Monday Morning Update 8/4/25

Top News

Digital physical therapy vendor Sword Health launches an AI division.

Sword Intelligence will have its own dedicated team and go-to-market strategy in operating outside of the company’s care delivery business. It will sell solutions to health systems, governments, and payers.

Sword Health’s June 2025 funding event valued the company at $4 billion.

Reader Comments

From Doc Martin: “Re: Sol Health rebrand. I thought this email notice was a joke at first. At least they named themselves after the most frequent response to mental healthcare needs nowadays.” The company renamed itself Sol Mental Health in 2023 as a reference to the sun. A hyped up rebrand evangelist decided it would be much cooler to shout it out in ALL CAPS, which turned the solar-themed company name into a version that starts with a vulgarity and ends with “out of luck.” HIStalk don’t play that — I capitalize the first letter even if the company doesn’t (Athenahealth), excise gimmicky symbols (M*Modal), and lowercase everything but the first letter unless it’s a clear initialism (KONZA Network is fine, SOL Health is not). Pedantic grammar note: an initialism is an abbreviation where each letter is pronounced (EHR), while an acronym is pronounced as a word (FHIR). Long-timers will recall the annual conference when HIMSS told its staff to turn the name into an initialism, forcing them to perform lingual gymnastics to sound it out as H-I-M-S-S to justifiably puzzled looks.

From Yardbird: “Re: LLMs. They might encourage generalists to manage specific conditions instead of sending the patient to a specialist if judgment rather than a procedure is involved.” That could happen and fits the cognitive displacement theory in which LLMs will replace people whose jobs involve recalling obscure facts, following a checklist, or reformatting information into a desired format such as a legal brief or a prescription. You could argue that non-procedural specialists often rely on pattern recognition to make a blink diagnosis that an LLM could replicate, with a generalist present to meet legal requirements or apply minimal judgment. Medicine changes so fast that the most valuable thing a specialist might offer is the focused-factory advantage of volume-bred expertise.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

About half of health system IT leaders expect their next budget to be less than the current one.

New poll to your right or here: How much will HHS’s “Make Health Tech Great Again” voluntary campaign improve healthcare?

I got some $10 AirPod knockoffs from Temu that are surprisingly good. Similar-looking versions go for as little as $5. I rarely use earbuds, so I was startled by the clarity and volume when I queued up some R.E.M. I’m sure the Apple product is fine, but not worth $200 to me.

I’m using Substack to create a solo hobby-style newsletter-website. It’s free unless you charge subscribers (that’s why I’m using it instead of the not-free Beehiiv) and definitely worth $100 or so to hire a Fiverr freelancer to tweak the CSS for formatting changes that the Substack UI doesn’t allow.

Sponsored Events and Resources

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Waystar reports Q2 results: revenue up 15%, EPS $0.36 versus $0.26, beating analyst expectations for both. WAY shares are up 72% since their June 2024 IPO, valuing the company at $6.2 billion.

Visage Imaging’s parent company Pro Medicus invests $10 million in lung function technology vendor 4DMedical.

Government and Politics

I was surprised to see NantHealth as a participant in HHS’s “Make Health Tech Great Again” event. I’m actually even more surprised that the company remains in business — shares are down 99.99% to just over a penny since the company’s much-touted IPO in June 2016, its market cap has been flat for years at less than $500,000, and the company’s top institutional shareholder owns less than $1 worth. It’s one of 11 Nant-named companies that were spawned off by billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, MD under the NantWorks label.

Other

A study finds that most ED patients who had a high mortality risk did not have their advance directive and treatment goals recorded in their EHR. The authors checked for healthcare proxy, power of attorney, living will, advance care plans, and physician orders for life-sustaining treatment.

Epic consulting firm Anura Connect posts on LinkedIn that some third-party EHR consultants are quietly double-dipping by working two full-time jobs at once and being paid by multiple health systems. The company says it’s easier to pull off now with loosely supervised remote work and a lack of vetting when hiring. It warns consulting firms that their reputation and long-term relationships could suffer when a client finds out, while the consultant themself could be blacklisted, at least until the next desperate recruiter calls.

Sponsor Updates

• SmarterDx donates $10,000 to Children’s Hospital Colorado.
• Black Book Research highlights Waystar in its latest report on the prior authorization technology landscape.
• Linus Health partners with consumer experience software vendor League to make online cognitive screening and care available to consumers through private health plans.
• Arcadia will provide its customers with a streamlined pathway into the CMS Aligned Network Strategy.
• Inovalon’s Converged Quality solution achieves NCQA HEDIS Measure Certification for HEDIS Measurement Year 2025.
• Ellkay, Surescripts, and TruBridge announce their support for the CMS Digital Health Ecosystem and Interoperability Framework.
• Nym names Sasha Ben David software engineer, Noa Landau coding specialist, Victoria Fitzgibbon and Kim Langner medical coding and compliance auditors, and Maya Enoch product manager.
• Symplr will present at AHRMM 2025 August 5 in Denver.
• Waystar will exhibit at the Mid America Summer Institute August 4-8 in Omaha, NE.
• CereCore releases a new podcast episode titled “The Value of Leadership and Optimization: A CNO to CEO Story.”

Blog Posts

• Iredell Health Sees Major Benefits from an Outsourced SOC (Fortified Health Security)
• Thriving through digital change: the critical role of nurse leaders (Meditech)
• 5 key takeaways on the EHR experience in 2025 (Nordic)
• Navigating the Shift to Modern Infrastructure (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Getting to ‘Yes’ with Hospital IT in a No-Spend Environment (Redox)

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 8/1/25

Top News

Several dozen health tech companies pledge at a White House-sponsored HHS event Wednesday titled “Make Health Tech Great Again,” to collaborate on interoperability and develop consumer-facing health tools in a patient-centric ecosystem. Thirty companies will build apps, 11 provider organizations will support adoption, and seven EHR vendors will promote data sharing and help “kill the clipboard” by reducing paper intake forms.

CMS says it will launch a digital health app library on Medicare.gov. It also outlined several related efforts:

• Enhancing the Medicare Plan Finder tool.
• Expanding the National Provider Directory.
• Adding digital IDs to Medicare.gov.
• Issuing FHIR-based digital insurance cards to improve access to Blue Button data.
• Launching the CMS Aligned Network to respond to patient and provider data queries.

The goals of the CMS Interoperability Framework include giving patients access to their medical and payer information using digital credentials and allowing providers to use their choice of technologies to obtain treatment access. It sets a July 4, 2026 date for participating networks to offer FHIR API access to chart notes, clinical documents, and encounter notifications.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor LiveData. Hospitals and ASCs come to LiveData for tools that improve surgical revenue, margin, and patient safety. Its PeriOp Manager is a modular, real-time “system of engagement” integrated across the complete patient journey – pre-op case scheduling, block optimization, day-of awareness, OR safety, and retrospective analytics. It serves the perioperative suite and services procedure service lines as well. The company’s OR-Dashboard with Active Time Out module was recognized as a Joint Commission Leading Practice, thanks to its impact on improving safe surgery checklist compliance. The PeriOp Planner module has been shown on average to increase block utilization by 34%, decrease cancellations by 54%, and increase case volume by 4-6%. Surgery departments using LiveData modules have documented other improvements in KPIs like case scheduling accuracy, first-case-on-time-starts, and OR turnover speed. LiveData helps its clients realize fast financial and strategic gains in competitive environments. Thanks to LiveData for supporting HIStalk.

Here’s a LiveData explainer video.

Sponsored Events and Resources

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Blackstone will acquire revenue cycle management firm AGS Health for $1.1 billion. Blackstone was rumored to be the leading bidder in late May.

Cybersecurity startup Axonius acquires medical device security technology vendor Cynerio for $100 million.

Clinisys acquires lab system competitor Orchard Software from Francisco Partners, which acquired the company in 2019.

People

Highmark Health hires Alistair Erskine, MD, MBA (Emory Healthcare) as chief information and digital officer.

Jared Allen, MBA (Premier) joins Sonifi Health as SVP of healthcare sales.

Medical University of South Carolina names Amar Nagaram (Indiana University Health) as enterprise CIO.

Announcements and Implementations

England’s NHS pilots an AI-powered virtual physical therapy clinic, using Flok Health, which offers same-day automated video visits. Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust reduced waiting times by 44%.

CVS-owned Aetna enhances its app with Aetna Care Paths, which gives members a personalized view of their benefits and provides AI-supported personalized health and wellness programs.

Clearwater launches an Enterprise Cyber Risk Management solution.

Government and Politics

ASTP/ONC submits a prescription drug cost transparency rule that addresses using EHRs to submit prior authorizations, choose drugs that are consistent with the patient’s insurance, and exchange prescription information electronically with pharmacies and insurers.

Other

An editorial in Radiology recommends separating the roles of radiologists and AI in diagnostic workflows, challenging the prevailing view that they should collaborate directly. It proposes that AI systems first generate a clinical summary from patient data, which radiologists then use to interpret images and produce the final report. The authors say that this division allows radiologists to focus on critical thinking and image interpretation while leveraging AI’s strengths in pattern recognition and data synthesis.

Sponsor Updates

• Konza Health pledges its support for the CMS Digital Health Ecosystem and Interoperability Framework.
• Black Book Research’s latest survey highlights a growing divide over AI regulation in US healthcare.
• Ellkay supports Ochsner Health (LA) in decommissioning its Cerner system.
• FinThrive will present at Mid America Summer Institute August 5 in Omaha, NE.
• A new Five9 study finds that its Intelligent CX Platform delivered $14.5 million in business value and a 212% ROI through automation and growth.
• Health Data Movers releases a new episode of its “QuickHITs” podcast titled “Building the Nest: Rebecca Woods on Community, Mentorship, and Showing Up Authentically.”
• Healthcare IT Leaders offers a new report titled “The State of Oracle Health in 2025.”
• Impact Advisors releases a new episode of its “Impactful AI” podcast titled “The AI-Powered Clinician.”
• Infinx publishes a new case study titled “How a Regional Hospital Reclaimed 30,000 Clinical Hours With Automated Prior Authorization Workflows.”
• Linus Health expands the availability of its Anywhere cognitive assessment platform to payers, pharmaceutical companies, wellness providers, and consumers.
• Med Tech Solutions publishes a new case study featuring Dayspring Health titled “Rural FQHC Migrates to the Cloud and Installs Technology Pieces to Modernize Service and Minimize Downtime.”
• The “Health Stealth Radio” podcast features MRO Chief Interoperability Officer Anthony Murray in an episode titled “TEFCA truth and interoperability tactics.”

Blog Posts

• Trust Is the True Test for AI in Healthcare (Medicomp Systems)
• Decisions, decisions: Things to consider when choosing an AI vendor (Altera Digital Health)
• A Strategic Guide to the Rural Health Transformation Fund (Findhelp)
• Proven Ways to Strengthen Active Directory Security (Fortified Health Security)
• No More Guesswork: Regional One Health Transforms Patient Safety (Inovalon)
• Hope and Healing: How EHRs Can Drive Suicide Prevention Across Care Settings (Meditech)
• The Strategic Value of Clinician EHR Coaching in Healthcare (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 7/31/25

There was some good discussion around the virtual physician lounge this week as one of my colleagues shared a recent article in Nature Scientific Reports about using AI to diagnose autism spectrum disorder and attention-deficit / hyperactivity disorder in children and adolescents.

Diagnosing these conditions can be challenging for primary care physicians who have limited time with patients and for parents who might wait months for their child to receive an appropriate assessment. In my city, the wait for a non-urgent assessment by a child and adolescent psychiatrist can be up to a year. Delayed diagnosis leads to delays in care.

The study still needs refinement, but preliminary results show that a sensor-based tool can suggest a diagnosis in under 15 minutes with up to 70% accuracy. The researchers began with a hypothesis that diagnostic clues can be identified in patients’ movements that are not perceptible to human observers, but can be detected by high-definition sensors. The authors catalogued movement among neurotypical subjects and those with neurodevelopmental disorders to inform a deep learning model. The movements were tracked by having the subjects wear a sensor-embedded glove while interacting with a target on a touch screen. The sensors collected movement variables such as pitch, yaw, and roll as well as linear acceleration and angular velocity.

I admit I was having flashbacks to some of my physics coursework as I read the paper, but it still kept my attention. The authors plan to continue validating the model in other settings, such as schools and clinics, and to validate it over time. The study has some limitations, namely its size. It had only 109 participants and some of those had to be excluded from the final analysis for reasons including inability to complete the exercise, motor disabilities, or problems with the sensors.

The participants were also a bit older than the typical age when diagnosis occurs, which could limit its broad applicability. Still, the ability to detect condition-related markers in an objective way, as opposed to having to use behavioral observations, would be a big step forward, especially if the study can be powered to significantly increase the sensitivity and specificity of the model.

Quite a bit of conversation occurred around a recent meta-analysis that looked at the number of steps adults should take in a day. Most of the patient-facing clinicians I know don’t have trouble getting their steps in on regular workdays, although some specialties have a fair amount of seated time, such as anesthesiology and pathology. A couple of folks I know are obsessed with getting a minimum of 10,000 steps each day, however, which is less important according to the recent article.

The authors looked at studies published since 2014 and concluded that individuals who got between 5,000 and 7,000 steps per day had a significant risk reduction for cardiovascular disease, dementia, and falls as well as all-cause mortality.

That’s not to say there’s a downside to getting 10,000 steps a day, but no clear evidence supports that specific number across the board. That’s good news for those of us on the IT side of the house who might spend less time ambulating than we’d like.

While we’re at it with our virtual Journal Club, another study that caught my eye this week looked at the benefits of the four-day work week. The authors looked at 141 companies that allowed employees to reduce workdays without a corresponding change in pay and found that the practice decreased employee fatigue, reduced burnout, increased job satisfaction, and improved efficiency compared to 12 control companies.

The process wasn’t as simple as just trimming days, however. Companies had to commit to some level of reorganization beforehand, focusing on efforts to build efficiency and collaboration prior to embarking on the six-month trial. There were 2,896 employees involved across companies in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand.

I’ve worked with a couple of vendors who have instituted this practice. Their employees seem to be satisfied with the practice. I enjoyed living vicariously through the account reps who used their long weekends for camping and backpacking.

One of the companies sold a patient-facing technology with 24×7 support, so extra coordination was involved to ensure that those workers had adequate days off even though the rest of the company was closed on Fridays. I’ve also seen some healthcare organizations do this with their management teams, although it doesn’t seem that big of a stretch when the organizations already had hundreds of workers whose routine schedules involved three 12-hour shifts and leaders were already used to providing management coverage 24×7.

From Yes, Chef: “Re: this week’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. I would have loved to have been part of the public health informatics team crunching that data.” The report details an incident that involved a pizza restaurant not far from Madison, WI last October. Apparently 85 people experienced THC intoxication after eating from the restaurant, which shared kitchen space with a state-licensed vendor that produces THC edibles. When the pizza makers ran out of oil, they used some from the shared kitchen, unknowingly putting some “special sauce” into their dough. Public health informatics is one of my favorite subdisciplines of clinical informatics, so here’s a shout-out to all the disease detectives out there who solve mysteries like this one every day.

I’m trying to slow the volume of emails hitting my inbox, and HLTH seems to be one of the biggest offenders. The organization has been averaging three emails a day over the last month and attempting to manage my preferences hasn’t seemed to make a difference. Before clicking delete, I looked at the registration options for this year’s conference. It looks like it’s $2,995 and goes up to $4,100 next week.

I get that it’s an all-inclusive registration and includes two meals on most days, but it’s still a large amount to ask companies to spend on top of travel and lodging. For the average consulting CMIO, unless I can get some good meetings scheduled, the price isn’t worth it. Of course, media and influencers can apply to attend for free, but that’s hard to do when one is an anonymous blogger.

If you’re experiencing an overloaded inbox, who is the biggest offender? Have you found unsubscribing helpful or do you have other strategies to share? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Healthcare AI News 7/30/25

News

Cedars-Sinai says that its CS Connect chatbot has been used in 42,000 telehealth visits. The system, which was built by integrating K Health’s technology with Epic, collects symptom information from the patient at the start of their scheduled or on-demand visit, then provides the physician with a summary and recommends treatment for their approval. Cedars-Sinai plans to expand CS Connect to support remote patient monitoring and link in-person urgent care visits with virtual care. K Health offers its own unlimited primary and urgent care virtual visits for $49 per month or $73 for a single visit.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warns that the company can’t guarantee privacy when someone shares personal or medical information with ChatGPT. He says that unlike therapists, doctors, or lawyers, OpenAI has no legal confidentiality obligation and could be forced to disclose user conversations in a lawsuit.

Stanford Medicine creates a virtual lab of AI “scientists” that communicate, debate, and collaborate under the guidance of a human principal investigator. Humans perform just 1% of the work, Stanford says. In a demo, the AI team designed an improved COVID vaccine candidate in just a few days.

Business

Mayo Clinic deploys high-end Nvidia hardware to support AI work in pathomics, drug discovery, and precision medicine.

Research

University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus researchers find that free, open-source AI tools can analyze medical images and reports as well as commercial systems like GPT-4, with the added benefit of keeping patient data within hospital infrastructure.

Other

Smart fitness company Amp adds a predictive AI coach to its $1,800 exercise machine that uses computer vision to track movement and adjust workouts in real time. The company strongly recommends spending the extra $23 per month for app membership since “it’s what turns Amp from a piece of equipment into your complete strength suite.”

Contacts

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

HIStalk Interviews David Howard, CEO, TeamBuilder

David Howard, MPH, MBA is founder and CEO of TeamBuilder.

Tell me about yourself and the company.

We started TeamBuilder in 2021. It grew out of almost 20 years of healthcare consulting. Much of that involved performance improvement, hospital and health system strategy, and the growth of health system employed physician practices.

Over the past 10 to 15 years, small private practices grew into large medical groups that health systems acquired. A lot of our work was focused around supporting that growth. The early stage of the TeamBuilder concept was studying how staff and staff management within those groups drive cost-effective access to care.

The reality then, as it is now, is that staff scheduling for these health system medical groups and smaller standalone groups is generally done on paper and spreadsheets. TeamBuilder was born out of that prior work to digitize the schedule process through a digital staff schedule that’s built for that care setting. We also apply data science to patient visit volume to align the team by hour and by day to drive cost effective access to care.

As for me, I spent 20 years in healthcare consulting in various aspects, from financial distress to performance improvement.

What challenges of paper scheduling can technology improve?

The scheduling of staff, and even providers, is more complicated than it seems. Dr. Smith might work Monday through Thursday, while Dr. Jones might work Tuesday to Friday. But when you’re talking about the staff – clinical, non-clinical, nurses, and front desk workers — every day is different, because different providers are in the office different days. Each provider sees a different number of patients for an array of reasons, such as the type of their patient panel and how busy their practice panel is. Monday to Tuesday to Wednesday to Thursday can be very different, and very different each week.

There’s a lot of turnover and callouts. A lot of mental gymnastics goes into setting the schedule a month or a couple of weeks out. I’ve got these callouts in the morning. My only front desk person called out. How I find the right person to backfill?

Schedules seem static and stable to an outsider, but a lot goes into it. If it’s a static piece of paper or spreadsheet, it’s hard to make changes and send them back out. Nobody has the right system of record or source of truth for what that schedule is on that given day.

Second is that provider practices, independent or not, don’t have a good way to understand the work that is needed to support that care. It involves a lot of heuristics. A rule of thumb might say that I need two nurses per doctor, but any benchmarks that are out there aren’t grounded in fact. How long does it take to check patients in, check patients out, room them, and come back in and give the injection or support a procedure in the office? It can be eye-opening for what is actually needed versus what managers, providers, physicians, and executives think might be needed .

TeamBuilder does both of those things.

What does your market look like?

When you think about the world of staff and staff scheduling, minds go towards existing legacy scheduling providers. Some great great solutions are out there, such as UKG Kronos, Symplr, Smart Square, and ShiftWizard. They focus on inpatient nurse scheduling solutions and provide the highest value there. It’s very different from the outpatient side of clinical practice and operations.

The outpatient ambulatory side of the house has been neglected over the years. That’s often surprising to people when we talk about TeamBuilder. Many health system executives don’t recognize the differences of staffing across the two.

What variables can be used to prevent overstaffing?

A lot of this is driven by visit volume by hour and by day for the office. In many cases, folks are just thinking, we’ll do 70 visits on this day, so I’ll need this number of people to work these shifts. But what does that look like over the course of the day? Is it 70 visits from eight until noon, and then nobody comes in from noon until 4:00? Folks often anchor by staff or provider, but we believe it needs to anchor on the visit volume and the visit volume throughout the day, not just in total. That is hugely important.

The other variable is how work occurs by specialty. We work with clients to understand their workflow. We have significant client cohorts, so we can say that within neurology, here’s how work is done and here’s how that team can be best aligned.

Do most organizations track productivity and staffing levels using external benchmarks, their own history, or nothing at all?

Some benchmark sets are out there, but the sample sizes are quite low and the questions are simple. The accuracy of the respondents to these benchmark surveys is not very high. The benchmarks that prevail most are the number of staff, which could be clinical or non-clinical, as a function of the number of providers. That becomes a problem, because providers could see 10 patients a day or they could see 35 patients a day. Why would you allocate staff the same if that’s the case?

Another common one is the number of staff per 10,000 RVUs. Relative Value Units is a metric that quantifies the amount of work effort. But it’s a billing designation that becomes a function of the acuity of the visit, how long it took and the complexity of the medical decision-making. But you don’t know any of these when scheduling a patient. So while it’s nice to be able to quantify using RVUs, it’s Monday morning quarterbacking. You won’t know the level of work effort until after it happens.

We anchor on visits. That’s what’s on the schedule and that’s what you need to set the schedule in the future.

What are the employee benefits of efficient scheduling?

It’s important to be able to quickly see your schedule on mobile or web. If the manager is putting out a paper schedule every other week that I take a picture of , what if it changes? Jenny calls out and now you don’t have an accurate view. That’s understanding your schedule, but it’s also important to be able to call out from your shift automatically so your manager doesn’t forget that you told her two weeks ago that you can’t come in.

People in all industries are looking for more flexible schedules. There’s remote work, or I want to be able to pick up a shift on my day off when someone calls out. Trying to manage a dynamic, flexible workforce is hard if you’re doing it on paper and spreadsheets.

Staff love the ability to see open shifts, pick up shift requests, and live in a more dynamic world. A lot of organizations are thinking about, should I pay a premium if I ask Joey to drive in from an hour away? If you pick up a shift inside of 24 hours, do I give you a little bit of a kicker? Staff are  excited about these things.

Can that help to reduce the cost of contracted workers, such as traveling nurses?

We often first think of managing the fixed workforce. You are hired to work Monday to Friday, 9:00 to 5:00, 40 hours.

How do I make sure that you’re providing that effort that you’re contracted for in the right place? Have I hired float pool or flex resources who I can tell where to report at a given time? Do I have per diem staff, either a little per diem group that is managed by the health system itself or engaged from nurse per diem companies to backfill shifts that I can’t fill from the first group? How do I get my best fit resource for the lowest expense and proper skill level alignment? 

Does AI have a potential role in your product?

It definitely does. We are constantly thinking about how to use AI behind the scenes, such as validating code or looking at user experience analytics. We use AI in a variety of ways today.

As we move forward, though, it’s important for our data science and analytics and recommendations to be well understood. Leaders and physicians and managers should be able to quickly understand why that recommendation was made, why this might be a better schedule, and how I should act on it.

At TeamBuilder, we are further clarifying what we do as an operational intelligence platform. We think of it as this intersection of  intelligence, which could include AI, and a practical reality that is well understood and explainable. The right answer can’t come from a black box, where nobody knows why the right answer today is 1.27 nurses.

I haven’t seen many CEOs and investors who have earned an MPH, which looks at how society can improve the health of the largest number of people rather than treating healthcare as a business. How do you see that intersection of healthcare and business?

I started in healthcare consulting out of business school after my MBA. I fell into it and grew to love it. Being able to drive business change inside of a clinical environment has been rewarding. When I was younger, I never foresaw myself getting into healthcare. I was doing turnarounds, distressed work, and strategy for health systems and growth. There becomes a time where you’re only looking at it through the business principles. I did not have as much exposure to the broader public health delivery ecosystem.

Going through the executive MPH program at Columbia rounded out that perspective. How is care delivered? Where does it need to be delivered? How is it done cost-effectively to provide value to community need?

There absolutely can be the intersection between running a business in an organization, but doing it in a way that benefits patients and providers optimally. The two are often at odds with each other, but don’t need to be. The backgrounds of the folks on our team let them live at this intersection between provider experience – which could be clinical or non-clinical – and business experience to be able to translate that. 

What factors will be important to the company over the next three or four years?

The care delivery environment continues to change. The mix of in-person, remote, inpatient, outpatient ambulatory surgery, and in-home care will need to be supported with flexible dynamism. The ways to support those settings are not well understood. A lot of our focus is to be nimble in helping organizations proactively recruit and retain talent and align it to drive care in different care settings.

This Week in Health Tech 7/30/25

Readers Write: Innovating the Consumer Experience Beyond the EMR with Open Standards

Innovating the Consumer Experience Beyond the EMR with Open Standards
By Robin Monks

Robin Monks is EVP of technology at Praia Health

Patients – and potential patients — expect seamless digital experiences. They’re getting them every day from their social media, retail, and banking apps. The difference in user experience between viewing a credit card statement and a healthcare bill is obvious – and shocking. At the same time, the costs of fragmented, proprietary systems for health systems are becoming unsustainable.

While we’ve seen progress in allowing patients access to more of their data, we’re just scratching the surface on data access and have yet to make inroads into data actionability. The lack of open standard adoption inflates integration costs, stifles innovation, and limits the true potential of digital health.

This challenge was the focus of our recent HIStalk webinar, “Innovating the Consumer Experience Beyond the EMR with Open Standards,” where fellow industry leaders and I explored the transformative power of open standards in healthcare. I was joined by Ryan Howells, principal at Leavitt Partners and program manager of The CARIN Alliance; David LaBine, vice president of software engineering at Providence 4SITE; and Kristen Valdes, CEO of b.well Connected Health.

We emphasized that open standards — such as OIDC (OpenID Connect) and HL7 FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) — along with broader open technology requirements are creating dramatic ROI where they’ve been deployed. They are strategic enablers that can dramatically reduce the burdens associated with integrations, data migrations, and workflow adjustments across the healthcare ecosystem.

These standards offer more than just future flexibility. They deliver immediate ROI by accelerating development timelines, minimizing rework, and significantly lowering long-term maintenance expenses. Every closed integration implemented today represents a missed opportunity to operate with greater speed, intelligence, and efficiency.

A key takeaway from our discussion was the critical role of open standards in fostering a truly patient-centric approach. The current landscape often forces individuals to navigate a labyrinth of disparate patient portals, each with its own login and limited data access. This creates significant friction and can even impede access to life-saving information, particularly for those managing complex or rare diseases. By adopting open standards for identity and data exchange, health systems can streamline patient access, improve engagement, and build stronger, more trusting relationships.

Our conversation also delved into the tangible business case for open standards, moving beyond mere compliance. By standardizing data exchange and identity management, organizations can reduce technology costs, automate manual tasks, and unlock entirely new business models. Examples shared included double-digit increases in lab completion rates and cash collection for health systems that have embraced open identity solutions. The ability to connect disparate data sources, from clinical notes to wearable device data, allows for a more holistic view of the patient that enables proactive care and improved outcomes.

We underscored the importance of leveraging established global standards from other industries. The financial sector, for instance, has long utilized open standards for seamless and secure transactions, demonstrating that these are solved problems that healthcare can readily adopt. This approach avoids the costly and inefficient creation of bespoke solutions, allowing resources to be redirected towards actual patient care and innovation.

For healthcare executives and developers who are looking to initiate this transition, the advice is clear. Identify areas where fragmented patient experiences and data silos create friction and cost. Assess how many applications are isolated due to proprietary identity systems.

The potential for double-digit increases in patient engagement and operational efficiency makes a compelling argument for investment. Advocates for this shift are often found among chief digital officers and transformation leaders who recognize the need for a broader, integrated ecosystem of applications.

A practical roadmap for open standards implementation involves a strategic, incremental approach. This includes auditing systems to understand existing data flows and identity challenges, developing a clear vision for interoperability, and creating cross-functional teams dedicated to this transformation.

Open standards are available for immediate adoption. Organizations do not need to wait for mandates or rely on proprietary vendor roadmaps. But adoption requires that vendors be held to open standards when evaluating solutions and during each renewal cycle. By actively engaging with collaborative initiatives and embracing these open frameworks, healthcare stakeholders can collectively drive innovation, enhance patient loyalty, and build a more efficient and effective system for everyone.

The time to act is now. The industry must move from business-to-business data exchange to truly individual-centered care.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 7/28/25

Several people have asked for my opinion about Bee, which Amazon is acquiring. The company makes the Pioneer, a wearable that records and transcribes your day. It captures not only what you say, but also the conversations of those around you. It tries to entice users by providing summaries of the day, reminders, and other suggestions from within its companion app.

Unsurprisingly, the solution also requests permission to all of the user’s info, including email, contacts, location services, reminders, photos, and calendars in an attempt to create “insights” as well as a history of the user’s activities.

The device costs $50, which can be avoided by using the Apple Watch app, and then a $19 per month subscription on top of that. The solution uses a mix of large language models to operate, including ChatGPT and Gemini.

A quick visit to my favorite search engine pulled up a number of pages that mention the device. Some reports say that it isn’t able to differentiate between the wearer’s conversations and what they were watching on TV or listening to on the radio.

I wasn’t surprised at all to hear that significant privacy concerns have been expressed. The company keeps transcripts of user data, although it doesn’t store the audio. I laughed out loud when I read quote from an Amazon spokesperson who said that Amazon “cares deeply” about user privacy and plans to give users more control over how their data is used after acquiring the startup.

Along with anyone who has had to go through multiple levels of annoying menus (that seem to change regularly) while trying to rein in their Alexa device, I’m not buying it. Although Amazon claims to not sell customer data to third parties, they have plenty of uses for it in-house. Anyone who visits Amazon can see how their targeted marking winds up in different places.

Putting on my end user hat, I have to say this is one of the more ridiculous tools, offerings, or solutions that I’ve seen. However, there must be a huge number of people who disagree with me, because if it weren’t a potential moneymaker, I don’t think Amazon would be acquiring it.

What if the user is located in a two-party consent state and is now recording conversations without notifying the other parties? I found a funny video about the device, where Wall Street Journal reporter Joanna Stern said it “turns you into a walking wiretap.” She also asked the device to do an analysis of her use of swear words over the course of the month and shared her statistics in a funny recap.

The company’s website plays a pretty mean game of buzzword bingo. Examples: “turns your moments into meaning”and ”earns and grows with you” as it “sits quietly in the background, learning your patterns, preferences and relationships over time, building a deeper understanding of your world without demanding your attention.”

The website shows an example of a user and their team “discussing ideas for the next product release.” That’s right, you can wear it to the workplace and have it collect all the company’s intellectual property over the course of the business day. I’m betting that most company’s employee handbooks don’t have language that addresses this. If I were in the corporate compliance department of anywhere with employees, I’d be sending out a memo ASAP.

The website also gives examples of how the device and its app can dispense parenting advice and manage issues such as “dealing with resistance to potty training and handling emotional outbursts.” I’m sure that pediatricians and family physicians will be thrilled to review the device’s recommendations at well-child visits (sarcasm intended) along with everything else they need to cover.

The website also had the device’s terms and conditions, which were 10 printed pages long. Here are some of my favorite highlights:

• By accessing the device, you agree that you have read, understood, and agree to be bound by all the terms, which can be unilaterally altered at any time and for any reason. The company will alert users simply by updating the “last updated” date on the terms page, and users “waive any right to receive specific notice of each such change” and accept the “responsibility to periodically review these Legal Terms to stay informed of the updates.”
• Bee specifically calls out in the second paragraph that it offers no HIPAA protection.
• The user accepts the responsibility to be compliant with any applicable laws or regulations and agrees to terms regarding the collection of data with respect to minors.
• Users are prevented from disparaging the company or its services.
• Users agree not to use information obtained “in order to harass, abuse, or harm another person.”
• Users agree not to “harass, annoy, intimidate, or threaten any of our employees or agents engaged in providing any portion of the Services to you.” The use of the word “annoy” caught my attention, since I can’t imagine an employee engaged in customer service or support who doesn’t find at least some percentage of the users with whom they interact to be annoying.

I found some user comments on Reddit and the following phrases were some of my favorites:

• I made the mistake of using the app to retrain my voice, and since then it doesn’t think I’m EVER talking, everything I say is recorded as “unknown”. So instead of thinking other people were me, now I’m not even me.
• While the little convo summaries are often amusing, now I am trying to figure out how this thing is supposed to be useful.
• Users accused the system of “trying to gaslight me.” Some of us get enough of that in our daily lives, so we don’t need an AI tool to contribute as well.

The website says the device is sold out, although the company is taking back orders and plans to ship new units by September. That means either their marketing team is trying to create some FOMO (fear of missing out) or that lots of people are ready to take the plunge, privacy be damned.

What do you think about the Bee Pioneer? Would you consider wearing one? Are you taking steps to specifically ban it and similar devices and applications from your workplace? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Monday Morning Update 7/28/25

Top News

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz will reportedly meet with tech executives Wednesday to seek vendor support for patient data sharing.

Reader Comments

From Oracle of Delphi: “Re: Oracle Health. A Redditor posted a screen shot of this comment from SVP Suhas Uliyar.” Larry Ellison’s healthcare minions are long on swagger and short on results. His provider-side guy (Chairman David Feinberg, former weeks-long Cerner CEO and leader of two Epic-using health systems) has been reduced to glad-handing and spending his golden parachute. Suhas’s entire healthcare background consists of a few months of chatting with health system C-suiters from his corner office at a company for which healthcare is a minor focus. Maybe he genuinely believes that Oracle Health can claw back customers who are still recovering from the cash and organizational stress that they judged was worth it to put Cerner in their rearview mirror. His thing is mobile and AI, so he’s betting that click reduction will provide a business case for former Cerner customers to return to the fold. I’ll make my own bold prediction: he’ll move on to his next Oracle suit job without seeing a single Epic displacement.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents aren’t convinced that pharma-sponsored telehealth doctors should issue prescriptions without reviewing the medical records of patients they have never met.

New poll to your right or here, as suggested by a reader: Health system IT leaders: How do you anticipate that your next budget will compare to this one? The simple answer choice could be nicely enhanced by adding a poll comment after you vote.

Sponsored Events and Resources

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

People

Cottage Health hires Ganesh Persad, MSBI (Emory Healthcare) as VP/CIO.

Michael Matthews (Yale New Haven Health) joins Northwell Health as VP of enterprise digital solutions.

John K. Wild, Jr., who took over his father’s JJWild business that sold hardware to Meditech and later moved into Meditech consulting, died Tuesday. He was 80.

Government and Politics

The FDA releases the Regulatory Accelerator, which provides digital health innovators with resources to help get their product to market.

Sponsor Updates

• WellSky’s summer interns volunteer at Kansas City Hospice House.
• FinThrive releases a new infographic outlining the timeline and impact of key healthcare policy provisions included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
• Altera Digital Health makes Sunrise 25.1 generally available to the UK healthcare market.
• A new Black Book Research study finds that clinicians benchmark AI tools on diagnostic accuracy, workflow support, and patient communication effectiveness.
• Nordic releases a new “Designing for Health” podcast episode featuring Brandy Parker.
• Redox releases a new episode of its “Shut the backdoor” podcast titled “A Bitter Pill – How Ransomware is Crippling Hospitals.”
• The ACHE “Healthcare Executive” podcast features RLDatix President of Patient Experience Solutions Ty Allen.
• Sonifi Health releases a new e-book titled “Trusted technology for new construction.”
• Symplr announces its first academic partnership with University of North Carolina Wilmington.

Blog Posts

• The One Big Beautiful Bill Act: A Seismic Shift in Healthcare Policy and What It Means for Revenue Strategy (FinThrive)
• Generative Engine Optimization: Why Data is Your New SEO Superpower (Kyruus Health)
• See What’s New with GEHRIMED PALTC Software (Netsmart)
• EHR Integration: PerfectServe Messaging for Epic & Oracle Health (PerfectServe)
• The One Big Beautiful Wake-Up Call: Experience Orchestration Is Now Essential (Praia Health)
• Inside Redox’s Journey to Empower IT and Data Teams Through Self-Service (Redox)
• The Quadruple Aim in Action: How Surescripts Is Advancing Healthcare’s Most Ambitious Goals (Surescripts)
• Maximize your investment in AI software for healthcare RCM: 5 initiatives for healthcare leaders (Waystar)
• UpToDate user survey: Shifting care team dynamics and added complexities show the need for clinical decision support (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• If You’re Connected to Carequality, September is Going to Affect You: What You Need to Know About Delegation of Authority (Zen Healthcare IT)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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News 7/25/25

Top News

Healthcare payments software vendor Waystar will acquire Iodine Software, which offers mid-revenue cycle solutions, for $1.25 billion.

Sponsored Events and Resources

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

We helped Praia Health put on a strong webinar this week titled “Innovating the Consumer Experience Beyond the EMR with Open Standards.” I noticed that presenter David LaBine from Providence has some cool guitars hanging behind him, maybe a Super Strat-style shredder and possibly a 1960s-era Teisco-style classic from Japan (he’s a band guy, per light Google stalking). All of the presenters held my attention, which is saying something. Praia’s founder and CEO is industry veteran Justin Dearborn, whom I interviewed a few months ago.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Informa’s half-year report notes that it has moved the HIMSS business, includes its conferences, from Informa Markets to Informa Connect, suggesting a shift in focus from large B2B conferences to year-round content and community engagement.

Sales

• Hospital for Special Surgery will implement Abridge’s ambient documentation system.

People

Virtual cancer care provider Reimagine Care hires Ann Stadjuhar (Decimal.health) as chief growth officer.

Avel ECare hires Martainn Lenhardt, MBA (Lyric) as CFO.

Neil Gomes, MSEd, MMS, MBA (AmeriHealth Caritas)  joins Avia as EVP of insights and advisory services.

Announcements and Implementations

Doximity launches an ambient documentation solution that is free to clinicians, but not integrated with EHRs. 

HL7 publishes the first FHIR standards for SMART health cards and links. Sample use cases are:

• Being able to present paper or digital proof of vaccinations that can be verified with the included QR code.
• Sending a member ID to a provider.
• Sending a link to a child’s school that allows them to review and verify their vaccination history.
• Providing a ticket to allow retrieving lab results.
• Authorizing a provider to time-limited or ongoing access to an individual’s medical data, including search capability.
• Scanning a prescription container to retrieve details.

The American College of Surgeons will work with Epic to automate the capture of surgical data from its EHR that can be sent in near real time to ACS’s quality programs and surgical registries.

ASTP/ONC releases USCDI v6. New data elements include implantable medical device UDI, portable medical orders, facility address to allow tracking quality by service location, care plan, date of onset, and family health history.

The American Hospital Association will educate groups about a postpartum hemorrhage risk assessment toolkit that Epic developed as a point-of-care feature in its Stork obstetrics module.

A new KLAS report on health tech staffing finds that three-fourths of responding organizations will either maintain or expand their use of contracted resources. The highest staffing need is for EHR projects and implementations. The chart above shows the 10 most commonly reported go-to firms.

Sponsor Updates

• Healthcare IT Leaders sponsors and the Boston Children’s Hospital Corporate Cup.
• FinThrive offers a new checklist titled “Turn Claim Denials into Approvals: 5 Steps for Success.”
• DrFirst shares the results of a new survey on advance care planning.
• RLDatix names Nicki Dexter chief people officer and Paul Sanders president of the UK and Ireland.
• Altera Digital Health adds the new Sunrise Health Record intelligent faxing solution to its Sunrise 25.1 EHR.
• Cardamom will host an Epic UGM networking event August 19 in Madison, WI.
• Optimum Healthcare IT becomes a services deployment partner for Workday Contract Lifecycle Management.
• First Databank names Alan Portnoy and Tiffany Abraham product managers and Nicholas Melson strategic account manager.
• Health Data Movers will host an Epic UGM networking event August 20 in Madison, WI.
• Clearwater will integrate Google Threat Intelligence with its managed security services and operations center solution.
• Impact Advisors congratulates Baptist Health – Central Alabama on a successful Workday implementation.
• Inbox Health announces that Veradigm has selected it as its app of the month.
• The Pharmacy Quality Alliance names Inovalon VP of Research Science and Advanced Analytics Christie Teigland, PhD to its Measure Concept Advisory Group.
• InterSystems will support the 2025 Run to Home Base supporting veteran and family care July 26 at Fenway Park in Boston.
• Kyruus Health’s Reach listings and reputation management solution now enables listings to display across Bing Places for Business, Google Business Profiles, and 100 health plan brand websites.

Blog Posts

• The hidden cost of inaction: How hospitals can prevent adverse events with better patient engagement (Altera Digital Health)
• Building the Backbone for Compliance: Using a CLRS for the New Medicaid Community Engagement Mandate (Findhelp)
• Top 5 KPIs for Managed Care Success (FinThrive)
• Respond and Remediate: A CISO’s Guide to the SharePoint Zero-Day Vulnerabilities (Fortified Health Security)
• Expanding value-based care to specialists: What the 2026 Ambulatory Specialty Model means for the future of Medicare (Healthmonix)
• Kyruus Builds a Generative AI Provider Matching Solution on AWS (Kyruus Health)
• How Amazon Connect Is Transforming Healthcare Contact Centers (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• SouthEast Alaska Regional Health Consortium (SEARHC) harnesses technology to enhance the patient and provider experience (Meditech)
• The hidden costs of low-cost staff augmentation: Why value beats volume every time (Cardamom)
• 2025 DIY Guide to MSSP ACO eCQM Reporting: From Clinical Data Chaos to Submission Success (MRO)
• Making prospective risk adjustment work for you (Navina)

Sponsor Spotlight

Effective cybersecurity demands not only visibility into threats, but also the ability to tap into the intelligence around these threats to understand and derive the best course of action in real time when they are detected. By embedding the latest and most robust threat intelligence commercially available into our Managed Security Services and Security Operations Center, Clearwater gives clients the insight and agility they need to outpace attackers. This includes predictive intelligence that enables Clearwater to take precautions to help block threats targeting healthcare organizations. Learn more about Clearwater’s Enhanced Threat Intelligence Service. (Sponsor Spotlight is free for HIStalk Platinum sponsors).

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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Sponsorship information.
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EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 7/24/25

JAMA Network Open recently published an Original Investigation titled “Patient Care Technology Disruptions Associated With the CrowdStrike Outage.” The UCSD authors found disruptions at 759 of 2,200 hospitals during the July 19, 2024 outage, with 239 of them being internet-based services that support direct patient care. These included patient portals, imaging and PACS systems, patient monitoring platforms, laboratory information systems, documentation platforms, scheduling systems, and pharmacy systems. The authors conclude that facilities should proactively monitor the availability of critical digital health infrastructure as an early warning system for potential adverse events.

The journal has had some great informatics articles recently, and also ran this one looking at the use of AI tools in intensive care units. A systematic review of 1,200 studies found that only a fraction (2%) made it to the clinical integration stage. There were also significant concerns about reporting standards and the risk of bias. The authors conclude that changes are needed in the literature looking at clinical AI, moving from a retrospective validation approach to one where investigators are focused on prospective testing of AI systems and making them operational. The study focused on systems used in adult intensive care units and I suspect that far fewer studies are done that look at the pediatric population, so that may be an area of opportunity as well.

From Savannah Banana: “Re: stadium naming rights. I saw an article about a city pushing back on a hospital buying stadium naming rights and of course it made me think of you.” Mayor Weston Wamp of Hamilton County, TN takes issue with Erlanger Hospital spending money on naming rights for the stadium that is used by the Chattanooga Lookouts “at a time of severe nursing shortages and quality of care concerns.” He calls the decision “hard to explain” and goes on to say, “As feared, it appears the stadium will be a drain on our community’s resources for years to come. Before I was elected, the Lookouts convinced city leaders to give the team all revenue from naming rights on this publicly owned facility. Now, in a sad twist, our local safety net hospital will be footing the bill for the Lookouts $1 million annual lease payment.”

The health system defended the deal, saying that “it allows our system an unparalleled opportunity to reach our community in new and exciting ways in a competitive market.” I still don’t understand how these naming deals generate revenue for hospitals and health systems, especially in regions where patients select hospitals based on the rules dictated by their insurance coverage rather than by their own personal choice or the influence of advertising. If some of our readers have insight, feel free to educate me.

Miami’s Mount Sinai Medical Center becomes the first health system to implement a Spanish-language version of Epic’s AI-powered Art (Augmented Response Technology) tool. Art helps process the growing volume of patient portal messages that are sent to care teams every day and creates drafts of suggested replies. The system has been available in English since 2023 and many of my colleagues who have used it consider it a game changer. I’ve seen it demoed multiple times but I’ve not personally been on either end of it since my personal physicians haven’t adopted it yet. I’m curious to hear the patient perspective, whether you know for sure your clinician is using it or whether you just suspect they are.

People are talking about Doximity’s free GPT. I tried it once awhile back, but I can’t remember if I was impressed by it. I received an email from them today inviting me to review an AI-generated professional bio for potential inclusion on my profile. I hope they’re not using the same GPT for their clinical tool, because what I saw with the profile was seriously underwhelming. It pulled the wrong name of the hospital where I completed residency, which it said was “preceding” my graduation from medical school. It ignored my recent achievements and publications and instead highlighted a letter to the editor that I wrote to a journal more than 20 years ago. I clicked the “don’t add” button on the entire thing. While I was on the site, I took the opportunity to check out their GPT again.

I asked it a fairly straightforward clinical question that is encountered in every hospital every day, asking for the initial steps needed to manage a particular condition. The first sentence of the response had me chuckling since it told me the first step was to recognize that the condition was present. Although not an inaccurate statement, it certainly wasn’t what I was expecting. The primary reference listed was from 2018 and there have been significant advances in management of the condition since then. I asked the question again and specified a pediatric patient and it failed to link any references. Based on those factors, I can say that I’m officially underwhelmed.

As we approach the end of the summer travel season, I spent some time at a continuing education seminar that covered travel health. As one would expect, a lot of the content that was presented covered vaccinations and other forms of prevention, as well as a review of the most common diseases. As someone who focused primarily on clinical informatics these days, I admit I wasn’t current on the status of some of the longer-known diseases, but I held my own in the discussions of those that have appeared more recently. Malaria and dengue lead the pack, with cholera and tuberculosis both making a comeback in recent years. Rounding out the rest of the list are Zika, measles, Chikungunya, Polio, yellow fever, typhoid, and rabies. It was a good reminder that regardless of how advanced we think medicine has become, there are plenty of things that can still get us in the great outdoors.

Have you ever had a travel medicine consultation prior to a trip? Did you find it valuable? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Healthcare AI News 7/23/25

News

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says that while he expects AI to eliminate entire job categories, he wouldn’t trust it for medical issues. He told banking conference attendees, “ChatGPT today … is a better diagnostician than most doctors in the world, yet people still go to doctors … maybe I’m a dinosaur here, but I really do not want to entrust my medical fate to ChatGPT with no human doctor in the loop.”

A University of Michigan poll of people over 50 finds that only 14% have used AI to obtain health-related information. Nearly half of those said that human interaction would have been better.

Qualifacts adds AI workflow tools to its behavioral and human services EHRs. The enhancements are free to existing customers.

Kims Hospitals in India launches AI-equipped, 5G-enabled ambulances that connect directly to EDs, allowing treatment to begin in transit during the “golden hour” for trauma, cardiac arrest, and stroke.

Business

Amazon will acquire Bee, which offers a $50 AI-powered wristband that listens to conversations and generates summaries, to-do lists, and reminders.

Aidoc raises $150 million in funding, increasing its total to $370 million.

Research

A researcher finds that large language models have stopped adding disclaimers to their responses that relate to medical issues, such as “My child’s lips are turning blue. Should I call 911?” Experts have observed that users are working around ChatGPT’s reluctance to analyze X-rays or blood work by saying that the images are from a movie script or school assignment.

Other

Provider Net EHR Experience scores at University of Iowa Health Care increased by 31.7 points after adopting the Evidently EHR summary tool.

A Wall Street Journal report describes how ChatGPT fueled a man’s delusions and mania by validating his belief that he had discovered a way to bend time. It also assured him that he was not experiencing mental health issues, explaining that “crazy people don’t stop to ask, am I crazy?” His mother later found the chat session and asked ChatGPT what went wrong, where it acknowledged that it had responded poorly and gave him the illusion of trusted companionship.

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 7/23/25

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 7/21/25

Mr. H is running a poll that asks, “Is it ethical for doctors to prescribe the drugs of their pharma sponsors to people who seek specific treatments?” He also posed a couple of follow-up questions, such as “Would you choose as your PCP a doctor who will prescribe whatever a drug company pays them to, even with minimal information about their patients?” and “Is a drug safer just because it can be sold only with a prescription, especially since prescribing might be nearly automatic and the same item might be sold safely over the counter everywhere else in the world?”

I like the response choices that Mr. H included in the poll. I thought I would go through them and add a few of my thoughts on those as well as the follow-up questions.

No. The patient should see their regular doctor. As a primary care physician, I agree with this one in my heart. Unfortunately, I can’t agree with it in my head, because a large number of people in the US simply don’t have a “regular doctor.”

According to my favorite search engine, approximately one-third of people in the US lack primary care physicians, and about a quarter of those are children. Although children can’t be expected to understand the importance of having a medical home and generally don’t have the capacity to arrange for their own care, those factors apply to a lot of adults that I encounter. Once they realize they need a “regular doctor,” they find out that it takes months to get an appointment to see one, which leaves them in the lurch. It’s easy to turn to retail clinics, online clinics, or physician groups that have been specifically formed to prescribe drugs or order tests offered by a particular for-profit entity.

No, unless they review the patient’s medical records. It’s always important to understand the history of a patient you’re treating in addition to their current health status. For example, you don’t want to prescribe the majority of estrogen-containing products to a patient who has had estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer. If you didn’t review the records, you might not know that, especially if the patient didn’t offer the specific information about her tumor.

I’ve worked as a telehealth physician for the large national telehealth companies. Most of the time in those situations, you don’t have the patient’s records. You might have a history that the patient has populated, but due to the nature of the workflow (filling out that history is standing between the patient and their visit), sometimes the histories are less than comprehensive. Also, patients sometimes omit things from the history in an attempt to get a specific treatment, and without being able to see their longitudinal records, you might miss those facts.

No. It drives costs up for everyone. This response is currently scoring rather low, but it’s an important one. Some of the diagnostic testing that is offered through these sponsor-focused programs can be wasteful as well as inappropriate. There’s a reason that screening tests have to go through a rigorous review in order to be formally recommended. Data has to show that they are not only safe and effective, but that screening large populations is cost effective.

In looking at some of the drug-related telehealth programs, available generic drugs are often equally effective as those that are manufactured by the program sponsor. You can bet that providers in the panel aren’t going to be prescribing those. If insurance is paying for the medications, this approach drives up costs for everyone. If the patient is paying out of pocket, not so much, but there’s still an overall societal cost.

No. It’s a prescriber lawsuit waiting to happen. I’m a little on the fence about this one. There’s a difference between outright malpractice and offering a treatment that might be safe and effective but not the ideal treatment for a particular patient. One of the things that physicians are encouraged to do is to take the personal preferences and cultural beliefs of our patients into practice before entering into shared decision-making with them.

If that sounds like a mouthful, that’s because it is. You’re not going to get that approach when you’re having an asynchronous, questionnaire-based visit with a physician who has no idea what you believe or value or how to meet you where you are.

Yes. It’s legal and what patients want. I’m going to channel millions of parents of teenagers here. My first thoughts were, “Just because it’s legal doesn’t make it the right thing to do” and “I want a lot of things, but that doesn’t mean I get all of them.”

I’ve treated many patients who think they want something. But when the risks and benefits are adequately explained, it turns out they really don’t want those things at all. I’m sure some program-employed telehealth physicians out there are committed to explaining the pros and cons. But I also suspect that they won’t last long in that model if they aren’t prescribing the target product, treatment, or intervention.

Of course, this happens during in-person visits as well. I once worked for an urgent care with in-house pharmacy and we were strongly encouraged to write lots of scripts to treat patient symptoms. Some of the drugs we were encouraged to prescribe had little value beyond that of placebo, so I simply didn’t do it. Still, there was a lot of pressure to do so, and I suspect that many of my colleagues just gave in.

Not sure, but it’s puzzling that doctors do this. I see a conversation about this nearly every day across the physician online forums I follow. A lot of reasons are cited for working in these models. Among them: burned out physicians or those leaving toxic practices who might be working through a non-compete situation; physicians who are fully employed but need extra money to cover their student loans, especially since some of the loan repayment programs just got unilaterally modified; and physicians who made poor financial choices and now need to make more to prepare for retirement.

I rarely see anyone say that they’re doing it because they like the product or service that they are ordering. Or that they feel that they are satisfying a clinical need that would otherwise be unmet.

As for Mr. H’s follow-up questions, I’d be skeptical about choosing a primary care physician who will prescribe whatever a company pays them to order, even with minimal patient information. It’s hard enough to practice good primary care without having undue influences coming between the patients and our good judgment.

As for whether a drug is safer because it’s available by prescription, I’d say it depends. Some drugs require a prescription in the US and not in other countries, and for the majority of them, I think they would be OK to go non-prescription in the US.

However, it’s important to understand the environment in which those drugs are non-prescription in other countries. Patients may have higher health literacy and a greater sense of personal responsibility in other countries. Also, I’ve experienced pharmacists in other countries who are more accessible to counsel patients about these selections. 

Plenty of substances are regulated differently in other countries than they are in the US (don’t get me started on why the rest of the world has better sunscreen products than we do) and it’s just overall a different environment in those countries. Not to mention that the presence of universal healthcare everywhere else provides a safety net for patients who don’t get the desired outcomes from self-treatment.

It will be interesting to see the final poll results when they come in. Feel free to leave a comment when you vote on the poll, and as always, you are welcome to leave a comment here or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Readers Write: The Multi-Million Dollar Transformation Opportunity Healthcare Loves to Hate: Application Rationalization

The Multi-Million Dollar Transformation Opportunity Healthcare Loves to Hate: Application Rationalization
By Amy Penning

Amy Penning is senior application analyst at CereCore.

Rationalize your applications, they say. It will lead to cost savings, streamline your portfolio, and release resources for innovation and technological advancement.

So why do we groan at the idea of starting an application rationalization effort? Immediate reactions to AppRat, as it is commonly called, are often due to the complexity of the work and lack of employee bandwidth to complete the work thoroughly. AppRat is often deemed a “not now, but maybe later” task that is driven by bigger strategic moves like M&A, cloud migration, and EHR implementations, further complicating these mission imperatives, adding to their timelines, and increasing their cost.

Consider these points about all there is to gain from having full visibility into your application portfolio before, rather than during, another strategic undertaking at your organization.

Application Sprawl is Expensive and Risky

Over time, even the most well-managed IT environments accumulate technical debt. Siloed purchasing, legacy systems, and shadow IT can create a bloated application portfolio that could:

• Drain IT support resources.
• Increase cybersecurity risk.
• Inflate licensing and maintenance costs.
• Complicate integration and data governance.
• Impact patient safety.

Application sprawl quietly erodes operational efficiency and financial flexibility, with the most significant impact observed at small to mid-sized hospital systems. However, application rationalization as a strategic lever introduces efficiencies through the elimination of overspending on resources and duplicated functionality.

Why AppRat Is a Strategic Lever, Not Just Cleanup

Too often, we think of AppRat as a “someday” project, something to tackle after the dust settles from a major initiative. But done right, it can:

• Fund transformation by freeing up capital that is tied to redundant or underused systems.
• Accelerate innovation by simplifying the IT landscape and enabling faster adoption of technology.
• Improve clinician experience by reducing system fragmentation and login fatigue.
• Streamline training and support by setting up your organization with enterprise standards versus siloed applications.
• Strengthen security posture by eliminating outdated or unsupported applications.

AppRat’s Anticipated Impact on Operations

I have led programs that decommissioned as many as 30% of an organization’s applications over five years, resulting in savings of as much as $70M. Given the value of resources that can be redirected to patient care, staff development, and digital innovation, the potential impact of an AppRat initiative is even higher.

Timing Is Everything, But So Is Framing the Purpose and Value of AppRat

Timing matters. No one wants to launch AppRat during a go-live or construction phase. But waiting for the perfect time often means that it never happens. 

Instead, organizations should reframe AppRat as a foundational part of transformation, not a follow-up act. AppRat should be a thoughtful, repeatable process that is embedded in the planning phase of any major initiative, not left for the post-project cleanup crew. 

Use Industry Tools Instead of Devising Your Own AppRat Approach

Leverage the findings and tools of those who have done the work before you. The CIO Council’s The Application Rationalization Playbook is available as a free download. It’s a great starting point to understanding methodology

Final Thought: Rationalization Is Essential

Application rationalization should become a regularly performed assessment of your overall application portfolio. It is never finished, but it is foundational. Start your organization’s next major technology innovation or change with full transparency into your organization’s IT costs and cost of ownership by conducting AppRat before it even starts.

Monday Morning Update 7/21/25

Top News

Humana integrates its health plan information with Epic, which allows patients to track deductibles and access health plan resources from their provider’s MyChart.

Reader Comments

From Guillermo: “Re: pharma telehealth. At least the clinicians who rubber stamp the patient’s self-diagnosis and self-prescribing will be able to see more patients. They will also get higher satisfaction scores in return for not using their professional judgment.”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Most poll respondents would prefer that the federal government stay out of patient records in the absence of patient complaints, quality reviews, or illegal activities.

New poll to your right or here: Is it ethical for doctors to prescribe the drugs of their pharma sponsors to people who seek specific treatments? Or phrased another way, would you choose as your PCP a doctor who will prescribe whatever a drug company pays them to, even with minimal information about their patients? An add-on question might be – is a drug safer just because it can be sold only with a prescription, especially since prescribing might be nearly automatic and the same item might be sold safely over the counter everywhere else in the world?

I was thinking as I set up the new poll. Do medical practices ever require patients to sign a pre-treatment document that requires any complaints to be resolved by arbitration instead of by lawsuit?

An interesting grammar quirk that Deepseek says is regional to the South or Midwest: making a business name possessive. I’m shopping at Target’s. I reckon I might go have lunch at Weinerschnitzel’s. Non-regional quirk #2, often seen on LinkedIn: leaving out pronouns in writing, but not speaking. Example: “Humbled to get the award. Appreciate the recognition. ”

Sponsored Events and Resources

July 22 (Tuesday) 1 ET. “Innovating the Consumer Experience Beyond the EMR with Open Standards.” Sponsor: Praia Health. Presenters: Ryan Howells, principal, Leavitt Partners and program manager, The CARIN Alliance; David LaBine, VP of software engineering, Providence Digital Innovation Group; Robin Monks, CTO, Praia Health; Kristen Valdes, CEO, b.well. As healthcare faces rising consumer expectations and tighter regulations, the high cost of maintaining fragmented, proprietary systems is no longer sustainable. While patient data access has improved, the lack of open standards continues to hinder innovation, drive up integration costs, and limit the potential of digital health beyond the EHR. This webinar will discuss how open standards like OIDC,  HL7 FHIR, and open technology requirements are essential for reducing integration burdens, accelerating development, and lowering maintenance costs. Panelists will describe how every closed integration represents a lost opportunity and will offer practical strategies for leveraging open technology as a competitive advantage that improves efficiency, ensures compliance, and strengthens patient trust.

Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Bankrupt Steward Health Care System sues its former executives for $1.4 billion, claiming that former CEO Ralph de la Torre and others “pilfered” its assets for personal gain in 2021 and 2022. The lawsuit claims that de la Torre arranged to pay a $111 million dividend to insiders while the company was insolvent, of which $81.5 million went to de la Torre, who used the proceeds to buy a $40 million yacht that costs $4 million per year to operate. His other yacht is worth $15 million.

The health IT market half-year review by Healthcare Growth Partners concludes that despite volatile market conditions that were created by White House policies, the market is performing well as interest rates are falling, capital is accumulating, the IPO market is functioning again, and investors are anxious to update their holdings and use their accumulated reserves. HGP thinks that the successful IPOs of Hinge Health and Omada Health will pave the way for rumored candidates Sword Health, Ro, Quantum Health, Spring Health, ZocDoc, Headway, and Maven Clinic.

Sales

• Peterson Health (TX) will implement Medaptus Charge Pro.

People

Optimum Healthcare IT hires Kumar Murukurthy, MBBS (Altais) as chief clinical officer.

Announcements and Implementations

The just-opened Charlotte, NC campus of Wake Forest’s medical school will use computer-powered patient dummies, a digital anatomy lab instead of cadavers, and problem-based learning and patient contact that starts on the medical student’s first day of classes.

An NYU study finds that patient EHR data accurately identifies those with heart failure, but still misses more than half of those who could be identified using recently developed standardized heart failure criteria.

A pre-print study by AI symptom checker Doctronic finds that the diagnosis and treatment plans of its “autonomous AI doctor” for virtual urgent care encounters were comparable to those of board-certified clinicians. The conflict of interest is 100%, but my real question was that if the findings were representative, what next? Despite the “autonomous” label, technology will not be taking over patient care any time soon, so that leaves the vague reduction of “administrative burden” rather than improved patient care as its raison d’être. It seems that selling AI solutions will require defining the extent and cost of that burden compared to the cost of the product, which can be a tough sell to a health system that isn’t good at capturing optimistic theoretical savings.

Government and Politics

HHS gives the Department of Homeland Security’s ICE agents access to the names and addresses of 79 million Medicaid recipients that will be used to track down those who are living in the US illegally. HHS had previously maintained that the information would be used only to reduce costs by identifying non-citizens who access Medicaid benefits.

The New York Times reports that Make America Healthy Again promoter and HHS adviser Calley Means is a co-founder of Truemed, a “wellness company” startup that issues medical necessity letters to people who want to use their health savings and flexible spending accounts to buy products such as bidets, saunas, and exercise equipment using tax-advantaged accounts. The company says it issued 500,000 such letters last year, for which it was paid from vendors of the purchased products. Users submit questionnaires that are a “giant wink” of pre-populated medical conditions that are not reviewed by clinicians, then receive their rubber-stamped doctor notes almost immediately from Truemed’s contracted white label telehealth provider OpenLoop Health. One telehealth lawyer calls the business “box-checking dressed up as medicine” as new startups rush to market.

A new Texas law requires covered entities to physically store their EHR data in the US. Also in the law:

• Providers may not store patient credit scores or voter registration status in the EHR.
• Clinicians may use AI provided they review its recommendations.
• Parents of minors must be granted access to the EHR records of their children.
• The EHR must support entry of biological sex as either male or female only.
• The EHR must restrict providers from changing a patient’s biological sex data except to correct a clerical error or from a documented disorder.
• Civil penalties up to $250,000 per violation for non-compliance can be assessed.

Other

A man dies after entering the MRI room where his wife was undergoing a procedure and was pulled into the machine when the magnet attracted his 20-pound metallic exercise necklace.

Sponsor Updates

• FinThrive will sponsor the HFMA Southern California Chapter’s Women’s Disruptive Leadership Summit July 24 in Long Beach, CA.
• Black Book Research’s latest survey results reveal major advances in EHR usability and clinician satisfaction.
• DrFirst promotes Erin Hall to director of event strategy and experience.
• Clearsense appoints recently retired AdventHealth president and CEO Terry Shaw to its Board of Directors.
• Nym names Daniel Masvidal EVP of customer operations and hires Nir Cohen as medical data analyst, Nadav Poran as backend developer, Grace Hejnal as medical coding and compliance auditor, Dimple Patel as director of strategic accounts, and Ben Shmueli as software engineer.
• Symplr achieves HITRUST certification and re-certification for several solutions.

Blog Posts

• How Health First Improved DKA Care With Pharmacy Surveillance Software (Inovalon)
• Actionable Strategies for Generative Experience Optimization (GEO) in Local Patient Search (Kyruus Health)
• Balancing data privacy in healthcare with the need for care personalization (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• Whole-Person Care in Action: How Integrated Platforms Are Transforming Addiction Recovery (Netsmart)
• Tech doesn’t work: Implementation does (Nordic)
• Why Health System Apps Haven’t Delivered (and What Needs to Change) (Praia Health)
• Redox Now Supports CDS Hooks: Smarter Decision Support, Seamlessly Delivered (Redox)
• Where Interoperability Strategy Falls Short—And How to Fix It (Rhapsody)
• Healthcare Data and the Longest Movie Ever Made (Surescripts)
• Fueling Financial Performance: A Step-by-Step KPI Guide (Tegria)
• The CEO Signal: The DNA of a Company Begins with its Founders (VitalChat)
• Learnings from the front lines: AI and home health care (WellSky)
• If You’re Connected to Carequality, September is Going to Affect You: What You Need to Know About Delegation of Authority (Zen Healthcare IT)

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 7/18/25

Top News

A Senate investigation finds that direct-to-consumer telehealth platforms that are operated by drug companies steer patients toward their own drugs.

Up to 85% of those patients receive a prescription from hand-picked telehealth providers, with some platforms allowing patients to pre-select the drug they want before the visit.

The report likens pharma-sponsored DTC telehealth to “an Amazon shopping experience” where patients can self-diagnose and pick their drug with a few clicks.

Some telehealth companies don’t use video visits, meaning that their providers are prescribing without seeing the patient. They also do not have access to the patient’s medical records, so they rely solely on patient-completed questionnaires.

The probe found that the drug companies paid their telehealth partners from $510,000 to $2.45 million each over their three-year contracts, but they did not violate anti-kickback laws by paying bonuses for generating more prescriptions.

Reader Comments

From Grammarian: “Re: using mispronunciation as written words, like this vendor’s email that says y’all. Hate it.” Mispronouncing you all as y’all conveys at least a small amount of regional charm. Replicating that mispronunciation as a misspelling seems odd. I blocked some Southern food social media sites because people were expressing their culinary nostalgia by writing taters, okrie, and kilt lettuce as the menu items they “fixed” for “supper.” They also fail to notice that the forum’s creator and moderator isn’t from the South unless you count South Sudan, which is obvious by the misspellings and odd phrasing that those admins use when describing the online photos that they have clearly stolen.

Sponsored Events and Resources

July 22 (Tuesday) 1 ET. “Innovating the Consumer Experience Beyond the EMR with Open Standards.” Sponsor: Praia Health. Presenters: Ryan Howells, principal, Leavitt Partners and program manager, The CARIN Alliance; David LaBine, VP of software engineering, Providence Digital Innovation Group; Robin Monks, CTO, Praia Health; Kristen Valdes, CEO, b.well. As healthcare faces rising consumer expectations and tighter regulations, the high cost of maintaining fragmented, proprietary systems is no longer sustainable. While patient data access has improved, the lack of open standards continues to hinder innovation, drive up integration costs, and limit the potential of digital health beyond the EHR. This webinar will discuss how open standards like OIDC,  HL7 FHIR, and open technology requirements are essential for reducing integration burdens, accelerating development, and lowering maintenance costs. Panelists will describe how every closed integration represents a lost opportunity and will offer practical strategies for leveraging open technology as a competitive advantage that improves efficiency, ensures compliance, and strengthens patient trust.

Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Bloomberg reports that UnitedHealth Group sold stakes in some of its businesses last year to private equity firms, then booked the resulting $3.3 billion as operating profit to offset losses from higher medical costs. Analysts say that it is unusual and potentially misleading for companies to selectively disclose asset sales, also noting that the deals appear to require UnitedHealth to repurchase the investments at a higher price after several years. UnitedHealth insisted to those involved that the deals should not be publicly disclosed.

Sales

• Royal Devon NHS implements Wolters Kluwer Health’s UpToDate Enterprise Edition as the first Trust to do so.

Announcements and Implementations

CareCloud launches a dermatology EHR with AI-powered charting.

Respondents to an AdvancedMD survey of ambulatory practices say that their EHR has the greatest impact on patient outcomes, with their telehealth platform ranking second, ahead of clinical decision support tools and mobile apps. Two-thirds report that patients schedule their appointments most commonly via a phone call.

Inbox Health releases a patient-facing AI chatbot assistant that is integrated with its billing platform.

Kyruus Health expands its Reach digital provider listing and reputation management solution to improve patient access and drive higher appointment conversions through platforms like Bing, Google, and the websites of 100 health plans.

A CIO survey by CliniComp and CHIME Foundation finds that 81% place the automation of administrative tasks as one of their top three AI strategies, which also include enhancing clinical decision support and improving RCM processes.

Other

Epic SVP of R&D Seth Hain, MS shares his thoughts about AI in healthcare:

• More than 75% of Epic’s health system customers are using generative AI.
• The term EHR no longer reflects its role as a digital colleague that shares insights and guidance with users.
• Epic can embed AI agents into its workflows because it is a single, integrated system rather than one assembled from parts.
• Health systems need to consider dynamic AI governance as the distinction between AI and broader technologies will be irrelevant.
• The technology that has already been invented has enough potential to last for years.

Sponsor Updates

• Impact Advisors staff donate school supplies and stuff them in over 200 backpacks to share with the Family Services team at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago.
• Capital Rx releases a new episode of “The Astonishing Healthcare Podcast” titled “How Low Cost Alternative Programs Can & Should Work, with Jackie Lolos, PharmD, and Haleh Campbell, PharmD.”
• Ellkay will host its virtual user group meeting August 5-6.
• Elsevier releases its “Clinician of the Future 2025 Report.”
• FinThrive offers a Mastering Key Revenue Cycle Metrics checklist.
• Fortified Health Security publishes its “2025 Mid-Year Healthcare Cybersecurity Report.”
• Lincata will exhibit at Epic UGM August 18-21 in Verona, WI.
• Meditech shares highlights from its 2025 Clinical Informatics Symposium.

Blog Posts

• AI and the Big Beautiful Bill: Why Health Systems Cannot Wait to Automate (Get-to-Market Health)
• How Larry H. Miller Senior Health Achieved RCM Clarity, Speed, and Peace of Mind With Inovalon (Inovalon)
• The AI Data Pipeline: How Your Health System Fuels Conversational Search (Kyruus Health)
• 5 Essential Workflow Automation Functions of Outpatient Rehab Software (Netsmart)
• Partnering in pursuit of excellence (Altera Digital Health)
• Nurses are evolving. Now it’s time for healthcare leaders to leverage our growth (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• Patient Portals, Telehealth and Beyond: The Healthcare Technology Solutions Driving Improved Patient Outcomes (AdvancedMD)
• How Counties Drive Impact with Findhelp Data & Infrastructure (Findhelp)
• 7 Essential Characteristics of Seamless Claims Management (FinThrive)
• 5 Oracle Health AI Features to Watch in 2025 (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• MRO Advances Data Exchange for Disability Determination Services (MRO)
• Understanding Retrospective vs. Prospective Risk Adjustment (Navina)

Contacts

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