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Management Consultants, Doximity Ask, and Docs Make Great Founders
By Jason Barry
May 7, 2026
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Together with
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“Shocked, shocked I tell you, to discover that management consultants may not deliver value (measured anyway you like) to not-for-profit hospitals in the U.S.”
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Alberta Health Services CEO Stephen Duckett
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If hospitals spend billions of dollars on management consultants, they will at least get:
- A) stronger finances
- B) better quality of care
- C) streamlined operations
- D) none of the above
The correct answer: D as in Deloitte! You guessed it, at least according to a new study in JAMA.
- Researchers analyzed 2,343 non-profit hospitals in the U.S. from 2009 to 2023, finding that they collectively spent over $7.8B on management consulting over that period.
- More than 20% of the hospitals brought on consultants, and the hefty total in the previous bullet means they spent an average of $15.7M for their services.
Here’s what that got them. Researchers compared 306 hospitals that enlisted management consultants for the first time during the study period to 513 matched hospitals that toughed it out on their own.
- Despite the substantial investment, the study found “little evidence of substantial, statistically significant, or systematic improvements” attributable to the consulting engagements.
Consultants couldn’t catch a break. The analysis showed that the hospitals that hired them saw no significant impact across any of the primary measures.
Not the financial measures.
- Net patient revenue was down 2.22% (P = .14).
- Total margin was down 0.19 percentage points (P = .71).
Not the operational measures.
- Inpatient length of stay was up 1.71% (P = .10).
- Total inpatient days were up 0.29% (P = .85).
Not the quality measures.
- All insignificant, besides 30-day stroke readmissions: up 1.37 percentage points (P = .03).
Big results, with limitations. An accompanying editorial applauded the analysis, but pointed out that struggling hospitals are also more likely to seek outside help. Future research should investigate this selection bias and “the factors that predict a hospital’s decision to hire a consulting firm.”
The Takeaway
High P-values don’t mean that management consultants aren’t making an impact. They just mean that the most notable study to investigate the impact couldn’t find one…
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DoxGPT Nabs a New Name – and Big Upgrades
The tool formerly known as DoxGPT is now called Ask, and it’s packing more upgrades than just the name. Ask’s new agentic reasoning model delivers better, faster answers to physician’s most complex clinical and workflow questions – with the same verified outputs, journal access, and drug dosing they already know and trust. Discover the difference and Ask today.
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- UnitedHealth Cuts Prior Auths: UnitedHealth Group seems to be walking the talk after eliminating prior authorization requirements for 30% of services. The move was positioned as a way to build on UHG’s recent initiatives to invest in digital tools that support electronic submission or standardize submission requirements among payors, and at the very least it’s some decent PR spin on AI automation that would have happened anyways. UHG noted that only 2% of medical services require PA, and that 92% are approved in 24 hours.
- Docs Make Great Founders: New research in NEJM Catalyst challenged the industry trope that “physicians are famously bad at business.” The paper analyzed 105 healthcare startups that grew a unicorn horn by notching a valuation over $1B between 2015 and 2024, finding that more than 25% had at least one clinician founder. Physicians are particularly well positioned to identify pain points and “impassioned to solve them,” which is why the authors make the case for integrating more innovation and venture exposure into clinical training to help cultivate these skills.
- Same Tool, New Name, Better AI: DoxGPT just got an AI overhaul and a new name to go along with it: Ask. Doximity’s clinical AI assistant still provides answers that are grounded in the latest research, verified by PeerCheck, and built into the workflows physicians are already using – that’s just all getting powered by Ask’s new agentic reasoning model that delivers better responses even quicker than before. Ask slots in as the capstone of Doximity’s Clinical AI Suite next to its Scribe and Dialer, and we definitely recommend testing it out for yourself.
- Cursor Dives Into Life Sciences: Cursor is expanding its popular AI coding platform into healthcare to help accelerate drug discovery, diagnosis, and research. SpaceX recently acquired the rights to acquire Cursor for $60B later this year in a potential push to help its flagship Grok model catch up to Claude’s coding prowess. Cursor also happened to jump into the life sciences arena the same week that Deloitte’s annual pharma report showed that the cost of developing a new drug topped $2.7B in 2025, up 20% in a single year.
- Assort Activate Launch: Assort Health is bolstering its voice AI platform with Assort Activate, a new outbound capability that proactively reaches out to patients to help fill care gaps. Activate delivers personalized outreach across use cases ranging from booking patients for their flu shots to rescheduling appointments when there’s a major snowstorm. In early deployments, Activate’s proactive outreach campaigns are already putting up some big numbers, including a 64% referral scheduling conversion at SENTA Partners.
- BCG’s 70-20-10 Rule for AI: Boston Consulting Group put out an analysis outlining why AI-driven productivity improvements will be a critical pressure release valve for health systems. BCG expects the demand for care to continue outpacing supply by 14% through 2036, with the current system already causing total healthcare spending to grow 3x faster than GDP. At the same time, AI’s potential to transform care delivery is being limited by the fact that nearly 80% of AI efforts fail to scale. BCG’s solution: Only focus 10% of effort on the AI models. Place 20% on building the scalable tech infrastructure to support them and 70% on the workflow redesign and role redefinition that actually makes transformation possible.
- Open Wearables, Open Platform: Open Wearables unveiled its open-source platform that unifies data across wearable devices and allows LLMs to easily reason over it. The platform ingests data from leading wearables like Apple Health, Whoop, and Oura – completely normalized and deduplicated – then provides a single API to access the information. Personalized health scores and coaching profiles also enable users to build custom programs and fine-tune open algorithms for their specific population (sleep, recovery, strain, stress, HRV, VO2 max).
- Fewer Doctors Plan to Quit: A promising sign for healthcare’s burnout crisis arrived in the form of a survey in JAMA Network Open that showed fewer physicians are planning to quit their current practice than during the pandemic. Researchers surveyed 37.1k U.S. physicians, finding that the percentage who intended to leave fell in 2024 compared to 2022 (15% vs. 20%), and the percentage who wanted to reduce their hours also dropped (23% vs. 26%).
- Graybill Goes the Third Way: Graybill Medical Group released two-years of performance data after swapping its front office for Third Way Health’s AI-enabled service platform two years ago. The independent multi-specialty group, one of the largest in DHW hometown San Diego, saw Third Way’s hybrid AI and live-agent solution outperform industry benchmarks across the board, including a 20.2 second average call wait time (85% answered within 20 sec), 50% savings across call center and records staging ($3M total), and a 24% reduction in no-shows.
- Medical Liability Premiums Rise: Medical liability premiums unsurprisingly continued their upward trajectory in a new AMA survey on medical malpractice. The proportion of premiums that rose in 2025 was up sharply compared to 2018 (40% vs. 14%), and premiums rose for the past seven years, a trend not seen since the malpractice crisis of the early 2000s. Premiums tended to be lower in states that have caps on non-economic damages, and the report stated that further premium increases could limit patient access to care.
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The Virtual-First Playbook: Rural Health
Rural healthcare is in crisis. More hospital closures, less access, and wider care deserts for essential services like primary care and behavioral health. Get Ovatient’s Virtual-First Playbook for Rural Health Transformation to see how your organization can leverage funding from new programs like the RHT to build enduring systems of care.
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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.
- Making the Case for AI: Healthcare organizations have a lot to gain from implementing AI that can enhance coding accuracy and quality metrics, but securing buy-in from leadership is a crucial first step. Check out Navina’s new guide by Dr. Michael S. Barr to see exactly how to demonstrate clear financial benefits, ROI potential, and alignment with organizational priorities to help ensure AI projects are successful.
- 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.
- The AI Hardware Built for Clinical Work: Phones were never meant to be propped on a desk for a 12-hour clinical day. Heidi Remote transcribes patient sessions offline, stores them securely on-device, and syncs to Heidi whenever you’re in range. Just clip on and get to work with the Heidi Remote.
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