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Pearl, EvidenceGrade, and Telehealth as an AI Canary
By Jason Barry, Jack Troy, Virginia Hunt
July 13, 2026
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Together with
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“Two years ago clinical transcription was a product category. Today it is a checkbox. I call this The Absorption Line. A waterline that rises with every frontier release. Whatever sits below it stops being a product and becomes something the platforms hand out for free.”
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North Star Labs Founder David Schaerf
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Another big week for World Cup lovers, Conor McGregor haters, and VBC enablers.
Let’s get after it.
Jason
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The value-based care enablement segment just saw one of its biggest raises of the year after Pearl Health locked in $110M of financing, split between a $50M equity round and a $60M credit facility.
Pearl was founded on a simple belief. “Healthcare should reward keeping people healthy, not just treating them when they are sick.” Pearl AI is what makes that possible.
- The platform helps PCPs manage risk and deliver better care to Medicare patients by translating clinical data into measurable outcomes.
- That means leveraging AI to help manage and predict risk, orchestrate workflows, and automate action before issues become costly emergencies.
- Over 10k providers caring for 250k+ Medicare beneficiaries are already live on the platform, including health systems like University of Vermont Health and MDX Hawaii.
VBC enablement has some strong tailwinds. As CMS continues pushing reimbursement toward outcomes rather than utilization, it’s creating stronger incentives for providers to prevent avoidable illness and manage patient populations. Investors are following the dollar signs.
- Honest Health landed $140M back in February to scale programs supporting the same Medicare population as Pearl, and Chamber Cardio picked up $60M to take the specialty-specific route with cardiologists.
Pearl plans to separate from the pack with AI and outcomes. The fresh funds are going straight to the AI roadmap, including Performance Intelligence, a natural language interface that gives population health teams real-time insights on cost, quality, and utilization.
- The raise will also help expand Pearl’s Care Orchestration AI agents, which automate annual wellness visit scheduling, post-discharge follow-ups, and care management outreach.
- Beyond the platform, the raise will fuel Pearl’s expansion into Medicare Advantage and new risk offerings beyond Traditional Medicare.
Preventive care shouldn’t break the bank. Pearl hit a rare milestone in both the risk-enablement arena and the wider digital health universe by reaching profitability in 2025.
- Rarer still, it pulled it off without taking its foot off the gas. Pearl now manages $3.6B in annualized medical spend (up from $2.4B), and is on track to triple its patient base from 2024 by the end of the year.
The Takeaway
With over 70M Medicare beneficiaries and costs exceeding $1T annually, Pearl is equipping providers with the picks and shovels needed to make the VBC transition – and some smart folks (or at least some folks with $110M laying around) think these docs can strike gold.
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Redefining Patient Monitoring for Obesity & Diabetes
Weight management programs live and die by adherence. Discover why partners like Calibrate,
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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.
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- Telehealth as an AI Canary: New research in JMIR suggests telehealth capacity could be a leading indicator of hospitals’ broader readiness for AI adoption. Researchers classified 6,173 U.S. acute care hospitals into three tiers of clinical AI adoption: 56% were Tier 0 (the weakest), 25% were Tier 1, and 19% were Tier 2. Clinical AI adoption scores increased from a median of zero among Tier 0 hospitals to 22 among Tier 2 hospitals, while telehealth volume climbed in parallel. Over half of the hospitals didn’t report their telehealth volume, and a vast majority of those (91%) were concentrated in Tier 0.
- OE Grades the Evidence: OpenEvidence launched EvidenceGrade to give physicians a better picture of the strength of the cited evidence behind AI-generated answers. OE noted that formal evidence appraisal is rarely done for frontline clinical questions because it typically requires expert panels and long timelines, so EvidenceGrade was built to deliver a real-time view of a paper’s quality, certainty, and relevance. Early data shows surgical oncology, pharmacy, endocrinology, and cardiology top the quality rankings, while physical therapy, transplantation, and orthopedics sit at the bottom.
- Making Sense of Wearables Data: Over half of Americans use wearable trackers like Apple Watches and Fitbits, but who’s using the stats? An AMA survey of 2.2k physicians suggests there are barriers to integrating data from these devices into clinical practice. While 97% of physicians review wearable data in some capacity, only 6% felt it was accessible in their existing clinical workflows. Despite the extra effort, 28% U.S. physician respondents said they take clinical action based on consumer wearable data every week.
- Frazier Picks Up MatrixCare: ResMed offloaded its MatrixCare business to Frazier Healthcare Partners for a hefty $490M. The MatrixCare EHR currently supports over 15k providers across skilled nursing, senior living, long-term care, and home health, generating over $220M in revenue this past year. Despite the strong numbers, ResMed’s move stemmed from a desire to focus on scalable service lines in sleep and breathing care, the company’s bread and butter.
- More Nurses Use AI, Less Trust It: Incredible Health’s new survey takes stock of nurses’ views on AI, and the results are mostly mixed. Use of AI has nearly tripled in the past year, with 44% of respondents saying they use the tech in their daily work, mainly in charting or patient education. A majority of the nurses leveraging AI are also opting for generic tools like ChatGPT over healthcare specific models, but 83% say their responses aren’t accurate enough for independent clinical use just yet.
- PE’s Nonprofit Backdoor: A report from the Private Equity Stakeholder Project showed that PE firms are increasingly using joint ventures with nonprofit health systems to expand while sidestepping oversight. Over one-fifth of PE-owned hospitals now operate through JV arrangements, which can help PE firms dodge state bans on corporate ownership of medical practices and skirt the scrutiny of nonprofit-to-for-profit conversions. The watchdog flagged Lifepoint Health, which owns 61% of its hospitals via nonprofit JVs, and urged regulators to tighten tax rules, especially for firms accumulating market power through serial partnerships.
- Health100 (Soft)Launch: CVS added its new consumer-facing Health100 app to the App Store last week, although it looks like the invite-only debut is only intended to help add a final layer of polish before the official launch this fall. Health100 unifies health and pharmacy benefits under a single interface to let users “take action with confidence,” marking CVS’ latest effort to prove it can succeed in the health tech arena by delivering proactive experiences across any pharmacy, provider, or health plan that patients are already using.
- Cancer Disparities in Rural Communities: A patient survey from the Prevent Cancer Foundation showed screening gaps between rural and urban populations continue to widen. While individuals living in rural areas see cancer diagnoses as more deadly than their urban counterparts (43% vs 35%, respectively), only 48% have had a cancer screening this year, compared to 56% of urban/suburban Americans. Costs were prohibitive for 39% of rural respondents, but slim wallets weren’t the only issue. One in four rural Americans also felt dismissed by clinicians.
- IKS Finalizes TruBridge Acquisition: IKS Health finalized its acquisition of TruBridge as it looks to weave its “healthcare operating system” and revenue cycle expertise across all types of care delivery orgs from independent practices and rural community hospitals to large health systems. TruBridge’s EHR and RCM services will reportedly strengthen IKS’ AI care enablement capabilities in the rural market, and the combined company now supports over 4k orgs and 150k clinicians.
- Record Year for Staying Alive: The latest CDC data shows that the U.S. age-adjusted death rate fell to 689.2 per 100,000 in 2025 – down 4.6% from 2024 and the lowest ever recorded in more than a century of tracking. Death rates dropped across every age group, with heart disease, cancer, and unintentional injuries still the top three causes. The news follows a record low in infant mortality and a 35% dropoff in annual cancer deaths since 1991, translating to more than 4.8M fewer lives lost.
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VBC 202: Intro to VBC and Risk Adjustment
Navina and Out-of-Pocket teamed up to create VBC 202, a three-part online course for anyone looking to build or scale value-based care programs. Watch the first session on-demand to learn why VBC emerged, how policy shapes provider behavior, and the fundamentals of risk, quality, and financial performance. Gary Pilling II joins as the guest instructor to dive into risk adjustment basics, including RAF scoring, HCC coding, and the CMS-HCC V28 model.
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Solving Patient Leakage with Virtual-First Care
Patients expect more from their healthcare – easy self-scheduling, ample availability, and appointments that allow them to get high-quality care wherever and whenever they need it. If your health system isn’t offering that, someone else is. Download the new white paper from Ovatient to see how health systems can look beyond traditional telehealth solutions to deploy an EHR-integrated, virtual-first care model that expands patient access and choice, builds long-lasting care relationships, and reduces leakage.
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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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- 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.
- Execution for Every Workflow: Health systems have no shortage of ideas for improving care and operations. Bunkerhill lets them bring those ideas to life – at scale, across service lines, and around the clock. Discover how the Carebricks platform is empowering clinical and operational teams to deploy AI agents that turn the data they have into the actions they need.
- 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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