|
Agents Get Another W, Mark Cuban Expands, and Midjourney Pivots
By Jason Barry
June 22, 2026
|
|
|
|
|
Together with
|
|
|
|
“This is how AI makes doctors look bad: not by being better at the medicine, but by being better at the benchmark’s representation of the medicine.”
|
|
Offcall Co-Founder Graham Walker, MD
|
|
|
Welcome to the first Digital Health Wire of summer! The sun’s shining, the water’s warm, and the AI keeps outperforming doctors (if you squint hard enough). Today we’re covering familiar faces like Google and Glooko, as well as some of healthcare’s newer friends like Mark Cuban and Midjourney.
Thanks for stopping by.
Jason
|
|
|
|
In case last week’s AI drama wasn’t hot enough, a pair of new studies in Nature cranked up the heat by finding that AI agents beat physicians on ER and care management tasks – just not real ones.
“Towards autonomous medical artificial intelligence agents.” The first study took a look at MIRA, an AI agent developed in Germany that operates inside a sandboxed EHR environment.
- Using 574 real emergency department cases, researchers had MIRA chat with another patient agent and execute entire care workflows, such as investigating diagnoses, ordering labs, and triaging for hospital admission.
The headline: MIRA significantly outperformed four board-certified physicians. The agent had higher overall diagnostic accuracy (87.8% vs. 78.1%), was better at ordering correct procedures like laparoscopic appendectomy (53.5% vs 38.3%), and had 35% better guideline alignment.
The reality: ER doc Graham Walker, MD, put it perfectly on LinkedIn: “There is no way in hell that humans mismanaged almost 30% of appendicitis cases, the most common ‘surgical emergency’ that we’ve all seen hundreds of in our career.”
- It turns out the EHR sandbox needed 21 keystrokes to get this right, and the physicians failed unless they explicitly searched and entered a “laparoscopic appendectomy.” AI is built for that, humans not so much.
“Towards conversational AI for disease management.” The second study explored whether Google’s AMIE agent could expand from pure diagnostics to longitudinal care management.
- The blinded study pitted AMIE against 21 primary care physicians on 100 multi-visit cases, with the agent pulling live guidelines and drug references to produce structured management plans.
The headline: AMIE’s care plans were better than PCPs across the board. The agent notched higher marks on management reasoning, precision of investigations, and guideline alignment.
The reality: AMIE operated in a world without prior auths, without formulary restrictions, and without social needs that patients didn’t want to bring up. The authors didn’t pretend otherwise.
The Takeaway
This might sound familiar, but these studies show that MIRA and AMIE performed well in ideal scenarios, not in the messy trenches of real-world medicine. That said, the results aren’t important because AI beat a benchmark, they’re important because AI took another big step toward “delivering actions” instead of just “delivering answers.”
|
|
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.
|
|
The Agentic Platform for Your Environment
Your care plans. Your patients. Every health system is unique, which is why Tucuvi tailors its agentic platform to the day-to-day realities of care delivery at each of its partners. With configurable protocols and seamless EHR integration from day one, LOLA is the AI voice agent care teams trust to reach every patient. See LOLA handle real care workflows with your use cases today.
|
|
- Midjourney Meets Healthcare: One of the earliest pioneers in AI-generated images made a surprise pivot to healthcare last week after Midjourney announced a new med spa concept, complete with an “ultrasonic CT scanner.” The Midjourney Medical locations are set to debut in 2027, featuring ultrasound tomography in a warm water bath that customers will be gently lowered into on an elevator, which is apparently an established concept in medical imaging. Even Midjourney acknowledged the idea sounds “a little weird and a little crazy,” and The Imaging Wire didn’t pretend otherwise either.
- Cost Plus Wellness: Mark Cuban is taking the same playbook he used to shake up prescription pricing to transform how providers get paid with the launch of Cost Plus Wellness. As the name suggests, Cost Plus Wellness is just as transparent as Cost Plus Drugs, connecting self-funded employers directly with providers through publicly posted contracts and upfront pricing. The platform already has 27 contracts listed on the site and a major system partner in Baylor Scott & White Health, although so far the providers leading the charge are mostly ASCs and physician groups (spanning 9k+ providers and ~200 facilities). Love to see it.
- More AI, More Lawsuits: New research out of the University of Cambridge delivered yet another reason why AI isn’t going to be replacing physicians any time soon: adverse events involving AI significantly increase the likelihood that people blame the hospital and file a lawsuit. The researchers conducted a pair of studies looking at (1) how people respond to AI-related adverse events, and (2) whether the reactions varied depending on physician involvement. It turns out that people were up in arms when AI acted alone, but were much more understanding when physicians maintained oversight and collaborated with the AI.
- Easing the Data Burden in Diabetes Care: Glooko’s Annual Diabetes Report underscored why the limiting factor in diabetes care is no longer data, it’s the time and workflows needed to act on it. Traditional measures like Time in Range are still essential, but they often don’t reveal when risk occurs or which patients need attention first. A prime example in the report showed how Glooko’s model was able to surface up to 2.71x more patients with overnight hypoglycemia exposure, even though they appeared near target by common measures. Head over to Glooko’s guest post on our website for the full breakdown and what they mean for health systems.
- Thoreau Forms Its Ensemble: Matt Holt’s PE firm Thoreau made its long-awaited platform move with a strategic investment in Ensemble, an end-to-end revenue cycle management vendor for health systems. Holt originally launched Thoreau with the intention of acquiring about $30B worth of the health tech assets he spent the last few years rolling up at New Mountain Capital. That didn’t quite pan out, but Ensemble provides a huge foundation to build off of, managing more than $55B in net patient revenue for 200+ hospitals across the country.
- Whoop Partners With HealthEx: Whoop users can now securely upload their medical records through a partnership with HealthEx. The integration creates “a more complete view of health” by combining medical history with continuous biometric insights in one place, giving Whoop AI the context it needs to deliver personalized coaching and insights directly within the app. It was surprising to see that the press release didn’t include a single mention of Whoop’s new in-app telehealth feature.
- Claude Customers: Anthropic put up a public customer page where you can see how each of its partners are using Claude, including eight big names in healthcare. Epic revealed that over half of its Claude usage comes from non-engineers, with clinicians and PMs prototyping new pieces of functionality they want to see in tools like MyChart. Other highlights included Banner Health using Claude to axe administrative tasks for clinicians in half, and Carta Healthcare leveraging Claude to cut clinical data processing time by 66%.
- Catastrophic Claims: An analysis from BCS called attention to a skyrocketing number of “catastrophic” healthcare claims over the last decade. BCS has reportedly seen an 850% increase in claims exceeding $3M, driven mostly by gene therapies and specialty drugs, as well as complex rare disease, oncology, and cardiac care. These treatments are only growing more common across the industry, and BCS only expects the rising loss ratios to continue into next year.
- Marathon + Lantern: Specialty care platform Lantern is teaming up with Marathon Health to bring down specialist spend for employers. Lantern directs members of health plans and self-insured employers to local providers for surgery, cancer treatment, and infusion centers, while Marathon works with employers and unions to offer hybrid primary care. The partnership will allow Marathon’s employer clients who don’t already offer Lantern as a benefit to purchase it directly through Marathon, ensuring primary and specialty care are closely integrated while simplifying the contracting process.
|
|
Start Practicing With a Partner
What began with notes now supports the work that surrounds them. From conversations to clinical questions and follow-ups, Heidi brings the full clinical day into one platform. See why clinicians across the country are making Heidi their trusted AI Care Partner.
|
|
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 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.
|
|
- Virtual-First, Local Always: The humans of healthcare can get lost in the background at conferences full of robo-docs and AI assistants, but deep personal connections are just as key as new technologies for driving better outcomes. Find out how Ovatient is keeping care “virtual-first, local always” in Digital Health Wire’s rapid-fire interview from the ViVE exhibit hall.
- 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.
- A New Path for ACCESS Model Participants: Building your CMS ACCESS program? Withings was accepted into the inaugural cohort as both a participant and a device partner via the ACCESS Tools Directory. Bring the same FDA-cleared, cellular-enabled devices into your program, including BPM Pro 2, capturing clinical measurements and patient-reported outcomes at the point of reading, purpose-built for value-based cardio-kidney-metabolic care.
|
|
|
|
|
