Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 8/18/25

As a clinician, I often have difficult conversations with parents about how to reduce the amount of time that their children spend using screen-based devices every day. Many of the parents I encounter are unwilling to limit their children’s screen time because of a perception that children who don’t have devices will be “left behind” or potentially ostracized by their peers.

I see a fair number of folks who use devices to entertain their children rather than interacting with them, which I find sad. When I walk into an exam room and see a kid poking away at a tablet while their parent sits in a heads-down position with their own phone, it makes me wonder what happens when they are not at the physician office. Ultimately, kids become dependent on devices for interaction and this can be a problem when they reach school age, when teachers spend a good chunk of time policing phone-related behavior.

As of the start of this school year, more than half of US states have passed legislation or created policies regarding the use of cell phones in K-12 classrooms. These range from requirements that school districts create guidelines of their own to outright bans. Among the reasons for such bans, lawmakers cite the need to create a distraction-free learning environment, a desire to curtain social media use, and a hope that such strategies will have a positive influence on youth mental health.

My own local district had a well-researched plan that had been created after stakeholder listening sessions with students, parents, and teachers. It was pre-empted by a maneuver at the state level that is significantly stricter. When my district was creating its policy, it used its health advisory committee to comment on the potential risks and benefits of restricting cell phone use.

Physicians raised the issue of the use of cell phones for medical reasons, including students and faculty who use apps to manage health conditions like diabetes. It’s clear from looking at some of the state laws that these kinds of needs might not have been considered by legislators. Needless to say, people aren’t happy about it, and I’m sure there will be some settling in once school starts.

With that in mind, I ran across this article that covers the topic from the youth point of view. Although it mentions the fact that devices have addictive properties, it also digs into the ways in which childhood in the US is changing. It reviews a Harris Poll survey of 500 children ages 8-12, with the majority saying they had smartphones and half of the older members of the cohort saying that social media use was common in their peer groups.

One of my favorite quotes from the piece states that, “This digital technology has given kids access to virtual worlds, where they’re allowed to roam far more freely than in the real one.” As a proud member of Gen X who had the stereotypical “come home when the streetlights come on” childhood, this resonated with me. The article notes that many children haven’t so much as gone down a grocery store aisle alone and that a good number aren’t able to play unsupervised in their own yards.

The authors note that children expressed a desire to socialize in person with minimal supervision, but due to restrictions by their parents, they instead use their phones to socialize unsupervised. Of course, there are reasons that parents have become more restrictive with their children, including fear of injury or abduction, but one of the statistics mentioned in the article is that “a child would have to be outside unsupervised for, on average, 750,000 years before being snatched by a stranger.”

It goes on to say: “Without real-world freedom, children don’t get the chance to develop competence, confidence, and the ability to solve everyday problems. Indeed, independence and unsupervised play are associated with positive mental-health outcomes.”

The authors mention the creation of parenting networks where kids are encouraged to get together for unsupervised play and community organizations that are promoting screen-free time. The deeper I got into the article, the more I wondered what tech companies think about these efforts and whether they feel that such advocacy for unstructured device-free play might ever be a threat to their respective bottom lines.

I’ve been a volunteer in youth-serving organizations for over 20 years, and I would say that any threat wouldn’t be a serious one. To get kids to put down their phones, we would likely need to see parents doing it first. On second thought, though, maybe if there was a TikTok influencer that started telling parents it was cool to let their kids run around the neighborhood and dig holes in the yard as some of us did once upon a time, we might see a change.

I recently read the book “Klara and the Sun” by Kazuo Ishiguro. It’s a complex novel told from the point of view of Klara, who is an Artificial Friend purchased to serve as a companion to a child with a chronic illness. I won’t throw out any spoilers as to the nature of that illness, but it was an interesting read.

There are already enough ways that technology is impacting childhood, so I hope we don’t get to the point where life starts imitating the novel. On the other hand, there are some scenes in the book where the main human character is allowed to go outside to play with only the supervision of the Artificial Friend. It made me think a bit that if parents won’t let their kids explore the world alone, maybe there just might be a role for technology.

It will be interesting to see if there is any research published in the next couple of years with respect to these cell phone limitations and bans and whether they do have a positive impact on youth mental health. It’s estimated that mental health is impacting the US economy to the tune of $282 billion annually, so we can’t afford not to study how these interventions play out.

What do you think about the role of government in limiting the use of technology for individuals, whether they’re children or adults? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

HIStalk Interviews Thomas Thatapudi, CIO, AGS Health

Thomas Thatapudi, MBA is CIO of AGS Health.

Tell me about yourself and the company.

We are primarily a revenue cycle management company. We work with pretty large enterprises, such as Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, and Baylor Scott & White Health. We offer services on the front end, which is usually scheduling, patient access-related functions, mid-cycle coding, and in the back end, AR and denials.  We are about 15,000 people. We are what I would call a tech-first services company.

My career over the past 20-odd years has been primarily in technology. I’ve been focused on building data-intensive apps. In the last two or three years, I’ve been pretty intrigued with AI and its applications.

What are the biggest pain points in RCM that technology may help solve?

I’ve been working on the provider side only since I’ve started working with AGS Health in the last four years, so I’ve seen a fair bit of insurance. When I say insurance, that’s  auto, home, and health insurance. I’ve worked a lot with payers, I’ve worked with credit card companies.

My take on providers is that healthcare has always been a laggard in terms of adoption of technology, and more recently, AI. Providers, even more. Even within providers, revenue cycle management is probably at the bottom of the totem pole when it comes to infusion of either the technology or capital that is required for technology.

RCM is primarily a labor-intensive enterprise. Because there are no unlimited resources for providers, it means that we need another toolset, or at least part of the toolset has to be technology or AI, to address some of the issues.

For example, the denial rates have only been going up in the last two to four years. The payers are making denials more complex. There is no way that providers can throw unlimited resources at it, and neither can the RCM providers like AGS Health. Therefore, each and every portion of the RCM life cycle, from when the patient has completed his or her interaction at the point of care to when the interaction is closed, whether it’s collected, denied, partially collected, or whatever. Through that whole function, it is important that there is some tech infusion happening, or else some of these things will fall through the cracks because there are only a limited number of humans that you can throw at some of these problems.

Are providers thinking about technology and AI for immediate cost reduction or revenue enhancement, are they looking at it strategically, or both?

I see a combination of both, at least in the last 12 months that I have been talking to customers. Last week I was with a chief revenue cycle officer who was progressive and wanted to get ahead of the curve in terms of adoption of AI. The reason is that the CFO comes back and says, can you squeeze more dollars from this? Can you do this? Instead of spending 7 cents collecting a dollar, can you do this using 4.5 cents? The bottom line always has to be, can I collect the dollars faster and more economically?

Others don’t want to miss the AI boom, so they make all the right noises, but actually don’t know how to wrangle with AI. You see both ends of the spectrum here.

How do RCM and consumerism intersect from a technology standpoint?

I’ll take something very simple. A patient needs to get a scan and the prior auth has been denied. Therefore, all it requires is informing the patient that his or her medical procedure has been denied and they need to go back to the clinician for an alternative clinical pathway. The question is, how exactly do you reach the patient to be able to inform them?

One of our customers has 50-odd people sitting in some town in Wisconsin making these calls. But half the time, nobody’s picking up those calls, because they don’t recognize the number.  You cannot even inform them that their procedure has been denied. If you leave them a voicemail or a message, it almost always triggers a call back into the contact center saying, “You left me a message. I have no clue. What am I supposed to do?”

These are patients who most probably have been waiting for that particular procedure for a long time. How do you actually reach out to the patient and make sure that their whole interaction with the healthcare system — getting the procedure done, making sure that they know how much they’re paying, making sure that their schedule is on time, and getting the right approvals from the payers — how do you make that interaction more seamless without making it burdensome? It’s a gnarly problem even now.

With mobile applications since 2010 and people being on social media and attuned to how they work on social media, we would have assumed that by 2025, some of these problems would have been more elegantly solved, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. This is an ongoing problem, so there’s a lot more opportunities than what it might seem.

How will healthcare use agentic AI? Is it too early to ask people if they are seeing results?

There’s been a lot of buzz about agentic AI, especially because of OpenAI and others. The VC-funded firms have been hyping up that word quite a bit. My own hypothesis is that it won’t solve world hunger, where all the humans disappear and there are just AI agents doing everything.  But it also doesn’t mean that the world will remain what it is. There will be some changes on that front.

With payers, when there is pressure in terms of claim loss and medical loss ratios going up, the first thing that they always go after is the provider contact center. One of the largest payers that I worked for had about 12,000 people in the contact center, with 7,000 of them addressing members and 5,000 working in the provider contact center. If the claim loss ratios are going up, the first thing that the CFO does is cut the number of people handling the provider contact center because as you can imagine, they’re not dying to answer questions about, where is my bill or is my prior auth approved? 

As I’ve talked to CTOs and CIOs on the payer side, they would like to deploy agentic AI to answer some of these provider questions. If it’s not already there, we should expect in the next 12 to 24 months that the payers will start fielding some of these agentic AI to answer questions either, if not to the members, at least to the provider community.

My own interaction with AI agents has been interesting. I suffered a home claim loss. I had to call on a Saturday because that’s when it happened. The insurance carrier was shut down, so they had a TPA taking that first notice of loss. It was an unpleasant interaction. It was almost like the lady was like, “How dare you have a claim loss on a Saturday?” I got the claim number, so the first thing that I did on Monday morning was to call them back to make sure that it was logged correctly.

For the first six or seven minutes, it was a very pleasant interaction. The other person was empathetic, saying all the right words, making sure that we were doing well, blah, blah. It took me a good eight or nine minutes to figure out that I was talking to an AI agent. Lo and behold, it was a good interaction. I got my details. I knew who I had to call as my next steps. I knew what to expect.

My assumption is that as the AI agents cross the uncanny valley of completely being unrecognizable as AI agents, patients and even payer contact centers might actually be comfortable talking to these AI agents. Going back to my example of calling up the patient to tell them that their prior auth has been denied, and they need to go back to the clinician. In my mind, there is no reason to do this using a human. We are piloting an AI agent to make these calls as we speak. 

We will start scratching the surface in terms of how many of these interactions can be done by AI agents versus humans. It’s a matter of time when it will happen, not whether it will happen.

Will companies treat AI agents as a feature, not something to hide, because many people would rather not talk to an actual human?

I was reading an article that the Gen Z’ers apparently don’t like calling at all. If they know they aren’t calling a human, they will be more open to calling.

I was at AWS last year and the CTO of Rocket Mortgage was presenting. He made an interesting observation that their mortgage conversion ratios are 3x when person who might take a loan talks to an AI agent rather than a human. There’s more empathy and understanding.

It will be an interesting phenomenon. My own assumption is that we as humans will most probably get attuned to it. When we are booking travel or ordering food on Uber Eats, many of our interactions will most probably be with AI agents. These AI agents in healthcare may not be such a curveball to patients or members. They might actually welcome it versus talking to a human.

How do you program AI to use the human knowledge, judgment, and intuition that a good employee develops and then teach it to apply it in a human-like fashion?

I simply don’t believe that all the human interactions will disappear and it will all be AI. Work will get delivered as a combination of humans and AI. Sometimes AI work being audited by humans and vice versa. Humans and AI are constantly interacting with each other in a seamless workflow. They are correcting each other, learning from each other, and auditing each other. They are passing work back and forth seamlessly.

We’re building a denial workflow as we speak. Right now the way that we do it is brute force. The denial reason that is being presented back to the payer, we’re going to use AI to present the denial letter back. We’re going to use AI to do the doc prep, which is supporting that denial letter. Then it goes to the doctor in Mexico, who says, I disagree with it , or I agree with it, and this is how I would audit it or edit it. Now that is being sent to the payer, but also being presented back to the AI. 

They are learning from each other. The human could learn from AI, oops, I didn’t think that this was like a credible reason or I didn’t think of this combination of CPT and ICD code. That’s a really good reason. AI and humans will constantly reinforce each other, learn from each other, and in my mind, work will get delivered as a combination of humans and AI.

If you think about autonomous coding and radiology, it could very well be that AI becomes 85 or 90%. But if it’s a complex denial more than $100,000, the AI could be just 20% or 25%. The ratio could differ, but it will always get delivered as a combination of human plus AI.

How do companies decide when to make a big AI bet, and if they are wrong, are switching costs so low that they will just take a different direction?

One of our customers told me that they need a full-time person to just monitor all the AI inquiries or propositions that they’re getting from startups. Everybody’s trying to solve for everything.

AGS Health was acquired by Blackstone just a couple of weeks ago. The whole investment hypothesis was, what do you think the scope is for AI? The way that I am approaching it within AGS Health is that we’re taking some very clear cut bets between four to five product lines. I’m looking at denial management. I’m looking at contact centers being up for disruption. I’m looking at how we can do more denials through AI and obviously autonomous coding. 

The question is, can we limit ourselves, fence ourselves, to four to five product lines, or four to five problem statements, and double down and triple down on them and make sure that we are working through them? It’s easy to look at 20 different problems. Each of them looks amenable to AI. The burnout ratio could be high if you end up chasing 20 of them.

The way that I’ve presented to Blackstone is that I’m picking five bets. Be ready for the fact that only three may work out and two may fail. But when the three work out, we will take a larger than reasonable market share. Therefore, we will be well off in the future.

It’s a little bit of change management, whether it’s to the customers or to my own investors, to tell them not to assume that every AI bet will pass the test and be ready for a 30 to 50% failure rate. But let’s take limited bets and see which ones pay off.

How will technology fit into the company’s strategy over the next few years?

The way that I always think about it, and the way that I talk to my own product and technology teams, is that it doesn’t actually matter how fancy the tech is. It could be the fanciest mousetrap in the world, but if it doesn’t solve the customer’s problem … can I collect the dollars faster and much more economically? Can I keep up with the denial claims ratios? Can I keep up with all the regulatory issues? Can I keep up with the payer whims and fancies? If I don’t solve for any of those, then it doesn’t actually matter.

Let’s take autonomous coding as an example. Whatever tech I put in place, if I cannot beat the offshore coder rate, then it doesn’t matter. Am I solving the customer’s problems and am I solving them at an economical rate?  If I have those two questions answered every time I build a mousetrap — whether it’s tech, AI, or a combination of tech, AI, and humans — then we have a winner on our hands.

Monday Morning Update 8/18/25

Top News

Epic UGM kicks off Monday, with good weather and highs in the upper 70s. 

Attendees are welcome to send me interesting tidbits from the conference, including details about rumored company announcements.  

Happy birthday to CEO Judy Faulkner, who turned 82 last week.

Reader Comments

From Inside Trader: “Re: Oracle Health. Pre-announcing an aspirational product with disclaimers that they aren’t actually promising anything is just marketing fluff. It’s an obvious effort to slow down the Epic train right before UGM. All hype until a customer goes on record about their success using it.”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents, probably similarly to ambient scribe vendors themselves, aren’t quite sure how Epic’s rumored release of its own product will affect the market. A couple of reader edited comments:

• Any good product manager know that watching the success of and then imitating cutting edge technologies is a great way to stretch the R&D budget. Epic has followed the market, seen the early successes, and now believes that there is something “there.” The Epic offering will be solid but not flashy. Their big advantage is that the solution is native technology and not a third-party integration. Plus, no one knows their customers’ workflow better than Epic, so expect to see those features that are actually useful and not a bunch of impractical bells and whistles. Nuance and Abridge, et al should double down on new, cutting edge feature / function and figure out a way to license it to Epic before Epic fast follows with their own version.
• The truth is painfully obvious but no one wants to admit it. Ambient is not a product, but a feature. If a company was built around ambient, it will now need to handle workflows. The painful truth is that the care workflow is called the EHR. Abridge has no option but to build an EHR, given the valuation they have raised on. Nuance is irrelevant.
• The Epic product has to be just accurate enough, just efficient enough, and just cheap enough to be worth the hype. If all else is equal, integrated Epic or Oracle products will get the nod based on fewer headaches in installation, contracting, and project management, which translates into lower costs.

New poll to your right or here, as inspired by Dr. Jayne: What should your providers do to improve their appointment reminder text messages?

Sponsored Events and Resources

Instant Access Webinar: “Healthcare Data Strategies: Retire, Retain, and Ready for AI.” Sponsor: Triyam, an Access Company. Presenters: Sudhakar Mohanraj, founder and CTO, Triyam; Benjamin Cassity, director of research and strategy, KLAS; Jamie Greenstein, senior marketing manager, Access. The presenters deliver practical tactics to help IT leaders manage exploding data volumes — how to clean up legacy systems, craft smarter retention policies, and prepare historical data for analytics and AI.

Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Teladoc Health acquires Telecare, an Australia-based operator of virtual care clinics.

People

Terri Couts, RN (The Guthrie Clinic) joins Sharp HealthCare as chief digital information officer.

Carol-Lynn Lloyd, MBChB (Servita) joins Altera Digital Health as chief medical officer. 

Announcements and Implementations

Five9 launches Fusion for Epic, which embeds advanced contact center capabilities into Epic.

Apple restores blood oxygen monitoring to the Watch, taking advantage of a US Customs ruling in its Masimo patent dispute that had forced its removal in 2023. 

Other

Fortune profiles the turnaround of NYU Langone, crediting its data-first approach and high-powered board members with growing it into sprawling system with $14 billion in annual revenue that delivers high quality with below-market prices. A key part of its operation is an 800-metric data dashboard that is its single source of truth. A quote from the well-written article:

Even as I marveled at the data available, I wondered if the dashboard-driven culture — part Moneyball, part panopticon — might feel oppressive to some. “It’s not for everyone,” Brotman later told me. “You’re on the hook 24/7, 365, and you’ve got this vulnerability and this expectation of accountability. If you don’t have the right disposition, it’s hard to deal with.”  

I felt awkward simply being in the room for moments of the “Snapshot Review,” a meeting where the chairs of clinical departments filed onstage for dashboard-informed questioning from administrators. The review sessions, in an airy conference room overlooking the East River, varied considerably in tone and substance. Some involved praise and practical problem-solving; others, discussions of “low-performing faculty members”; and another — featuring a relatively new leader who clearly hadn’t found his footing — the feel of a man pleading for mercy.

Sponsor Updates

• ReferWell staff prep 90 breakfast bags for The Food Bank of Lower Fairfield County.
• Surescripts will exhibit and present at NACDS TSE August 23-25 in San Diego.
• Black Book Research’s latest survey reveals that a majority of global respondents have funded, active cloud programs scheduled for enterprise deployment within the next 18-24 months.
• The latest survey from TrustCommerce, a Sphere company, finds that nearly 60% of older consumers are at least somewhat comfortable using digital payments for healthcare.
• Conduce Health co-founder and Executive Chairman Eric Rosow joins the ArcheHealth advisory board.
• Artera announces that its virtual agents have automated 42 million patient sessions, 94% of them with no staff intervention needed.
• Netsmart will present at the Florida Behavioral Health Association’s 2025 conference August 20 in Orlando.
• Optimum Healthcare IT releases a new episode of its “Visionary Voices” podcast titled “Finding an Inventive Path to Health IT.”
• Waystar will exhibit at the California Ambulance Association Annual Conference August 20-21 in Monterey.
• VisiQuate will exhibit at CAHAM 2025 September 2-5 in Newport Beach, CA.

Blog Posts

• Your Guide to Building a Proactive Healthcare Data Strategy (Tegria)
• Healthcare’s big challenge: how to foster a resilient, supported clinical workforce? (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• Stop Waiting for Stale Data — Why Hospital Leaders Need Real-Time Surgical Metrics Now (LiveData)
• What’s New in Coding: July 2025 CMS Updates (What You Need to Know) (Nym)
• Health Consumerism Isn’t Dead. But Your Digital Strategy Might Be. (Praia Health)
• CMS Pledge Reflections: The future of interoperability is, and must be, plural (Redox)
• Clinician Survey Reveals the Path Forward for Prior Authorization Innovation (Surescripts)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Sponsorship information.
Contact us.

News 8/15/25

Top News

Oracle releases its Oracle Health EHR for ambulatory providers in the US.

The company says it will add hospital functionality to the cloud-based, voice-first system in 2026.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Browser tip: If you need to log in to multiple accounts on the same website, or if you want to test your password without logging out or resetting it, open a Chrome window in incognito mode. It ignores your cached data, cookies, and stored autofill data so you start fresh. You can also use incognito mode to avoid dynamic pricing (where the site knows it’s you and prices accordingly) or to read articles on sites that limit free views before showing a paywall. Bonus: it also hides profile and web history when Googling and thus can’t target ads or customize search results.

Sponsored Events and Resources

Instant Access Webinar: “Healthcare Data Strategies: Retire, Retain, and Ready for AI.” Sponsor: Triyam, an Access Company. Presenters: Sudhakar Mohanraj, founder and CTO, Triyam; Benjamin Cassity, director of research and strategy, KLAS; Jamie Greenstein, senior marketing manager, Access. The presenters deliver practical tactics to help IT leaders manage exploding data volumes — how to clean up legacy systems, craft smarter retention policies, and prepare historical data for analytics and AI.

Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Abridge will use 80% of its available funds to expand beyond ambient documentation into claims, clinical decision support, and care management, with the remaining 20% reserved for acquisitions. Funding rounds in February and June 2025 value the company at over $5 billion.

Clearinghouse operator Stedi raises $70 million in a Series B funding round.

Personal health record vendor Citizen Health raises $30 million in Series A funding.

People

Adam Tallinger, RPh, MHA (Huron) joins Nordic as Epic managing director and practice lead.

Cotiviti hires Robert Kopanic (Oracle Health) as chief revenue officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Rhapsody announces GA of Image Director, an image orchestration solution that simplifies routing imaging data from CT, MRI, and X-ray to PACS, VNAs, AI models, and cloud archives. 

The FDA grants De Novo authorization for ArteraAI Prostate, making the AI-powered digital pathology tool an FDA-regulated Software as a Medical Device. It predicts long-term outcomes for patients with non-metastatic prostate cancer.

Humana will use DrFirst’s prescription orchestration platform to close care gaps, starting with identifying patients who could benefit from statins and sending their providers prescription recommendations that they can approve with one click.

Epic enhances its wound care module with computer vision AI that calculates wound surface area and volume from a photo.

Athenahealth adds AI capabilities to its cloud-based AthenaOne that will eventually include fax processing, managing patient information from external sources, providing clinical summaries, and answering questions using all available clinical data.

Altera Digital Health launches an ambient documentation solution for its TouchWorks EHR.

Other

An entrepreneur couple who bought telemarketer-pitched health insurance to avoid the high cost of ACA premiums spends $20,000 on coverage that paid almost none of their medical bills. The plans are sold by a shell company that secretly lists each customer as a limited partner to evade state insurance regulation, which provides an exemption for employer-provided plans. One Atlanta mailbox serves as the employer address for 30,000 such “workers.” Telemarketing firms used deepfake ads featuring Taylor Swift and Dr. Phil promising cash payouts to lure callers into insurance pitches.

Sponsor Updates

• Health Data Movers sponsors the Northern Ohio HIMSS Charity Golf Classic & Collaboration Summit.
• Medicomp Systems releases a new episode of its “Tell Me Where IT Hurts” podcast featuring Hearst Health EVP and COO and FDB Executive Chairman Chuck Tuchinda, MD, MBA.
• Nordic and Clear partner to offer healthcare organizations a seamless, secure way to manage EHR accounts.
• Wolters Kluwer Health enhances its Lippincott platform to streamline author workflow and expedite vital research dissemination.
• Surescripts releases a new data brief based on the results of its latest survey titled “Healthcare Professionals Highlight Medication Prior Authorization Challenges & Solutions.”
• Black Book Research offers a new report titled “Cloud Momentum in Healthcare: Adoption, Economics, and Vendor Performance.”
• Healthcare IT Leaders will sponsor Workday Rising September 15-18 in San Francisco.
• Inbox Health partners with Empower Healthcare & Compliance Partners to bring together patient billing technology and industry-leading compliance expertise.
• Infinx releases a new episode of its “Revenue Cycle Optimized” podcast titled “Medicare Fee for Service Meets Prior Authorization.”
• Inovalon releases a new episode of its “Inovators” podcast titled “What Individuals, Corporations, and the Healthcare System Can Do to Address Mental Health.”

Blog Posts

• Realizing AI’s Promise: How Data Governance Supports AI Success (Tegria)
• Completing the circle of success: Debunking common myths about denials (Altera Digital Health)
• Analyst Kate Guffey on navigating a career pivot into health IT (Cardamom)
• Improving Medication Adherence for CHF Patients in Rural Communities: Lessons From Magnolia Regional (DrFirst)
• The role of data quality in building a robust health tech ecosystem (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• How GEHRIMED Supports Promoting Interoperability Compliance (Netsmart)
• Employee Engagement in Healthcare: The Hidden Revenue Strategy Healthcare Leaders Are Overlooking (Vyne Medical)
• What the Forrester TEI Study Says About the Real ROI of the Intelligent CX Platform (Five9)
• August 2025 CISO Brief: Policy, Funding, and the Path Forward (Fortified Health Security)
• How to Create Effective Patient Access Solutions: A Practical 3-Step Guide (Kyruus Health)
• Identifying & Fixing The “True Root Cause” of Epic Hyperdrive Slowness (Goliath Technologies)
• Improving efficiency and patient care with analytics dashboards at Fulton County Health Center (Meditech)
• From Frustration to Functionality: Reducing Burnout Through EHR Optimization (Med Tech Solutions)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Sponsorship information.
Contact us.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 8/14/25

Perplexity made an unsolicited offer to buy the Chrome browser from Google for $34.5 billion. Several people I spoke with agree with the Axios statement that it’s a great marketing play, but unlikely to actually be accepted by Google.

I’ve seen friends and colleagues move away from Google in the months since it added its AI overview feature. I’ve been back and forth with it. I had three significant hallucinations in the same day recently, and all were related to simple fact-based searches that shouldn’t have been problematic. Perplexity claims to have financing in place for the deal, but we’ll likely never know who agreed to back it.

JAMA Network Open has become one of my go-to journals for relevant research that addresses hot topics in healthcare information technology, but at a level that is accessible to more frontline clinicians than might be found in a journal that was targeted towards clinical informaticists. An article this week addressed a great question: “Can a patient portal message with either a physician-created video or an infographic with a physician photograph increase end-of-season influenza vaccination rates?” The study was done at UCLA Health with 22,000 patients from 21 practices. Neither approach raised overall vaccination rates, but both methods increased immunization rates for children and the video message option scored slightly higher.

There’s a lot of vaccine hesitancy in the US, and the Health and Human Service secretary’s recent approval of influenza recommendations received little press coverage. Here’s to hoping that messages from trusted physicians can help drive the needle.

Another feature in the same issue looked at whether physicians made more edits to hospital course summary documents that were generated by large language models (LLM) compared to those generated by physicians. The study was small, looking at only 100 inpatient admissions to the general medical service. The authors found that the percentage of LLM-generated summaries that required edits was smaller than the percentage of physician-generated summaries. The studies were evaluated against a quality standard, with the authors concluding that since the LLM-generated documents needed fewer edits, they were of higher quality than those created by physicians.

I found the study design particularly interesting on this one. The hospital course summaries were randomly assigned to one of 10 internal medicine residents. They had three minutes to review each pair of summaries and edit them for quality purposes. The output of those editing steps was then reviewed and scored for quality by an attending hospitalist physician.

The authors controlled for document length by using a “percentage edited” score and also looked at how much the meaning of the original summary was altered. The authors noted that while the LLM-generated summaries required less editing and may have been “comparably or more complete, concise, and cohesive” they also “contained more confabulations.” They noted that the artificial time constraints may have influenced the result. The study overall supports the idea that using LLMs to help complete this task could be of value.

OpenAI has been trumpeting the release of its GPT-5 model, saying it does a better job with medical questions than its predecessor, but users have been clamoring for an option to return to the previous model. The majority of complaints are around system speed and increased errors. Others took issue with the fact that the new model was rolled out without notice, leading CEO Sam Altman to admit that “suddenly deprecating old models that users depended on in their workflows was a mistake.”

Those of us who have been in the healthcare IT trenches for years understand the value of adequate change management and communication strategies, so I was surprised to learn that the company thought it would be no big deal to just hot-swap the models. If they’re looking for a change management sensei, I might know a girl. Another great quote from Altman: “the autoswitcher broke and was out of commission for a chunk of the day, and the result was GPT-5 seemed way dumber.” Something to ponder for all the folks relying on these technologies. Sounds like they may need a testing advisor as well.

One of my favorite colleagues from residency was in town the other day, doing college visits with one of her children. Her family is going through additional challenges in the college hunt as they evaluate the medical and support resources available to help students manage chronic health conditions in their first few months away from their families. My friend is a brilliant physician who has worked in environments from academic to military to rural health, so she has seen it all.

One of her concerns was the sheer number of communications she receives from her child’s care team: “Seriously, I think I got 15 reminders and a survey, I don’t want to have this kind of a relationship. I already replied, so why are we still having this conversation?” She’s worried that when her child is on her own and receiving all those reminders and messages that they will cause anxiety, which is certainly valid.

Props to health organizations who allow patients to customize reminders and communications. I personally just need one reminder three days out and that’s all. My dentist sends a reminder at 10 days, seven days, three days, one day, and then hourly until you arrive. They claim they can’t adjust it. I’m not sure I’m buying that, but I’m not well versed in dental platforms.

Dr. Nick van Terheyden reached out to let me know that the Lown Institute is accepting nominations for its annual Shkreli Awards, named after notorious “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli. The awards are given “to perpetrators of the ten most egregious examples of profiteering and dysfunction in healthcare.” Previous winners have done such things as: selling the body parts of the deceased without notifying the next of kin, defrauding Medicare by submitting claims on behalf of patients who never received services, and bankrupting community hospitals while living a lavish lifestyle.

What’s the most egregious thing you’ve seen lately in healthcare, regardless of whether it’s worthy of a Shkreli award? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

HIStalk’s Guide to Epic UGM 2025

Cardamom

Contact: Adam Dial, chief customer officer
608.469.6154

Cardamom is a Madison-based health IT startup that brings together experts in data, analytics, AI, and applications to help healthcare organizations maximize the value of their technology investments. With a technology-forward mindset, Cardamom takes a team-driven, outcomes-focused approach to solving complex IT and operational challenges across the healthcare enterprise, from revenue cycle optimization to EHR application support, patient engagement, and beyond.

Cardamom is hosting its annual Sunset on the Square, sponsored by Snowflake, on Tuesday, Aug. 19 from 8-11 p.m. Join us on our terrace overlooking the stunning Wisconsin State Capitol building for delicious bites, refreshing cocktails, and fantastic conversations. Whether you’re looking to make new connections with the Cardamom and Snowflake teams, or simply unwind, this is an event you won’t want to miss. Event details: Date: Tuesday, August 19 Time: 8 – 11 p.m. Location: 1 S. Pinckney St., Madison. Make sure to register to reserve your spot.

Clearsense

Contact: Glenn Wirick, chief commercial officer
480.450.4424

As health systems migrate to Epic, their legacy applications create a bloated portfolio that causes costly tech debt. Recent federal legislation heightens financial pressures to reduce OpEx spend for improved profitability. Clearsense leads the industry in accelerated archiving and decommissioning. Our solutions more rapidly reduce costs while simplifying user access to unified legacy patient data—a proven approach with the largest and fastest projects in the industry. (According to KLAS and Gartner, Clearsense has delivered the largest, most rapid archive projects in the industry.) Talk to Clearsense to learn how you can accelerate application decommissioning and cost savings.

Clearsense is co-sponsoring the Nordic Summer Social Event. Date: August 18th, 2025 Doors Open: 6 p.m. Location: The Edgewater Hotel, Madison, WI. Register here.

Divurgent

Contact: William Marshall, head of marketing
william.marshall@gmail.com

Divurgent is a full-service, healthcare-focused HIT consulting firm led by people you actually want to work with. We’re one of the only firms out there that has your back for the whole journey. We can help you select an EHR or tool, implement it, staff it, bring you live, optimize it, and more. Three hundred sixty degrees. We’d love to treat you to a drink and hear about what you’re working on!

Divurgent is hosting a happy hour in Madison on August 20 at the AC Hotel Madison Downtown, in the AC Lounge. Details and RSVP.

DrFirst

Contact: Colin Banas, chief medical officer
804.677.0656

DrFirst has 25+ years innovating in medication management with end to end solutions from Med Rec to patient adherence through personalized engagement. We are integrated into over 80+ Epic Health Systems and growing!

The DrFirst team will be in Madison Sunday through Thursday for partner meetings, dinners, and drinks. The more the merrier – please contact me via email cbanas@drfirst.com or on LinkedIn.

Findhelp

Contact: Rachel Harris, director of business development
rharris@findhelp.com

Integrate clinical care and social care with Findhelp. Pop by our booth to explore the solar system of our tailored Epic integrations, and learn about success stories and best practices from customers like NYC Health + Hospitals, Eskenazi Health, Cooper University Healthcare, and more.

Come by any time Monday through Wednesday to enter our raffle for a “cool” prize, then join us on Wednesday and Thursday at 8am for quick presentations on the latest Findhelp + Epic workflows and the winner announcement! (Must be present to win). Learn more.

Five9

Contact: Roni Jamesmeyer, senior healthcare marketing manager
972.768.6554

Five9 is a HIPAA-compliant cloud contact center solution for healthcare, integrating with EHRs like Epic to orchestrate patient access, scheduling, and revenue cycle workflows. Powered by Agentic CX and Genius AI, intelligent AI Agents automate complex tasks with built-in trust and governance—enhancing productivity, reducing costs, and improving patient experiences through secure, real-time, and scalable digital engagement.

Five9 was recently accredited into Epic’s Toolbox program with an adapter for Epic that enables healthcare contact center agents to manage patient interactions directly within the Epic interface. This helps streamline workflows and reduce average handle time. By embedding the core Five9 contact center platform into Epic, we deliver a unified, efficient, and patient-centric communication experience.

Five9 is hosting two offsite events during UGM that we would like to invite attendees to. Monday 8/18 – State Line Distillery 6pm-9pm,  Wednesday 8/20 – The Statehouse 6pm – 9pm. Please register here. 

Health Data Movers

Contact: Brooke Foster, marketing coordinator
847.404.0326

Health Data Movers (HDM) is a healthcare technology services firm. We are trusted partners to healthcare organizations, biotechnology companies, and digital health enterprises through our Services – Data Management, Integration, Project Management, and Clinical & Business Applications – we are the smart choice for creating unique solutions that empower patients and providers by unleashing the potential of healthcare data and technology. We Make IT Happen! V

Join Health Data Movers for Pints of the Patio at the Great Dane Downtown on Wednesday, August 20, from 5:00 – 7:00 PM! RSVP to let us know you’re coming!

Lincata

Contact: Adam DeRocher, chief revenue officer
712.541.9132

LincTV by Lincata is an Epic Toolbox approved solution which makes existing TVs compatible with MyChart Bedside TV. LincTV’s flexible offering also supports connected workflows with virtual nursing, live TV content, third party streaming applications, and more. Please visit the Lincata booth in the UGM exhibit hall to learn more.

Nordic Global

Contact: Bryana Curry, social media and PR manager
323.706.4628

Nordic, a global healthcare consulting firm, will host its annual Summer Social on Monday, Aug. 18, at The Edgewater Hotel during Epic UGM week. The event will celebrate 15 years of Nordic partnering with more than 700 healthcare organizations worldwide to improve healthcare IT solutions.

This year’s celebration also marks the announcement of Nordic’s new partnership with CLEAR, the secure identity company. CLEAR joins Nordic’s trusted partners AWS, Clearsense, Fortified Health Security, and Premier Stanson Health in sponsoring this year’s Summer Social. Additionally, Nordic will donate $20 on behalf of each attendee who checks in, contributing funds to the Community Foundation of Texas Hill Country to assist communities impacted by the Texas floods.

Tegria

Contact: Berit Rhody, manager of events and engagement
608.210.4863

Tegria is a global healthcare consulting and services company created by healthcare for healthcare. We deliver customized, end-to-end solutions that deliver outcomes and drive transformation. We proudly partner with provider and payer organizations to advance care, improve performance, and address healthcare’s biggest challenges.

Get ready to Rock the Rooftop with Tegria in the heart of downtown Madison! Join us on Monday, Aug. 18, from 6:00-9:00 pm on the rooftop of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art for an evening of food, music, art, and networking. RSVP today. 

Wolters Kluwer Health

We providing trusted clinical technology and evidence-based solutions that engage clinicians, patients, researchers, and the next generation of healthcare providers in effective decision-making and outcomes across healthcare. We specialize in clinical effectiveness, learning, research, compliance, and data solutions.

Join the UpToDate team at The Edgewater after the Starlight Dinner for an evening of cocktails, conversation, and connection at the Starlight Soirée. Relax in a social atmosphere where you can network with peers and make stellar new connections. Reserve your spot today – space is limited.

This Week in Health Tech 8/13/25

Healthcare AI News 8/13/25

News

OpenAI says that its newly released GPT-5 is its best model yet for answering health questions as an “active thought partner,” offering improved explanations of test results and health risks, better understanding of medical terminology, simpler presentation of treatment options, and suggestions for topics to raise at the next provider visit.

Note: My ChatGPT subscription now offers the option to switch to the previous version, GPT-4o, as many users had requested.

A new Illinois law bans the use of AI to make therapeutic decisions or deliver psychotherapy without clinician involvement.

An AI expert shortens his AGI timeline, predicting that it will be able to learn and apply knowledge in a human-like way within five years. He proposes a system in which an AI agent solves a task, breaks the solution into reusable parts, and share those components to a global library where collective learning becomes the game-changer. He has created online games as a test in which AI and humans can try to figure out the unstated rules to win, which so far AI doesn’t do nearly as well as humans.

Business

India’s Apollo Hospitals will double its AI investment over the next two to three years, expanding its use beyond image and report analysis.

Research

Researchers find that AI use may degrade the diagnostic skills of clinicians who perform colonoscopies. A previous study reported that AI tools alter the “gaze patterns” of users, causing them to focus almost entirely on the AI-highlighted areas of diagnostic images. The authors suggest that users occasionally work without their AI tools to preserve their expertise.

A Black Book Research flash survey of hospital executives finds eight areas where AI delivers immediate benefit:

1. Real-time predictive analytics for admissions, ED visits, and staffing. 
2. Financial forecasting.
3. Personalized clinical decision support.
4. Automated compliance and risk management.
5. Patient flow management.
6. Cybersecurity.
7. Supply chain optimization.
8. Revenue cycle management and complex claims management.

Other

Elon Musk responds on X to a post that describes how patients are using ChatGPT to advocate for themselves and to challenge the conclusions of their doctors.

A South Korean hospital develops an AI system that matches patient EHR data with a legal database to flag potential malpractice risks.

A parent in Australia says on social media that their child’s pediatrician canceled their appointment because the mom declined to allow the doctor to use an AI transcription tool. Australia’s health regulator says doctors aren’t obligated to see patients outside of emergencies, so they can turn down such visits although patient education about their use of AI might be a better approach. Startups that are developing these tools say their consent models allow opt-in or opt-out use, and one company that expected 30% of patients to decline AI involvement was surprised to see just 1% opt out. Patients can also request note deletion. Interestingly, the parent is an AI expert who questions the privacy and security oversight of such tools.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Sponsorship information.
Contact us.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 8/11/25

I was intrigued by Mr. H’s mention last week of the Mass General Brigham FaceAge AI tool that can estimate age from facial photos. Researchers found that patients with cancer appeared older than their stated age. The older they looked, the lower their odds of survival.

Although physicians have historically used visual assessments to predict potential outcomes, the tool uses face feature extraction to estimate a user’s biological age based on their photo. An article describing the tool was recently published in The Lancet Digital Health if you’re interested in all the details.

This item, as many things that Mr. H mentions, got me thinking. I found a couple of sites that host biological age calculators and completed the relevant surveys to get a couple of results. Some of them were more specific, asking for various lab values. Fortunately, I had results for all of the requested lab values and even some of the exercise performance measures that were included on one of the questionnaires. I also found a tool that is very similar to FaceAge, although not the exact one used in the study, and snapped my selfie.

The survey-based calculators estimated my biological age as anywhere from 4.6 to nine years below my actual age. The facial photo tool thought that I was more than 10 years younger. I suppose my liberal use of sunscreen and hats is paying off, since my facial wrinkles were scored as 2 out of a possible 100 points. I also did well on the “undereye” measure, although I admit that my photo was taken when I was well rested. I’m sure it would not have scored as well had it been taken after a shift in the emergency department.

I don’t look at a lot of high-resolution pictures of my face, and when I received my score report with a full-screen of my face right in front of me, I was somewhat surprised that you can still see some artifacts from years of wearing an N95 mask while seeing patients. I’m guessing that when I look in the mirror my brain somewhat processes that out, so it was a little startling.

I’d be interested to see how I would score on a medical-grade tool such as the one mentioned in the article. Although it was a fun exercise to complete the different surveys and see where I stand, none of the recommendations provided alongside the results of any of the tools were different from what I usually hear during my primary care preventive visits: keep moving, eat as healthy as possible, and watch out for the rogue genes you’re carrying around.

I would be interested to hear others’ experiences with similar tools and whether they have motivated you to do anything different from a lifestyle perspective.

Mr. H also recently mentioned efforts by NASA and Google to develop a proof-of-concept AI-powered “Crew Medical Officer Digital Assistant” (CMO-DA) to support astronauts on long space missions. As a Star Trek devotee, I couldn’t help but think of the Emergency Medical Hologram from “Star Trek: Voyager.”

The project is using Google Cloud’s Vertex AI environment and has been used to run three scenarios: an ankle injury, flank pain, and ear pain. The TechCrunch article noted that “a trio of physicians, one being an astronaut, graded the assistant’s performance across the initial evaluation, history-taking, clinical reasoning, and treatment.” A particular astronaut/physician came to mind when I read that, and if there’s a hologram to be created, I’m sure other space fangirls out there would find him an acceptable model.

The reviewers found the model to have a 74% likelihood of correctness for the flank pain scenario, 80% for ear pain, and 88% for the ankle injury. I’m not sure what the numbers are like for human physicians in aggregate, but I’m fairly certain I’ve had a higher accuracy rate for those conditions since they’re common in the urgent and emergency care space. However, NASA notes that they hope to tune the model to be “situationally aware” for space-specific elements, including microgravity. I would hazard a guess that most physicians, except for those with aerospace certifications, don’t have a lot of knowledge on that or other extraterrestrial factors.

The article links out to a NASA slide deck. Since I do love a good NASA presentation I had to check it out. I was excited to see that there is a set of “NASA Trustworthy AI Principles” that address some key factors that are sometimes lacking in the systems I encounter. The principles address accountable management of AI systems, privacy, safety, and the importance of having humans in the loop to “monitor and guide machine learning processes.” They note that “AI system risk tradeoffs must be considered when determining benefit of use.” I see a lot of organizations choosing AI solutions just for the sake of “doing AI” and not really considering the impacts of those systems, so that one in particular resonated with me.

Another principle that resonated with this former bioethics student was that of beneficence, specifically that trustworthy AI should be inclusive, advance equity, and protect privacy while minimizing biases and supporting “the wellbeing of the environment and persons present and future.” Prevention of bias and discrimination, prevention of covert manipulation, and scientific rigor are also addressed in the principles as is the idea that there must be transparency in “design, development, deployment, and functioning, especially regarding personal data use.” I wish there were more organizations out there willing to adopt a set of AI principles like this, but given the commercial nature of most AI efforts, I can understand why these ideals might be pushed to the side.

In addition to the CMO-DA project, three other projects are in the works: a Clinical Finding Form (CliFF), Mission Control Central (MCC) Flight Surgeon Emergency Procedures, and a collaboration with UpToDate. I love a catchy acronym and “CliFF” certainly fits the bill.

I recently finished the novel ”Atmosphere” by Taylor Jenkins Reid . If you are curious about the emergency procedures that a mission control flight surgeon might need to have at their fingertips, the book does not disappoint.

The deck goes on to discuss the evolution of Large Language Models, retrieval-augmented generation, and prompt engineering within the context of the greater NASA project. The deck specifically notes that any solution must be on-premise, which is particularly true when you experience the communications blackouts that are inherent in space travel.

There are more details in the deck about the specific AI approach and the scenarios. I particularly enjoyed learning about “abdominal palpation in microgravity” and the need to make sure that the patient is secured to the examination table to prevent floating away. I also learned that “due to the microgravity environment, the patient’s abdominal contents may shift,” which got me wondering exactly how many organs were subject to shifting since many of them are fairly well-anchored by blood vessels and other not-so-stretchy structures.

The deck listed the three physician personas who scored the scenarios. Based on physician specialty, it’s likely that my favorite astronaut wasn’t one of them, but I was happy to see that an obstetrician / gynecologist was included.

Apparently there was a live demonstration of the CMO-DA at the meeting for which the presentation deck was created, so if anyone has connections at NASA, I know of at least one clinical informaticist that would love to see it. I’ll definitely be setting up some online alerts for some of these topics and following closely as the tools evolve.

Did you ever dream of being an astronaut, and what ultimately sidelined you from that career? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Readers Write: Healthcare Search Strategy Needs a Reboot

Healthcare Search Strategy Needs a Reboot
By Harsh Bhatt

Harsh Bhatt is  executive director of AI and analytics at Praia Health.

With policy changes out of Washington impacting reimbursements, the need for health systems to attract and retain commercially insured patients will become critical. These patients are not only the most profitable, but also the most digitally savvy and the most likely to comparison shop for care.

Health systems have invested years and millions of dollars building digital front doors and acquisition funnels to capture these patients. Unfortunately, those once-proven funnels are quietly eroding beneath the surface, disrupted by something few health systems have yet to account for: AI-powered search.

Despite continued investment in SEO and content creation, leading health systems are seeing a 10% or greater decline in search traffic, even while maintaining high search rankings. AI-powered answers and summaries are increasingly satisfying patient questions at the top of the results page, leaving no need for them to click through to their local health system’s website.

Patients are still searching, but fewer are actually reaching a health system’s digital front door. Since the launch of these AI-powered features, click-through rates from search have dropped by more than 30% across industries.

The problem isn’t just visibility; it’s redistribution. Generative AI tools are favoring national brands like Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic, and Johns Hopkins, as well as commercial providers like Amazon and Teladoc. These entities aren’t winning traffic solely because of name recognition. They are winning because their content is structured for machine readability and optimized for citation by generative algorithms.

This is a fundamental shift. Most patients no longer begin their digital care journey on a health system home page or even a service line page. Increasingly, they begin, and often end, their journey with a generative answer.

To stay competitive, health systems must reimagine not just how they drive traffic, but how they capture and convert it. Traditional SEO is no longer enough. The new frontier is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), strategies that organize content in conversational Q&A formats, use structured data and schema markup, and position information to be picked up by AI-driven search experiences.

But even if that click is won, the digital journey can’t end at a static landing page. Unless the next step is personalized, immediate, and intuitive, the opportunity to engage that patient disappears. Health systems need to have intuitive consumer identity and experience on-ramps embedded throughout their digital properties.

Every visitor is more valuable than ever. Health systems must deliver personalized, logged-in experiences that build loyalty and drive retention. When a patient lands on a site, the experience should adapt to who they are, what they need, and how they prefer to engage. Guided navigation, tailored service recommendations, and contextual digital support aren’t just nice-to-haves – they are required to reduce friction and move people closer to care.

Search isn’t dying, but the way patients use it is changing fast. The digital strategies that worked even two years ago are no longer sufficient. Health systems must pivot quickly to remain discoverable, credible, and competitive in the AI-shaped search landscape.

Monday Morning Update 8/11/25

Top News

Doximity acquires Pathway Medical, which offers a medical reference AI assistant, for up to $63 million.

Pathway has sold annual subscriptions to the service for $125 to $300.

Doximity’s co-founder and CEO is Jeff Tangney, who previously founded medical reference app vendor Epocrates, which Athenahealth acquired in 2013 for $293 million.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Less than 10% of poll respondents think HHS’s “Make Health Tech Great Again” campaign will improve healthcare. Some comment excerpts from those who voted: 

• What is this callback logic, referring to “Again?” When was this imagined Nirvana of greatness in healthcare tech? The truth is, now is the Nirvana! Despite all the problems and challenges, healthcare tech has never been so strong, so widespread, and so capable.
• I find it humorous when the Big Tech execs talk about these bold “new” visions that will “revolutionize healthcare.” Meanwhile, those that actually know the industry all know that Epic already provides many of these things that they talk about like they are some sort of innovative future state pipe dream. … How long are we going to keep pretending that ShareEverywhere doesn’t exist already? Or the 24 million records already exchanged daily via CareEverywhere, half with non-Epic orgs?
• If the participating organizations feel so enthusiastically as their press releases and social media posts suggest, that this will be a game-changer for healthcare, they should have some financial skin in the game. Let them put in $100 to $100,000 each, based on annual revenue. If the goals of the initiative (which, from what I can surmise, are neither clear nor measurable) are achieved, everyone gets their money back. If they aren’t, the funds go towards paying off a minuscule slice of the national debt.
• Groundhog Day. It shouldn’t take some stupid slogan to bring the healthcare tech companies together and it’s embarrassing for the companies who have already taken millions of dollars out of providers pockets promising what was “contrived” at this summit.
• Very easy to smile and nod for the photo op and then do nothing. This will join the tall heap of other well-intended but failed HIT initiatives that will “transform healthcare”. Anyone remember PHRs? No? Me either.

New poll to your right or here:  How will AI scribe vendors like Nuance and Abridge react if Epic announces its own product as rumored? It’s a hot, investor-pumped market out there and much of the potential business, especially the high-dollar contracts, will involve Epic users. Maybe the rumor won’t pan out, but it’s fun to speculate anyway. This would test some theories:

• AI scribing is a commodity market with low switching costs.
• The real value-add is integration, where Epic can’t lose.
• Agile first-mover companies that have already established customer relationships should be able to dominate the more broadly focused Epic.
• Epic will always win even if their product starts out with minimal functionality because health systems prefer “one throat to choke” and Epic’s history involves rapidly improving a MVP-type offering.
• Epic will dominate because it can use its own massive data stores to train an AI scribe and can better integrate its output.

HIStalk sponsors who are participating in Epic UGM – tell me about what you’re doing by Wednesday, August 13 and I’ll include it in an online guide.

Sponsored Events and Resources

Instant Access Webinar: “Healthcare Data Strategies: Retire, Retain, and Ready for AI.” Sponsor: Triyam, an Access Company. Presenters: Sudhakar Mohanraj, founder and CTO, Triyam; Benjamin Cassity, director of research and strategy, KLAS; Jamie Greenstein, senior marketing manager, Access. The presenters deliver practical tactics to help IT leaders manage exploding data volumes — how to clean up legacy systems, craft smarter retention policies, and prepare historical data for analytics and AI.

Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Heartflow shares jump 51% on their first day of trading Friday, valuing the coronary artery disease technology company at $2.3 billion.

Announcements and Implementations

NASA and Google are developing “earth-independent” medical procedures for long-duration space missions, including a Crew Medical Officer Digital Assistant to help astronauts diagnose and treat symptoms without a doctor or contact with Earth. NASA plans to incorporate medical device data and adapt the system for space-specific conditions such as microgravity. Google says that lessons learned could benefit terrestrial healthcare but was vague on commercialization plans.

Government and Politics

A VA OIG review finds that VA facilities sometimes fail to retrieve and import community care medical records into veterans’ EHRs on time, with inconsistent use of tracking tools, unclear policies, and outdated technology contributing to delays that could impact care. The OIG made 10 recommendations to improve processes, oversight, and technology, all of which VHA agreed to implement. Veterans can obtain care in their community if they live more than a 30-minute drive from a VA facility, after which the community provider has 30 days to send records to the VA, which then has another week to scan the records and import them into the EHR.

Health wearables vendor Whoop says that it will continue selling its devices that include the capability to estimate blood pressure despite the FDA’s warning that it has not approved the technology.

Privacy and Security

Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center fires 15 nurses for allegedly improperly accessing the electronic records of a 12-year-old inpatient who died by suicide, citing HIPAA violations. The nurses have filed a union grievance claiming that the terminations were retaliation for speaking to the media.

Other

Doximity’s 2025 physician compensation report confirms the saying that the smaller the patient, the smaller the paycheck. Six surgical specialties top the list with annual compensation greater than $600,000, while 10 of the 13 lowest-earning specialties involve pediatrics and earnings of below $300,000.

A South African hospital halts a deceased patient’s funeral to demand that the family return the body for an autopsy, citing disagreement among a panel of doctors about the cause of death. National law allows remains to be released to a funeral home only with the stipulation that they be returned if authorities determine that a post-mortem is needed.

Sponsor Updates

• WellSky staff wrap thousands of diapers for HappyBottoms during the company’s quarterly volunteer day.
• Black Book Research announces the top-performing supply chain management technology vendors in US healthcare for 2025.
• AWS recognizes Netsmart with its 2025 AWS Champions Award for its Bells Virtual Scribe solution.
• Nordic releases a new episode of its “Designing for Health” podcast featuring Minal Shah, MD.
• Waystar will exhibit at the MedInformatix Summit August 12-14 in Austin, TX.

Blog Posts

• Benefits of Operational Optimization Prior to Epic Implementation (Impact Advisors)
• From Manual to Modern: Transforming Novel Influenza A Detection at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital (Inovalon)
• Beat healthcare burnout with future-forward tech that empowers patients as care team members (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• Your EHR support model is undermining everything (and you don’t even know it) (Nordic)
• What do nurses think of digital whiteboards? (Sonifi Health)
• OBBBA’s Impact on Hospitals & Health Systems (Symplr)
• Understanding the AR Process in Medical Billing (TruBridge)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Sponsorship information.
Contact us.

News 8/8/25

Top News

Epic will launch an ambient scribe tool at UGM, August 18-21, according to insiders who spoke to Politico.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

HIStalk sponsors who are participating in Epic UGM – tell me about what you’re doing by next Wednesday, August 13 and I’ll include it in an online guide.

I was experimenting with some long ChatGPT prompts that were a pain to retype every time but not appropriate for storing in long-term memory. The fix: AText, which lets you create text snippets that can be pasted via keyboard shortcuts. I’ve used Macro Scheduler for years and could have scripted the same result, but you have to be careful because it basically takes over your keyboard and thus requires very careful macro design. I know this because one of my macros deleted an entire HIStalk post years ago because I was unwisely triggering actions based on the location of the cursor and on-screen objects whose consistency I had overestimated.

Sponsored Events and Resources

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Hinge Health reports Q2 results: revenue up 55%, EPS –$13.10 versus –$0.96, beating Wall Street expectations for revenue but falling short on earnings. The $581 million loss was mostly due to stock-based compensation, but non-GAAP reporting otherwise showed a swing to profitability. Hinge shares jumped sharply on the news and are up 61% since its May 2025 IPO, valuing the digital physical therapy company at nearly $5 billion.

Telehealth vendor LifeMD reports Q2 results: revenue up 23%, EPS –$0.06 versus –$0.19, missing analyst expectations for both and sending shares down 45%. The company’s weight loss guarantee resulted in higher than expected patient refunds in a highly competitive GLP-1 market. The company’s market cap is $294 million.

Sales

• Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre will implement Oracle Health’s EHR, with go-live expected in 2027. I believe their current system is the homegrown SunnyCare, but I don’t know much about it or what they will be implementing from Oracle Health.
• Duke Health will implement growth planning analytics from Trilliant Health.

People

Roche-owned Flatiron Health promotes Nathan Hubbard to CEO. He replaces Carolyn Starrett, who will transition to senior advisor. Drugmaker Roche was rumored last year to be seeking a buyer for the cancer software company, which it acquired in 2018 for $1.9 billion.

UPerform hires Stephanie Lahr, MD (Artisight) as chief medical officer.

Meera Atkins, MD, MBA (Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota) joins Lyric as chief medical officer.

Industry veteran and recruiting firm owner Mark Fidler died on July 29 at age 72.

Announcements and Implementations

OpenAI releases GPT-5 to all users of ChatGPT as its flagship model. The company says that among its broad improvements, GPT-5 provides more accurate answers to health questions and hallucinates less than 2% of the time.

Ascension creates an innovation institute that will vet and implement technologies and innovations that can improve patient care and the clinician experience.

First Databank launches Meducation Bedside Solution, which allows bedside nurses to provide patients with first-dose education using the information in the electronic medication administration record.

Rhapsody announces GA of Envoy, a platform for managing integrations operations.

The AMA approves a new CPT code for body composition analysis, which will allow the US Army’s Armed Forces Wellness Center to record the discrete results of air displacement plethysmography into the EHR to better monitor body composition and prevent obesity-related conditions.

Pieces Technologies debuts a phone-based personal assistant that creates an inpatient EHR note from a physician’s voice memo.

Sponsor Updates

• Netsmart announces that it has been recognized as a Qualified Health Information Network.
• CliniComp expands its EHR Solution Suite at the VA Hampton Health Care System to the MedSurg unit in just one month.
• Hospitals under 50 beds indicate an urgency to transition to next-generation EHR replacements, according to Black Book Research, whose latest study highlights HIStalk sponsors Meditech and Altera Digital Health as top future-ready EHR vendors for smaller facilities.
• The Consulting Report includes Nordic in its “Top Consulting Firms of 2025” list.
• Health Data Movers sponsors the Northern Ohio HIMSS Charity Golf Classic & Collaboration Summit.
• Infinx will present at the Idaho HFMA 2025 Summer Conference August 13-15 in McCall.
• Meditech announces that it has been recognized as a Representative Vendor in the “Gartner Market Guide for Enterprise Electronic Health Records.”

Blog Posts

• Hallucination vs. confabulation: Why the difference matters in healthcare AI (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• Securing ePrescribing: Why Redundancy and Resilience Matter (First Databank)
• AI-Powered Customer Service Is Here, And It’s Changing Everything (Five9)
• In Honor of Kevin Mitnick: What Healthcare Must Learn About Social Engineering (Fortified Health Security)
• What the 2026 PFS Proposed Rule means for MIPS: Impact and opportunities for provider (Healthmonix)
• Don’t Let Your Legacy Systems Jeopardize Your Go-Live (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Lessons from Sanford Health: How to Create a Scalable Data Strategy that Works (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• 8 Proven Strategies to Optimize Revenue Cycle Workqueues in Healthcare (Impact Advisors)
• Faster Alerts Help PIH Health Transform Infection Prevention (Inovalon)
• Harnessing data to drive precision medicine in South Africa and Namibia (Meditech)
• Why EHR Vendors Must Partner with a CMS-Approved QR/QCDR for MIPS 2025 (MRO)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 8/7/25

One of the hot topics around the virtual physician lounge this week was the opening of the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine in Bentonville, Arkansas. The school is named after its founder, who is an heir to the Walmart fortune.

The initial class of 48 students will be trained in a curriculum that is based on preventive care and a whole-health philosophy. The school is located on Walton family property and borders the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, which should provide an excellent diversion when students need time away from studying. Apparently the curriculum also includes a course that incorporates art appreciation as a way of encouraging observational skills and empathy.

Students are expected to perform community service as a way of better understanding those in their care. Other ways the curriculum differs from the standard include a focus on nutrition education, including cooking classes with teach-back sessions to patients, and time spent gardening and working on a teaching farm.

Tuition for the first five graduating classes will be covered by Mrs. Walton, who hopes that graduates will consider practicing in underserved areas. There are certainly some opportunities for service in Arkansas, which has some of the poorest health outcomes in the US.

The lure of free tuition is strong, but students are taking a bit of a gamble attending a school that does not yet have a track record for residency placements or a broad alumni network. Still, the school received over 2,000 applications for the class. Best wishes to these new students, and I look forward to seeing how the curriculum is implemented as the inaugural class progresses.

Another hot topic was a recent JAMA op-ed piece that is titled “When Patients Arrive With Answers.” It covers the evolution from patients arriving with newspaper clippings to bringing in printed results of internet searches and now arriving with AI-generated materials to discuss with their physicians.

One of my colleagues focused on a line in the piece about tools like ChatGPT: “Their confidence implies confidence.” This led to a discussion hallucinations that we have encountered using AI solutions, even in situations where simple fact-based questions are being posed. The author notes that they are now “explaining concepts like overdiagnosis, false positives, or other risks of unnecessary testing.” 

That comment resonated with my colleagues. One noted that she feels that AI is worsening the burnout problem in her primary care practice. She must regularly defend her recommendations against AI-generated suggestions, as well as misinformation that is being provided by TikTok influencers. The author recognizes this, and notes that explaining evidence-based recommendations in contrast with patient requests isn’t a new phenomenon and encourages physicians to “meet them with patience and curiosity.” Given the tight schedules that most physicians face, I’m not sure that’s realistic.

Keeping with the theme of AI, I enjoyed this JAMA Editor’s Note on “Can AI Improve the Cost-Effectiveness of 3D Total-Body Photography?” As someone who has had entirely too many skin biopsies, this immediately caught my attention.

The authors specifically address the idea of photography for patients who are at high risk for melanoma, citing a recent randomized clinical trial published in JAMA Dermatology. The study found that although the intervention resulted in more biopsies, it didn’t increase the number of melanomas that were identified.

Another study that was also published in JAMA Dermatology looked specifically at whether 3D total-body photography is cost-effective. It found that it wasn’t, but posed the idea that with AI enhancements, it could become more financially feasible. For patients who need regular monitoring, however, I guess we’ll just have to stick with “usual care.”

I used a non-medical AI tool this week to help address a question that a family friend posed. When you’re a primary care physician, everyone assumes you know about all facets of medicine. I’m constantly getting questions about radiology reports or lab results because people “don’t want to bother the doctor.” I still find it strange that they’d rather expose their protected health information to someone they don’t know well, who is merely the daughter of a friend, but that’s often how it goes.

I was curious what the patient would have seen had they decided to just use Google or any of the AI tools out there. In this case, both Google and Copilot did a great job explaining “what does pleural based opacity” mean, giving answers that were similar to my own.

The primary difference between the human answer and the AI generated one was in the follow up. Where I said that the patient should follow up with the ordering physician to understand what the term means in context of their clinical picture, both sources recommended further investigation, which most patients would interpret as needing additional testing.

I wasn’t as patient with another person who reached out for medical advice. Someone who I hadn’t seen since high school decided it was a great time to message me via Facebook and ask about various medications versus injections versus surgery for back pain. I have to admit that I took the easy way out by saying “so many factors play into the choice of treatments and it really depends on the patient,” which was as empathetic as I could get at the time.

A few days later, I plugged it into Google to see what it would provide. It did an exhaustive review of the different options and closed with this: “Important note: The choice of treatment depends on the specific nature and severity of the herniated disc, as well as individual patient factors and preferences. It’s crucial to consult with a doctor or pain specialist to determine the most appropriate course of action for your situation.” At least in this situation, I agree 100% with the Google. 

Are you a clinician who has to field medical questions from people who are not your patients? Have you considered outsourcing your advice to AI, especially if it’s outside of your typical scope of practice? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Healthcare AI News 8/6/25

News

OpenAI will improve ChatGPT’s ability to detect signs of mental health issues or emotional stress after reports that it sometimes reinforces user delusions. The company says that AI can feel more personal and responsive than other technologies, which can be problematic to someone who is experiencing mental issues.

Clinicians credit Epic’s AI, which flags keywords in radiology reports, with helping identify lung cancer in a patient who was initially diagnosed with sinus issues.

Google says that Med-Gemini did not hallucinate when it cited the non-existent term “basilar ganglia” in a research paper, but instead relied on radiology reports for training in which “basal” was often erroneously transcribed as “basilar.”

A watchdog group finds that ChatGPT will advise teens on how to get drunk or high, hide eating disorders, and write a suicide note.

Business

Health tech and AI marketplace operator Elion raises $9.3 million in seed funding. The company says that 60% of US health systems have used its service.

Research

Researchers find that LLMs hallucinated 50% to 82% of the time when a single false element — such as a bogus lab result or nonexistent condition – was inserted into simulated clinical notes, warning that “adversarial hallucination” poses a serious risk to real-world AI uses such as clinical decision support.

Mass General Brigham researchers develop FaceAge, an AI tool that estimates age from facial photos. They found that cancer patients often appear five or more years older than their actual age, with the most aged-looking patients having the lowest odds of survival. They say that doctors already use visual assessments when considering ordering chemotherapy or radiation and the tool will help them quantify it.

A study finds that LLMs can screen EHR data to identify clinical trial candidates but sometimes performs poorly on specific eligibility criteria, leading them to instead score the patient by the percentage of requirements that they meet.

Other

Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis predicts that  AI may eventually take over aspects of diagnosis and decision-making that are typically performed by doctors, but it will never replace nurses because it can’t provide empathy, emotional support, and human connection.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Sponsorship information.
Contact us.

This Week in Health Tech 8/6/25

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 8/4/25

I recently had the opportunity to spend some time with a computer engineering student who was looking to learn about healthcare information technology. Specifically, he was curious about the role that clinicians play in the field.

We had some great conversations and the experience was very enjoyable, in large part because few of the discussions centered on AI. He has a particular interest in cybersecurity, so our initial conversations had some fairly deep coverage of the topic. He was interested in learning more about how hospitals and health systems handle the backup and recovery process, particularly when a security incident might have occurred. Based on a couple of his comments, I think I surprised him by being able to provide a deeper discussion of the topic than he expected to hear from a physician. 

It was a good opportunity to explain the field of clinical informatics and how many types of roles we fill. I’m unusual in how much experience I’ve had with infrastructure, architecture, and the nuts and bolts of interoperability. I’ve been fortunate to work with some great engineering and development teams throughout my career, picking up some interesting and unique knowledge along the way. I never thought I’d be able to have conversations about Citrix load balancing or be able to explain the role of transaction log shipping as part of a disaster recovery solution, but you never know where your career is going to take you.

In large part, I learned about those things not because I necessarily wanted to, but because I had to. The first EHR project I was involved in did not go well. A lot of IT folks were techsplaining, which didn’t help me solve the problems that were interfering with my ability to deliver high-quality care.

Although I think that many of them were just talking in their everyday language — similar to how physicians talk among themselves, without trying to leave me out of the conversation — I experienced more than one situation where an IT staff member was treating me in a way that was equivalent to patting me on the head and saying, “Don’t worry about this, little lady.”

After one of those encounters, I decided that I would need to hold my own, so I started doing a lot of reading. I figured if I could learn biochemistry and the complexities of the human nervous system I could certainly learn some of this new language and how all the technology was supposed to be working compared to how it was actually performing in the field.

Thinking about how information access has changed, learning about those domains would be a lot easier now than back in the days when only 5% of physicians were using electronic health records. You couldn’t just pop into your web browser and find articles about implementing systems in hospitals, because we were just getting started. Meaningful Use wasn’t yet a thing, and those of us that were trying to bring up systems were doing it because we thought we could revolutionize patient care, not because someone was making us do it.

Hospitals had electronic laboratory and monitoring systems and of course billing, but computerized order entry wasn’t even on the radar of physicians. Heck, we couldn’t even print patient labels from the computer system at one of my hospitals. They were still using Addressograph cards to add patient information to the paper used for writing daily progress notes.

We went down the internet rabbit hole as I was trying to explain that piece of equipment to my student. I wish I had a picture of the look on his face when I explained how a similar technology was once used to process credit cards at businesses. Apparently you can buy a vintage credit card imprinter machine via various online resale sites, for those of you who miss the very specific noise made when the charge card was pressed under the carbon paper.

That led to a good conversation around the idea that 40 years ago, we had no frame of reference for the technologies that we would be using today. No one would have guessed that we could simply tap our credit cards on a machine to pay, let alone load that credit card information into a palm-sized phone and use it to pay as well. I can’t even imagine how things will work in 40 years, and I hope that when he’s later in his career, he will have the experience of being able to share stories of how things used to be with someone who is just starting out.

We also had some interesting conversations about healthcare in general, and particularly around healthcare finance and how the revenue cycle works. In my opinion, it’s one of the messier aspects of the US healthcare system, and opportunities exist to make it better.

We had a good conversation around how claim adjudication works and why it’s rare in our area to see an organization that is doing real-time claims adjudication. Some of the practices that I go to don’t even collect your co-pay during the office visit, so I can’t imagine what a big shock it would be to use a system like that.

I also ended up teaching him how to read an Explanation of Benefits statement, which I think was an eye-opener, especially for someone who doesn’t have a lot of patient-side experience in his relatively brief adulthood.

I enjoyed learning about some of the non-healthcare work that the engineering student has done as he works towards his degree. Also, the supplemental activities that are available to students that didn’t exist when I was in school. His school has competitive rocketry, drone, and Mars rover teams where students can apply what they’re learning as early as the first semester. We had to wait until our junior year to really have experiential learning opportunities and they certainly weren’t as cool as any of those.

Although I tried to bring healthcare and healthcare technology to life, I’m not sure it’s going to be as cool as some of the other career options that will undoubtedly be available to him, especially if he’s leaning towards cybersecurity and cryptography. He’ll be back next week, and I plan to cover topics including robotics, prosthetics, and human-computer interaction. I might still be able to convince him that healthcare can be cool.

What do you think are the coolest technologies we’re using in healthcare, beyond AI? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Readers Write: Self-Service in Health IT: More than a Fancy Kiosk

Self-Service in Health IT: More than a Fancy Kiosk
By Sriram Devarakonda

Sriram Devarakonda, MSEE is CTO at Cardamom.

Self-service first emerged in the consumer space, where it was designed to offer a frictionless, user-controlled experience. Whether buying a soda from a vending machine, ordering a burger at a kiosk, or depositing a check via mobile app, self-service is no longer a novelty — it’s an expectation.

The goal? Empower customers with speed and convenience, while still providing the right guardrails.

In health IT, self-service started gaining traction in the early 1990s, as support demand quickly outpaced available resources. Early implementations focused on handling low-complexity tasks like password resets, login issues, and access to knowledge articles.

Today, self-service goes far beyond troubleshooting. Users expect more sophisticated, cognitive tasks, such as exploring data, generating ad-hoc reports, and deriving meaningful insights, all without having to file a ticket. Yet despite the strategic focus placed on self-service across industries, sustainable, impactful adoption in healthcare remains rare.

What separates organizations that succeed with self-service from those that struggle?

Let’s go back to the burger analogy. Why might a customer avoid using a self-service kiosk?

• The interface isn’t intuitive.
• It doesn’t allow for customization (no pickles, extra cheese?).
• It doesn’t support their preferred payment method.
• Most importantly: if the kiosk gets the order wrong, that customer probably won’t use it again. If the burger itself is bad, they may never return to the restaurant, which is a different, but equally important, problem.

Now, apply that thinking to self-service reporting in healthcare. The stakes are higher, and the choices are rarely as simple as picking from a preset menu. Success requires more than just implementing a tool. It demands the right mix of people, processes, and technologies to ensure that the information that is being served is accurate, actionable, and tailored to the user.

Here’s what that takes:

A deep understanding of users and use cases.

A care manager may need a quick list of patients for outreach. An ED director may be focused on real-time throughput. These are vastly different needs, both in purpose and in technical complexity. And that’s just two personas. Most healthcare systems support dozens more, each with their own complexities and needs.

Strong data governance

Certified, approved definitions help avoid inconsistent or misleading data. It’s the difference between ordering a Big Mac and ending up with a plain hamburger.

Rigorous validation processes

Just as restaurants test new menu items before launch, healthcare solutions should be reviewed by cross-functional teams — including clinical, technical, and operational experts — to ensure accuracy and trust.

A long-term mindset

Self-service is not a one-and-done implementation. It’s a journey that evolves with user maturity, system capabilities, and data maturity.

Robust user enablement

Even the best tools fall flat without support. Users need training, ongoing coaching, and a clear path for feedback and escalation.

Clear, meaningful measurement

Success should be tracked through real adoption, demonstrated value, and a measurable reduction in support tickets for routine issues.

Accessible, intuitive technology
The best self-service tools are invisible — seamless, simple, and always available when users need them. 

When executed effectively, self-service doesn’t just reduce dependency on IT teams. It empowers frontline users to make faster, more informed decisions. It builds trust. It turns skeptics into advocates.
But success isn’t a matter of flashy platforms. It requires a service-oriented mindset, one that is grounded in empathy, clarity, and commitment to getting it right.