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AI Can Do It, Oura Cancels IPO, and Heidi Redux
By Jason Barry and Virginia Hunt
October 1, 2026
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Together with
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“No one is going to care about the underlying AI model soon, especially for consumers. The models are already good enough for most of what people need. What consumers want is for AI to be useful, easy to access, and or bundled into something they already pay for.”
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Tony Fadell, AKA the “father of the iPod”
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Welcome to the first DHW of October. The pumpkins are growing, the PSLs are flowing, and AI can already do all the outpatient care – or at least a fifth of it according to McKinsey.
– Jason Barry, Managing Editor
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The fine folks over at McKinsey are as bullish as ever on AI, with their latest report estimating that it can already handle over a fifth of U.S. outpatient care.
McKinsey sees AI reshaping healthcare across three vectors. This chart lays them out nicely.
- Discursive care – reasoning and dialogue but not hands-on treatment (ex. intake, triage).
- Personalized pathways – AI trained on individual history to tailor treatment.
- Autonomous interventions – self explanatory.
The report centers on the first vector. McKinsey analyzed 2024 commercial, Medicare, and Medicaid claims to flag what discursive AI could already own today:
- 16-22% of all outpatient claims (13-19% of outpatient spending), ~3B claims/yr.
- Most of that is evaluation visits with no or low-complexity care, 11-15% of claims.
- The rest is interpretation of diagnostic and imaging results, 5-7%.
Big numbers. McKinsey expects discursive care to fuel the segments where demand goes unmet because of access barriers. Primary care is a prime example, with 92M people living in shortage areas and a 31 day average wait for an appointment.
- AI stands to make PCPs more efficient decision-makers while improving access for patients, without needing to hire more docs to do it. It also means more diagnostics and specialist referrals.
- That runs the risk of low-value care cascades, but McKinsey thinks AI would give care teams the confidence to break those cascades and manage more complex conditions in a primary care setting.
Mileage may vary. AI-powered discursive care threatens low-acuity visit volume for fee-for-service orgs, which would need follow-up care, referrals, and procedures to offset the revenue hit.
- VBC orgs would fare better, using AI to improve their underlying care management economics by catching disease earlier, closing care gaps, and keeping patients engaged.
Who comes out ahead? Payers. With AI becoming the new front door to care, the top of the funnel is shifting from PCPs to whoever can feed the most patient data to the shiniest AI model.
- McKinsey sees that as payors’ chance to go from financing care to orchestrating it, and says a payor-deployed AI clinician could even become the primary interface patients use to access care.
- Definitely a hot take, and a potentially brutal hit for fax machine manufacturers.
The Takeaway
It’s never too surprising when AI consultants say AI can do everything. Then again, that’s turning into a pretty popular opinion.
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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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Evidence, in the Flow of Care
Heidi brings trusted guidelines and peer-reviewed research directly into clinical workflows so decisions don’t stall care. Clinicians get clear, evidence-based answers without leaving the conversation. No ads, no limits, and no outside interests getting in the way of care. Find out how with Heidi Evidence.
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- Oura Calls Off IPO: Oura’s plans to ring the bell in New York City lasted about as long as Aaron Rodgers’ tenure on the New York Jets. The
smartring manufacturer consumer health AI company indefinitely postponed its IPO just one day before shares were set to begin trading due to “uncertainty in the IPO market.” Oura was expected to raise $2.2B at around a $15B valuation, but it doesn’t take much inflation or war to shake confidence in the public markets. Maybe Oura thinks it can wait out those transient little problems, or maybe investors weren’t as hungry for shares as they were hoping.
- Heidi Redux: If you liked Heidi, you’re going to love Heidi II. The ambient AI company that just raised $340M without sharing too many details on how it planned to use it just shared all those missing details. Heidi II is a “clinical grade computer-using agent” that takes the intelligence that Heidi’s scribe gathers during visits and executes the tasks that stem from it. Heidi II introduces five capabilities to make that happen, including a new agent suite and the aforementioned computer use that lets it “safely use your keyboard and mouse with healthcare guardrails to integrate with any system needed.”
- Building Trust in AMIE: The Google team shared a great paper on trust in clinical AI based on lessons learned while moving its AMIE medical AI assistant from simulations into real-world trials. The Nature article explained why “trust is not a fixed property of a model and cannot be measured as a benchmark. It is earned incrementally through direct human experience with the AI agent and rigorous scientific analysis of the study results.” The authors also reached the not-too-surprising conclusion that “trust is not static and can be earned or lost based on interactions with the AI system.”
- We Have AiME at Home: Dimer Health announced the launch of AiME, an AI agent that works like an in-hospital call button from patient homes (no relation to any Google assistants you might have read about recently). When patients get home from the hospital, AiME helps with everything from guidance and recovery to medications and scheduling, escalating to clinicians if the situation calls for it.
- Payers Make Medicare Cuts: Seniors apparently won’t have to worry as much about Medicare Advantage analysis paralysis next year after the latest CMS data showed fewer payers are participating in the program. While the top-level number of MA plans is staying put, major payers like Centene and Humana are cutting 3k and 2.4k individual plans, respectively. That could worsen the burden put on the one in ten seniors forced to find new plans in 2026, as CMS says about 80% of beneficiaries should be able to stay on their current plan with equal (or lower) premium costs.
- Patient Concerns About Medical AI: Patients still have many concerns about medical AI, but they appear to be warming up to its use in their care. Wolters Kluwer’s 2026 Future Ready Healthcare survey found that strong majorities worry about health data privacy (74%) and inaccurate AI-generated answers (69%), and want medical AI responses to be validated by humans (89%). Interestingly, far more men than women are comfortable with autonomous AI making a diagnosis and recommending treatment (61% vs. 36%).
- GC Wants Summa That AI: General Catalyst is finally opening up the Summa komono about a year after acquiring the health system to be its sandbox for AI-native care. In an interview with Endpoints, GC revealed how partnerships with eight of its portfolio companies have transformed everything from RCM to supply chain at the two-hospital system. So far, the scope of the tech has stayed squarely on the admin side, and it sounds like one of the biggest advantages has been faster deployments than you’d find elsewhere. Guess it’s easier to roll out 30 Hippocratic use cases when you’ve already done your diligence.
- Unavoidable Readmissions: Nearly all seven-day hospital readmissions can’t be prevented, at least according to a new study in Journal of General Internal Medicine. Data from 204 patients at Yale New Haven Hospital showed that 90% of these readmissions weren’t preventable, with chronic disease progression (39.8%) and new illness/injury (32%) driving the largest share. Upwards of 15% returned for substance use or mental health, and 58% left when they were advised not to. Only 10.2% were found to be preventable, with 4.5% attributed to diagnostic or management errors, 4.1% to medication-related issues, and 1.6% to inadequate follow-up.
- Payor-Provider Brinkmanship: A study in Health Affairs wrapped numbers around the “brinkmanship” between hospitals and payers, or the payment disputes where a hospital actually ends up going out-of-network. About 8% of contracts ending between 2021 and 2025 resulted in a hospital or payer publicly threatening to end the collaboration, with for-profit hospitals or those with slim margins the most likely to resort to such measures. Only 28% of these led to an actual breakup, or just 2% of the relationships included in the study.
- Physician Burnout Relief: Physician burnout is endemic throughout healthcare, but some docs have successfully taken steps to make it out the other side. Some of the more effective ones are described in a new JAMA Network Open article based on interviews with 30 physicians who tried interventions that worked. Some 87% attributed improvements to active work or personal changes, including “deliberate changes in mindset, contemplative practices, taking time away, working with a therapist or coach, and prioritizing self-care.” Many also reported changing jobs or stepping away from leadership roles.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
- 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.
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