News 12/19/25

Top News

UnitedHealthcare will delay implementation of a controversial policy that would have restricted its payment for remote patient monitoring, according to Stat.

The recently announced policy was to have gone into effect on January 1, but will instead be delayed until later in 2026.

Reader Comments

From Dr. Herzenstube: “Re: FHIR. The new version of the FHIR US Core Implementation Guide removes extensions for birth sex, gender identity, and individual pronouns as required to comply with the White House’s executive order titled ‘Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.’” Verified, per the document above.

From Potentate: “Re: HIMSS. I worked for them until recently. They were having major money issues and could not compromise on membership restructuring from the top to allow revenue generation, mainly from the corporate side of things. Funds were not allocated optimally after the sale of the global conference. They laid off what I would say was about half the organization because they knew that the chaos between the new CRM system (causing a lag in data and membership issues) and revenue, things were going south quickly. There is barely any chapter team left as the director and senior manager left before the layoffs. No corporate relations. Most of the media, engagement strategy, and government relations teams are down to bones.” Unverified. This report came from a verified former employee.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Sunday, December 21 is Yalda, a holiday that I like because it excludes no one (although to be fair, neither does New Year’s Day). Yalda celebrants, most of whom are in or from Iran and neighboring countries, mark the last day of fall and thus the longest and darkest night of the year. Then comes winter, when the light begins its slow return. Families celebrate Yalda by staying up until dawn, protecting each other from the dark forces and eating watermelon and pomegranates whose glowing reds signify sunrise and renewal. Yalda means “birth,” which feels exactly right for people like me whose energy level rises with long summer days (Southern Hemispherians must do their pomegranate procurement in June). Celebrant or not, may your Yalda or winter holiday of choice be filled with light, warmth, good company, and the optimism that the clock is about to be reset with 12 months that have no mistakes in them yet.

Sponsored Events and Resources

None scheduled soon. Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Startup Hundred Health launches its $499 annual membership program and app that offers lab testing, health tracking, and nutritional supplement sales.

People

Navina hires Shlomit Labin, PhD, MSc (Shield) as VP of AI.

Sean Dennehy, MBA (Oracle Health) joins Infinx as VP of business development.

Impact Advisors names Casey Bryson (Lurie Children’s Hospital) as VP and client relations executive.

Emory Healthcare promotes interim chief information and digital officer Laura Fultz, MS to the permanent role.

Announcements and Implementations

An Athenahealth survey of ambulatory practices finds that 62% used four or more AI-enabled tools in the past year, and most expect AI to reduce documentation burden and improve patient engagement. Respondents say that AI’s potential is limited by inconsistent data formats and the challenge of finding needed clinical information.

HCA Healthcare UK goes live on Google Cloud-hosted Meditech Expanse in its 11 hospitals, with project support from CereCore.

A KLAS Arch Collaborative analysis of previous surveys of acute care nurses finds that unproductive charting is a key contributor to nurse dissatisfaction, burnout, and departures. Nurses asked for streamline or reduced charting twice as often as any other EHR enhancement to address duplicate and redundant documentation (especially in flowsheets), lack of task standardization in flowsheets, and a requirement to document information that nobody ever looks at and that doesn’t make a difference in patient care.

Government and Politics

A federal jury indicts Done Global on allegations that it arranged the distribution of 40 million doses of Adderall for non-legitimate medical reasons to members who paid it $100 million in subscription fees. The company’s former CEO and medical president were convicted of controlled substances distribution and fraud charges last month.

Other

Cisco provides its hospital customers with Connected Santa, which offers hospitalized children a virtual visit with Santa via Webex with help from onsite company and hospital volunteers.

Sponsor Updates

• Wolters Kluwer Health publishes a new report titled “2026 healthcare AI trends: Insights from experts.”
• Fortified Health Security names Justin Bockrath penetration tester and Jace Cawiezell threat defense analyst.
• Health Data Movers releases a new episode of its “QuickHITs” podcast titled “How Great CIOs Lead: Insights from Luis Taveras, PhD.”
• The “Tech Teams Today” podcast features Healthcare IT Leaders CTO Paul Cannon in an episode titled “Reliability Beats Cutting Edge.”
• Infinx names Heather Swanson business development director.
• WEDI honors InterSystems with its annual Innovation in Health IT Award.

Blog Posts

• 8 healthcare dashboard examples and the metrics they track (Arcadia)
• Arkansas Social Care Summit: Highlights from the Natural State (Findhelp)
• Why Data Security Will Define Cost-Effective RCM in 2026 (FinThrive)
• EHR build sprawl: Why “just in case” is costing you more than you think (Cardamom)
• Meditech staff lead holiday giving for local families (Meditech)
• Leveraging Your EHR to Maximize Reimbursements (Med Tech Solutions)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Sponsorship information.
Contact us.

News 12/17/25

Top News

FDA updates its policy to accept de-identified real-world evidence to support drug and device application reviews. This change allows use of registries, insurance claims, and EHR data that were previously excluded because they lacked patient-level confidential information.

FDA says it intends to review the same policy change in its guidance for drug and biologics.

Reader Comments

From Dr.SickandTiredHIT: “Re: Texas versus Epic. Can we all just say the quiet part out loud? A conservative politician, who is running for statewide office and is looking to make a splash, is suing a company led by a liberal in a liberal city. The Texas v. Epic suit is nonsense beyond a politician trying to score points. Why can’t Epic say that?”

Sponsored Events and Resources

None scheduled soon. Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Virtual cardiology company Auxira Health raises $7.8 million in seed funding. Auxira offers cardiology practices remote services that include access to advanced practice providers, care coordination, patient engagement, medication management, and system integration. MedStar Health (MD) launched Auxira in May through a collaboration with Abundant Venture Partners.

Healthcare technology, analytics, and services vendor Sentact acquires event and incident management company Performance Health Partners and Vizient’s Patient Safety Organization. Performance Health Partners founder and CEO Heidi Raines will join Sentact as chief strategy officer.

Lin Health announces $11 million in Series A funding. The company offers an app-based treatment program for the management of chronic pain.

The private equity owners of Netsmart will reportedly seek a buyer for the company for the second time.

Medify Health, which offers remote patient monitoring and chronic care management services for Medicare beneficiaries, shuts down.

Sales

• WellSpan Health will expand its use of Aidoc’s clinical AI beyond radiology to include its nine hospitals and 250 outpatient facilities.
• The Tampa General Hospital Cancer Institute (FL) selects Reimagine Care’s virtual cancer care services.
• Mt. San Rafael Hospital and Clinics (CO) will implement Oracle Health, apparently replacing Medhost in the 25-bed hospital.
• Berlin, Germany-based Charité, which is Europe’s largest university hospital at 3,000 beds, will implement Epic in a $235 million project.

People

Rakshay Jain, MBA (Innovaccer) joins DexCare as chief product officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Tebra incorporates DrFirst’s RxInform prescription notification tool into its EHR+ for private practices.

South Gippsland Hospital in Australia implements Altera Digital Health’s Sunrise EHR.

Children’s Minnesota will outsource its revenue cycle management to Ensemble Health Partners.

Manifest MedEx will provide the California Mental Health Services Authority with ADT notifications for people who are being seen by county behavioral health organizations.

Health insurer Fallon Community Health plan sues Innovaccer, alleging that the company’s software was worthless, didn’t improve risk adjustment revenue as promised, and was sold under fraudulent misrepresentation.

Government and Politics

PenRad Technologies will pay $530,000 to settle federal allegations that it violated the False Claims Act by inadvertently causing providers to bill Medicare and MassHealth for medically unnecessary breast cancer screenings due to an overlooked software setting. Intelerad Medical Systems acquired PenRad in 2022.

Members of the House Veterans’ Affairs Technology Modernization Subcommittee voice concern over the soaring cost of the VA’s Oracle Health–based EHR Modernization program. The estimate has grown from an initial $10 billion to $37 billion, and the Institute for Defense Analyses projects at least $50 billion. Thirteen facilities are slated to go live next year, with full deployment expected by 2031. Subcommittee chair Tom Barrett (R-MI), a US Army veteran, has a personal stake in the rollout because four Michigan facilities that he uses for care will be the first to adopt the system since the 2023 pause.

An ASTP blog post outlines the similarities and differences between TEFCA and CMS-Aligned Networks.

Other

University of California researchers find that automated outreach to patients offering help with advance care planning significantly increases the number of patients who complete ACP documentation.

Sponsor Updates

• CloudWave names Maria Graham business development manager.
• WellSky and UMed partner to expand home-based patient access to national clinical research registries.
• Wolters Kluwer Health releases a new report titled “Future Forecast: The Growing Impact of PAs in the Healthcare System.”
• Clinical Architecture releases a new episode of “The Informonster Podcast” titled “Inside Informatics with John D’Amore.”
• Linus Health names Julie Wood, MD, MPH senior medical director, clinician engagement.

Blog Posts

• AI Clinical Assistant from AdvancedMD: AI Innovation to Help Healthcare Providers Prioritize Patient Care over Paperwork (AdvancedMD)
• Climbing higher together: A look inside our 2025 client successes (Altera Digital Health)
• 28 Healthcare analytics companies fueling insights in 2026 (Arcadia)
• Patients Save Over 88% with Real-Time Prescription Benefit (Arrive Health)
• AI in Healthcare Compliance: How Artera is Setting the Standard (Artera)
• The Cyber Risks of Legacy Applications for EHRs and Why Action Cannot Wait (CTG)
• How Healthcare Organizations Use Analytics to Improve Outcomes (Dimensional Insight)
• Survey reveals challenges physician assistants face: AI, insurance, and technology (Wolters Kluwer Health)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Sponsorship information.
Contact us.

Monday Morning Update 12/15/25

Top News

A GAO report says that the VA must address several previously raised issues to support its accelerated Oracle Health rollout. Among them:

• Produce an updated cost estimate and schedule.
• Implement change management activities and conduct an independent assessment of the EHR’s user suitability and effectiveness.
• Document a change management strategy to drive user adoption.
• Develop change readiness scores before future deployments.
• Assess whether enhanced VA and Oracle Health training has been effective.
• Establish user satisfaction goals.
• Monitor trouble ticket resolution within established goals.
• Postpone deployment in new locations if critical test issues have not been resolved.

Reader Comments

From Jacinto: “Re: Dr. Craig Joseph’s comments about packaging AI as cuddly robots to improve behavior change. This is blazingly insightful. I can think of quite a few examples where words on a screen or delivered by a faceless voice would be more effective.” His company blog post made me think about the patient care value of anthropomorphized AI speech that is delivered by a comforting, universally understood form factor (which also happens to be inexpensive). As he says, “People don’t struggle with anxiety or diabetes or rehab exercises because they are missing the right paragraph of text.” Potential uses that I can see:

• Deploy virtual avatar-powered staff extenders that engage with patients instead of being used in the factory robot model of making deliveries and lifting. This would be especially powerful if connected to humans who could seamlessly take over the conversation or look at real-time video as needed. Such use would be beneficial in any care setting, but especially in staff-stretched skilled nursing facilities.
• Use a human-like robot to coach exercise or rehabilitation routines, with real-time personality tuning to adapt to whatever style works best for each patient (drill sergeant versus cheerleader).
• Monitor and coach hospital-at-home patients, providing nudges and a sense that caregivers remain involved and invested in their outcomes.
• Reassure children during pre-op coaching, MRI prep, and medication / injection administration and teaching.
• Support patients who are experiencing agitation, dementia, or withdrawal symptoms and provide ongoing reorientation about place and situation.
• Perform real-time language translation for informed consent, discharge instructions, and staff communications.
• Conduct pre-rounding conversations that AI then turns into a clinician-ready daily narrative.
• Allow distant family members to deliver verbal patient support via the comforting form factor.
• This is way out there, but empathetic, carefully guardrailed robots could be used to reduce clinician burnout by debriefing them about the emotional weight of caring for distressed or critically ill patients or delivering bad news to families. Clinicians may lack social support or may avoid sharing concerns with peers. Studies show that people are often more candid with technology.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents are still trying to figure out if having a C-level AI advocate provides clear benefit.

New poll to your right or here, from the discussion above: Will socially assistive AI robots outperform chatbots when the goal is patient behavior change? I expect a lot of respondents to punt with the “need more evidence” option, but let’s see votes and comments from those who have firmer opinions.

A generation donation from Bill, amplified by matching funds from outside sources and my Anonymous Vendor Executive, fully funded these Donors Choose teacher grant requests:

• Cricut tools for STEM projects for Ms. N’s middle school class in Paterson, NJ.
• Compassion corner furnishings for Ms. H’s elementary school science academy class in Youngstown, OH.
• Science supply cabinets for Mr. T’s middle school class in Paterson, NJ.
• STEM design supplies for Ms. P’s elementary school class in North Miami Beach, FL.
• A microscope and STEM activities kits for Ms. Y’s elementary school class in Van Nuys, CA.
• A document camera for Ms. R’s elementary school science academy class in Austintown, OH.
• Headphones for Ms. S’s middle school class in High Point, NC.
• Magnetic stick building blocks for Ms. O’s elementary school class in Hayward, CA.
• Flexible seating and STEM kits for Dr. H’s elementary school class in Forest Park, GA.
• Science club supplies for Ms. S’s middle school in Utica, NY.
• Science and engineering expo supplies for Ms. S’s elementary school class in Lorton, VA.

Sponsored Events and Resources

None scheduled soon. Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

A report by The Information says that new fundraising by OpenEvidence values the company at $12 billion.

Mass General Brigham spins out AIwithCare, an AI-powered tool that matches patients to clinical trials.

A new reach for private equity tentacles shows up in software for volunteer fire departments. PE-backed ESO Solutions bought the $795-per-year system that is used by Norfolk VFD, shut it down, and offered a $5,000 replacement. Norfolk found a cheaper option, but ESO then acquired that vendor, too. ESO now serves 20,000 of the nation’s 30,000 fire departments, and its two largest rivals are also PE-backed. ESO’s majority owner is Vista Equity Partners, which also holds positions in Greenway Health, SimplePractice, and TigerConnect. Its president and CEO is Erick Beck, DO, MPH, who left his president / COO role at University Hospitals to join ESO in June 2022.

Announcements and Implementations

Investment banker and former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD says in a JAMA Health Forum article that AI has not boosted healthcare productivity because the industry depends on labor-intensive work that is better measured by outcomes than output. He predicts that AI will raise productivity by taking over some cognitive and physical tasks, which will free physicians to focus on work that requires human judgment. He argues that FDA should replace its static device framework with one that permits safe, iterative AI updates without full reapproval unless performance standards are violated. He adds that adoption lags because Medicare does not pay for technology directly and must remain budget-neutral, which forces any new payments to be offset by cuts to physician reimbursement.

Private equity firm Geneva PE launches the development and funding of NXXIM, an AI-powered enterprise medical imaging platform. The announcement provides few details, such as naming the “world-class leadership team of industry veterans” who are involved.

Other

A San Francisco woman gives birth in the back seat of a Waymo driverless car that she had hailed for a ride to the hospital. The car noticed “unusual activity” and called emergency services en route.

Interesting: HIMSS members who participate in any of its volunteer committees, task forces, and workgroups are prohibited from recording the content (that’s reserved for HIMSS to package as its own content) and can’t use any AI devices or software to record or transcribe the meeting.

Not health tech related (yet), but fascinating. Google upgrades Translate so that users can hear real-time translations in their earbuds. It also translates the user’s speech into the other person’s language. The Gemini AI enhancement auto-detects the languages being spoken, filters ambient noise, and preserves the original speaker’s intonation and pacing. I can’t imagine traveling internationally without Translate and Maps on my IPhone’s homepage.

Sponsor Updates

• Nordic releases a new “Designing for Health” podcast episode featuring Matthew Trowbridge, MD.
• Optimum Healthcare IT publishes a new white paper titled “Strategic Transformation in the AI Era: Turning Innovation into Impact.”
• The “Lead the Team” podcast features RLDatix North America CEO Dan Michelson in an episode titled “The CEO Who Saw What Success Hid.”
• Switchboard Health offers a new case study titled “Large Health System Cuts Provider Message Touches by 42% with Switchboard, MD.”

Blog Posts

• Redefining pharmacy: As the role of hospital pharmacists evolves, drug decision-making requires a new approach (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• Empowering Pharmacists to Prevent Opioid-Related Harm: A Patient-First Prescription (First Databank)
• The Reality of Incident Response Readiness in Healthcare (Fortified Health Security)
• Build or Buy? Choosing the Right Path for Effective Member Outreach (ReferWell)
• How Riverside County is Driving Connected Care (Netsmart)
• Cutting Through AI Hype: The 3 Tiers of Medical Coding Automation (Nym)
• 5 Trends Shaping Healthcare in 2026 (and 3 to Leave Behind) (PerfectServe)
• A Rural Hospital’s Guide to Revenue Recovery (Sliced Health)
• Tegria’s Biggest Event Takeaways From 2025 (Tegria)
• Harnessing AI for post-acute RCM: How leaders can build a smarter revenue cycle (Waystar)
• The Biggest Shift in Health Tech Regulation Since HITECH (And What It Means for Your Organization in 2026) (Zen Healthcare IT)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Sponsorship information.
Contact us.

News 12/12/25

Top News

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton files an antitrust and consumer protection petition alleging that Epic maintains monopoly power. It says that Epic controls more than 90% of US patient records, locks in hospitals through extreme switching costs, restricts competitor access to data, and imposes no-hire restrictions on employees. The petition also argues that Epic delays or limits access to medical records for providers and patients who are outside Epic’s system. 

The lawsuit further accuses Epic of misleading Texas children’s hospitals about its parental access rules, which is likely the key issue of the lawsuit.

The lawsuit seeks injunctive relief to restore competitive conditions, civil fines, and court costs.

An Epic spokesperson provided this company response:

The action taken by Texas is flawed and misguided by its failure to understand both Epic’s business model and position in the market and the enormous contributions our company has made to our nation’s healthcare system illustrated by products like MyChart —software that tens of millions of Americans depend on every day. Every month, we improve quality of care by helping providers see a more comprehensive picture of their patient through over 725 million record exchanges—more than any other electronic health records vendor—and over half of these are with non-Epic systems. Health systems using Epic shared information with almost 1,000 patient-facing apps 2 billion times in the past year. Epic does not determine parental access to children’s medical records. Decisions about parental access to children’s medical records are made by doctors and health systems, not by Epic.

Reader Comments

From Dr. Herzenstube: “Re: HELP committee’s inquiry into the American Medical Association. It sounds as if there are some very specific alleged practices around CPT codes that they are investigating.” Sen. Bill Cassidy, MD (R-LA) seeks information from organizations that have licensed CPT about their price structure, AMA’s willingness to negotiate contract provisions, and any other areas outside CPT in which AMA collects royalties.

Sponsored Events and Resources

None scheduled soon. Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Oracle announces Q2 results: revenue up 14%, EPS $2.10 versus $1.10, exceeding earnings expectations but falling short on revenue. ORCL shares fell 11% on Thursday over investor concern about rising AI infrastructure costs. Co-CEO Mike Sicilia said in the earnings call that 274 customers are live on Oracle Health’s clinical AI agent and that its new AI-based ambulatory EHR is generally available.

Nashville-based virtual clinic Joi + Blokes acquires women’s-health startup HerMD, creating one of the largest virtual care platforms for menopause, sexual health, and hormone therapy. HerMD previously raised $40 million in venture capital, then closed its five physical locations to focus on virtual care.

Sales

• Val Verde Regional Medical Center will implement Commure Ambient AI.
• Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust selects UpToDate Enterprise Edition from Wolters Kluwer Health.

People

Healthmonix hires Bill Marella, MS, MBA (HealthShare Exchange) as COO.

Announcements and Implementations

OpenAI’s “State of Enterprise AI” report names healthcare as one of the fastest-growing business sectors for ChatGPT use, with eightfold growth in  customers in the past 12 months.

Included Health expands its care navigation platform with an intelligent AI assistant that uses personalized medical, claims, and benefits data to guide employer-based members. It also nudges them toward preventive screenings and better benefits use.

A Microsoft review of 37 million Copilot conversations finds that it is most often used to answer health questions.

A new KLAS report on IT planning and assessment services finds that Chartis, Impact Advisors, Healthlink Advisors, Nordic, Deloitte, and Optimum Healthcare IT are the firms that are most frequently considered and selected.

Government and Politics

More than 100 provider groups and medical societies ask HHS to withdraw its proposed cybersecurity rule that would expand HIPAA requirements, and instead collaborate with industry to develop practical, actionable, and less-burdensome cybersecurity standards.The 393-page Notice of Proposed Rulemaking would require providers, business associates, health plans, and clearinghouses to implement specific safeguards, perform annual compliance audits, document deeper analysis of technology assets, and maintain written documentation. Mandatory technical controls include encryption of EPHI at rest, multi-factor authentication, vulnerability scanning, and network segmentation.

Other

Nordic Chief Medical Officer Craig Joseph, MD says healthcare is betting on the wrong AI horse in embracing purely digital chatbots, which have been found to be less effective in improving outcomes than packaging the same LLM as an inexpensive socially-assistive robot. He says that digital health apps aren’t good at improving behavior change and engagement because they can’t provide the emotional experience and physical presence that engages the brain. Excerpts:

Behavior change is not a content-delivery problem; it is an emotional-experience problem. People don’t struggle with anxiety or diabetes or rehab exercises because they are missing the right paragraph of text. They struggle because doing hard things alone is deeply, intrinsically difficult … humans need accountability, presence, encouragement, and social cues to persist when something feels uncomfortable. Motivation is not downloaded; it’s co-created … The truth is that healthcare already understands the importance of presence. Physicians know that the 30 seconds spent sitting instead of standing changes the perceived quality of a visit. Nurses know that touch conveys trust in ways chart messages never will. Behavioral health clinicians know that therapy is not powerful because of what is said, but because of who is saying it, how they are saying it, and where the interaction occurs. Embodied AI doesn’t replace this relational wisdom. It simply extends it into new settings where humans cannot always be.

Eli Lilly says that a clinical trial of its next-generation, three-hormone GLP-1 drug for obesity and diabetes shows that participants with obesity and arthritis lost an average of 29% of their body weight, about 71 pounds, which exceeds the results reported for Zepbound and Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy. Participants also saw major improvements in their arthritis symptoms. Demand for Lilly’s GLP-1 drugs has driven the company’s valuation to $1 trillion.

The founder of online mental health platform BetterLyf is arrested after he allegedly started a fire at a California winery, threw a wine bottle at employees, intentionally crashed his Tesla into two cars while fleeing, and then locked himself in his car and refused to surrender until police officers pepper sprayed him. Vikram Beri was charged with assault with a deadly weapon and resisting arrest.

Sponsor Updates

• CereCore offers a new e-book titled “The Buyer’s Guide to IT Managed Services: Your Guide to Smarter Healthcare IT Decisions.”
• Findhelp and AIDA Healthcare announce an integration partnership to transform post-acute care referrals.
• Optimum Healthcare IT publishes a white paper titled “Strategic Transformation in the AI Era: Turning Innovation into Impact.”
• Goshen Health (IN) goes live on Meditech’s redesigned Expanse Pathology software.
• Inbox Health partners with Encoda to help physician practices capture revenue.
• Epic adds WellSky CarePort Community Referral Network solution to its Toolbox in the Community Resource Network category.
• Judi Health releases a new episode of its “The Astonishing Healthcare Podcast” titled “Health Benefits that Work for Everyone: Aligning Incentives & Focusing on Members’ Needs, and with Susana Villegas Spillman.”
• RxLogic’s new Formulary & Benefit Connect capability uses eligibility and formulary technology from Surescripts.
• The American Board of Medical Specialties Portfolio Program will use Wolters Kluwer Health’s Ovid Synthesis to streamline the continuing certification credit process and fast-track patient improvement initiatives.
• WellSky’s CarePort Community Referral Network solution is now part of the Epic Toolbox category for Community Resource Network.

Blog Posts

• How Predictive Analytics and Reporting Increase Healthcare Revenue (AGS Health)
• Connected for Better Care: How Strategic Partnerships are Transforming Lab Connectivity (Ellkay)
• Why Drug Knowledge Delivery Must Evolve (First Databank)
• Empowering Value-Based Care in Outpatient Rehab Therapy (Netsmart)
• The CMS TEAM Mandate: What Hospital Leaders Must Know to Be Ready for the 2026 Performance Year (ReferWell)
• Clinically meaningful evidence in the age of AI (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• Consistency in Action: What Industry Recognition Means for Healthcare Progress (FinThrive)
• Five9 Celebrates CRN 2025 Products of the Year Awards (Five9)
• CISO Brief: A Look Back at Healthcare Cybersecurity in 2025, A Year Defined by Disruption (Fortified Health Security)
• Key Regulatory Updates and Compliance Deadlines for 2026 (Med Tech Solutions)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Sponsorship information.
Contact us.

News 12/10/25

Top News

Global investment firm EQT seeks $1 billion for its 40% stake in CitiusTech.

EQT sold its majority stake in AGS Health to Blackstone for a similar amount in August.

CitiusTech, a global healthcare IT business, acquired Health Data Movers at around that same time.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Reader donations and matching funds provided Ms. O’s kindergartners with marble run sets for STEM learning. She reports, “By playing with building sets, my students are learning how to build all kinds of different structures. They are also learning engineering skills. That is STEM learning at its best! This project has been so important because giving students a strong foundation in math and literacy in their first year of school, makes a big difference by giving them a good start in their academic careers.”

Sponsored Events and Resources

None scheduled soon. Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Spare Tire raises $3 million in a Series A funding round. The startup offers on-demand access to inpatient historical data for workflow continuity during unplanned EHR downtime.

Clinical trial software and services vendor Paradigm Health acquires Flatiron Health’s tech-enabled clinical research solutions. The companies will also partner on integrating Paradigm’s capabilities with Flatiron’s OncoEMR.

Patients report that hospitals are charging them for self-administered questionnaires. Novant Health bills the patient or insurer $5 to $10 for a screening questionnaire about social determinants of health. A patient says that a questionnaire that was asked to complete during online check-in resulted in a $17 bill for a “brief emotional and behavioral health assessment.”

Sales

• Springfield Memorial Hospital (IL) will implement virtual sitting technology from CareView Communications.

People

ReferWell names Rich Smith (Axion Contact) SVP of sales.

UC San Diego Health promotes Alexander Khalessi, MD, MBA to chief innovation officer.

Smarter Technologies promotes Mike Gao, MD to CEO.

HaloMD names Nirnay Patel (Simplify Healthcare) chief data officer and Dan Heinmiller (Health Catalyst) VP of data integration and operations.

Announcements and Implementations

VHC Health in Washington, DC begins offering virtual urgent care services from HealthTap.

Bamboo Health announces GA of Bamboo Bridge, which assists providers and payers in connecting patients with the right level of behavioral healthcare.

A Joint Powers Authority arrangement between Palomar Health and UC San Diego Health will give Palomar clinicians access to UC’s Epic system.

Kontakt.io launches Access Agent, an AI tool designed to help outpatient clinics better anticipate and manage the allocation of exams.

Researchers determine that off-the-shelf AI tools such as ChatGPT can successfully de-identify EHR patient data without training, potentially reducing the cost and time required for preparing clinical data for research.

Donate Life America presents its Courage Award to Epic in recognition of its donor registration program that was launched in May 2025.

Government and Politics

ASTP and its partners release a Standard Operating Procedure document that outlines using TEFCA to check an individual’s eligibility for Social Security disability benefits.

Other

A study of newborn EHR data in Epic’s Cosmos database finds that 5% aren’t being given a vitamin K injection to prevent bleeding, doubling the 2017 rate. Pediatricians say that parents decline vitamin K either because they confuse it with a vaccind or distrust authority. Hospitals are reporting an increased number of cases of infant bleeding, which can be fatal in severe cases.

Sponsor Updates

• Hospital cybersecurity leaders identify non-negotiable domains to fund by 2028 in a new analysis from Black Book Research.
• Dimensional Insight announces that it has been recognized in the “KLAS 2025 Consistent High Performers Report” for its continued excellence in healthcare analytics.
• Nordic announces that it has been named a Major Contender in Everest Group’s “Healthcare Specialists IT Services PEAK Matrix Assessment 2025.”
• Judi Health releases a new episode of “The Astonishing Healthcare Podcast” titled “Best of ’25! – Solving Pharmacy Benefits: Inside the RFP Process, with Josh Golden & Nic Bolitho.”
• Agfa HealthCare releases a new white paper titled “Enterprise Imaging 2030: From Data to Insight, From Insight to Impact.”
• CloudWave offers a new resource guide titled “Navigating Healthcare Cybersecurity with AI.”
• CTG releases a new client success story titled “CTG Helps Medical Center Accelerate and Streamline Testing With Eggplant DAI.”

Blog Posts

• Three Revenue Cycle Management Strategies to Navigate Uncertainty (AGS Health)
• Looking back on 2025: Bringing our vision to life (Altera Digital Health)
• All Talk, No Walk? The ACCESS Model is Here to Find Out (Arcadia)
• Patients Save Over 88% with Real-Time Prescription Benefit (Arrive Health)
• How to Maintain HIPAA & SOC2 Compliance in 2026 (Bizmatics)
• Why Tech Makes Care More Human: Sir David Sloman’s Lessons from the NHS (CereCore)
• Why Web & Mobile App Pen Testing Is Critical in Healthcare (Clearwater)
• Unifying Medical and Pharmacy Benefits: The Blueprint for Better Employee Health and Wellness (Judi Health)
• Four Critical Factors for Selecting a Business System Hosting Partner (Med Tech Solutions)
• Why Physicians Spend Hours Pre-Charting—and How Navina Solves It (Navina)
• Empowering Value-Based Care in Geriatric Health (Netsmart)
• The Human Side of Interoperability (Surescripts)
• The Real ROI of Modernizing Contract Management in Healthcare (Symplr)
• Clinical experts-in-the-loop are essential for AI trust (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• Own the Outage: Smart Cloud Strategies for Healthcare (CloudWave)
• What the 2× Weight Drop Means for CAHPS and How to Stay Ahead (ReferWell)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Sponsorship information.
Contact us.

Monday Morning Update 12/8/25

Top News

HHS plans to expand its use of AI, primarily to improve administrative efficiency, and also to deliver real-time patient guidance by analyzing medical records.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Three-fourths of poll respondents consult a research-only firm when making buying decisions, most often KLAS.

New poll to your right or here: Will health systems meaningfully benefit from adding an C-suite AI job, such as chief AI officer?

Reader donations and matching funds provided Ms. M’s NC-based student-run school news program with audio and video equipment. She reports, “This is such a blessing to our student news team! They are so excited to bring the school news to our school, but we are struggling to make it work with limited technology. These items, such as the microphones, will be SO helpful so that we are able to be heard around the building! We have such ambitious, funny, bright students who are excite to bring something school wide.”

Welcome to new HIStalk Gold Sponsor FinThrive. The Plano, TX-based company helps 3,200 healthcare organizations increase revenue, reduce costs, improve patients financial experience, and ensure regulatory compliance across their entire revenue cycle continuum. Its SaaS-based RCM Platform delivers the industry’s widest breadth of capabilities, including integrated workflows supporting patient access, revenue integrity, claims management, contract management, and collections management teams within a centralized work environment. The company helps its customers bring modern digital experiences to their patients, including self-scheduling, virtual check-in, price estimations, patient payments and payment plans, and ongoing SMS-based secure communications.  – with no app downloads required. Its platform also leverages machine learning, robotic process automation, end-to-end RCM analytics, and billing and coding education resources to increase efficiency and drive sustained ROI. Thanks to FinThrive for supporting HIStalk.

Sponsored Events and Resources

None scheduled soon. Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Lightbeam Health Solutions acquires Syntax Health, whose platform supports value-based care contracting.

Nova Scotia’s IWK Health goes live on Oracle Health, the first hospital to do so under the province’s One Person One Record project.

India-based Healthify expects to add more GLP-1 drug makers to its patient support program, which offers metrics tracking and coaching, following its new contract with Novo Nordisk. The company says that it has 45 million global users.

Announcements and Implementations

OpenEvidence releases a free dialer program that allows physicians to contact their patients without exposing their personal phone number. It integrates with the Visits portion of the company’s app to allow users to automatically create a clinical note from the call.

Government and Politics

The FDA launches a pilot that creates a risk-based regulatory pathway for chronic disease digital health devices, giving manufacturers enforcement discretion while they gather and publish real-world performance data.

Privacy and Security

BJC HealthCare calls out a “misleading” social media post that claims that the health system revokes parental access to their children’s records. It clarifies that its MyChart portal changes parental access from full to limited access when their child turns 12, but parents can still obtain records through its release process, all of which complies with federal and state privacy laws.

A US Embassy official assures Kenyans that their identifiable health records will not be shared with the US government under a new $150 million security agreement between the countries. A Kenya-based whistleblower claims that the deal grants full US government access to patient records, calls for sharing data with drug companies, and places Kenya’s data rights at risk by putting the agreement under US law.

Other

An Asheville, NC-based news site says that the soaring share price of hospital operator HCA Healthcare has boosted the net worth of co-founder and major shareholder Thomas Frist, Jr., MD to $42 billion, with the $15 billion jump so far this year making him the 47th richest person in the world.

Sponsor Updates

• Judi Health staff volunteer with Nourishing Hope and sponsor 7,500 meals for Chicago families in need.
• Black Book Research’s latest survey finds that RCM leaders feel that AI ambitions are running into data quality, governance, and integration barriers.
• TrustCommerce, a Sphere company, and Qure4u partner to streamline and secure integrated patient payments.
• Altera Digital Health offers a new client story titled “Horizon Health System continues driving better care with the help of Altera’s Paragon 24.1.”
• WellSky releases its fourth annual “Evolution of Care” report.
• HCTec publishes a new case study titled “Epic Implementation/ Go-Live Support with Staffing and Direct Hire for a Leader in Urgent Care Services.”
• CHIME recognizes several Meditech customers with its 2025 Digital Health Most Wired designation.
• Nordic releases a new episode of its “Designing for Health” podcast featuring Anna Schoenbaum, DNP and Srinath Adusumalli, MD.
• Optimum Healthcare IT achieves AWS Generative AI Services Competency.
• RLDatix will exhibit at IHI Forum 2025 December 7-10 in Anaheim, CA.

Blog Posts

• The future of integrated healthcare workflow: Delivering on the promises of the EHR dream (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• Building an ambient AI scribe for the real world (Altera Digital Health)
• Care management software: Overview and 10 options for 2026 (Arcadia)
• Boost Call Quality with Five9’s Support for Microsoft Multimedia Redirection (Five9)
• Inside a Healthcare Ransomware Battle: How Preparation Saved Patients (Fortified Health Security)
• Navigating the 2025 Telehealth Policy Cliff: Why a Care Access Platform is No Longer Optional (Kyruus Health)
• International impact: How healthcare technology helps deliver high-quality patient care across the globe (Meditech)
• Which Cloud Service is Right for Your Organization? (Med Tech Solutions)
• Rethinking HEDIS and Stars: Building a quality-first culture (Navina)
• 5 Ways Automation Is Transforming Human Services Workflows (Netsmart)
• When to Use Modifier 25 vs. Modifier 59 (Nym)
• How to Improve Ambient Temperature Monitoring in Hospitals (SmartSense by Digi)
• Understanding Payment Card Fees in Healthcare Payments (TrustCommerce, a Sphere company)
• Access is an Outcome: Eliminating Coverage Uncertainty Across the Patient Journey (Surescripts)
• CHIME Fall Forum 2025 Insights for Healthcare CIOs (Symplr)
• Why Coding Teams Are Moving Toward Single Path Coding (TruBridge)
• Connect care to payment: The value of combining clinical + financial data in one platform (Waystar)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Sponsorship information.
Contact us.

News 12/5/25

Top News

The Spokesman-Review and The Washington Post say that the VA remains on track to expand its Oracle Health EHR rollout to 13 more medical centers in 2026 despite the problems that clinicians reported at all six go-live sites.

• VHA data indicates that the system was involved in 4,600 cases of patient harm, including six deaths.
• Former VA Secretary David Shulkin says that the VA’s implementation was botched after he left in 2018 by trying to implement the system top-down from Washington instead of involving users.
• Reported problems at the initial sites include disappearing notes, incorrect medication doses, and total system outages.
• Staff reported alert fatigue due to a steady stream of email alerts from VA technical support about system problems.
• Providers complain of increased burnout, reduced patient time, and fear of harming veterans due to system complexity and instability.
• An internal VA study showed that system go-live was associated with a 30-40% drop in primary care visit volume, and increased wait times have not resolved.
• The project’s $16 billion estimated cost is now at $33 billion, with one GAO official predicting that the final cost will be “hundreds of billions.”
• A VA spokesperson said in a statement, “Biden political appointees’ mismanagement of VA’s electronic health record modernization effort resulted in a program that was nearly dormant for almost two years. The Trump administration won’t repeat those same mistakes and is already moving quickly to accelerate deployment of the system and bring the project to completion as early as 2031.”
• The spokesperson says that staff satisfaction with the system is improving and that five of the original six sites report increased productivity compared to pre-implementation.

Sponsored Events and Resources

None scheduled soon. Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Healthcare AI agent developer Artera raises $65 million in growth investment.  

Sales

• Ob Hospitalist Group will implement Commure Autonomous Coding at 200 care sites.

People

AdvancedMD hires Nupura Kolwalkar-Rana, MS, MA (DNAnexus) as chief product and technology officer.

LiveData promotes Jeff Forbes, MBA to VP of commercial healthcare sales.

Announcements and Implementations

Medical kiosk maker OnMed will implement its CareStation clinic-in-a-box at 30 charter schools in a pilot project with 22Beacon, which provides real estate development, financing, and advisory services to charter schools. OnMed announced in October 2025 that it plans to go public via a SPAC merger.

Aetna lists the milestones it has achieved in its strategy to simplify healthcare experiences for providers and patients, which include combining prior authorizations for prescriptions and procedures into a single clinical review, introducing collaborative care models for Medicare Advantage members, and rolling out conversational AI solutions. 

A new KLAS and Arch Collaborative report on clinician turnover finds that problems with organizational leadership top the list of causes, often triggered by a bad EHR experience. One clinician says that IT leadership pay should be pegged to patient satisfaction just as theirs is, while another says that IT protects its fiefdom and shows little interest in clinician needs.

Privacy and Security

Kaiser Permanente’s health plan will pay $46 million to settle a class action lawsuit that involves its 2024 use of web tracking technology.

Other

I ran across the Substack of Helen Lu, RN, MSN, clinical director of informatics and analytics at Community Health System, who is also a family nurse practitioner, insightful health tech analyst, and AI fan. She questions on LinkedIn why she can stream Netflix in 4K, yet downloading a diagnostic quality image takes 30 minutes. She says that the technology exists, but hasn’t been adopted:

• Cloud-based imaging that is faster than on-premise servers.
• Smart pre-fetching that occurs before the chart is even opened.
• Progressive image loading that allows starting reading immediately instead of waiting for a full download.
• Vision-language AI models that can choose the most relevant views upfront.
• Networks that prioritize imaging over less-important traffic.

A BMJ article says that social media influencers shape public perception of medical guidance by promoting oversimplified or misleading advice that often conflicts with evidence-based recommendations. Influencers often lack expertise, are motivated by financial conflicts, and overgeneralize their personal beliefs. The authors add that official statements and fact-checking aren’t effective at countering misinformation because they lack the immediacy, appeal, and reach of influencers. They outline possible countermeasures, but say that no single approach is likely to work.

Sponsor Updates

• Agfa HealthCare shares its experience at RSNA 2025.
• Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust in England enhance pediatric care by integrating digital growth charts within its Sunrise EHR from Altera Digital Health.
• The “What Fuels You” podcast features Arrive Health CEO Kyle Kaiser.
• Optimum Healthcare IT posts a new case study titled “NGHS Achieves Cloud First Vision With Epic on AWS.”
• Black Book Research offers its free “2026-2027 Boardroom Playbook for Hospital Health IT Approvals.”
• The US Department of Labor honors Clearwater with the 2025 Gold HIRE Vets Medallion Award.
• Findhelp welcomes new customers TimelyCare, Adventist Health, Pear Suite, and InCharge Education Foundation.
• HCTec offers a new case study titled “Scaling Excellence: How HCTec Became a Prominent Academic Health System’s Go-To Epic Go-Live Partner.”
• Healthmonix welcomes Georgia Cancer Specialists as a new customer.

Blog Posts

• Best Practices for Success with Agentic AI Implementation (AGS Health)
• The empowerment evolution: Three ways health IT is enhancing patient engagement (Altera Digital Health)
• Top 8 healthcare analytics tools and tips for selecting one (Arcadia)
• Patients Save over 88% with Real-Time Prescription Benefit (Arrive Health)
• Healthcare Cybersecurity in the Age of AI: Navigating the Opportunities and Challenges (CloudWave)
• Optimizing EHR Performance and End-User Adoption in the Era of AI (CTG)
• How to Evaluate Healthcare Analytics Platforms: What “Best” Really Means (Dimensional Insight)
• 5 Questions Every Health System Should Ask Before Choosing a Drug Database for Your EHR (First Databank)
• Five9 CX Summit 2025: A Community That Redefined What CX Can Be (Five9)
• When Cyber Threats Hit Rural Hospitals: Lessons from the Front Lines (Fortified Health Security)
• Strategic EHR Transitions: Unifying Healthcare Data (Health Data Movers)
• How do you offer payment plans for patients? A guide for medical practices (Inbox Health)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Sponsorship information.
Contact us.

News 12/3/25

Top News

A new, 10-year CMS model called ACCESS will test whether an outcome-aligned payment approach can expand access to technology-enabled chronic care management in Original Medicare starting in July 2026.

CMS says that telehealth, wearables, lifestyle coaching apps, and FDA-authorized devices can support clinical consultations, lifestyle support, counseling, patient education, medication management, ordering and interpreting tests and imaging.

The program will focus on four tracks:

• Early cardio-kidney-metabolic conditions such as hypertension, dyslipidemia, obesity, and prediabetes.
• Cardio-kidney-metabolic conditions such as diabetes, chronic kidney disease, and heart disease.
• Chronic musculoskeletal pain.
• Depression and anxiety.

Some LinkedIn comments from Christian Pean, MD, MS, executive director of AI and IT innovation at Duke Orthopedic Surgery:

Value-based care just got more real for orthopedics. I’ve sat through countless meetings about the shift from volume to value. It often feels abstract. But the CMS ACCESS Model (launching July 2026) is one of the most tangible signals I’ve seen that the ground is shifting below our feet. For those of us in orthopedic surgery and health tech, CMS says this is a playbook for the next decade. Instead of just paying us to intervene, CMS wants to pay us to manage patients longitudinally. The model introduces Outcome-Aligned Payments, recurring revenue that is contingent on the patient actually getting better … You cannot succeed in this model with a clipboard and a phone call. To manage outcomes at scale, we need AI-enabled Integrated Practice Units (IPUs). We need remote monitoring that feels invisible to the patient but gives the clinical team actionable data.

Reader Comments

From Nasty Parts: “Re: Accuity. I’m hearing that it was acquired by [publicly traded vendor name omitted]. Not announced, but integration is underway.” Unverified. I’ve omitted the rumored acquirer’s name since they are publicly traded.

From Ray: “Re: TEFCA. I agree that comparisons between TEFCA and CMS Aligned Networks is confusing. This document may help clarify.” Thanks to Ray Duncan, MD, who has more experience in interoperability and technology than just about anybody, for creating and sending this document.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

A reader’s generous donation, matched with funds from organizations and my Anonymous Vendor Executive, fully funded these Donors Choose teacher grant requests from historically underfunded schools:

• STEM activities and sensory toys for Ms. A’s elementary school class in Paterson, NJ.
• Geometric line design tools for Mr. N’s elementary school class in Starkville, MS.
• Headphones for Ms. Z’s middle school science academy class in Youngstown, OH.
• Apple pen and accessories for Mr. W’s middle school science academy class in Youngstown, OH.
• Structural design toys for Ms. S’s middle school class in Jonesboro, GA.
• Educational marble construction sets for Ms. O’s kindergarten class in Hayward, CA.
• Literary center shelving units for Mr. V’s elementary school class in Paterson, NJ.
• Agriculture microbit coding kits for Ms. M’s elementary magnet school class in Pasadena, CA.
• Equipment for the student-led news project of Ms. M’s elementary school class in Charlotte, NC.
• Headphones for Ms. M’s elementary school class in Oklahoma City, OK.
• Graphic design certification peripherals for Mr. W’s high school class in Port Saint Lucie, FL.
• STEAM supplies for Dr. K’s elementary school class in Port Saint Lucie, FL.
• STEM activities for Ms. H’s elementary school class in Hemet, CA.
• English and Spanish books for Mr. H’s elementary school class in Los Angeles, CA.
• Science experiment kits for Ms. M’s elementary school class in Philadelphia, MS.
• Jump ropes and hula hoops for recess activities for Ms. C’s elementary school class in Port Saint Lucie, FL.
• STEM supplies for Ms. H’s elementary school class in Bowen, IL

Sponsored Events and Resources

None scheduled soon. Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Hospital-at-home company Inbound Health shuts down, citing regulatory uncertainty around reimbursement for its services. It was spun out of Allina Health in 2022 to help health systems develop tech-enabled, home-based care programs and had raised $50 million.

West Virginia University Health System will spend $80 million to roll out Epic across Independence Health System (PA) facilities, which will become a part of WVU’s system next fall.

Avandra, which is developing a federated network for medical imaging and clinical data for pharma and AI innovation, acquires DatCard Systems, which offers DICOM distribution solutions, and Sorna Corporation, whose technology supports automated medical data distribution.

Sales

• Sauk Prairie Healthcare (WI) will implement Jorie AI’s automated RCM technology.
• UnityPoint Health (IA) selects Mayo Clinic Platform_Insights to enhance its clinical and operational workflows.
• Children’s of Alabama, Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center (NY), and Vancouver Clinic (WA) select Visage Imaging’s enterprise imaging software.
• Inova Health selects Signal 1’s AI Management Platform for AI tool visibility, monitoring, prompt improvement, and ROI tracking.

People

e

Owensboro Health (KY) promotes Bridget Burshears, MD to CMIO.

Darrell Keeling, PhD, MBA (Parkview Health) joins Bronson Healthcare as CTO and VP of IT infrastructure and cybersecurity operations.

HealthEx promotes Jeremy Schwarz to chief commercial officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Queen Victoria Hospital NHS Foundation Trust launches Altera Digital Health’s Sunrise EHR.

Tampa General Hospital (FL) implements Hyro’s voice AI agents within its call center workflows.

In Kansas, Gove County Medical Center will transition to Meditech through a new affiliation with HaysMed.

The New York State Nurses Association accuses hospitals of deploying AI without their involvement, specifically the Sofiya AI assistant that is being used in Mount Sinai’s cardiac catheterization lab.

CGH Medical Center (IL) goes live on Epic.

KLAS finds that despite better access to external records due to EHR vendor improvements, clinicians remain frustrated because duplicate data, inconsistent formats, and weak mapping limit actionability. The report notes that more APIs do not translate to more data or value, and that mistrust among providers and payers is a bigger barrier to sharing than the technology itself.

Government and Politics

House lawmakers pass the Hospital Inpatient Services Modernization Act, which if signed into law, would extend federal reimbursement for hospital-at-home programs through 2030. Funding for such programs was cut off during the federal government shutdown.

Sponsor Updates

• Altera Digital Health will present at HCTC 2025 December 2-4 in Chula Vista, CA.
• Black Book Research announces the 2025 rankings for outsourced RCM solutions in laboratory and ancillary healthcare sectors, with XiFin taking top marks.
• Milliman CareFlowIQ announces expanded medication reconciliation capabilities from Surescripts.
• AdvancedCare integrates Inbox Health’s automated billing communication and payment technology with its clinical and RCM platform.
• CereCore releases a new podcast titled “Why Tech Makes Care More Human: Sir David Sloman’s Lessons from the NHS.”
• Findhelp announces a data-sharing partnership with Manifest MedEx.

Blog Posts

• Maximizing Reimbursements in Outpatient Rehab: How TheraOffice Helps You Capture Every Dollar (Netsmart)
• What shopping carts can teach us about fixing broken workflows (Nordic)
• What the 2× Weight Drop Means for CAHPS and How to Stay Ahead (ReferWell)
• Funding the Frontline: Why Rural Pharmacists Must Be Part of the Transformation (Surescripts)
• 5 Reasons Bonafide, powered by WellSky, is the best ERP for DME (WellSky)
• From EHR To EHR Reimagined: It’s A New Era for Oracle Health (CereCore)
• How artificial intelligence is transforming healthcare (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• The Latest from Vital Signs: Physician Pay Is Up, Practice Leaders Prioritize People-Centric Goals, and Burnout Is Worse for Women Physicians (AdvancedMD)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Sponsorship information.
Contact us.

Monday Morning Update 12/1/25

Top News

Best Buy’s CFO says in the company’s Q3 earnings call that it record a $192 million asset impairment charge for exiting Best Buy Health, which it says was caused by pressure in Medicaid and Medicare Advantage.

Best Buy paid $400 million for the Scotland-based hospital-at-home technology vendor Current Health in October 2021. It sold the business back to its co-founder Christopher McGee in June 2025 for an unstated price.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents mostly blame Done for its Adderall mess, but plenty join me in faulting the clinicians who eagerly stepped into the company’s marionette strings seeking patient cash rather than patient care.

New poll to your right or here, for providers, as requested by a reader: Which research-only firm do you use most often when buying IT products and services?

I spent dozens of weekend hours watching “Cunk on Earth” and related episodes on Netflix and YouTube. I will proclaim it as the second-funniest series I’ve ever seen, trailing only “Arrested Development” for the number of laughs out loud. I can’t get enough, especially of the truly baffled expressions of the high-profile British academics who ponder Philomena Cunk’s interview questions such as, “When the human body dies, what hole do ghosts come out of, north or south?” Or in her narration, “With its cowboys, guns, and steam train rides, America became known as the land of the free, which must have come as a surprise to all the slaves.” Any of her musings that begin with “My mate Paul” are guaranteed gold.

A Reader’s Notes from the EHealth Exchange and Sequoia Project + Carequality Annual Meetings in Nashville

EHealth Exchange

Statistics

• 25 billion exchange transactions in 2025, supporting 300+ million patients.
• Vast majority of transactions are for treatment purposes. A key goal for the future is to encourage more non-treatment exchange.
• 132.5 million electronic case reporting transactions to APHL AIMS (this number is the total done on behalf of eHealth Exchange, TEFCA, and Carequality, since all of those eCR transactions go through eHealth Exchange)
• 1.7 billion patient histories retrieved by VA and DoD. 149 million shared back with community providers.
• 2026 roadmap: heavy focus on FHIR, the CMS Health Tech Ecosystem, and TEFCA

Kim Brandt, CMS Deputy Administrator and COO

• Key focus area is rooting out fraud, waste, and abuse.
• Medicare spending on skin substitutes went from $256 million in 2019 to $10 billion in 2024. Unclear how much of this was a volume increase in skin substitutes versus an increase in prices.
• $17.2 billion in estimated overpayments to Medicare Advantage plans for 2022. Stepping up oversight of risk adjustment process.
• $1.9 billion in estimated improper payments for durable medical equipment in fiscal year 2024.
• 1.8 million Medicare beneficiaries enrolled in hospice care, which is a 12% increase from 2020. Brandt says this is “inconsistent with demographics.”
• CMS conducted Enhanced Site Visits for hospices and DME suppliers; 60% of the ESVs Nov 24 – Jul 25 resulted in revocations of Medicare enrollment.

Breakout Session on FHIR

• eHealth Exchange has been investing in FHIR infrastructure. Most of their FHIR-based exchange (which is not much) is for public health purposes.
• They have a SMART on FHIR app that serves a proxy for other SMART on FHIR apps, basically a container app that allows other apps to run inside of it. Unclear why providers would want to allow this app in their environments, given that the true consumer of the data would be obfuscated.

Panel on Health Data Utilities

• Craig Behm, President and CEO of CRISP. Numerous state borders in their coverage area means patients are crossing borders often for healthcare. This makes governance the greater challenge, rather than technology. They have to account for all the variation in state laws around privacy, AI, and more.
• Erica Galvez, CEO of Manifest MedEx. Manifest MedEx powers the infrastructure for electronic lab reporting and electronic case reporting for the entire state of California. Not seeing demand for data through TEFCA. They are participating in TEFCA through the eHealth Exchange QHIN and yet they have practically zero TEFCA exchange.
• Amy Gleason, Acting DOGE Administrator. She was disappointed to find that rules she helped craft during the first Trump administration won’t come into effect until 2027 (I believe she was alluding to CMS 0057 that introduces API requirements for prior auth and payer-to-payer exchange). Goals of the CMS Health Tech Ecosystem are to promote innovation, build partnerships among participants, experiment, and move faster than government can. Her daughter was diagnosed at age 12 with an autoimmune disease, after 15 months of numerous concerning symptoms, doctor visits, and misdiagnoses. Gleason shared that the final diagnosis was a bit lucky: a provider wanted to do light therapy and the payer said they needed to get a biopsy first, which led to the ultimate diagnosis. “Only time prior authorization ever helped us.” Over the course of her life, her daughter has acquired 47 patient portal accounts. Some are from one-and-done sites of care, like an urgent care, but some are for providers she regularly sees. Gleason is bullish on the potential of AI. She says her daughter was rejected for a clinical trial, so her daughter uploaded her medical records to ChatGPT and asked for any trials she is eligible for. ChatGPT found that she actually was eligible for the original trial. Also cited an instance where her daughter was having side effects and her doctor recommended going to the ED. Daughter consulted ChatGPT and it pointed out she forgot to taper down from steroids, leading her to develop a taper-down plan and avoid an ED visit. A sandbox/proof-of-concept for the proposed national provider directory has been developed and testing is starting. Sounds like initial testing is happening in Oklahoma.

Sequoia Project/Carequality

Amy Gleason and Tom Keane, Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy

• Gleason gave the same presentation from the eHealth Exchange meeting, so nothing new.
• ASTP priorities: patient control of their data, data liquidity, and deregulation.
• ASTP is revisiting all EHR certification criteria, with the goal of eliminating some of them, and is planning to revise/reduce info blocking exceptions.
• No specifics provided, however the currently regulatory agenda hints that ASTP will codify several enforcement discretions previously announced.
• Dr. Keane said HIPAA (or the interpretation of it) is creating info blocking; they are looking at how to address that.
• To increase enforcement of info blocking, ASTP is consulting with states for anti-competitive law enforcement and with the FTC.
• A priority for TEFCA is building out support for research-based exchange.
• Oracle becomes the 11th designated QHIN under TEFCA

Other Tidbits

• Clinical Architecture and NCQA are working on a rubric for assessing the quality of FHIR payloads, with the goal of reducing the burden of Data Aggregator Validation/Primary Source Verification.
• CMS is working on a proposed rule (CMS 0062) to streamline prior authorization of drugs. CMS 0057 covered prior auth interoperability for procedures/services only, not drugs.
• Sequoia Project and Carequality have worked on aligning and refining definitions and practices to encourage greater transparency. Principals (entities who have signed the framework agreement) must identify all of their authorized delegates in the directory, and delegates must identify the Principal they are requesting data on behalf of.

Reader’s Takeaways

• Plenty of confusion on how the CMS Health Tech Ecosystem is different from TEFCA. Those who have pledged to the HTE seem convinced they are complementary; those on the outside are less clear/more skeptical.
• There was at times a level of frustration that bubbled up among attendees. Folks seem to recognize that a lot of spaghetti has been thrown at the wall, and some has stuck, but interoperability is still a struggle and outcomes still aren’t good.
• HIPAA is becoming a dirty word, viewed as an outdated law that doesn’t fit with the technologies and landscape we have in 2025 and that is misused as an obstacle to data exchange.
• Payer-provider exchange through the national networks seems unlikely. Not enough trust between the parties, and providers want to get paid for the data they’re sharing.
• Note that the HTE specifies that payers should be able to query for data related to recent claims and quality measures. Also, currently under the TEFCA SOP for Operations, TEFAC participants must respond to queries for data related to HEDIS, quality measures, and care coordination starting 2/16/26. Whether these actually come to fruition is TBD.

Sponsored Events and Resources

None scheduled soon. Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Brown University Health psychiatry fellow Bhargav Patel, MD, MBA sues health AI company Sully.AI and several of its executives for firing him as chief medical officer. His lawsuit says that the company didn’t pay him, classified him as an independent contractor, and fired him for raising concerns about its lack of compliance with HIPAA and FDA requirements. The lawsuit claims:

Plaintiff joined a call with Defendant Nasser and a prospective hospital customer to whom Defendants were attempting to sell an AI radiologist. Patel was told that the product was basically a ChatGPT wrapper, but on the call, Defendant Nasser claimed Defendants were utilizing an FDA approved AI model. When the hospital’s representative responded that their own research failed to discover the existence of an FDA approved AI radiologist model, Defendant Nasser became upset and abruptly ended the call … Patel also expressed the same concerns to co-founder Henry Duong (“Duong”), stating, “I think we should be a little more careful with those things. Don’t want to expose ourselves to legal liability when it comes to compliance/FDA approval type things.”

I’m enjoying the latest HealthVC newsletter from European fund partner Martyn Eeles, who explains to startups how to keep pilot projects from becoming a slow death sentence:

• Buyers will commit only to those metrics that they already track, not to ones invented by their vendors.
• Harmless-looking discounts become psychological anchors that block a clean path to commercial pricing.
• The most valuable part of a pilot is the evidence, which lives in operational data that buyers control unless founders negotiate data rights upfront.
• Strong pilots often fail to expand because missing renewal language forces the entire negotiation process to restart.
• Founders expect product performance to speak for itself, which it never does. Enterprise relationships are built on cadence, visibility, and trust, not performance alone.

Announcements and Implementations

An auditor’s report finds that New South Wales left key costs out of its $650 million USD Epic-powered Single Digital Patient Record project, such as integration work.

Government and Politics

Three big insurers ask the federal government to limit their liability for potentially catastrophic claims that involve AI.

Digital health executive Tarun Kapoor, MD, MBA says that health tech conferences are failing – and he skips the presentations anyway – because panels can’t touch podcasts that dive deeper while costing zero in time and money. He adds that health system leaders who participate in the panels upend the conference “ladies drink free” business model by dodging vendors to head home at first opportunity.

Chillicothe VA Medical Center (OH) introduces EHRnie the Eagle, who accompanies its Change Leadership Team to talk with staff and veterans about the VA’s EHR deployment.

Other

Advocate Health paid its CEO $26 million in 2024, up 49% from the previous year.

NEJM AI describes a fast track manuscript review process that combines AI and human reviews to accelerate acceptance within seven days of submission, conditional on making requested revisions.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Sponsorship information.
Contact us.

News 11/26/25

Top News

New Zealand’s health minister announces a 10-year investment plan to convert the 65% of hospitals that use paper records to digital systems.

The plan calls for a single national digital medical records system, remote patient monitoring, a national radiology system, and stronger cybersecurity.

Reader Comments

From GoBeyond: “Re: HIMSS. Please investigate whether HIMSS was technically insolvent when it sold the global conference to Informa. Also, who does it count as a ‘member’ in announcing a big increase?” On the latter issue, only HIMSS can answer how it counted its announced 75% membership increase over the past eight years. I wonder about HIMSS organizational affiliate memberships, the all-you-can-eat plan where an organization pays one price for unlimited individual members. For example, health systems can sign up unlimited individual members for a total annual cost of just $5,000. On the first issue, a non-profit’s financial health can be ascertained only from its 990 tax forms or audited financials and I haven’t seen those. Here’s some background:

• A 501(c)(6) trade association like HIMSS is required to file a Form 990 every year, although IRS backlogs (which IRS has confirmed) can affect the visibility of those filings.
• IRS records show no timely HIMSS Form 990 filings for fiscal years 2022, 2023, and 2024. HIMSS has also not provided recent returns upon my multiple requests as required by federal disclosure rules.
• The organization’s fiscal year change to a December year-end for 2021 explains a one-time shift in timing, but not a multi-year absence of posted filings.
• HIMSS announced a global headquarters in the Netherlands in 2023 and sold its conference operations to Informa in the same year. The global headquarters change does not relieve HIMSS of the obligation to file 990s for its US operation.
• I don’t know who HIMSS uses as an external auditor in the absence of 990 filings. HIMSS CFO Annemarie Tuzik left the organization in October 2025 after two years and an interim is in place. She was hired at the same time as its general counsel, who left after just over one year and does not appear to have been replaced.
• Without 990s or audited financials, an organization’s financial health can be assessed only through observable behaviors such as persistent late filings, refusing to provide disclosure, downsizings, executive or board turnover, selling core revenue-generating assets, a reduction in membership or sponsorship levels, office relocations, program cancellations, and major operational shifts.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

My aggravation of the day: news websites that force me to turn off my ad blocker, then dump me off to paywall anyway.

It’s nearly Thanksgiving, which means that tens of thousands of people will pack their heavy coats and turkey sandwiches for Chicago and RSNA, where the already cold weather will worsen under a forecast winter storm. Exhibitors love adverse weather that keeps attendees in the exhibit hall.

Subject-verb agreement matters, at least to me. Removing those first three words fixes the problem and shortens the headline as a bonus.

Sponsored Events and Resources

None scheduled soon. Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Canada’s competition bureau is investigating Well Health Technologies over concerns that its recent acquisitions, including Healwell AI and Orion Health Holdings, are reducing competition in the AI transcription market. The former yoga studio operator now operates 227 medical clinics and has announced plans to take its software subsidiary Wellstar public next year.

Sales

• UI Health will implement Abridge.
• University of Michigan School of Dentistry will implement Epic through PDS Health Technologies.

Announcements and Implementations

RapidAI obtains FDA clearance for five new imaging modules in its Rapid Enterprise Platform.

Government and Politics

The White House launches the Genesis Mission, a national effort to use AI to transform scientific research.

Sponsor Updates

• Health Gorilla’s Chief Medical Officer Steven Lane, MD, MPH and Altera Digital Health Chief Medical Officer Laura Kohlhagen, MD, MBA will co-present at the Harris Customer Training Conference in San Diego on “A New Dawn: Data Exchange in Sunrise via TEFCA” December 3 in San Diego.
• Wolters Kluwer Health adds Lexidrug to its UpToDate Expert AI.

Sponsor Spotlight

AGFA HealthCare returns to RSNA 2025 with fresh insights, cloud-powered innovation, and a “Clinician-First” approach to transforming the imaging experience. Attendees can explore interactive demos, join expert-led Lunch & Learn sessions, and participate in peer-to-peer conversations with AGFA HealthCare’s imaging leaders who are shaping what’s next in radiology. From streaming workflows to smart reporting and deep integrations, AGFA HealthCare’s RSNA lineup offers a first look at how enterprise imaging is evolving. Discover the full schedule and reserve your spot. (Sponsor Spotlight is free for HIStalk Platinum sponsors).

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Sponsorship information.
Contact us.

Monday Morning Update 11/24/25

Top News

GE HealthCare will acquire medical imaging company Intelerad for $2.3 billion in cash.

London-based private equity firm Hg Capital, whose healthcare portfolio also includes HHAeXchange and Rhapsody, acquired intelerad in 2020 for a reported $500 million. It then made several acquisitions and increased the company’s revenue by 3.5 times.

Reader Comments

From Former HIMSS Manager: “Re: HIMSS. Hal Wolf held a five-minute call to announce layoffs, ended with ‘be well,’ and hung up. The entire membership team was eliminated. Factors were that HIMSS has missed financial targets for years, doesn’t have much to show from selling the annual conference to Informa, and has experienced constant executive turnover. I can confirm that Hal hired Deloitte to restructure and push analytics. Coincidentally, we were recently ranked among the lowest by the Global Digital Health Partnership. HIStalk, please investigate and share what is happening. Your reporting is one of the few independent voices.” Unverified, except to note that HIMSS indeed didn’t perform well in the September 2025 report that the reader cites. I received an unsigned response to my inquiries from HIMSS, which I greatly appreciate even though I don’t know who sent it from their generic press email address. They (someone) said, and I quote:

• The number of team members impacted was much less than stated. HIMSS is making changes based on the evolving needs of our 125,000+ members, including the growing demand for our thought leadership and expertise in the areas of analytics solutions, professional development, and media offerings. In response to those needs, we have made thoughtful adjustments to our organization, including the redesign or elimination of certain roles. These decisions were made with the utmost care and respect for the talented colleagues who have contributed to the HIMSS mission.
• HIMSS does not provide public comment on internal financial matters.
• HIMSS follows the IRS process and timing for completing and submitting HIMSS 990 forms. We will continue to abide by IRS policy for public disclosure as more recent 990s are completed and filed.

The response confirms that HIMSS hasn’t filed recent 990 forms, but doesn’t say why. It also confirms the reader’s report that analytics will be a focus, although it doesn’t say what kind. HIMSS sold the data portion of the provider analytics business of HIMSS Analytics to Definitive Healthcare in early 2019 while keeping the Adoption Model part of the business.

From Former HIMSS Employee: “Re: HIMSS. I left voluntarily a while back. Here’s what I learned from several people who were terminated this week.” This reader entrusted me with their identity, so I can confirm that this came from a former employee.

• Deloitte advised on layoffs and reorganizations, resulting in the termination of 40 staff members last week. 
• Middle management is gone across analytics, media, marketing, engagement, and membership.
• Marketing and HIMSS Media were significantly downsized.
• Engagement strategies and membership teams were eliminated.  
• The 2025 goal was to increase membership, and that was accomplished. Now the membership team has been eliminated. Corporate membership went down after Informa bought the conference since it sells booth space directly to vendors, which was previously available as HIMSS corporate membership perk.
• HIMSS seems interested in trying to become a consulting firm since it is charging for previously free consulting for the maturity models they sell.
• A meeting with chapter leaders on Monday confirmed that the focus will be on content, professional development, and the HIMSS Analytics maturity models, advisory services, and validations.

From Sepulchre: “Re: survey. You did a weekly survey in 2019 about which services such as KLAS and Black Book provider decision-makers use when making a buying decision. It’s budget time for 2026 and I’m looking for input on planned investments.” I will run that as next week’s poll.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Most poll respondents haven’t experienced a provider’s AI chatbot, and three-fourths of those who have say it wasn’t useful.

New poll to your right or here: Who is most responsible for Done’s online Adderall prescribing misconduct? I acknowledge the easy out that an “all of the above” option would offer, but think harder.

Sponsored Events and Resources

None scheduled soon. Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Drug maker Eli Lilly becomes the first healthcare company to be valued at $1 trillion, buoyed by sales of its blockbuster weight loss drug that it sells as Zepbound and Mounjaro. That injection is expected to be the top-selling drug of 2025 as it constantly erodes the market share of Novo Nordisk’s less-effective Ozempic and Wegovy. Lilly is working on an oral version of its products and is testing another possibly better GLP-1. A $10,000 investment in LLY shares when current CEO Dave Ricks took over in early 2017 would be worth $144,000 today.

Memorial Sloan Kettering reports a $62 million loss on $1.2 billion in Q3 operating revenue, which a spokesperson attributes to the budgeted cost of implementing Epic. The hospital spent $169 million on the project in the year’s first three quarters. It began the implementation in 2022 and went live in February 2025.

People

Vermont Health Information Exchange, VITL, hires Randy Farmer, MS, MEd (Delaware Health Information Network) as president and CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

Penn Medicine authors describe the organization’s self-developed tool that automates integrating data from inbound faxes into the EHR. They report that it has saved significant staff time and improved staff satisfaction since its rollout in 2002.

AMA profiles and interviews Elise Boventer, MD, MPH, medical informatics strategist for Northwell Health. Her comments cover the need for physician informaticists, the importance of female representation in the field, and the value of mentorship. She finishes up with an insightful comment about AI:

It’s been surprising how often I’ll see an idea or an algorithm, either from industry or research, where there clearly wasn’t much thought about how to integrate it into the workflow or the impact it has on physicians. For example, if there is a new generative AI tool that summarizes data, I’d ask: How many pages long is the output that the physicians are now expected to read? When in the care process are they expected to read it and what is the liability if something is missed? And how does reading the output change management?

A Navina study finds that using ambient AI alone to generate clinical documentation for chronic disease management performs poorly compared to approaches that integrate patient-clinician conversations with the patient’s medical history.

Findhelp launches a solution that allows states, payers, and providers to manage new work requirements for Medicaid eligibility within a single workflow.

A study of 26 cancer clinics finds that 88% believe that team-based supportive care model will improve care, versus 25% who favor a technology-first model.

A meta-analysis concludes that most smart watches perform well at detecting atrial fibrillation, with sensitivity and specificity in the 96-99% range, but Google’s Fitbit performed poorly at 66% and 79%. The top performer was Amazfit, model unspecified, with 99% on both. The $65 Amazfit Bip 6 watch provides fitness tracking, AI coaching, 14-day battery life, GPS navigation, and real-time monitoring of heart rate, sleep, blood oxygen, and stress. Amazfit is owned by China-based health technology Zepp Health. Thanks to Paulius Mui, MD for mentioning the article on LinkedIn.

Government and Politics

Vohra Wound Physicians Management will pay $45 million to settle False Claims Act allegations that it billed Medicare for unnecessary surgeries, overtreated patients to increase procedure volume, and submitted claims for non-billable services. Federal investigators say the company pushed physicians to perform debridement at as many visits as possible, then altered its EHR to automatically bill Medicare for higher-paying surgical excisions and generate false supporting documentation. The settlement also requires an independent review of its EHR. Founder Ameet Vohra, MD said recently that the company has 300 physicians and 50 nurse practitioners serving 3,000 skilled nursing facilities.

The VA will implement ambient AI in all of its medical centers in 2026 following a 10-VAMC pilot that started last month. The pilot project vendors are Knowtex and Abridge.

Cancer registries that receive funding from the CDC or the National Cancer Institute will be required by a White House directive to record patient sex only as male, female, or unknown.

Other

A Tucson woman who was scheduled to have her tongue and larynx removed because of mouth cancer uses AI to preserve her commonly used phrases for use after she permanently loses her voice. She recorded “Happy birthday,” “I’m proud of you,” and a string of essential curse words. She also recorded a dozen children’s books for future grandchildren. She types messages into the free, open source text-to-speech app Whisper, which speaks them aloud using her AI-generated voice. When insurance refused to cover the $3,000 cost, she said through the app, “Apparently, having a voice is not considered a medical necessity.” Her daughter summarizes, “She got her sass back. When we heard her AI voice, we all cried, my sister, my dad, and I. It’s crazy similar.”

Sponsor Updates

• Vyne Medical offers a new guide titled “Machine Learning vs. RPA in Healthcare: Finding the Right Automation for Intelligent Data Processing.”
• Praia Health releases a new case study titled “Platform Results: 3 Years of Impact at Providence.”
• SmarterDx publishes a new white paper titled “Metrics that matter for AI in RCM.”
• TrustCommerce, a Sphere company, collaborates with Complete Clinic Software to bring clinics a smarter, more seamless way to manage payments.
• Waystar offers a new e-book titled “The ROI of AI in healthcare payments: Which metrics matter?”

Blog Posts

• Epic Embraces AI: Key Highlights from Microsoft Ignite 2025 (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Introducing Five9 OneVUE: One Dashboard. Smarter Contact Center Reporting. (Five9)
• Incident Response Programs vs. Incident Response Retainers (Fortified Health Security)
• Honoring Care at Home Month: A Personal Reflection (Netsmart)
• Wolters Kluwer showcases AI leadership at Microsoft Ignite 2025 (Wolters Kluwer)
• How personalized medicine empowers patients and cuts healthcare costs (Nordic)
• CPT Code News: What’s New for Medical Coders and Providers (Nym)
• The CMS TEAM Mandate: What Hospital Leaders Must Know to Be Ready for the 2026 Performance Year (ReferWell)
• Reconciling conflicting claims about reinforcement fine-tuning in LLMs (SmarterDx)
• How Surescripts Helps Solve the Case for Today’s Full-Service Pharmacies (Surescripts)
• An Introduction to OPPE and FPPE (Symplr)
• Key Takeaways From CHIME25 Fall Forum (Tegria)
• Support, not replacement: How healthcare workers are feeling about AI and why messaging matters (WellSky)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Sponsorship information.
Contact us.

News 11/21/25

Top News

Ruthia He, founder and CEO of ADHD-prescribing site Done, is convicted on federal charges of illegally distributing Adderall, committing healthcare claims fraud, and conspiring to obstruct justice. The company’s clinical president, David Brody, MD, was also convicted on the distribution and fraud counts.

HHS OIG’s deputy inspector general calls it “one of the most egregious abuses of telehealth that we’ve seen.”

Prosecutors say the billion-dollar startup raised investor money by offering frictionless access to 40 million doses of Adderall and other stimulants and spent $40 million on social media ads during the pandemic to target drug seekers and convince people that they had ADHD.

The company required clinicians to rush first visits, paid nurse practitioners up to $60,000 per month to refill prescriptions without patient contact, and barred clinicians from discharging patients even when families reported Adderall-induced psychosis.

The obstruction charge stems from He moving the company’s operations to her home country of China to hinder evidence discovery. Each defendant faces up to 20 years in prison.

Reader Comments

From IT Networker: “Re: HIMSS. Insiders say that layoffs started with managers on Monday and non-management on Wednesday. Entire teams were eliminated in some cases, while others were downsized to minimal staff. Hal reportedly used a top tier consulting firm to make the staff reduction and reorganization decisions, but those who remain still aren’t clear on direction.” Unverified, in the absence of a response to my inquiries from HIMSS. People who are better LinkedIn users than I am could probably find some newly available names. A reader’s notes from the Georgia HIMSS annual meeting last month quoted Hal Wolf as saying that membership has increased 75% over the past eight years. It’s shocking, shocking I say, that the hard-hitting, HIMSS-owned Healthcare IT News has shared no investigative reporting on the topic. Email me if you are an insider who has details and I’ll keep you anonymous.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Last chance to sign up as a new or returning HIStalk sponsor to get year-end spiffs. Contact Lorre.

It’s going to be mighty quiet in health tech land starting right about now, so I’ll probably skip some updates between now and New Year’s Day.  

Sponsored Events and Resources

None scheduled soon. Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

WellBeam, which facilitates information exchange between the EHRs of acute care providers and those of post-acute care providers, raises $10 million in Series A funding.

Arbiter launches with $52 million to offer AI solutions that automate administrative healthcare tasks like appointment scheduling, follow-up, and referrals.

Ember, an AI-powered denial prevention software startup, announces $4.3 million in seed funding.

Function, which offers lab test memberships, raises $298 million in a Series B funding round that values the company at $2.5 billion. 

People

LiveData hires David Owen (Symplr) as chief product officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Sheer Health rolls out an app that lets consumers compare their medical bills to their insurance coverage so that they can understand deductibles, co-pays, and benefits. The app uses AI and human reviewers to answer questions, and the company offers billable services to contest denied claims and out-of-network determinations.

Trilliant Health publishes a machine-readable dataset of the negotiated prices of 5,000 hospitals, which it obtained from hospitals that are required to publish them by the Hospital Price Transparency rule.

The American Medical Association will develop and disseminate AI learning tools for medical schools and provide CME to upskill practitioners.

Privacy and Security

In Ontario, Canada, an AI-powered bot sends confidential patient details from an unnamed hospital’s grand rounds meeting to 65 invitees, 12 of whom no longer worked there. A doctor who had left the hospital a year earlier sent an Otter.ai “meeting agent” to attend the virtual meeting in his place. The tool then emailed the transcript, including full details on seven patients, to everyone on the invitee list.

Sponsor Updates

• Optimum Healthcare IT will partner with non-profit solution provider Celerate to develop a chatbot for neurosurgeons.
• Visage Imaging will showcase innovations, including AI, to its Visage 7 Enterprise Imaging Platform at RSNA.
• Vyne Medical offers a new case study titled “How Automation is Shaping the Future of Document Management at VHC Health.”
• Artera promotes Michael Jensen to CFO.
• Altera Digital Health adds Sunrise Thread AI, its new ambient scribe and note generation assistant, to its Sunrise EHR.
• Kyruus Health publishes a new report titled “”From Crisis to Control: Executive Insights to Transform Care Guidance with Data and AI.”
• Ellkay offers a new success story featuring West Feliciana Hospital titled “Empowering Rural Healthcare: From Integration to Enterprise Data Management.”
• Findhelp will host a Washington Social Care Summit December 4 in Seattle.
• Five9 introduces updates to its Genius AI Suite, introducing AI across routing, quality management, and analytics.
• Visage Imaging propels AI optimized enterprise imaging at RSNA 2025.
• Healthcare Growth Partners advises Tonic Health on its sale to Luma Health.
• InterSystems establishes a public sector subsidiary.
• AdvancedCare launches Inbox Health’s billing communication and payment technology across its provider network.
• Health Data Movers releases a new episode of its “Quick HITs” podcast titled “Advancing Community Health Through Innovation with Alex Romillo & Oscar Perez.”
• Healthmonix welcomes Akira Health of Fresno and Akira Health of Los Angeles as new customers.
• Infinx releases a new case study titled “How an Academic Health Network Achieved a 70% Revenue Growth & 88% Increase in Charge Volume.”
• CommonWell Health Alliance completes its technical migration to Ellkay.
• Linus Health will present new evidence validating its AI-enabled tools for early detection and trial readiness at the Clinical Trials on Alzheimer’s Disease conference December 1-4 in San Diego.

Blog Posts

• Revenue Cycle Tech That Pays for Itself: Building the ROI Case for Automation (Vyne Medical)
• What if AI could help restore the human touch in healthcare? (Elsevier)
• Accreditation in Specialty Pharmacy: Turning Compliance Burden into Operational Strength (First Databank)
• The Agentic Future: When Quality Management Becomes Your Strategic Growth Engine (Five9)
• Carrying the Legacy Forward: How a Family History of Service Shaped a Path from Navy to Cybersecurity (Fortified Health Security)
• Building a High-Performing Epic EHR Team at Not-for-Profit Health System (HCTec)
• How Val Verde Regional Medical Center is using data to redefine patient care (Meditech)
• Five Key Strategies to Strengthen Healthcare Budget Resilience (Med Tech Solutions)
• Can AI Help Deliver CMS’s Value-Based Care Agenda? (Navina)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Sponsorship information.
Contact us.

News 11/19/25

Top News

A federal jury orders Apple to pay Masimo $634 million for violating the company’s blood oxygen reading patents in Apple Watch’s workout mode and heart rate notification feature.

The legal battle between the companies has involved numerous lawsuits over six years, with the federal government instituting a ban in 2023 on imports of select Apple smartwatches because of the technology infringement.

Apple subsequently introduced an updated, import-friendly version of its technology.

Reader Comments

From Funicular: “Re: HIMSS. Staff tell me that layoffs started Monday as part of a 30% workforce reduction.” Unverified. I asked HIMSS to comment as I always do, which resulted in the usual lack of response. They have also not responded to my repeated requests for their updated nonprofit tax filings, the most recent of which that I have seen is from 2021.

From AccelerateHIMSS: “Re: HIMSS. Heading toward a 60% workforce reduction by year’s end. Did they spend the HIMSS20 insurance payout and rumored $150 million sale of the annual conference on the failed Accelerate instead of refunding attendees and exhibitors, which would have allowed them to thrive?” Unverified.

Sponsored Events and Resources

None scheduled soon. Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

MRO acquires Clinetic, which uses EHR data to help providers and life sciences companies find, screen, and enroll patients for clinical trials.

Sales

• University of Illinois Health and EFW Radiology in Canada select enterprise imaging technology from Agfa HealthCare.
• Advanced Radiology Management will implement Visage Imaging’s Visage 7 Enterprise Imaging Platform in a five-year, $29 million contract.

People

Divurgent names Vitalize Consulting Solutions co-founder Danny Arnold EVP of growth and strategy.

Penn State Health (PA) names Dennis Sutterfield (SUNY Downstate Medical Center) VP/CIO.

Brandon Theophilus (NextGen Healthcare) joins Basata as SVP of growth.

Unite Us appoints Sean Burke (Ascend Learning) president.

Announcements and Implementations

Humana goes live on Epic’s Coverage Finder and Digital Insurance Card Exchange capabilities for its 800,000 Medicare Advantage members, which provides insurance verification and streamlined check-in.

Edifecs introduces a member consent management solution for health plans.

A CHG Healthcare survey of physicians finds that 82% are not highly engaged in their workplaces, 59% don’t trust their executive leaders, and 60% say their leadership doesn’t ask for their input.

Healthcare technology consulting and staffing services firm ROI International renames itself Quoris.

Early users of Oracle Health’s Clinical AI Agent for ambient documentation give the product a 94% “would recommend” in a new KLAS report, with strong integration, flexible cost, and product accuracy being its key strengths.

Privacy and Security

An Illinois school superintendent is charged with felony misconduct after ordering a county health nurse to share information about students who were diagnosed with hand, foot, and mouth disease. The superintendent and two IT employees were arrested for violating student privacy laws.

Other

The family of a university freshman who died by suicide files a wrongful-death lawsuit against telehealth firm Hims & Hers Health Inc. for allegedly prescribing an antidepressant that is known to increase suicide risk without proper patient evaluation. Also named in the lawsuit is a fraternity that the lawsuit alleges hazed the student and contributed to alcohol misuse. The family says that Hims & Hers targeted their son through an Instagram ad, prescribed him a 90-day supply of antidepressants with only text messaging contact, and doubled his dose 30 days later.

Northern Maine Medical Center launches its Comprehensive Patient Assessment & Specialist Support program to offer critical care and pulmonology patients bedside virtual consults with specialists. The hospital will add neurology and cardiology to the COMPASS program next year.

Sponsor Updates

• Arcadia will exhibit at NAMD Fall 2025 November 19-21 in National Harbor, MD.
• Artera will exhibit at ModMed Momentum November 21-23 in Orlando.
• Linus Health will present new evidence validating its AI-enabled tools for early detection and trial readiness at the Clinical Trials on Alzheimer’s Disease (CTAD) conference in San Diego December 1-4.
• Black Book Research releases the “2026 Health System & Hospital AI Governance Resource Guide.”
• KLAS recognizes Impact Advisors as best positioned to meet specific organizational needs in the “KLAS Healthcare HIT Professional Services Outlook 2025 Report.”
• Agfa HealthCare, Concord Technologies, Elsevier, PerfectServe, Rhapsody, Wolters Kluwer Health, and Visage Imaging will exhibit at RSNA 2025 November 30-December 3 in Chicago.

Blog Posts

• Preparing for Agentic AI Implementation in Healthcare RCM (AGS Health)
• Carrying the Legacy Forward: How a Family History of Service Shaped a Path from Navy to Cybersecurity (Fortified Health Security)
• Improving Referral Workflows: A Key Driver for Improving Patient Experience and Collections (Vyne Medical)
• From reactive to resilient: Reimagining revenue cycle with AI (Altera Digital Health)
• Why HITRUST r2 Certification Really Matters in Healthcare (Arrive Health)
• Enterprise EHR vs. Standard EHR: Key Differences & Your Best Fit (Bizmatics)
• Cloud Infrastructure: The Foundation for Digital Agility (CTG)
• Lessons from KLAS Research’s 2025 Consistent High Performers Report (Dimensional Insight)
• Solving the Adherence Equation: Better Access Plus Personalized Engagement Keeps Patients on Diabetes Medications (DrFirst)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Sponsorship information.
Contact us.

Monday Morning Update 11/17/25

Top News

House Rx, which provides technology and expertise to support specialty clinics performing in-clinic “medically integrated dispensing” instead of sending prescriptions to specialty pharmacies, raises $55 million in Series B equity.

Reader Comments

From Unicode Bandit: “Re: Dr. Jayne and emojis. If my clinician’s note ends with an 👍emoji instead of ‘signed,’ I’ll know the AI bot finally took over. 👀” 

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Most poll respondents chose one of these two items as cause for health tech sales concern.

New poll to your right or here: Have you seen or used what seems to be an AI chatbot on a provider’s website? I usually try to make those that annoyingly pop up on any website go away immediately, the online equivalent of pressing 0 for a human to escape the time-consuming phone tree that was designed to keep paying customers like me from bothering the company’s cheap overseas call center contractor. Next thing you know that chatbot will ask me to please hold while it transfers me to a more advanced model.

I had an ultrasound at a small local hospital last week. The tech told me the results would hit MyChart quickly and she was right, the alert landed before I even got back to my car. Moments later, my Direct Primary Care doctor emailed me, showing full awareness of my knowledge level and my preference for brevity with a subject line of “Ultrasound,” and body of “Negative.”

Sponsored Events and Resources

None scheduled soon. Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Sales

• Marshall Browning Hospital (IL) will implement Oracle Health CommunityWorks and Oracle Health Clinical AI Agent. The 25-bed hospital appears to be replacing Meditech.

People

Jonathan Steinhouse (Strike Health) joins ClearBalance Healthcare as VP of business development.

Announcements and Implementations

Stanford Cancer Institute describes Oncoshare, a data sharing project that connects EHR data from Stanford and Sutter Health with the California Cancer Registry for research.

A new KLAS report finds that 80% of healthcare CIOs plan to maintain or increase their spending on professional services over the next 12 months. Their top targets are EHR optimization, cybersecurity, and AI and automation. Impact Advisors ranks first in mindshare, while Huron, Nordic, and Chartis are frequently mentioned. CIOs choose which firms to invite based on relationships and peer reputation, then score RFPs on confidence and clarity.

Other

Elon Musk says that robots, more specifically his Optimus Tesla Bot, will transform global healthcare by giving everyone access to “the best surgeons.” He says that great doctors and surgeons do not grow on trees, but will eventually be built in factories. He also claims that Optimus could replace prisons by assigning criminals a robot that “just gonna follow you around and stop you from doing crime.” Optimus was announced in 2021 and targeted for a 2023 release, yet despite reaching Generation 2, it still has not made it to market. Musk drew criticism in October 2024 when he had Optimus mingle with conference attendees and mix drinks without disclosing that it was being operated by a human.

Sponsor Updates

• WellSky publishes a new report on AI and technology as healthcare recruitment tools titled “Addressing today’s healthcare workforce challenges.”
• Nordic releases a new “Designing for Health” podcast featuring Eve Cunningham, MD.
• PerfectServe publishes a new report titled “Clinician Survey: Why Clinician Wellness Starts with Operational Wellness.”

Blog Posts

• Why I’m Returning to the Five9 CX Summit: Insights from a CX Leader (Five9)
• Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: A Fortified Veteran Honors His Uncle’s Legacy (Fortified Health Security)
• Automation in Action: How VHC Health is Shaping the Future of Document Management (Vyne Medical)
• One Voice for Care at Home: Celebrating Compassion and Connection This November (Netsmart)
• Chikungunya Virus and the Revenue Cycle: What RCM Leaders Need to Know (Nym)
• Streamlining Referral Management: How Real-Time Booking Transforms Provider Operations (ReferWell)
• AI and charge capture 101 (SmarterDx)
• Healing Healthcare: From Friction to Flow State (Surescripts)
• Custom Development vs. Technology Partnership: Building Smarter Staffing Solutions (Symplr)
• Waystar Advisory Board insights: How healthcare leaders can prepare for regulatory changes + AI in RCM transformation (Waystar)
• Support, not replacement: How healthcare workers are feeling about AI and why messaging matters (WellSky)

Sponsor Spotlight

Praia Health is the patient experience orchestration platform for health systems. We help health systems attract, engage, and retain patients by supercharging their portals and digital tools with seamless, personalized journeys in one platform. The result is higher retention, lower costs, and measurable ROI. In just three years, Providence has realized over $87M in measurable, attributable ROI from the platform. Click here to explore three years of operational data following deployment at Providence. (Sponsor Spotlight is free for HIStalk Platinum sponsors).

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Sponsorship information.
Contact us.

News 11/14/25

Top News

RCM vendor R1 sells Tonic Health to patient access, engagement, and intake technology vendor Luma Health.

Tonic Health offers a mobile patient intake, survey, and payments platform.

Reader Comments

From Gaucho Marx: “Re: Adventist Health Portland. After investing $20 million to convert from Cerner to OHSU’s instance of Epic, it will join the enterprise instance in September 2026. This is surprising, since there is a good deal of benefit to AH Portland to remain a part of OHSU Health’s large patient network, such as more negotiating power with payers and the ease of transferring and referring patients. Adventist Health will bring all hospitals except AH Portland live on September 1, 2026 in a $500 million project. Portland was out of scope because of their business agreement involving tens of millions of dollars in loans from OHSU, which has had a tough time with financial losses and layoffs.”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Trivia: I asked ChatGPT to name the 10 best US cities to live in, which it calculated from multiple, evidence-based sources. Which was the only state to have two cities on the list? Which city was #1?

Sponsored Events and Resources

None scheduled soon. Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Oracle’s reorganization under co-CEOs has left 64,000 of the company’s employees, or 40% of its workforce, reporting up to CTO, co-founder, and chairman Larry Ellison. Co-CEO Mike Sicilia oversees the largest headcount at 84,000 workers, which includes Oracle Health.

Sales

• Cigna Healthcare will offer Headspace’s meditation and sleep app at no cost to seven million people who receive behavioral health services through their employer.
• Smart infant monitoring technology vendor Owlet chooses Rhapsody for EHR integration of its pulse oximeter.

People

Marc Probst, MBA (MF Probst Strategic Advisory) rejoins Ellkay as CIO advisor.

MRO hires Lidia Bernik, MHS, MBA (Flatiron Health) as president of Curation Solutions.

Announcements and Implementations

A PerfectServe survey of 350 clinicians finds that three-fourths spend time dealing with manual aspects of scheduling, more than half say that waiting for calls takes time away from patient care (it was the #1 time-sapping task), and 60% say that existing systems aren’t much help in prioritizing urgency.

KLAS names its 2025 Consistent High Performers.

Government and Politics

The deal to end the federal government shutdown will extend Medicare’s coverage of telehealth through January 30 and will pay providers retroactively for virtual services that they provided since October 1. The Senate package also  provides $3.4 billion to the VA for its Oracle Health rollout work in FY2026, contingent on it providing Congress with a revised timeline and cost estimate. 

The VA awards Accenture Federal Services a six-month, $7.7 million contract to support its Oracle Health implementation, including program management, support, and data integration services, with options to extend the work for four additional one-year periods and one six-month period.

Other

The family of a two-year-old sues University of Florida Health, alleging that a physician’s decimal error caused a fatal tenfold overdose of electrolyte replacement. The lawsuit claims that pharmacists did not catch the error even though their computer system generated a Red Flag dose warning.

Caring Brands either just pulled off the biggest capital raise in human history or it needs to hire a more careful headline writer.

Sponsor Updates

• Netsmart will integrate ScribePT’s documentation system with its TheraOffice PT and rehab EHR/PM.
• CTG’s parent company Cegeka earns Microsoft Partner of the Year award for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain.
• Arrive Health names Alison Bechtel senior director of marketing.
• AvaSure announces that its Virtual Care Platform has achieved designation in Epic’s Toolbox for the Inpatient Virtual Care category.
• Findhelp welcomes new customers Hospital in Your Home, Allied Behavioral Health Solutions, and the Tennessee Department of Veterans Services.
• HCTec offers a new case study titled “HCTec Technical Managed Services Elevate the End-User Experience.”

Blog Posts

• Why Buy Beats Build in Health Tech ROI (Medicomp Systems)
• Transforming cancer care: The benefits of a cloud-based chemotherapy prescribing solution (Altera Digital Health)
• Unify clinician and patient journeys with AI and shared evidence (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• Meet the Innovators Powering the New CX (Five9)
• CISO Brief: October 2025 Cybersecurity Threat Recap & Insight (Fortified Health Security)
• From MIPS to MVPs to ASM: How CMS is redefining quality measurement in the 2026 final rule (Healthmonix)
• Breaking the Chains of Legacy: Embracing Agile Solutions for EHRs (LiveData)
• Creating the Confidence Standard: AI-Powered Quality Control in Health Information Management (MRO)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Sponsorship information.
Contact us.

News 11/12/25

Top News

SymphonyAI Group combines its holding Get Well (formerly known as GetWellNetwork) patient engagement business with its AI-powered precision care company, RhythmX AI, to form GW RhythmX.

RhythmX AI founder and CEO Deepthi Bathina will lead the new company, while Get Well founder and CEO Michael O’Neil will serve as vice chair.

Reader Comments

From PagingDrLeftOnHold: “Re: CMS requirement that telehealth doctors list their actual location. A health system spending $1 million a year to confirm that doctors are at home feels like a perfect American healthcare story.”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

More fun with the Opal AI app builder. I made Interview Grader, which evaluates any HIStalk interview against a 10-item rubric that I developed and then assigns letter grades for each item and overall. It has no practical use other than as an experiment.

PR and marketing people: I then applied that rubric to make an interview prep sheet. I also generated a promotional plan for an interview that uses my most recent one as an example.

Thanks to our veterans and their families for the quiet sacrifices they have made on behalf of the rest of us. The impact of your service, from basic training to separation, continues long after the uniform comes off.

Sponsored Events and Resources

None scheduled soon. Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Investment holding company Emergence acquires RCM technology vendor MedEvolve, which sold its RCM services business a month ago.

TruBridge announces Q3 results: revenue up 2%, EPS $0.88 versus –$0.21, beating analyst expectations for both.

NextSense raises a $16 million Series A round to market its wireless earbuds that monitor EEG patterns and use auditory stimulation to enhance slow-wave sleep. The device costs $399 plus a $15 monthly subscription.

People

Vitalchat promotes Brady Keeter to SVP of product and Mackenzie Laughridge to SVP of people.

MPulse names Eileen Cianciolo (Clarity Software Solutions) chief product officer. MPulse acquired payer-focused Clarity in August.

Rutland Regional Medical Center CMIO and medicine chair Rick Hildebrant, MD, MBA, MA is appointed commissioner at the Vermont Department of Health.

The American Telemedicine Association promotes Kyle Zebley to CEO. He replaces Ann Mond Johnson, who has retired.

Sales

• Baraga County Memorial Hospital (MI) will implement Oracle Health CommunityWorks and expand its use of the vendor’s clinical AI agent.
• AdventHealth Manchester (KY) will launch virtual care smart rooms using technology from HelloCare.
• DRH Health (OK) selects Commure’s Ambient AI clinical documentation software.
• Saudi Health Holdings will implement RapidAI’s imaging AI system.

Announcements and Implementations

CalmWave develops Alarm Insights to give clinical device managers visibility into bedside monitor alarm functionality and patterns.

CTG will offer Hippocratic AI consulting services and will co-develop solutions with the company.

UF Health (FL) goes live on Epic’s MyChart Central, giving patients the ability to log in to their medical records from across participating organizations using a single sign-on.

Other

OpenAI is reportedly considering entering the consumer health market, such as creating a personal health assistant or health data aggregator.

Nemours Children’s Health will expand its new advanced care at home program, which offers remote patient monitoring and virtual support, to its hospital in Delaware. Launched in June at the health system’s hospital in Orlando, the program has helped families avoid 91 emergency department visits and prevented 27 readmissions.

Sponsor Updates

• The American Medical Informatics Association inducts Clinical Architecture Senior Informaticist and Clinical Architecture Anand Kulanthaivel, PhD into the Fellows of the AMIA.
• Judi Health releases a new episode of “The Astonishing Healthcare Podcast” titled “The Survey Says: Inflation is a Problem, and Change is Imminent, with Business Group on Health’s Jim Winkler.”
• AvaSure achieves Epic Toolbox designation for inpatient virtual care.

Blog Posts

• Building a Strong Appeal Strategy for Clinical Denials (AGS Health)
• IDoR 2025: Agfa HealthCare celebrates the 14th International Day of Radiology. (Agfa HealthCare)
• Working smarter: Virtual medical assistants on the up and up (Altera Digital Health)
• Enterprise EHR vs. Standard EHR: Key Differences & Your Best Fit (Bizmatics)
• Data maturity is a muscle, not a milestone (Cardamom)
• Using Analytics to Battle Rising Healthcare Costs (Dimensional Insight)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Sponsorship information.
Contact us.

Monday Morning Update 11/10/25

Top News

Microsoft forms an MAI Superintelligence Team to develop AI that exceeds human capability, with medical diagnostics being its first focus area.

The blog post was written by Mustafa Suleyman, who joined Microsoft as CEO of AI in March 2024 after co-founding DeepMind and Inflection AI.

Reader Comments

From VectorPilot: “Re: ChatGPT. It’s one thing to say ‘see a professional’ when asked for clinical advice. It’s another when it will still give a fully formed management plan if you fool it by saying it’s for an article or screenplay you are writing. Nobody can guardrail everything that AI does. For health systems, this is a governance test since this change doesn’t eliminate liability, it just migrates it to health systems. These are uncredentialed clinicians, not toys.”

From Over Easy: “Re: UnitedHealthcare’s decision to stop paying for most RPM because evidence is lacking. The real question isn’t what will be reimbursed, but rather who will fund the next wave of evidence generation when the payer says, ‘show me value now or vanish.’”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Most poll respondents see a conflict when a health system pitches a product from one of its portfolio companies.

New poll to your right or here: Which recent development will hit health tech sales the hardest?

Listening after YouTube pushed it on me: Netherlands-based Focus. Forget that 1970 musical albatross “Hocus Focus” that wears out the welcome of excellent playing with manic yodeling and fluting and instead enjoy some decent 1970s prog rock, although keyboardist, flute player, and vocal gymnast Thijs van Leer looks like a coked up Dr. Frasier Crane attending to the Hammond B-3 organ. The two remaining original members still make pretty good music for appreciators of the genre, who also number about two.

I’m experimenting with Google’s experimental no-code mini-app builder Opal, where you simply describe what you want your app to do and it creates it. I made a little app where I provide a link to a company’s earnings report and it extracts the specific details that I track, retrieves share performance and market cap data from Yahoo Finance, compares results to analyst expectations, and calculates the 12-month share price change. Emboldened by immediate gratification, I build a second app that accepts a company’s website URL and then summarizes what the company does, the name and previous job of the CEO, the three latest news headlines, and the year the company was founded.

Lastly, I used a sample blog writing app to create an article about OpenAI’s throttling of ChatGPT’s medical advice capability. It did a great job, including generating an Internet-standard cheesy clickbait graphic.

Sponsored Events and Resources

None scheduled soon. Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Cancer diagnostics company Lunit retires the Volpara Health Technologies brand, integrating its AI breast health technology under the Lunit name.

Announcements and Implementations

A New York Times article calls around-the-clock fetal monitoring “the worst test in medicine,” saying that it drives unnecessary C-sections despite its inability to reliably predict fetal distress. The article says the use of the technology stems from malpractice fears, hospitals running centralized remote monitoring centers to cut labor costs, and software vendors such as PeriGen that make unsupported claims. One obstetrician concludes, “We may be the only specialty that continues to do major abdominal surgery without a shred of evidence of benefit.”

WellSky launches a patient engagement solution that allows providers to deploy two-way text and chat campaigns for refill assessments, infection services, and onboarding.

Government and Politics

CMS chooses six vendors to participate in the six-year, six-state WISeR pilot program to automate prior authorization with AI: Cohere Health, Genzeon, Humata Health, Inovaccer, Virtix Health, and Zyter.

A large health system estimates that it will spend $1 million per year to comply with a new CMS rule that requires telehealth physicians to list their actual location, such as a home address, rather than their office address. The American Telehealth Association warns that hospitals would need to verify hundreds of addresses to stay compliant, and the health system says it may instead require remote clinicians to conduct telehealth sessions from the hospital.

India’s supreme court rules against a hospital that sought to move its lawsuit with a technology vendor into arbitration. The court affirmed earlier findings that although a contract section was titled “Arbitration,” it did not create an arbitration agreement since it required any unresolved disputes to be decided in civil court.

Other

Judy Faulkner says in her latest post in Epic’s “Hey Judy” series that she’s glad she didn’t get an MBA because she would have been taught to court outside investors, plan an IPO, issue impressive job titles, set and follow departmental budgets, and hire via interviews, none of which the company does. The company’s budget policy is “buy it if you need it,” Epic hires mostly based on test results, and she encourages employees who are attending conferences to just make up a job title. I’m curious to hear from anyone who made up an interesting Epic job title.

Police in South Korea charge four doctors and dozens of patients with faking medical records to collect $340,000 in insurance payments. The scheme collapsed when an insurer checked the address of the supposed inpatient facility and found it was a luxury hotel.

Sponsor Updates

• CereCore joins Oracle’s partner program.
• Netsmart will exhibit at the 2025 APTA Private Practice Annual Conference November 12-15 in Orlando.
• Symplr CIO in Residence Theresa Meadows, RN joins the CHIME Foundation board of directors.
• KLAS highlights Tegria’s Clinical Optimization Services in its “2025 Consistent High Performers Report” for achieving an overall performance score of 95+ for three years in a row.
• Wolters Kluwer Health will exhibit at the AMIA 2025 Annual Symposium November 15-19 in Atlanta.
• Censinet will present at AIMed25 November 11 and 12 in San Diego.
• Altera Digital Health, AvaSure, CereCore, Clearsense, Clearwater, Divurgent, Ellkay, Health Data Movers, InterSystems, Meditech, Nordic, Optimum Healthcare IT, RLDatix, and Symplr will exhibit at the CHIME Fall Forum November 10-13 in San Antonio.

Blog Posts

• Strategies for Strengthening Cybersecurity Programs (Fortified Health Security)
• How a Specialty Hospital CEO Balances Care, Technology, and Growth (CereCore)
• Maximise your EPR investment: The power of benefits realization (Nordic)
• 5 PACS Strategy Questions CIOs Should Ask (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• From Dispenser to Indispensable: Equipping Pharmacists for Patient Care (Surescripts)
• How Nurse Leaders Drive Change & Advance Strategic Goals (Symplr)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Sponsorship information.
Contact us.