News 2/18/26

Top News

Drug and diagnostics company Danaher will acquire Masimo for $9.9 billion.

Masimo is a leading vendor of blood oxygen monitoring technology.

A federal jury ordered Apple to pay Masimo $634 million in November 2025 for infringing on its smartwatch blood oxygen monitoring patents.

Reader Comments

From Bueno: “Re: Sachin Jain article. Did you see this?” I hadn’t seen it, but “When Patients Win, Hospitals Lose” describes the conundrum in which hospitals make more money when their outcomes are poor. Some quotes:

• No one said “we need more sick people.” But economically, that was the implication. When better health becomes a financial threat, something is profoundly broken.
• Airlines don’t justify crashes to protect repair revenue. Fire departments don’t root for fires to keep budgets stable. Yet healthcare routinely normalizes illness as financial necessity. If your organization only survives when people are hospitalized, the business model is misaligned with the mission.
• We need some people to stay sick so others can get care. That is not a sustainable ethical position.
• If hospitals lose when patients get healthier, whose side is the system really on?

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I read the “Lonesome Dove” series last week, all 3,000 pages of it, and then watched the six-hour miniseries for probably the 30th time. I watched the first episode again last night in honor of Robert “Captain Augustus McRae” Duvall, who died this week at 95. The first time I watched it many years ago, it was straight through, after which I restarted it and watched all six hours again without a break. The surly bartender scene is my favorite — watch the bemused Woodrow Call smile tightly, turn to the door, and place hand on gun at the bartender’s first derogatory comment knowing full well what is about to happen. Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones are just outstanding. For Mr. Duvall, who has always said that the Gus role was his career favorite, here’s to the sunny slopes of long ago.

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

Drug, therapy, and remote patient monitoring company Perigon Health 360 spins out Medesto Health, which offers an intelligent patient engagement and care coordination platform.

Baystate Health (MA) cuts 117 corporate positions and decides to outsource management of its clinical assets to TriMedX. Employees working on Baystate’s clinical engineering team will become TriMedX employees in May.

Redditors attribute Northwell Health’s recently reported IT layoffs to the system’s conversion to Epic, with one mentioning that most of those pink-slipped had been working with legacy systems. The New York-based provider began making cuts and reorganizing operations last year. It is still dealing with lawsuits related to a former employee who secretly filmed patients in the bathrooms of its sleep center. Northwell took more than a year to notify 13,000 patients of the incident.

Innovative Consulting Group acquires Pivot Point Consulting. The combined organizations will operate under the Pivot Point brand.

Sales

• Hartford HealthCare (CT) selects AI tools from Sift Healthcare to improve reimbursement workflows and outcomes.

People

BayCare (FL) promotes Robert Carvajal to CISO.

Hippocratic AI names Anoop Sangha, MD (Transcarent) associate chief medical officer, Eduardo Reis, MD (Cognita) VP of strategy, and Niloy Sanyal (LeanTaaS) chief marketing officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Oracle Health makes its Clinical Note AI agent available to providers in the UK after a successful pilot program with several NHS facilities.

Medical University of South Carolina launches virtual nursing in its NICU using technology from VirtuAlly.

Aliso Ridge Behavioral Health (CA) implements Xferall’s patient transfer and care coordination software.

Fujitsu automates its software development lifecycle with its Takane LLM and agentic AI, which it says increased productivity 100-fold. The company will target deployment across its government and healthcare systems by the end of the fiscal year.

Government and Politics

VA Deputy Secretary Paul Lawrence says upcoming rollouts of the department’s Oracle Health-based EHR will return to pre-deployment levels of productivity more quickly than the initial sites that went live on the new software several years ago. He adds that the system is meeting contractual uptime targets and that 10 of the last 12 months have been free of incidents.

The Social Security Administration will connect to the TEFCA network through Qualified Health Information Network EHealth Exchange in early spring.

The federal requirement that hospitals post their prices publicly hasn’t reduced cost or improve the ability to patients to shop around, but it has benefited health systems and insurers that use the data for contract negotiations.

Other

End-users rate Netsmart the top vendor in behavioral health and community-based care, according to a Black Book Research survey of 1,100 behavioral health professionals.

Sponsor Updates

• Agfa HealthCare details its latest enterprise imaging sales, including an expanded partnership with Tampa General Hospital.
• Arcadia releases “Healthcare data management software: A comprehensive guide.”
• The “NCPDP Unscripted” podcast releases a new episode titled “How Real-Time Data Improves Access to Medications: A Conversation With Arrive Health.”

Blog Posts

• AI and A/R Automation in Healthcare: Six Reality Checks Behind the Hype (AGS Health)
• Streamline Clinical Workflows with MEDITECH Expanse 2.2: A How-to Guide (CereCore)
• From shift to shift: How consistent technology extends nurses’ care (Altera Digital Health)
• The healthcare data lake vs. other data storage structures (Arcadia)
• EHR Compliance Checklist for CIOs (Bizmatics)
• Cultivating the garden of leadership: Lessons for female leaders in growth, resilience, and boldness (Cardamom)

Contacts

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