News 4/22/26

Top News

Healthcare quality and safety non-profit ECRI spins off Staritas, which offers supply chain spend management and recall management solutions.

ECRI has provided these products for 50 years.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Results from my side-by-side testing of ChatGPT and Claude, along with occasional frustration when ChatGPT wasn’t responding, have led me to pay $200 for a year-long subscription to Claude. So far, so good.

Sponsored Events and Resources

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Ethermed, a Philadelphia-based prior authorization automation startup, secures $8.5 million in Series A funding.

Revenue intelligence software startup Joyful Health announces $17 million in Series A funding, bringing its total raised to $22 million.

People

Nym appoints Lori Jones (Aptarro) CEO.

AmplifyMD names Kurt Blasena (Digital Diagnostics) chief commercial officer.

Alameda Health System Director of Emergency Ultrasound Arun Nagdev, MD (Exo) joins Butterfly Network as chief medical officer.

Announcements and Implementations

UnitedHealthcare will eliminate most prior authorization requirements for 1,500 rural and critical access hospitals across all lines of business, and accelerate payments to those facilities by up to 50%.

Midland Health (TX) automates the patient assignment process for its hospitalist program using software from Medaptus.

Government and Politics

VA Deputy Secretary Paul Lawrence, PhD says that the department’s go-lives in Michigan earlier this month went as expected, with no major issues reported thus far. He credits super users and pay-it-forward teams for ensuring a smooth transition to the new Oracle Health-based EHR. He summarizes, “This is the result of a lot of hard work. Sure, there are some hiccups, but so far everyone is feeling good. We haven’t let our foot off the gas. We’re still watching. We are still 24/7.”

Privacy and Security

Democratic lawmakers demand that the White House’s Office of Personnel Management drop its plan to collect detailed medical and pharmaceutical claims data on more than 8 million federal workers, retirees, and their families. Senate Democrats and the largest federal employee union argue that the proposal likely violates HIPAA, and that it raises concerns about health data potentially being used to target federal workers.

Other

Kaiser Permanente researchers determine that overweight patients who actively engage in the provider’s app-based Lifestyle, Eating, and Activity in Pregnancy program have lower rates of weekly and total weight gain and are less likely to have babies with large weights for their gestational age. Study participants were equipped with digital scales and wearables, and had access to lifestyle coaches via text and phone.

Cerner co-founder Cliff Illig reminisces about the company’s early days, noting that friends didn’t think his partnership with the late Neal Patterson would last more than three weeks:

We ended up spending 40 years together, living out of the same pocketbook, working on everything. We were always focused on the bigger picture. Over the years, we had to work through a lot of stuff. I think Neal, literally, has said that he could count on one hand the number of times we disagreed to the point where one of us got up and walked out of the room. A lot of times our talks were over glasses of scotch, late in the evening, just sitting there with our feet up, watching the sunset, talking about what we were trying to accomplish. I encourage partnerships because it’s a lot easier when you’ve got somebody that you can share it with.

Sponsor Updates

• Surescripts will present at the 2026 NCPDP Annual Conference May 4-6 in Scottsdale, AZ.
• The Diakonessenhuis teaching hospital in the Netherlands selects Agfa HealthCare’s enterprise imaging platform.

Blog Posts

• Driving Revenue Cycle Transformation with AI: Lessons from the 2026 AGS Health Summit (AGS Health)
• 10 Value-Based Care Software Solutions to Consider in 2026 (Arcadia)
• 5 Strategic Frameworks to Boost Contact Center Agent Productivity (Five9)
• Spring 2026 Regulatory Updates: What Healthcare Organizations Need to Know the Rest of the Year (Med Tech Solutions)
• What Are the Best Practices for Managing Incidental Pulmonary Nodules Detected During Lung Cancer Screening? (Qure.ai)
• Closing the Medication Visibility Gap (Surescripts)
• EMR vs. EHR: What is the Difference and Why Does it Matter for Your Practice? (AdvancedMD)
• Clear skies ahead: Making cloud migration work in the real world (Altera Digital Health)
• Epic Tapestry Managed Services: How a Delegated Risk Organization Cut Incident Resolution by 27x (Canopii Collaborative)
• Patient access as strategy: Moving beyond scheduling optimization (Cardamom)
• SQL Injection in OpenEMR Identified and Recommendations (Clearwater)
• I Moderated a Panel on the Proposed HIPAA Security Rule. Here’s What Three CISOs Actually Think. (CloudWave)

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