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Abridge, Future Ready Healthcare, and CMS Gets a New Office
By Jason Barry
June 15, 2026
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Together with
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“You can’t ship a party trick.”
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Abridge CEO Shiv Rao, MD
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The Knicks got it done in five, team USA is off to the races, and Abridge unveiled its new clinician intelligence platform. The energy was so electric in New York last week that it’s no surprise our flight back home got cancelled due to thunderstorms.
Worth it.
Jason
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Patients, platforms, Lilly, and Nvidia. Abridge’s first keynote had it all.
There were enough major announcements to fill an entire issue of DHW, so here’s the abridged version of the top stories to come out of NYC.
The new platform stole the show. Abridge unveiled “the first AI-native clinician intelligence platform” organized around patients, built for clinicians, and designed to help health systems.
- Before the visit: The platform surfaces care gaps and relevant clinical context so clinicians can address what matters during the visit instead of discovering it in retrospective chart reviews.
- During the visit: Abridge suggests discussion topics while delivering evidence-based answers to clinical questions from a growing content library that includes new specialty-focused partners like AAFP, AAN, ADA, and ASCO.
- After the visit: Abridge generates documentation, flowsheets, patient summaries, orders, and billing codes (soon to be fine-tuned through a new partnership with AHIMA).
“The base unit of healthcare is a clinician caring for a patient.” As Abridge pushes into new models of care delivery, its platform will provide the connective tissue between the clinical workflows where care actually gets delivered and outside orgs like payers or life sciences firms.
- The keynote highlighted some key examples: Cigna was on stage discussing how embedding AI in clinical workflows has the potential to unlock real-time claims adjudication, and Aetna shared how it could help realize the promise of VBC.
- More than 300 health systems are already live, including a just-announced rollout at Northwestern Medicine.
Eli Lilly is buying into the vision. The pharma giant made a strategic investment in Abridge’s next chapter, and even though the keynote was light on details, the move started to add up after seeing one of the new capabilities coming to the platform: clinical trial screening.
- By comparing clinical guidance with patient-provider conversations in real-time, Abridge can surface relevant trials directly in the encounter – the moment it matters most.
- They didn’t mention a check size, but big opportunities attract big investments, and identifying candidates while initiating screening at the point of care sounds huge.
Last, but certainly not least, Nvidia. Abridge is teaming up with Nvidia to develop a first-of-its-kind foundation model for clinical conversations that’s trained, shaped, and evaluated against real-world conditions.
- We’ll have to wait until later this year to see it in action, but a little pre-, mid-, and post-training magic with Abridge’s de-identified clinical data will apparently help make it the first model that can “reason clinically from its foundation.”
The Takeaway
If the keynote made one thing crystal clear, it’s that Abridge’s platform doesn’t revolve around AI documentation. It revolves around patients, and every new feature is purpose-built to prove it.
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Clinician-First Copilot for Value-Based Success
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The Agentic Platform for Your Environment
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- Office of Health Technology and Products: CMS officially established a new office to focus on driving interoperoperability in healthcare technology, complete with 8 divisions and 100 unique responsibilities. The Office of Health Technology and Products will provide enterprise leadership for CMS’ health tech strategy and “promote interoperability, open standards, and secure data exchange across CMS programs.” Although that job has typically fallen on the ONC, the new office might have better luck given that it can wield reimbursement to advance its agenda.
- Future Ready Healthcare: Wolters Kluwer’s 2026 Future Ready Healthcare Report highlighted the shifting perspectives of both clinicians and patients around the evolving AI landscape. One of the more interesting findings was that only 27% of clinicians know their org’s AI policy, up just 6 percentage points in a year, while their daily AI use has tripled. On the patient side, 42% report bringing AI-generated content into medical appointments, and 59% of clinicians say they engage with that information during visits. A vast majority of clinicians (77%) are worried about erosion of clinical decision-making skills, and 68% of patients share concerns around clinician overreliance on AI.
- Glucose Management Lawsuit: Glucose management startup Glytec is taking Prisma Health to court over allegations that the health system reverse engineered its Glucommander platform to develop its own software (and trim about $1M per year in licensing fees). The lawsuit alleges that Prisma spent years licensing Glucommander before replicating its proprietary algorithms and creating its own competing product. Prisma denied the allegations, but the litigation has already survived an early dismissal challenge, prompting a federal judge to issue an injunction that bans Prisma from marketing its software while the case proceeds.
- Enforcing Transparency: RFK Jr. and Dr. Oz hopped in front of the camera together to let Americans know that they’re leaning in on enforcing price transparency requirements. The X post told hospitals to “come into compliance immediately – or face serious consequences.” In the 16 months since RFK Jr. took over as health secretary, he’s made close to a hundred promises about how he’ll make Americans healthier (STAT has been keeping count), so we’ll have to wait and see whether this turns into one of the two dozen that have actually been kept or are in progress.
- GLP-1s Gain Ground: A new report from Trilliant Health found that more than half of GLP-1 patients have a diagnosis associated with a newly approved or investigational indication. The analysis of national all-payer claims data showed that the number of patients on GLP-1s skyrocketed 636% from 2018 to 2024, with the steepest growth between 2021 and 2023. Over that same period, just over half of established GLP-1 patients had at least one diagnosis associated with an emerging or recently approved GLP-1 indication, led by obstructive sleep apnea (25.5%) and major depressive disorder (18.2%).
- None the WISeR: The House Appropriations Committee unanimously struck down the WISeR pilot set to bring AI-powered prior authorization to Medicare. WISeR’s been getting a ton of pushback after Washington state delivered an unfortunate crash course on U.S. health policy by showing that the model aimed at “Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction” led straight to higher costs and fewer treatments for seniors. Lawmakers adopted the amendment during their 2027 spending bill markup, although the overall spending bill has not yet passed.
- Costs Only Go One Direction: PwC expects medical costs to climb another 9% in 2027, the highest jump in 17 years. The firm’s latest estimates have spending on track to top $9 trillion by 2035, driven primarily by pharmaceutical innovation, mental healthcare, and growing provider reimbursement pressure combined with the adoption of AI-enabled revenue optimization tools. “Without macro health cost deflators, payers and employers face mounting pressure to act.”
- OSF + hellocare: OSF HealthCare is deploying AI-assisted intelligent hospital rooms enterprise-wide after expanding its strategic partnership with hellocare. The move will integrate Virtual Nursing, Virtual Sitting, AI Patient Safety, Digital Whiteboards, and Patient Engagement into a single inpatient ecosystem designed “to transform how care is delivered.” hellocare said its unified infrastructure was built for this exact type of large scale deployment, and OSF also happens to be a strategic investor in the company.
- Urgent Care vs. Retail Clinics: A recent report from the National Center for Health Statistics shows that patients’ preferred care site largely depends on their age. In 2024, 6% of people had at least one visit to an urgent care center and 19% made a trip to a retail health clinic. Patients aged 65 or older tended to use retail health clinics far more than urgent care centers, but the opposite was true for pediatric patients who visited urgent care centers nearly 3x more than retail clinics. The trends were nearly identical across both urban and rural settings.
- The World’s Furthest Cardiac Surgery: Robotic cardiac surgery just hit a new milestone toward enabling expert care anywhere in the world. A surgeon based in Georgetown, Guyana recently accomplished a left internal mammary artery takedown heart procedure on a patient in India, 12,500 miles away. The procedure used a high-speed fiber communications network between Guyana and India to control an SSi Mantra surgical robotic system at the Sri Aurobindo Institute of Medical Science in Indore, India, where the robotic arms and surgical instruments precisely replicated the surgeon’s hand movements.
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A Care Partner for the Full Clinical Day
Patient conversations are more than just a note. Heidi supports clinicians across the day from documentation to decisions and follow-ups, without adding any burden. See why clinicians around the globe are turning to Heidi for a true AI Care Partner.
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How MUSC Is Bringing Care Closer to Home
MUSC Health teamed up with Ovatient to accomplish a simple goal: ensure access to care isn’t determined by a ZIP code. A third of South Carolina residents live in rural areas, but travel barriers don’t make preventative care any less crucial. See how Ovatient’s virtual-first approach is improving access to urgent care, primary care and integrated behavioral health and reducing leakage – without MUSC providers doing the heavy lifting.
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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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- Redefining Patient Monitoring for Obesity & Diabetes: Weight management programs live and die by adherence. Discover why partners like Calibrate, 9am Health, and Wondr Health trust Withings to keep members weighing in, with cellular-connected scales that deliver instant weight insights, full body composition data, and the lowest possible barrier to action throughout their weight loss journey.
- Better Health Through Virtual-First Primary Care: For patients, positive health outcomes are driven by strong relationships built on trust with health systems and providers. Hear how Ovatient’s fully EHR-integrated, virtual-first care approach is helping primary care patients like Tito Santiago reach their care goals and build a stronger relationship with The MetroHealth System.
- Any Use Case, Any Specialty: Bunkerhill’s Carebricks platform doesn’t stop at surfacing insights. It translates them into real-world action. From automating prior auths to closing care gaps, Carebricks lets health systems design and deploy AI agents for any clinical or operational need – without adding to anyone’s manual workload. Learn how Carebricks can automate actions for your patients today.
- Abridge Named #1 Best in KLAS – Again: KLAS just named Abridge #1 Best in KLAS for Ambient AI for the second year in a row. The recognition was based on direct customer feedback from the nation’s largest and most complex health systems, which gave Abridge the highest overall satisfaction score and A+ ratings across Culture, Loyalty, Relationship, and Value. Discover why Abridge is the market-leading AI platform for clinical conversations.
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