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).

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