Optura Co-Founder Mike Hollis

There’s nothing better than interesting research and acquisitions, unless of course you love live conversations with industry experts. Digital Health Wire is officially launching its webinar series on September 30th, and we’re super excited to be kicking it off with Ovatient.

Consumers want convenient care. Employers want high-quality care to be as accessible as possible for their employees. Virtual care is clearly part of the solution.

The question now is who owns it – health systems, or the payers and vendors happy to take it off their hands? Grab your spot to find out.

Jason

Providers

The Hidden Bias in Portal Message Triage

Most patients assume that a portal message sent to their doctor goes to their doctor, but a new study in JAMA Network Open suggests that how it’s written could decide whether it ever gets there.

Here’s the setup. Portal messages land in a shared pool where a triage nurse or medical assistant makes a snap call: handle it themselves, or forward it to the doc.

• Researchers analyzed 3.6M portal messages at Mass General Brigham, finding that just 32% got a reply from the clinician they were addressed to (77.5% heard back from anyone).

• Prior work from lead author Mitchell Tang showed that historically marginalized patients fare worse in that process, and the new data agrees: Black patients were 3.7 percentage points less likely than White patients to hear back from their own clinician.

It isn’t the advice patients ask for. The authors ran NLP across a million threads to separate message content from writing style, and content explained just 5.7% of the Black-White response gap.

It’s how they ask. Writing style – length, sentiment, punctuation, and especially the greeting – explained 48% of the Black-White gap, 34.9% of the Hispanic-White gap, 60.5% of the education gap, and 42.8% of the Medicaid-commercial gap.

• Messages opening with the clinician’s name (“Dear Dr. Tang”) got a response from that clinician 38.7% of the time versus 25.7% with no greeting, and Medicaid patients were far less likely to use one.

• Longer messages and expressive punctuation also outperformed, while messages containing “please” fared worse. Manners are apparently negotiable, but name-dropping is not.

Here’s the good news. The authors see style bias as far more fixable than demographic bias.

• Triage teams probably don’t know it exists, portal composers could help structure messages, patient-facing AI can assist with drafting, and AI triage could extract the clinical signal from the stylistic noise – as long as models trained on human triage don’t inherit the same habits.

The Takeaway

Triage teams are making split-second calls to tackle skyrocketing message volumes, so polish is getting mistaken for priority. Health systems now have a clearly labeled bias to design out of their in-baskets, but until they do, patients should probably brush up on their portal etiquette.

Making Healthcare Feel More Human

Abridge has always believed that the best healthcare technology should make healthcare feel more human. That means focusing on the most human signal we have: the conversation. Head over to CEO Shiv Rao’s latest blog to see Abridge’s vision for bringing the broader healthcare ecosystem into the picture, so clinicians can focus more on the practice of medicine and less on the process of medicine.

Be Part of Elevate

Medallion’s flagship virtual conference for healthcare leaders returns for its fifth year. Elevate brings together healthcare leaders, innovators, and operators – and you’re invited. Attend sessions that examine how technology, operational efficiency, and regulatory compliance are transforming care delivery. Register today to be part of the conversation.

The Wire

• Sword Needs Some Headspace: Sword Health is reportedly in talks to acquire mental health app Headspace for between $200M and $300M, a nice chunk of change but not quite the $3B peak valuation that the OG meditation app was flaunting in 2021. Axios got the scoop from the usual sources close to the matter, which revealed that Sword plans to acquire Headspace by scooping up its parent company OrangeDot in a transaction that’s expected to close by October. Sword has been rounding out its MSK services ahead of a hotly anticipated IPO, most notably announcing its AI Care Platform and Dawn direct-to-consumer mental health solution that seems like it could be getting some extra backup in just a few weeks.

• Summa + HATCo: General Catalyst’s HATCo unveiled the inaugural technology partners that it will be working with to power the world’s first AI-native health system, its very own Summa Health. The tech stack spans eight GC-backed movers and shakers, including Aidoc, Clarium, Commure, Fabric, Hippocratic AI, Judi, Transcarent, and Verse Medical. HATCo will also be working with fellow GC portfolio company Percepta to build what they’re calling a Health System Command Center to link the vendors into a single operating layer for hospital operations. 

• RCM’s Front-End Frustrations: An Inovalon survey of 400 revenue cycle leaders revealed that their greatest challenges usually start on the front-end. Claim denials were cited by 46% of executives and 38% of managers as the top issue, but nearly 80% said most problems occur during front-end work. Issues with eligibility/benefits, authorization/pre‑certification, and patient registration/demographic verification were the primary contributors to denials. Those areas were unsurprisingly among the top strategies to prevent denials, but there was also a notable absence: prior authorizations.

• The Healthier the Berry: Berry Street is looking to bring AI-based nutrition care to an app store near you with its Healthify merger. In 2025, Berry Street moved into a booming market with its insurance-covered nutrition program built specifically for the one in eight Americans that use GLP-1s. Now, India-based Healthify brings an impressive user base of 45M people worldwide and nearly a decade of experience with human-in-the-loop AI models to scale up use of the platform. 

• Dartmouth Sunsets Tele-ICU: Dartmouth Health is winding down the Tele-ICU and Tele-ED services that have supported 13 rural hospitals across New Hampshire and Vermont, saying the programs are unsustainable at their current scale without external funding. The services let Dartmouth Hitchcock clinicians backstop emergency and intensive care at smaller hospitals that lack around-the-clock specialist coverage, but the 24/7 staffing costs proved too heavy for a system carrying a $63.5M operating deficit. Another sobering reminder that even 14-year-old telehealth programs with clear clinical value still struggle to work out.

• Pressure to Put Quantity Over Quality: High-quality care may be compromised by corporate interests, per a new survey by the Physicians Advocacy Institute. Corporate entities employ >82% of physicians, and 63% of the 1k respondents to the survey said that their work policies create real challenges to referring patients out-of-network. Nearly half also said they feel pressure to put patient volume over optimal care. Still, one of the most surprising findings was that 88% of respondents reported experiencing burnout symptoms, more than double recent AMA estimates. 

• Oracle’s Agent Learns New Tricks: Oracle Health expanded its clinical AI agent with AI-assisted professional fee coding, chart review that surfaces relevant context from across the EHR, and real-time dictation into any text field. Oracle says the agent has saved physicians over 400k hours since its 2024 launch, and the update builds on February’s automated order creation plus the recently revamped AI-powered patient portal.  

• Patients Beat Doctors to the Portal: A JAMA Network Open analysis of nearly 5k HINTS survey respondents found that 68.6% of patients immediately viewed their test results in the portal before hearing from their care team, and 6.6% of those early viewers said they didn’t really understand what they saw. Poor comprehension was less common among patients reporting strong patient-centered communication and higher digital literacy, which the authors say makes the case for portal redesign and plain-language (or AI-summarized) results.

• Hopscotch Hops to Series D: Rural primary care company Hopscotch closed a $53M Series D to expand its tech-enabled, value-based care model for Medicare patients in rural communities. Founded in 2021, Hopscotch serves 15k+ patients across the Southeast with same-day visits, 24/7 care team access, and proactive outreach. The model appears to be working considering the company touts an NPS of 89 and over 90% patient retention.

• LLM Sharpens Surgical Triage: Another human-in-the-loop model is here to make it easier to decide who needs special care after surgery. Among 6.2k cases, the tool showed 94% sensitivity and a more moderate 78% specificity, leaving some room for physicians to step in on complicated decisions. Issues that caused high-risk patients to be incorrectly deferred from treatment could usually be fixed by quick configuration adjustments, though 11% were true errors by the LLM.

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.

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.

How MetroHealth Reduced Barriers to Care

Modern consumers want easy access to healthcare. MetroHealth met the moment with a patient-centered model where there’s no wrong door to care. The system partnered with Ovatient to offer virtual urgent, primary, and behavioral health care, while leveraging Ovatient and Phox Health to provide same-day prescription delivery. Read the case study to learn more. 

The Resource Wire

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

The Industry Wire

1. FDA approves breakthrough pill for pancreatic cancer. 
2. Hormone replacement therapy reduces dementia risk in women.
3. Costs tied to No Surprises Act’s IDR process exceed $22B.
4. Pennsylvania sees first measles deaths in 35 years.
5. Shingles vaccine has cardiovascular benefits. 
6. Boston Scientific operations hit with cyberattack. 
7. Guardant ordered to give $245M in DNA sequencing patent dispute.
8. Study supports vaping for smoking cessation – with caveats.
9. California voters say healthcare is a top priority.
10. High-risk women struggle with breast MRI costs.