News 2/6/26

Top News

KLAS posts its “2026 Best in KLAS: Software and Services.” Some results:

• Epic won overall health system suite for the 16th consecutive year, plus awards in 11 individual market segments. Scores: Epic 89.7, Meditech 76.7, Oracle Health 63.3.
• Athenahealth topped the Overall Independent Physician Practice Suite and four market segment awards. Scores: Athenahealth 83.4, NextGen Healthcare 68.6, Greenway Health 64.6.
• Chartis was named top firm in Overall IT Services.
• Optimum Healthcare IT topped the Overall Implementation Services Firm.
• Impact Advisors was top Overall Healthcare Management Consulting Firm.

HIStalk sponsors that were named as winners in the Best in KLAS report:

• Agfa Healthcare (PACS small, universal viewer imaging, vendor neutral archive).
• Artera (patient communications).
• Clearwater (security and privacy consulting services)
• Findhelp (social determinants of care networks).
• FinThrive (insurance discovery).
• Fortified Health Security (security and privacy managed services).
• Impact Advisors (overall healthcare management consulting firm, data and analytics services, human capital consulting).
• Meditech (acute care EHR and patient accounting, small).
• MRO (release of information).
• Optimum Healthcare IT (overall implementation services).
• PerfectServe (clinical communications in ambulatory and post-acute care, physician scheduling).
• Rhapsody (integration engine).
• Waystar (patient access).
• Wolters Kluwer (infection control and monitoring, pharmacy surveillance, patient-driven care management, patient education).

Reader Comments

From Banty Rooster: “Re: job changes. Please announce the formation of my new consulting business.” I suspect that readers share my lack of interest when someone exits a long corporate career, often because of a decision they did not make, and announces that they are now a solo consultant. I pass because the industry impact of that “business” is minimal and the audience is mostly personal acquaintances who already know. Many of these entrepreneurial bursts end quietly with a return to salaried work when demand fails to materialize or travel becomes intolerable. Consulting as a skill and business endeavor is not necessarily predicted by a management career, and many shingle-hangers discover that their former influence came from their title, not their personal brand. It’s tough to leave a big paycheck and benefits to start out with no clients, pipeline, or income.

From Sierra Mister: “Re: NavvTrack. Has gone out of business.” The website of the health system fleet management solutions vendor, which was spun out from Henry Ford Health in 2019, goes to 404. LinkedIn shows that co-founder and CEO Daniel Siegal, MD, COO/CFO Heather Grisham, and VP/CTO Pratik Agrawal all left the company in August 2025.

From Nobodyyouknow: “Re: Waystar. Gearing up for another acquisition? A large number of legacy team members are being promoted to VP.”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Medcurio. Medcurio helps health systems access and act on their EHR data in real time, without waiting months for integrations or settling for partial interfaces. Its VennU platform installs inside the customer’s environment and gives teams direct, governed access to the data they already own. The result is faster insight, faster action, and fewer workarounds. Unlike traditional interoperability approaches, Medcurio does not rely on slow pipelines, brittle custom builds, or transaction-based APIs. Teams can surface operational, clinical, and financial signals as they occur, not days or weeks later. What typically takes months can be stood up in days.Medcurio is used to power dashboards, alerts, automations, and/or any downstream workflows that depend on complete and timely EHR data. Customers decide what data is accessed, who can use it, and how it is applied, with full auditability and security controls. Nothing leaves the customer’s control. For organizations serious about real-time operations, analytics, and AI, Medcurio provides the data foundation those efforts usually lack. Thanks to Medcurio for supporting HIStalk.

I downloaded Lotus Health’s app to give their 24×7 free primary care service a try. I was waitlisted, but I completed the registration and intake form and gave the chatbot a spin for a made-up medical issue. The process was well designed and the chatbot’s advice and plan were sound even if not much different than what ChatGPT offered. I’ll be interested to see how the most important part works, the handoff from chatbot to human physician when warranted. What I will be looking for: (1) how the service collects medical records; (2) how the lab test and prescription generating process works; and (3) how the video visit feels compared to an in-person one, especially for a continuity of care perspective. I experimented with an online service a few years ago and was underwhelmed because it felt like symptom Whac-a-Mole, where the faceless physician jumped overly quickly to a diagnosis and prescription from the limited set of drugs he was authorized to prescribe for a limited set of conditions. Lotus Health’s LinkedIn shows just nine company employees or contractors, none of them with any medical background, but it claims to be using doctors from Stanford, Harvard, UCSF, and Johns Hopkins. If you’ve used the full Lotus Health service, tell me more. The question of “how does a free service make money” will likely be answered with paid advertising, a freemium model, and partnering with insurers and employers.

Sponsored Events and Resources

Live Webinar: February 18 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “From Blind Spots to Insights: Gaining Real-Time Visibility into Healthcare Risk.” Sponsor: CloudWave. Presenters: Jacob Wheeler, MBA, director of sales engineering, CloudWave; Mike Donahue, chief operating officer, CloudWave. Resilience starts with the ability to see clearly, across every endpoint, cloud workload, user, and clinical system. Join CloudWave’s cybersecurity leaders for an in-depth session on how real-time visibility transforms your ability to detect threats early, respond decisively, and strengthen resilience across the care ecosystem. Attendees will learn the practical steps that hospitals can take to move from reactive defense to resilient action.

Publication: HIStalk’s Guide to ViVE 2026 lists the activities of sponsors at the conference.

Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Lotus Health AI, which offers free 24×7 primary care using patient data, AI diagnostics, peer-reviewed evidence and guidelines, and clinician review, raises $41 million.

People

Amit Mathradas, MBA (Nintex) joins Five9 as CEO.

Gozio Health hires Jay Kleinman (TechCXO) as chief revenue officer and Michele Forlenza (Prealize Health) as VP of client success.

Bayhealth hires Thomas “Mac” Marlow, MBA (UT Southwestern Medical Center) as VP/chief digital and information officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Epic releases AI Charting, which uses ambient listening to draft visit notes and suggest orders, as part of its Art AI for clinicians.  

A small study finds that primary care physicians who used Eko’s digital stethoscope correctly diagnosed moderate to severe valvular heart disease with 92% sensitivity versus 46% using a traditional stethoscope.

Government and Politics

The federal government awards Accenture Federal Services a 4.5-year contract of unspecified value to support the VA’s implementation of Oracle Health. The company will provide integration services, lead standardization across VA facilities, and oversee federal-community interoperability.

RCM services vendor Gryphon Healthcare will pay $2.9 million to settle claims related to its July 2024 cyberattack that exposed the patient information of one of its customers.  

ASTP/ONC posts a draft of USCDI Version 7 for public comment.

ASTP/ONC chooses nine pilot sites to test behavioral and physical health integration data exchange standards.

Former Ole Miss football All-American tight end Rufus French is convicted of fraudulently billing Medicare and the VA $200 million. The Department of Justice says that he used overseas call centers to pressure elderly Americans, including patients with Alzheimer’s disease or dementia, to provide their insurance information and consent to receiving unnecessary orthotic braces that were ordered by doctors and nurse practitioners who worked for sham telemedicine companies who never contacted the patients.

Other

A Health Affairs article says that healthcare’s AI bubble needs to burst in a dot-com-like “coming clinical correction,” citing these reasons:

• Most enterprise AI pilots fail to deliver financial returns and usually don’t survive beyond pilots.
• Health systems are touting AI deployments as innovation, but the projects often involve products from vendors that are surviving only because of investor funding.
• Many AI vendors will fail but will continue to operate as zombie operations that bill hospitals under existing contracts, but don’t spend the money to keep their algorithms current, exposing hospitals to liability for errors.
• Companies that offer crucial technologies that don’t involve AI are forced to squeeze AI into the products unnecessarily to attract investment.
• AI products are being deployed in the absence of evidence.

Sponsor Updates

• SlicedHealth posts Episode 1 of its price transparency guide podcast titled “What Hospital Leaders Need to Know About Price Transparency Enforcement in 2026.”
• Black Book Research releases findings from its “Q1 2026 Rural Transformation Readiness Survey” of rural, small, and critical access hospitals.
• Judi Health releases a new episode of “The Astonishing Healthcare Podcast” titled “Providing the Right Level of Guidance & Expertise in this Business is About as Hard as Driving Change, with Hannan Allen.”
• FinThrive promotes D’Wan Grimes to partner success manager.
• Health Data Movers will sponsor the NEECO Spring 2026 Conference March 31 in Waltham, MA.
• Healthmonix releases its 2026 MIPSpro Enterprise Qualified Clinical Data Registry, approved by CMS for the 2026 performance year.
• Infinx will present at the Oregon HFMA 2026 Winter Workshop February 12 in McMinnville, OR.
• LiveData will exhibit at the OR Business Manager Summit February 9-11 in Austin, TX.

Blog Posts

• OCR’s 2026 Cybersecurity Update to Healthcare: From Risk Analysis to Enforced Risk Management (Clearwater)
• Small steps become giant leaps: Reimagining how to approach innovation in healthcare (Altera Digital Health)
• ‘Best in KLAS for SDoH’: One Year is Potential, Five Years is Proven (Findhelp)
• Revenue on Autopilot: How Smarter Denial Management Reduces the Cost to Collect (FinThrive)
• Preparation Changes Outcomes In Ransomware Attacks (Fortified Health Security)
• Why Specialized Staffing Matters in Healthcare Technology (HCTec)
• 7 Mistakes to Avoid When Releasing Medical Records (HealthMark Group)
• The Digital Front Door Reckoning (Impact Advisors)
• The Provider’s Guide to AI Conversations (Med Tech Solutions)

Contacts

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