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Khosla Says We Don’t Need Doctors, Abridge Goes Big, and Commure Changes Plans
By Jason Barry, Virginia Hunt
August 20, 2026
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Together with
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“Game mostly over for human doctors vs. AI.”
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Sun Microsystems Founder Vinod Khosla
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The Digital Health Wire Show is back with Brook Health CEO Oren Nissim to unpack the proposed changes that risk limiting access to remote care for Medicare patients in the 2027 MPFS. Oren maps out everything you need to know about the changes, the areas the rule got right, and the levers CMS could pull to better serve patients (and their providers) before taking the nuclear option with RPM vendors. Catch the full episode here.
Buckle up. This is turning into one of the biggest news weeks of the year and UGM isn’t even wrapped yet.
Jason
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Will autonomous AI deliver better medical care than physicians by 2030?
Who knows, but that didn’t stop Vinod Khosla from saying it in JAMA (and starting an angry mob of doctors in the process).
When Khosla talks, people listen. The VC heavyweight has a long track record of nice picks in healthcare – Abridge, Headspace, Sword, and most recently Bunkerhill.
- His predictions carry a lot of weight, especially when he makes them in a respected journal with co-authors like former White House health policy adviser Zeke Emanuel and Curai Health CEO Neal Khosla (maybe genius runs in the family).
The latest forecast ruffled some feathers. It’s easy to see why: “AI alone will provide better medical care than physicians, or even physicians working with AI.”
The article argues that AI already rivals or outperforms doctors at five cognitive medical tasks:
- gathering patient information
- choosing tests
- making diagnoses
- prescribing treatments
- managing chronic diseases
Those are some big ones. The authors cite plenty of evidence to back that up (some might say low-quality evidence), then go on to predict that the gap will only widen from here.
- The argument is that AI is rapidly improving, whereas physicians are increasingly threatened by AI-induced deskilling.
- They also make the case that once AI beats physicians at a task, including a human in the loop will only degrade performance. In other words, AI-only care will outperform human-AI hybrid care.
Fair points for the techno-optimists. Not fair enough for the doctors.
- Everyone agrees that getting the diagnosis right matters. Choosing the right test matters. Recommending the right treatment matters.
- But so does understanding what a patient values, knowing when something doesn’t feel right, and having the instinct to act on it.
Performing medical tasks isn’t the same as practicing medicine. AI might be better at one, but you’ll get an angry mob if you say it’s better at both.
- If serendipity is on your side, you might also get a beautiful new framework for physicians’ role in the age of AI, straight from DiMe and the same AMA that runs a certain journal that isn’t afraid to print hot takes.
The Takeaway
Average views produce average returns, and Khosla didn’t make his fortune by following the herd. That said, this might be the most contrarian view we’ve ever seen, so luckily we only have to wait until 2030 to find out if doctors are all out of the job.
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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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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.
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- Abridge Power Move: Boom! Abridge made its context-aware decision support available to every clinician at its partner health systems, regardless of whether they use the ambient scribe. That means clinicians at over 300 of the largest systems in the U.S. just got access to not only a polished enterprise solution to stack up against whatever CDS tool they grabbed off the App Store, but also pre-visit summaries, responses that are informed by the patient in the room, and contextualized post-visit support like referral letters and handoffs. Definitely gave UGM attendees something fun to talk about as Epic was on stage unveiling its own evidence integration with UpToDate.
- Commure’s Change of Plans: The devil works quick but STAT investigations work quicker. Less than a day after last week’s less-than-flattering article about Commure’s “growth at all costs engine,” the company announced that it terminated all programs that incentivized partners for referring its products. Turns out that Commure’s referral program wasn’t “industry standard” and “everybody” was not in fact doing it.
- RPM Works for Hypertension: A recent study in JMIR showed exactly why it’s important to differentiate between low- and high-value remote care before you pull the rug out from third-party vendors. The study of nearly 1.5k patients with hypertension enrolled in the Brook Remote Care RPM program found that nearly three-quarters of patients receiving consistent monitoring and nurse-led care management achieved blood pressure control within 12 weeks. That’s about a 27% gap above usual care, which is one of the many examples Brook CEO Oren Nissim shared on the latest DHW Show of why next year’s MPFS still needs more than a little fine tuning.
- Inc. 5000: In case you didn’t catch one of the 5k different LinkedIn posts about it, this year’s Inc. 5000 just dropped, and digital health companies made a pretty strong showing. We didn’t spend an afternoon tallying up all of them up, but we counted nine digital health high-flyers in the top 100. Big shoutout to our friends at Nourish (AI-native metabolic care that just carbo-loaded on $100M), Nsight Health (AI-driven remote care management), and Autonomize AI (clinical and payer workflow agents).
- 1 in 6 Prior Auths Denied: Delays in prior authorizations often defer treatment, which is why KF raised concerns over new data showing major payers deny 12-18% of PA requests. KF looked at denial rates from 14 payers across Medicare Advantage (12%), Medicaid managed care (14%), and ACA Marketplace plans (18%). Still, the extra work to appeal the denials may be worth it. About 67% of appealed denials were overturned by Medicare Advantage, 47% by Medicaid managed care, and 43% by ACA plans.
- OE Patient Take-Homes: OpenEvidence introduced Patient Take-Homes, a new capability that allows clinicians to turn its answers into educational materials for their patients. The custom handouts range from discharge instructions and school letters to specific educational summaries directly from a patient’s visit context. In related news, OE also teamed up with Springer Nature to integrate its portfolio – including Nature and Nature Medicine – into the platform.
- Millions Missing Maternity Care: There’s a one-in-three chance your county is a maternity care desert, and that’s only getting worse according to a new March of Dimes report. Between 2024 and early 2026, upwards of 96 hospital labor and delivery units closed across 35 states. Some advocacy groups have cited Trump’s OBBB Act and the financial pressures it created as a key driver of the closures, especially for rural clinics.
- Study Questions FDA AI Clearances: While we’re on the subject of AI regulation, a new paper in PLOS Digital Health is questioning the methodology the FDA uses to clear AI-enabled medical devices. Researchers analyzed 1.4k authorizations for AI-based devices, finding that only 34 had been included in registered clinical trials, only 12 had results posted, and just three were tested on patient outcomes. The authors note that “clearance tells you a device resembles something already on the market. It does not tell you it helps anyone.”
- Ode + PCC: Ode with Anthropic selected PointClickCare as the first senior care platform partner it will help deploy frontier AI systems at scale. As the name would suggest, Ode with Anthropic combines Anthropic’s latest models with AI engineers and the backing of investors like Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman. The company is setting out to identify where AI can have the greatest impact for enterprises, then build and deploy those systems from the ground up using frontier models like the recently released Fable 5.
- Medicare Platform Picks Up $50M: Medicare Platform’s $50M raise marked another victory for measurement-based care. The financing will be used to provide AI-based coding support and claims analytics to ACOs as CMS continues pushing value-over-volume. Over 14.3M Medicare beneficiaries receiving support from ACOs in 2026, up from 13.7M last year.
- Global Warming Versus Heart Health: Record-high temperatures and smoky air can each be harmful, but taken together, they pack an even more powerful punch to heart health. Data from nearly 6M death records published in JACC showed compound exposure to heat waves and fire-related air pollution increased the risk of cardiovascular mortality by 11.5%, more than heat (8.3%) or smoke (1.4%) alone. As global warming continues, the synchronicity of these hazards is only expected to increase, pushing air conditioning even further up the ranks of important digital health solutions.
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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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Best Practices for Value-Based Obesity Care
Healthcare executives focused on value-based obesity care need actionable guidance, and that’s exactly what they’ll find with Withings’ new best practices. By leveraging connected health data to measure outcomes and optimize resources, care teams can improve long-term patient engagement and success, while still being cost effective. Get the best practices today.
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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.
- Pre-Round Preparation Without the Noise: Abridge delivers pre-round preparation with complete context. Before stepping into the room, inpatient clinicians get a concise summary of what matters most – drawing from nursing assessments, ED notes, labs, and the patient’s broader history – so every encounter starts with signal, not noise. See the capability in action here.
- 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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