Briefly googling, preventive and preventative both mean the same thing and have both been used and accepted for centuries although…
Monday Morning Update 4/20/26
Top News
Medical imaging vendor Sectra acquires Oxipit, which offers AI solutions such as autonomous chest x-ray analysis.
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
Respondents to last week’s poll believe that ambient scribe tools will give clinicians a headline benefit, but also allow vendors to cash in while health systems quietly ponder converting efficiency into more billables. Hint: history suggests that any healthcare technology innovation will quickly become a revenue factory, because people and organizations consistently take whatever action delivers the greatest benefit to themselves.
New poll to your right or here: If AI reduces patient visits, what changes most?
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People
UCI Health promotes Deepti Pandita, MBBS to chief medical and informatics officer.
PerfectServe names Steve Tyler (TigerConnect) as CTO.
Announcements and Implementations
Fulton County Medical Center (PA) will join WVU Health, with the hospital saying that a key part of the agreement is that it will move from Meditech to WVU’s Epic system.
In Australia, Justice Health NSW goes live on the Epic-powered Single Digital Patient Record, becoming the first NSW Health organization to do so. The system will eventually link 220 hospitals, 150 pathology collection centers, 65 labs, and 600 community health centers across New South Wales.
Priority Dispatch launches a SMART on FHIR app that connects the company’s emergency dispatch protocols to Epic so that hospitals can coordinate inter-facility patient transfers. The Medical Transfer Protocol app was built using VectorCare’s Smart on FHIR as a Service platform.
Government and Politics
A New York physician pleads guilty to orchestrating a scheme that fraudulently billed insurers tens of millions of dollars for COVID-19 testing and related services, including submitting false claims and fabricated medical records, causing $24 million in losses. Anesthesiologist Ali Rashan, MD opened several ClearMD clinics in New York City during the pandemic, staffing them with untrained college-aged “medical assistants” who fed samples into a machine, which then generated patient emails that promised a physician examination and telehealth visit that never happened. Prosecutors allege that he instructed employees to create a program to fabricate progress notes and test results to support the fraudulent billing.
Other
Stripe CEO Patrick Collison says that the most useful preventive medical advice that he has received came from using AI coding agents to analyze his genome to recommend specific tests and treatments. He says that for a few hundred dollars to sequence his genome and perform the analysis, he found that he was 30x predisposed to melanoma that may be prevented by supplements.
I asked Claude to list the exact steps that would be needed to replicate the experience above and to show me a sample report. I would be interested in having a clinician try this and let me know the result. Also, I’m wondering how many primary care doctors would be comfortable creating an action plan from a report like this one. I can see someone using Claude to create a business plan, e-commerce website, and marketing campaign in selling the entire genomics package for maybe $3,000 to become one of those “one person and AI” businesses that generate a fortune.
- Order whole-genome sequencing from Nebula Genomics at around $300 and download the resulting raw genetic data.
- Set up a coding agent using Claude.ai with extended thinking. No actual coding is needed.
- Ask the AI to analyze your mutations, but make it show its work to catch any skipped steps or overconclusions.
- Cross-reference with databases such as ClinVar and GnomAD. The AI can explicitly check all known sources on request.
- Bring the AI findings to your doctor to order any screening tests, validate pharmacogenomic findings, and determine whether a consult with a certified genetic counselor would be beneficial.
Robert Wachter, MD analyzes Epic’s dominance in healthcare AI, which he attributes to not necessarily offering the best tools, but benefiting from EHR integration, health system trust, and perceived long-term stability as health systems try to reduce IT risk and complexity. He also concludes that “good enough” beats “best” when choosing between Epic and a startup, that CIOs make job-safe choices, and that Epic has a strong distribution advantage in being able to quick-ship AI directly into clinician workflows.
Parkview Health SVP/CMIO Mark Mabus, MD, RPh advises health systems to say more than just “we use Epic” in provider recruitment and instead explain why their implementation is different.
The first episode of New York Times Opinion’s “Divided” program, “Who Is the US Health System Really For?” features a plastic surgeon and the former chief medical officer of CVS Health debate the question of whether insurance companies prioritize profits over patient care.
Sponsor Updates
- Black Book Research releases a new e-book titled “The State of Healthcare Supply Chain Technology 2026.”
- Nordic releases a new “Designing for Health” podcast featuring Shan Liu, MD.
- Nym offers a new report titled “Automating Mid-Revenue Cycle Workflows: What to Consider.”
- Optimum Healthcare IT releases a new “Visionary Voices” podcast featuring Charity Darnell.
- Praia Health will present at Utah HIMSS and HIMSS Alabama events April 24.
- CereCore offers a new case study titled “Creative Staffing Coordination for Budget Friendly Epic Implementations.”
- SlicedHealth will sponsor the Louisiana Rural Hospital Coalition Annual Conference April 20-21 in Baton Rouge.
- Waystar will exhibit at the ACDIS Annual Conference April 20-23 in Chicago.
- Vyne Medical will exhibit at the UNOS Transplant Management Forum April 28-May 1 in Atlanta.
Blog Posts
- AI-Inferred Risk Adjustment in LEAD: A Quiet but Consequential Shift (Arcadia)
- 4 Ways to Improve Customer Service with AI Virtual Agents (Five9)
- Bloom Where You Are – A Spring Renewal Guide (Med Tech Solutions)
- 26 Things Care at Home Leaders Need to Know in 2026 (Netsmart)
- Implementation has a playbook. De-implementation has a prayer. (Nordic)
- How to Set Up a Closed-Loop Follow-Up Plan After Detecting an Incidental Pulmonary Nodule (Qure.ai)
- Practical Steps To Modernizing Rural Hospital IT (CereCore)
- AI Is the Easy Part. The Health System Is the Hard Part. (Rhapsody)
- Top 5 Things Every Pharmacist Needs to Know About RxTransfer (Surescripts)
- What is the WellSky 340B Program Management, enabled by MedEdge solution? (WellSky)
- Wildfire Season Isn’t a Season Anymore: Hospital Readiness for Year-Round Risk (VectorCare)
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RE the Stripe CEO:
1. Using “preventative” instead of “preventive” is a good test for whether a person is not much of a serious reader.
2. No credible evidence that supplements prevent melanoma.
3. Very good evidence, however, for avoidance of sun exposure and use of high-quality sunscreens, although the best quality UV filter ingredients are not available in the US due to our classifying sunscreen as a drug and not a cosmetic.
I mean who could possibly have guessed that a pasty white Irish guy living in California is at risk for melanoma?
Briefly googling, preventive and preventative both mean the same thing and have both been used and accepted for centuries although “preventive” may predate it slightly. Both hit my ear as correct. I found a dataset made up of online text used to train AI and preventive had 3,938,407 uses, compared with preventative having 1,183,776.
The comments on the NYT opinion piece between Drs. Potter and Brennan were really interesting as well. I recommend reading the full piece accompanying the video:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/opinion/divided-healthcare-doctors-insurance.html