move from experimentation to enterprise-wide impact. The report uncovered a widening gap between ambition and execution, with 76% of orgs reporting that they have more AI pilots than they can scale. Over half (55%) are concerned about keeping pace with evolving policies and regulations, and just 30% feel prepared to adapt to regulatory change.
- UHS Acquires Talkspace: Hospital operator United Health Services scooped up Talkspace for $5.25 per share ($835M all-in) as it looks to expand its outpatient behavioral health services. UHS noted that Talkspace’s network of 6,000 therapists would help address slower-than-expected growth in its outpatient behavioral health business, and that the younger membership base with a skew toward commercial coverage was an ideal fit. Talkspace expected to end the year with $280M in revenue, so the 3x multiple was probably music to investors’ ears given the bumpy rise that the company has been on since its SPAC public market debut in 2021.
- Medbridge Occupational Health: Medbridge introduced a new Occupational Health Pathway to address the most significant causes of work-related musculoskeletal issues. The pathway initially provides three tracks for “industrial athletes,” with each focused on the unique needs of high-risk workers who most commonly experience repetitive motions and physically demanding tasks. The tracks can be done either live or virtually, and can be deployed through advanced primary care, health systems, and private practice resources to give employers and employees a healthy variety of options.
- Physician AI Use Doubles: The AMA’s 2026 Physician Survey on Augmented Intelligence shows that AI use among doctors has doubled as confidence builds in the technology. The survey data found that more than four in five physicians (81%) are using AI in their practices, up from just 38% in 2023. The average number of use cases per physician now stands at 2.3 (up from 1.1 three years ago), with the most common uses of AI centered on medical research summarization and clinical care documentation. More than three-quarters of docs now believe AI improves their ability to care for patients, and they’re most bullish on its expected impact for diagnostic accuracy and work efficiency.
- Digitally Guiding Antihypertensive Therapy: New research in JACC suggests that expanding access to digital health data (like home blood pressure and wearables metrics) significantly increases the likelihood of prescribing antihypertensive therapy for elderly patients. While factors like frailty and history of falls typically drive clinical inertia, the study found that remote monitoring gives doctors the reassurance needed to pursue aggressive hypertension targets. Additionally, pill burden proved to be a critical barrier, with nearly half of physicians favoring intensive treatment only if delivered via low-tablet regimens.
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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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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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- The Perfect Moment for Digital Health: With expanded support for remote care, digital health is positioned to play a central role in value-based models. Check out Withings’ latest overview to learn how connected technologies can help reduce preventable events while improving care quality and efficiency.
- State of Payor 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. Head over to the full report to get insights tailored to your role and org type.
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