Monday Morning Update 8/11/25

Top News

Doximity acquires Pathway Medical, which offers a medical reference AI assistant, for up to $63 million.

Pathway has sold annual subscriptions to the service for $125 to $300.

Doximity’s co-founder and CEO is Jeff Tangney, who previously founded medical reference app vendor Epocrates, which Athenahealth acquired in 2013 for $293 million.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Less than 10% of poll respondents think HHS’s “Make Health Tech Great Again” campaign will improve healthcare. Some comment excerpts from those who voted: 

• What is this callback logic, referring to “Again?” When was this imagined Nirvana of greatness in healthcare tech? The truth is, now is the Nirvana! Despite all the problems and challenges, healthcare tech has never been so strong, so widespread, and so capable.
• I find it humorous when the Big Tech execs talk about these bold “new” visions that will “revolutionize healthcare.” Meanwhile, those that actually know the industry all know that Epic already provides many of these things that they talk about like they are some sort of innovative future state pipe dream. … How long are we going to keep pretending that ShareEverywhere doesn’t exist already? Or the 24 million records already exchanged daily via CareEverywhere, half with non-Epic orgs?
• If the participating organizations feel so enthusiastically as their press releases and social media posts suggest, that this will be a game-changer for healthcare, they should have some financial skin in the game. Let them put in $100 to $100,000 each, based on annual revenue. If the goals of the initiative (which, from what I can surmise, are neither clear nor measurable) are achieved, everyone gets their money back. If they aren’t, the funds go towards paying off a minuscule slice of the national debt.
• Groundhog Day. It shouldn’t take some stupid slogan to bring the healthcare tech companies together and it’s embarrassing for the companies who have already taken millions of dollars out of providers pockets promising what was “contrived” at this summit.
• Very easy to smile and nod for the photo op and then do nothing. This will join the tall heap of other well-intended but failed HIT initiatives that will “transform healthcare”. Anyone remember PHRs? No? Me either.

New poll to your right or here:  How will AI scribe vendors like Nuance and Abridge react if Epic announces its own product as rumored? It’s a hot, investor-pumped market out there and much of the potential business, especially the high-dollar contracts, will involve Epic users. Maybe the rumor won’t pan out, but it’s fun to speculate anyway. This would test some theories:

• AI scribing is a commodity market with low switching costs.
• The real value-add is integration, where Epic can’t lose.
• Agile first-mover companies that have already established customer relationships should be able to dominate the more broadly focused Epic.
• Epic will always win even if their product starts out with minimal functionality because health systems prefer “one throat to choke” and Epic’s history involves rapidly improving a MVP-type offering.
• Epic will dominate because it can use its own massive data stores to train an AI scribe and can better integrate its output.

HIStalk sponsors who are participating in Epic UGM – tell me about what you’re doing by Wednesday, August 13 and I’ll include it in an online guide.

Sponsored Events and Resources

Instant Access Webinar: “Healthcare Data Strategies: Retire, Retain, and Ready for AI.” Sponsor: Triyam, an Access Company. Presenters: Sudhakar Mohanraj, founder and CTO, Triyam; Benjamin Cassity, director of research and strategy, KLAS; Jamie Greenstein, senior marketing manager, Access. The presenters deliver practical tactics to help IT leaders manage exploding data volumes — how to clean up legacy systems, craft smarter retention policies, and prepare historical data for analytics and AI.

Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Heartflow shares jump 51% on their first day of trading Friday, valuing the coronary artery disease technology company at $2.3 billion.

Announcements and Implementations

NASA and Google are developing “earth-independent” medical procedures for long-duration space missions, including a Crew Medical Officer Digital Assistant to help astronauts diagnose and treat symptoms without a doctor or contact with Earth. NASA plans to incorporate medical device data and adapt the system for space-specific conditions such as microgravity. Google says that lessons learned could benefit terrestrial healthcare but was vague on commercialization plans.

Government and Politics

A VA OIG review finds that VA facilities sometimes fail to retrieve and import community care medical records into veterans’ EHRs on time, with inconsistent use of tracking tools, unclear policies, and outdated technology contributing to delays that could impact care. The OIG made 10 recommendations to improve processes, oversight, and technology, all of which VHA agreed to implement. Veterans can obtain care in their community if they live more than a 30-minute drive from a VA facility, after which the community provider has 30 days to send records to the VA, which then has another week to scan the records and import them into the EHR.

Health wearables vendor Whoop says that it will continue selling its devices that include the capability to estimate blood pressure despite the FDA’s warning that it has not approved the technology.

Privacy and Security

Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center fires 15 nurses for allegedly improperly accessing the electronic records of a 12-year-old inpatient who died by suicide, citing HIPAA violations. The nurses have filed a union grievance claiming that the terminations were retaliation for speaking to the media.

Other

Doximity’s 2025 physician compensation report confirms the saying that the smaller the patient, the smaller the paycheck. Six surgical specialties top the list with annual compensation greater than $600,000, while 10 of the 13 lowest-earning specialties involve pediatrics and earnings of below $300,000.

A South African hospital halts a deceased patient’s funeral to demand that the family return the body for an autopsy, citing disagreement among a panel of doctors about the cause of death. National law allows remains to be released to a funeral home only with the stipulation that they be returned if authorities determine that a post-mortem is needed.

Sponsor Updates

• WellSky staff wrap thousands of diapers for HappyBottoms during the company’s quarterly volunteer day.
• Black Book Research announces the top-performing supply chain management technology vendors in US healthcare for 2025.
• AWS recognizes Netsmart with its 2025 AWS Champions Award for its Bells Virtual Scribe solution.
• Nordic releases a new episode of its “Designing for Health” podcast featuring Minal Shah, MD.
• Waystar will exhibit at the MedInformatix Summit August 12-14 in Austin, TX.

Blog Posts

• Benefits of Operational Optimization Prior to Epic Implementation (Impact Advisors)
• From Manual to Modern: Transforming Novel Influenza A Detection at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital (Inovalon)
• Beat healthcare burnout with future-forward tech that empowers patients as care team members (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• Your EHR support model is undermining everything (and you don’t even know it) (Nordic)
• What do nurses think of digital whiteboards? (Sonifi Health)
• OBBBA’s Impact on Hospitals & Health Systems (Symplr)
• Understanding the AR Process in Medical Billing (TruBridge)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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