Monday Morning Update 8/18/25

Top News

Epic UGM kicks off Monday, with good weather and highs in the upper 70s. 

Attendees are welcome to send me interesting tidbits from the conference, including details about rumored company announcements.  

Happy birthday to CEO Judy Faulkner, who turned 82 last week.

Reader Comments

From Inside Trader: “Re: Oracle Health. Pre-announcing an aspirational product with disclaimers that they aren’t actually promising anything is just marketing fluff. It’s an obvious effort to slow down the Epic train right before UGM. All hype until a customer goes on record about their success using it.”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents, probably similarly to ambient scribe vendors themselves, aren’t quite sure how Epic’s rumored release of its own product will affect the market. A couple of reader edited comments:

• Any good product manager know that watching the success of and then imitating cutting edge technologies is a great way to stretch the R&D budget. Epic has followed the market, seen the early successes, and now believes that there is something “there.” The Epic offering will be solid but not flashy. Their big advantage is that the solution is native technology and not a third-party integration. Plus, no one knows their customers’ workflow better than Epic, so expect to see those features that are actually useful and not a bunch of impractical bells and whistles. Nuance and Abridge, et al should double down on new, cutting edge feature / function and figure out a way to license it to Epic before Epic fast follows with their own version.
• The truth is painfully obvious but no one wants to admit it. Ambient is not a product, but a feature. If a company was built around ambient, it will now need to handle workflows. The painful truth is that the care workflow is called the EHR. Abridge has no option but to build an EHR, given the valuation they have raised on. Nuance is irrelevant.
• The Epic product has to be just accurate enough, just efficient enough, and just cheap enough to be worth the hype. If all else is equal, integrated Epic or Oracle products will get the nod based on fewer headaches in installation, contracting, and project management, which translates into lower costs.

New poll to your right or here, as inspired by Dr. Jayne: What should your providers do to improve their appointment reminder text messages?

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

Teladoc Health acquires Telecare, an Australia-based operator of virtual care clinics.

People

Terri Couts, RN (The Guthrie Clinic) joins Sharp HealthCare as chief digital information officer.

Carol-Lynn Lloyd, MBChB (Servita) joins Altera Digital Health as chief medical officer. 

Announcements and Implementations

Five9 launches Fusion for Epic, which embeds advanced contact center capabilities into Epic.

Apple restores blood oxygen monitoring to the Watch, taking advantage of a US Customs ruling in its Masimo patent dispute that had forced its removal in 2023. 

Other

Fortune profiles the turnaround of NYU Langone, crediting its data-first approach and high-powered board members with growing it into sprawling system with $14 billion in annual revenue that delivers high quality with below-market prices. A key part of its operation is an 800-metric data dashboard that is its single source of truth. A quote from the well-written article:

Even as I marveled at the data available, I wondered if the dashboard-driven culture — part Moneyball, part panopticon — might feel oppressive to some. “It’s not for everyone,” Brotman later told me. “You’re on the hook 24/7, 365, and you’ve got this vulnerability and this expectation of accountability. If you don’t have the right disposition, it’s hard to deal with.”  

I felt awkward simply being in the room for moments of the “Snapshot Review,” a meeting where the chairs of clinical departments filed onstage for dashboard-informed questioning from administrators. The review sessions, in an airy conference room overlooking the East River, varied considerably in tone and substance. Some involved praise and practical problem-solving; others, discussions of “low-performing faculty members”; and another — featuring a relatively new leader who clearly hadn’t found his footing — the feel of a man pleading for mercy.

Sponsor Updates

• ReferWell staff prep 90 breakfast bags for The Food Bank of Lower Fairfield County.
• Surescripts will exhibit and present at NACDS TSE August 23-25 in San Diego.
• Black Book Research’s latest survey reveals that a majority of global respondents have funded, active cloud programs scheduled for enterprise deployment within the next 18-24 months.
• The latest survey from TrustCommerce, a Sphere company, finds that nearly 60% of older consumers are at least somewhat comfortable using digital payments for healthcare.
• Conduce Health co-founder and Executive Chairman Eric Rosow joins the ArcheHealth advisory board.
• Artera announces that its virtual agents have automated 42 million patient sessions, 94% of them with no staff intervention needed.
• Netsmart will present at the Florida Behavioral Health Association’s 2025 conference August 20 in Orlando.
• Optimum Healthcare IT releases a new episode of its “Visionary Voices” podcast titled “Finding an Inventive Path to Health IT.”
• Waystar will exhibit at the California Ambulance Association Annual Conference August 20-21 in Monterey.
• VisiQuate will exhibit at CAHAM 2025 September 2-5 in Newport Beach, CA.

Blog Posts

• Your Guide to Building a Proactive Healthcare Data Strategy (Tegria)
• Healthcare’s big challenge: how to foster a resilient, supported clinical workforce? (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• Stop Waiting for Stale Data — Why Hospital Leaders Need Real-Time Surgical Metrics Now (LiveData)
• What’s New in Coding: July 2025 CMS Updates (What You Need to Know) (Nym)
• Health Consumerism Isn’t Dead. But Your Digital Strategy Might Be. (Praia Health)
• CMS Pledge Reflections: The future of interoperability is, and must be, plural (Redox)
• Clinician Survey Reveals the Path Forward for Prior Authorization Innovation (Surescripts)

Contacts

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