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Bending the Cost Curve, Abridge Care Signals, and Omada Passes the Torch
By Jason Barry, Jack Troy, Virginia Hunt
August 10, 2026
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Together with
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“Health systems are leading in AI transformation right now – it’s really quite incredible. To think, when we started Rock Health, very few startups sold into hospitals because the sales cycle was long, and most health systems didn’t have the infrastructure or culture to successfully absorb new innovation. Now, if you look at the big AI companies getting funded, most of them are building for health systems. It’s a sign of just how much has changed.”
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Rock Health Founder Halle Tecco
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It’s great to be back, and even better to see that more of you were opening Jack’s newsletters than mine. My feelings are barely even hurt!
Thanks for not skipping a beat so I had plenty of major announcements to cover in my return DHW. We truly have the best readers in the world, and I appreciate every one of you<3
Jason
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A new paper in NEJM Catalyst makes the case that AI might finally bend the cost curve in healthcare, just not in the direction patients were hoping for.
“Show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcomes.” National health expenditures jumped 60% to nearly $5T per year in the last decade, and widely cited estimates from McKinsey suggest AI could shave about $360B off the annual total.
- Venrock’s Bob Kocher and Brian Zhao teamed up with USC’s Erin Duffy to explore the areas where those savings will allegedly materialize, and they found the same overarching problem with all of them.
You get what you pay for, and fee-for-service pays for volume. No matter where they looked for potential savings, the authors believe AI is even more likely to have the opposite impact.
- Drug Development – Faster AI-driven discovery means more new drugs and more eligible patients, but a healthier population doesn’t happen overnight. The net effect for the foreseeable future is more pharma spending, not less.
- AI Scribes – Under FFS, freeing up physician capacity is a direct path to more visits, which is a hop and a skip away from more fees, tests, referrals, and prescriptions.
- DTC “AI Doctors” – Could be deflationary if they replace pricier human encounters, or inflationary if every chat ends in an escalation and a testing cascade. Early evidence points to cascades.
- RPM and CCM – AI dramatically cut the cost of delivering remote care by reducing the clinician time needed to analyze the data, but blanket deployment means more billable monitoring and more incidental interventions (see: United Healthcare’s now-paused move to narrow RPM coverage to two conditions).
- Admin Automation – The AI-generated savings are real, but in consolidated hospital and insurance markets, that translates to higher margins, not lower prices.
Flip the model, flip the outcome. Every one of those buckets cuts the other way under value-based care arrangements, where the AI force multiplier is more likely to get pointed at complex patients and preventive care rather than volume and more volume.
- At-risk providers are already using AI to expand access, improve screening, and deliver better treatment. The AI upside is there, it’s just not showing up in the places most people are looking.
- The authors’ most direct policy fix is simple: more value-based care, and more outcomes-based reimbursement efforts like CMS’s new ACCESS model.
The Takeaway
While AI holds enormous potential to improve healthcare, this paper highlights exactly why it takes more than new tech to bend the cost curve. It also takes the right reimbursement models wrapped around it.
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Turning Ideas Into Action
Healthcare has never been short on great ideas. What is new is the ability to turn them into reality at the pace patients need. Discover how Bunkerhill Health is closing the distance between knowing and doing, so providers can get back the two things they never have enough of: the time and the clarity to care for people.
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How Clinicians Are Using AI to Find Relief
Clinicians are facing a documentation burden that’s outpaced every attempt to contain it, and they’re adopting AI to tackle the crisis faster than health systems can keep pace. Download Heidi’s new report to see how over 1,800 clinicians around the world are already using AI to find relief, and what that means for the institutions still catching up.
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- Abridge Care Signals: Abridge isn’t taking its foot off the gas the summer after following up its first-ever acquisition with the debut of Care Signals, a capability co-developed alongside Kaiser Permanente to reimagine risk-adjustment at the point of care. Care Signals flags care gaps before the visit (via payer data, EHR histories, registries), surfaces discussion topics as the conversation happens, and gives compliance teams audit-ready documentation the moment the note is signed. This is the latest in a string of launches that have been taking Abridge beyond visits to the work surrounding them.
- More AI Than AI Testing: A survey of health system execs from UPMC and KLAS showed that almost everybody is using AI tools, yet far fewer folks have a dedicated platform to test them. More than 90% of respondents have already deployed third-party AI solutions, and 92% said they evaluate AI prior to deployment (8% are apparently just grabbing life by the horns). Although validation was nearly universal, the methods varied considerably, ranging from formal vendor testing protocols to limited pilot programs. Only 44% have a dedicated data platform for AI testing, which makes sense considering 63% reported that their AI strategy is ad hoc or under development rather than fully established.
- Omada Passes the Torch: Omada Health delivered its strongest quarter ever alongside some big leadership news, with President Wei-Li Shao taking over as CEO on January 1 as Sean Duffy transitions to Founder and Executive Chair (that chair sounds comfier than the CEO chair). Shao joined in 2019 after 18 years at Eli Lilly and helped scale Omada from a single-condition program to a multi-condition cardiometabolic platform. The Q2 numbers back up the approach: revenue hit $88M (up 43%), membership grew 45%, and the company swung to a $5M profit while raising its full-year outlook to ~30% growth.
- Beyond Inflation: Vizient’s Summer 2026 Outlook showed that non-labor expenses account for a growing share of health system spending, and are now deciding where – and how – care gets delivered. The report forecasts above-average inflation for pharmaceuticals (3.5%) and overall supply chain (3.4%), with medical/surgical products (3.1%) trailing close behind. Vizient emphasized the need for health systems to evolve their approach to non-labor expenses (traditionally looked at through the lens of category management and cost control) as spending is increasingly shaped by intertwined influences like technology adoption, site-of-care changes, and service line shifts.
- UpToDate Dosing: Wolters Kluwer expanded UpToDate Expert AI into drug dosing, bringing its AI-powered guidance into one of the highest-stakes areas of clinical decision-making. The new capability provides dosing guidance and supporting rationale, with transparent assumptions that clinicians can evaluate based on the individual patient. WK’s announcement also included a nice pat on its own back for UpToDate Expert AI hitting the 2,500 hospital milestone, representing more than 90% of its U.S. enterprise partners.
- Included Acquires Firefly: Included Health acquired Firefly Health as alternative plan designs continue to pick up steam with employers. Firefly got its start delivering virtual primary care company leaning in on the employer market with incentive-aligned health plans. The acquisition builds on Included’s own alternative plan design that was just announced earlier this year, with Firefly adding a nationwide in-home care and specialty network, clinically-integrated health plans, and a proven model for reducing total cost of care by over 15%.
- HealthSnap Snags $25M: Virtual care management platform HealthSnap secured a $25M growth financing facility to accelerate its AI roadmap and scale its Advanced Primary Care Management platform. HealthSnap unifies RPM, CCM, and APCM into a single EHR-integrated platform, and now supports 80k+ active patient programs across 200 health systems (including strategic investors like Sentara, Tampa General, and UnityPoint). The financing follows momentum on both the AI front (3M+ progress notes reviewed last year) and revenue front (up over 400% since 2023).
- Data Descriptions Vary at Hospitals: U.S. hospitals aren’t using consistent language to describe metadata, which only stands to complicate data standardization efforts. That’s according to a new study by Medicom of 22k imaging searches across 124 provider organizations. Researchers found 145 different spellings for “two-view chest radiograph,” while “screening mammogram” had 392 distinct terms, and six routine radiology procedures had 1.3k different names. That probably doesn’t make it any easier for radiologists to pull up prior exams, and it only makes it harder for new technologies to leverage the data.
- Solventum Sheds HIS: Solventum is looking to part ways with its Health Information Systems business, announcing plans to pursue a separation within the next 12-18 months. HIS isn’t a small spinoff – the coding and revenue cycle unit generates $1.4B annually, serves 75% of U.S. hospitals, and processes upwards of 660M clinical documents per month. Solventum says the split will let it focus on becoming a pure-play medtech company, while giving HIS the agility to chase autonomous coding and international expansion, whether independently or combined with “a scaled player in the space.”
- Med-Metrix Completes Vitalware Pickup: Med-Metrix completed its $147M acquisition of Health Catalyst’s Vitalware mid-revenue cycle business. The transaction came in at roughly 4x Vitalware’s full-year 2025 revenue, allowing Health Catalyst (Nasdaq: HCAT) to get straight to work on cleaning up its balance sheet and debt load. The divestiture reportedly already helped Health Catalyst eliminate $19M in annual interest expense and provided the “financial flexibility to invest decisively in its core strategy.”
- Language Barriers to Results: Communicating results via patient portals may be convenient, but a recent JACR study revealed that many patients would prefer to hear from their PCP – especially those whose primary language isn’t English. Data from 838 patients who underwent breast biopsies at a safety net system showed that 70% preferred person-to-person communication with their provider over quick delivery of results. PCP-first contact was more likely to be preferred by patients whose primary language wasn’t English, highlighting the need for multilingual support in telehealth.
- WellSpan Doubles Down on Hippocratic: WellSpan Health is expanding its partnership with Hippocratic from individual use cases to a platform-wide commitment spanning inbound, outbound, ambulatory, and inpatient settings. Ana, WellSpan’s Hippocratic-powered voice agent, already handles 160k+ patient calls per month, and will now take on post-discharge follow-ups, chronic disease check-ins, and outreach for missed imaging appointments. Hippocratic is also embedding a dedicated team at WellSpan’s York, PA campus to co-develop next-gen clinical AI, including voice tools for triage support and its new Orchestrator solution for care plan navigation.
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State of Payor Enrollment and Credentialing
AI is changing the way that healthcare leaders tackle provider network management. Medallion’s latest report breaks down the biggest challenges, emerging trends, and how automation is transforming the landscape. Get the insights you need – read the full report today.
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How Clinicians Are Using AI to Find Relief
Clinicians are facing a documentation burden that’s outpaced every attempt to contain it, and they’re adopting AI to tackle the crisis faster than health systems can keep pace. Download Heidi’s new report to see how over 1,800 clinicians around the world are already using AI to find relief, and what that means for the institutions still catching up.
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Full Context for Complex Patients
Clinicians want to walk into the exam room fully prepared, without the nights and weekends spent poring over charts. Abridge’s Care Signals makes this possible. Co-developed with Kaiser Permanente, the risk-adjustment technology flags risk gaps pre-visit, tracks discussion topics, and creates audit-ready documentation of confirmed conditions. Check out Abridge’s latest move beyond clinical notetaking.
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- 8 Keys to Gain an AI Edge in VBC: As value-based care models evolve and competition intensifies, healthcare leaders are seeking practical strategies to improve performance across risk, quality, and financial outcomes. Head over to Navina’s roundup of eight key insights from VBC leaders to learn how aligning AI-powered tools with organizational priorities and clinician needs can help secure a measurable competitive edge in value-based care.
- 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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