EHRMusing - You make a lot of accurate statements about key factors in the selection process but the comment about…
News 9/12/25
Top News
OpenEvidence, which offers ad-supported medical search and AI for clinicians, acquires advertising company Amaro to enable advertising on its site.
Sponsored Events and Resources
Online Event: September 16 (Tuesday) 11:30 a.m. ET. “Waystar Innovation Showcase: Activating Advanced Automation + AI to Transform Healthcare RCM.” Join us for Waystar’s Fall Innovation Showcase to see the tools and tactics that are transforming healthcare payments and driving real, measurable results, like a 36% boost in workforce efficiency. In just one hour, we’ll reveal major advancements helping teams streamline processes, ensure accuracy, and speed reimbursement with AI + less manual work.
Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
Penguin Ai raises $30 million in funding. The company offers AI solutions for administrative workflows that include medical coding, prior authorizations, claims adjudication, and medical chart summarization.
Ascend Learning acquires Laudio, which sells a workforce management system for frontline leaders in health systems. I interviewed Laudio co-founder and CEO Russ Richmond, MD last year.
Bayer will shut down its radiology AI businesses, discontinuing Calantic Digital Solutions AI and the service offerings of Blackford Analysis.
Musculoskeletal care navigation vendor TailorCare acquires Stabl, which offers a computer vision monitoring platform.
Humana-owned CenterWell will acquire bankrupt The Villages Health, the North Florida-based healthcare system that serves 55,000 patients in the sprawling retirement community.
People
Joel Klein, MD, MA (University of Maryland Medical System) joins Hackensack Meridian Health as chief digital and information officer.
Announcements and Implementations
Oracle CTO Larry Ellison — who briefly became the world’s richest person Wednesday as his ORCL shares rose by $101 billion — fielded a fanboy-style analyst question about enterprise application competitors during the earnings call.
It’s a huge advantage to be on both sides of that equation, both being an application builder and a builder of the application generation technology, the underlying AI application code generators. That’s a huge advantage. Let me give you another advantage, which is often a disadvantage. We’re very large. We no longer sell individual discrete applications. We sell suites of applications. We decided to go into the medical business against Epic, believing that we could solve much more of the problem because we’re much bigger than they are. By the way, we’re much bigger than Workday or ServiceNow, and we’re solving a larger portion of the problem. We’re able to do all of ERP, then we can add all of CRM, but all the pieces are engineered to fit together. That makes it so much easier for customers to consume.
Oracle launches the Oracle AI Center of Excellence for Healthcare, which will provide a dedicated company team, a resource hub, and advice on regulatory requirements.
Oracle will add OpenAI-powered features to its patient portal, including test result explanations, plain-language translations of medical terms, visit preparation, provider message drafting, and follow-up scheduling. General availability is expected in 2026. The company also announced that it will add precision medicine features from DNAnexus to its EHR.
Apple’s new Watch Series 11 offers hypertension notifications and sleep scoring. Prices start at $399.
AMA releases the CPT 2026 code set.
A study in England finds that primary care physicians who use Eko Health’s AI-enabled smart stethoscope increased detection of heart failure by 2.3 times, atrial fibrillation by 3.5 times, and valvular heart disease by 1.9 times.
Homecare Homebase will incorporate Element5’s agentic AI platform in its EHR.
A new KLAS report on end-to-end revenue cycle outsourcing ranks Ensemble highest, while clients of R1 RCM and Optum report low satisfaction. Most vendors are investing in AI, but clients say it has yet to deliver operational or financial gains.
Government and Politics
The FDA will convene an advisory panel on November 6 to review AI-powered digital mental health tools.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton drops the state’s lawsuit against a pediatric endocrinologist who he had accused of falsifying medical records in providing transgender youth care. Paxton’s office said that it found no legal violations after reviewing the doctor’s medical records, but warned that it will continue to pursue cases against “delusional, left-wing medical professionals.”
Privacy and Security
US Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) asks the FTC to investigate Microsoft over Ascension’s 2024 ransomware attack, which his office says began when a contractor clicked a malicious Bing search result. The incident was enabled by Microsoft’s continued support of the outdated RC4 encryption standard, which the company had pledged to fix in October 2024.
Sponsor Updates
- Medicomp Systems achieves implementation milestones across Southeast Asia.
- Vyne Medical publishes an automation guide e-book titled “Machine Learning vs. RPA in Healthcare: Finding the Right Automation for Intelligent Data Processing.”
- HCTec staff sort and pack 3,420 pounds of food at the Second Harvest Food Bank of Middle Tennessee during the company’s volunteer day.
- Health Data Movers names Anthony Velazquez integration engineer.
- A new study using Inovalon data published in the Journal of the American College of Radiology reveals a decline in the number of US radiologists dedicating most of their clinical effort to pediatric imaging.
Blog Posts
- From Chaos to Clarity: Exodus Recovery’s Scheduling Transformation (Inovalon)
- Powering Massachusetts ACOs’ HRSN Service Delivery (Findhelp)
- CISO Brief: August 2025 Cybersecurity Threat Recap & Fall Outlook (Fortified Health Security)
- Human-centered research at Mile Bluff leads to improved clinician experience with Expanse Navigator (Meditech)
Contacts
Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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Re: Larry Ellison’s tough talk on healthcare
“It’s a huge advantage to be on both sides of that equation, both being an application builder and a builder of the application generation technology…”
Well, maybe. Except that Cerner wasn’t built using Oracle’s app generator (as far as I know).
“We no longer sell individual discrete applications.”
Plausible. But Epic is such a large application, is it even valid to speak of it in those terms? My information is that Epic has well over 100 different modules. I’ll suggest that it is easier for Epic to add a new module, than it is for Oracle to integrate Cerner into the Oracle apps.
“…all the pieces are engineered to fit together.”
Does that include the Cerner piece? I’ll bet it doesn’t include the Cerner piece (sad trombone).
Even if Oracle has an ‘integrated’ ERP system with the Cerner modules the question is: How significant is that for a hospital? Payroll, AP, GL and Supply chain are nice to have integrated but not as critical as RCM integrated with Care management. Is it really worth the pain to throw out Epic to get that? How much and how often does GL, AP, and Payroll have to communicate with the EMR? Only a non-Epic hospital wanting to replace it’s current systems might consider that a ‘nice to have’ and all those are smaller facilities.
Fact is Larry will have to come up with a bigger hammer than that to knock out an Epic.
Exactly. My company is a signature example of this.
We have the Oracle Financials, and Oracle Purchasing stuff. We are also an Epic shop. Both are running well and there is Zero Interest (0), in replacing either one. I cannot imagine a circumstance in which we’d adopt the Cerner piece, in order to increase our Oracle footprint.
There are benefits to integration, of course. But the Cerner components are weaker clinically and we’d have to swallow that pill in order to get better integration.
In the end, we are a healthcare organization. We aren’t a financial or logistics organization. Superior clinical functionality is powerfully appealing and I don’t see that changing.