Monday Morning Update 3/30/26

Top News

Andy Crowder, Advocate Health SVP / chief digital and AI officer, describes how Advocate is using Epic’s Agent Factory to create four prototypes that it plans to placed into production in July. .

Advocate convened an agile sprint for pharmacy complex order verification and infusion charting prep, which yielded the four prototypes.

Reader Comments

From Skeptical Clinician: “Re: Perplexity Health. Every new healthcare AI entrant promises trustworthy answers, which is comforting right up until you remember that healthcare already has plenty of confident systems that are wrong in more expensive ways.” At least “confidently wrong” will now scale.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents envision providers and payers getting into AI wars over billing codes, which doesn’t seem farfetched. Both sides could claim intentional injustice, but the American way is that proven or admitted fraud generates a financial penalty but no jail time for those who knew it was happening, so it’s just a cost of doing business with positive ROI as long as the profit exceeds the penalty.

New poll to your right or here, as inspired by the Reddit post last week: Should patients have the sole approval for sending their medical records to any third-party tool they choose?

Reader donations to Mr. H’s Los Angeles elementary school class funded his Donors Choose teacher grant request for Spanish-language books to help the 75% of his students who are English learners. He reports, “My students have been grabbing the new books left and right. Many of them are getting upset when they want to change their book, but it has been taken. It is great to see the love of reading flourish again in my classroom. This could not have happened without your donation.”

I’ve been frustrated by an IPad problem where the back-arrow and close window icons at the top of portrait-mode screens overlay screen content, making it impossible to go back a page or close the window without tilting over to landscape mode. I Google extensively for an answer that never came, but I noticed that an IOS upgrade was waiting for me to clear some space because it was huge. It seems to have fixed the problem.

Sponsored Events and Resources

None scheduled soon. Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Sales

• San Juan Regional Medical Center will implement PerfectServe for scheduling, secure communication, alerting, patient outreach, and switchboard workflows.

Announcements and Implementations

Advocate Health will launch the country’s largest hospital-based drone delivery network, using Zipline drones to deliver prescriptions, lab specimens, and medical supplies in three of its markets, starting in Charlotte, NC. Advocate expects drones to make 100,000 deliveries per year.

Analysis finds that one or two health systems control the entire inpatient healthcare market in half of US metropolitan areas. Concentration in 97% of metro areas exceeds FTC/DOJ antitrust levels.

Praia Health is granted a US patent for performing identity and access management for EHR instances.

Government and Politics

This is not a good look for the VA, especially if John Windom starts naming companies and executives in his trial.

Other

A study finds that people who use their phones during bathroom visits have a 46% higher risk of hemorrhoids because they spend more time on the toilet after getting distracted by scrolling news or social media.

Sponsor Updates

• TrustCommerce will sponsor the NEECO Spring 2026 Conference March 31 in Waltham, MA.
• VisiQuate VP of Growth Michelle Taylor joins the NAHSE NorCal Board of Directors.
• Vyne Medical releases a new case study titled “How Automation is Shaping the Future of Document Management at VHC Health.”

Blog Posts

• The Truth About How Hospital Size Shapes IT Strategy (CereCore)
• From Configuration to Adoption: AI Deployment Best Practices for Contact Centers (Five9)
• Thoughts on the HHS RFI on Artificial Intelligence: How we get to innovation, trusted adoption, and equitable impact (Meditech)
• Why Nordic’s refreshed brand matters for healthcare IT leaders (Nordic)
• 10 Questions to Ask Autonomous Coding Vendors (And Why They Matter!) (Nym)
• How 3 Clinicians Use Their Expertise Away from the Bedside (PerfectServe)
• How to Optimize Healthcare Inventory Management with IoT in 2026 (SmartSense by Digi)
• What’s New in Patient Access in 2026? (Surescripts)

Contacts

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