Monday Morning Update 3/2/26

Top News

AHA asks for these changes to ASTP/ONC’s HTI-5 proposed rule:

• Set a reasonable transition timeline for changing the certification program to FHIR-based criteria.
• Maintain criteria for C-CDA since rural providers depend on it.
• Retain certification criteria for privacy and security, transitions of care, and decision support interventions.
• Retain real-world testing conditions.
• Issue broad guidance on AI before defining how it fits within information blocking.
• Retain the “infeasibility” exception that allows providers to deny third-party requests to modify medical records.
• Repeal the disincentive actions that can be taken for information blocking.

Reader Comments

From K-Pop: “Re: medical innovations. This TV series shows cool technologies that are actually real.” Gizmodo lists real-life technical innovations that have been shown on HBO Max’s “The Pitt” that include hand-held ultrasound, AI-assisted transcription, and virtual reality.

From Janus: “Re: conferences. ViVE is an expensive conference, and reading that people attend without a plan makes me cringe. Then folks like Clear are sitting in on all these regulatory meetings pushing products that don’t actually provide any real value. Do patients even WANT Clear? Also, is anyone at HHS considering the fact that patients don’t trust them, and the idea of a nationwide framework / TEFCA is terrifying for a lot of Americans?”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents say that using conferences as a way to meet with customers or prospects efficiently is their top reason for attending. Most don’t place ROI on generating leads.

New poll to your right or here: What does vendor litigation over network patient data sharing say about interoperability governance?

Listening: reader-recommended The Shoaldiggers,  a nine-piece band from NC whose eclectic music, as portrayed on You Tube, requires a van full of instruments such as mandolin, banjo, flute, washboard, a bow-played handsaw that sounds like a theremin, and a comically large upright bass. They are a testimonial for seeing local talent instead of ignoring music that isn’t from your college years or getting locked in to catchiness-engineered hits that feature “performers” who can’t write music or play an instrument.

Sponsored Events and Resources

Publication: HIStalk’s Guide to HIMSS26 lists the activities of sponsors at the conference.

Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

People

Christina Waters, MBA (AssistRx) joins PerfectServe as chief revenue officer.

Announcements and Implementations

A study finds that primary care physicians who cut visit volume by 10% spent more time per visit in Epic, while their after-hours work and inbox time also increased. The authors conclude that asynchronous EHR work continues even when visit volume declines.

The FDA issues 510(k) clearance for six indications to Qure.ai’s algorithm for chest x-ray analysis, increasing its total to 26.

A new KLAS early insight report on digital pathology finds that while adoption by US healthcare organizations lags that of global counterparts at just 15%, use is growing due to newly FDA-cleared products and the possibility of billing for the service.

Privacy and Security

University of Mississippi Medical Center will reopen its clinics on Monday, stating that “we can access patient records” following a February 19 ransomware attack.

Other

This must-read post seems relevant to how small-business health tech folks like physicians and boutique consultants could use healthcare AI. It’s also convinced me that I need to dig deeper into Anthropic’s Claude. An attorney describes how his two-person business law practice competes with huge firms by building its work around Claude:

When legal AI companies talk about customizing AI to a firm’s playbook, they are solving a problem that barely matters and ignoring the one that does. The real leverage comes not from which template the AI starts with, but from the instructions that tell it how to think about the work …. I’ve created custom instruction files, called “skills,” that encode my analytical frameworks, my preferred formats, my voice, and my judgment about how specific types of legal work should be done. When I upload a contract for review, Claude doesn’t apply a generic framework. It doesn’t even apply my firm’s framework. It applies my framework, the one I’ve developed over a decade of practice, automatically. The difference between a firm playbook and an individual lawyer’s encoded judgment is the difference between giving someone a recipe and teaching them how to cook.

Also possibly relevant, Block, the parent company of Square and Cash App, will lay off nearly half of its workforce despite strong business performance. CEO Jack Dorsey says that expanded use of AI allows smaller teams to operate more efficiently and effectively, and he predicts that most companies will follow a similar path within the next year. My observation is that many corporate executives are so convinced, logically or not, that AI will dramatically reduce their headcount needs that they are willing to undertake big downsizings now and figure out the details later.

Epic is right up there with Wendy’s for sassy corporate tweets. I want to believe that doctors aren’t really using MyChart to hit on women, but I’ve worked in hospitals too long to rule it out.

Sponsor Updates

• CVS Caremark expands its use of Surescripts Touchless Prior Authorization.
• Nym celebrates its eighth anniversary.
• Optimum Healthcare IT receives a 2026 ServiceNow Partner of the Year Award.
• Qure.ai’s FDA cleared indications now total 26 across nine products for X-ray and CT, exceeding 65 CE certified indications and other global validations.

Blog Posts

• How AI-Enabled Biomarkers Improve Early Cancer Diagnosis. (Qure.ai)
• Revenue Cycle Tech That Pays for Itself: Building the ROI Case for Automation (Vyne Medical)

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 2/27/26

Top News

Health Gorilla files a motion to dismiss the lawsuit brought by Epic and several health systems, which alleges that it enabled third parties to improperly access patient data by misrepresenting their purpose for obtaining records.

Health Gorilla argues that both Carequality and TEFCA require mandatory dispute resolution before litigation, that the interoperability frameworks assign enforcement authority to Carequality and the TEFCA RCE rather than private litigants, and that the complaint alleges at most that Health Gorilla should have been more suspicious rather than that it acted with actual knowledge of willful misconduct.

An Epic spokesperson says that Health Gorilla remains responsible for safeguarding patient data and understanding how it is used, and adds that the matter should be resolved in federal court for transparency.

Meanwhile, LlamaLab, which was also named in the lawsuit, files its own motion to dismiss the document, arguing that Epic bypassed its own contractual dispute obligations and wrongly included the company in the case among several unrelated defendants. LlamaLab, which sells medical records to negligence law firms for $50 per request, says that Epic is protecting its dominance and targeting companies that make it easier for patients to retrieve their own medical records.

Reader Comments

From Beagle Eagle: “Re: Epic v. Health Gorilla. If interoperability only works when one dominant EHR vendor plays traffic cop, then it was never really interoperability. Either the governance frameworks function as designed, or we admit that the network-of-networks model is mostly branding. Watching vendors argue in federal court about who gets to define ‘treatment purpose’ feels like a preview of how TEFCA disputes will play out when real money and market share are at stake.”

From Thalamus: “Re: UMMC downtime. Every health system says downtime procedures are solid, yet hospitals or clinics still go dark for days when ransomware hits. If core ambulatory operations can’t function without network access, then business continuity planning is still theoretical.”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

ViVE down, HIMSS to go. My guide to HIMSS26 will be updated ongoing (see Dr. Jayne’s unsolicited testimonial). HIStalk sponsors can provide their participation information to be included. Companies that aren’t sponsors can still get in on the action by contacting Lorre to sign up.

Sponsored Events and Resources

Publication: HIStalk’s Guide to HIMSS26 lists the activities of sponsors at the conference.

Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

The chief legal officer of personal health record company ChartSquad warns that law firms and other organizations, including their intermediaries, cannot misrepresent themselves as treating providers to obtain medical records from exchanges. She adds that attorneys should not pay third-party companies to retrieve records, then bill the patient for that service, when established legal pathways allow them to obtain records directly from patients or providers with proper authorization.

Sales

• Wayne General Hospital (MS) will deploy Eko Health’s Sensora AI cardiac detection platform and digital stethoscopes in its emergency and primary care departments.

People

Teresa Tonthat, MBA (Texas Children’s Hospital) joins Cook Children’s Health Care System as SVP/CDIO.

Announcements and Implementations

Mend launches Nutrition for Healing, a free educational resource that addresses evidence-based nutrition as a cornerstone of healing and recovery. Mend’s CEO is industry veteran Paul Roscoe.

A NEJM editorial says that the human-in-the-loop principle should be treated as a design specification that includes three parts: the clinical loop at the point of care, the governance loop, and the learning loop that oversees ongoing monitoring and model updates.

Oracle Health launches a paid program that will validate medical device connectivity, functionality, and workflow alignment.

Government and Politics

CMS develops a Medicare App Library on Medicare.gov that beneficiaries can use to find and access digital tools that meet standards for security, privacy, use of medical evidence, usability, and equity. The use cases include “Kill the Clipboard,” conversational AI assistance, and prevention of diabetes and obesity. The library is part of the CMS Digital Health Tech Ecosystem.

A federal jury convicts Texas medical laboratory owner and former professional football player Keith Gray of running a genetic testing fraud scheme that billed Medicare $328 million, of which $54 million was paid. His labs paid kickbacks to marketers to supply DNA samples and Medicare beneficiary information that was used to bill for medically unnecessary genetic tests. Gray earned a bachelor’s degree in actuarial science and mathematics from UConn and played center on its football team, although his NFL career consisted of only a few weeks on a practice squad.

Privacy and Security

Cognizant-owned TriZetto updates the size of its 2024 breach to 3.5 million people.

University of Mississippi Medical Center clinics remain offline from a confirmed ransomware attack on February 19. Officials say that the attackers have communicated them, but declined to divulge the amount of ransom requested. UMMC hopes to reopen the clinics on Monday. 

Other

Epic CEO Judy Faulkner posts a tribute to Meditech’s Neil Pappalardo, who died last month:

Neil Pappalardo, who founded MEDITECH in 1969, passed away in January at the age of 83. He created a great company.

Neil helped Epic get a start. He and others at MEDITECH shared advice with me; for example, how to assign offices, what to do about titles, forms to fill out such as for vacation — and everything they shared was very helpful. They care for their customers, they focus on technology, and they never went public, so they avoid the tyranny of the quarter. Epic holds MEDITECH in high regard.

Years ago, when they were helping us get started, Neil invited me to his home for dinner. I realized it was unusual when his kids asked why a piece of folded cloth was next to each plate. I felt honored to be there.

Dolly Parton never ceases to amaze me and everybody else (after all, she wrote “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You” in the same day), so it’s not shocking that East Tennessee Children’s Hospital renames itself Dolly Parton Children’s Hospital.

Sponsor Updates

• Fortified Health Security names Harold Hansen EOD security analyst and Alex Goldstein third-party risk analyst.
• Inbox Health becomes an UrgentIQ preferred patient payments partner.
• Shannon Health (TX) goes live on Mednition’s Kate AI.
• Optimum Healthcare IT posts a new episode of “Visionary Voices” podcast featuring Trinity Health.

Blog Posts

• HFMA Region 5 SES 2026: Leadership Is the Differentiator (FinThrive)
• 15 Essential Contact Center Metrics and KPIs to Measure in Healthcare (Five9)
• Evaluation of AI in Patient Communications (Impact Advisors)
• How our Digital Front Door strategy is easing administrative burdens and boosting the patient experience (Meditech)
• How Effective Are Your Health System’s IT Cost-Cutting Measures? (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.

HIStalk’s Guide to HIMSS26

Agfa HealthCare

Booth 225

Contact: Kara Clarke, director of marketing, North America
kara.clarke@agfa.com
978.761.9432

At HIMSS26, Agfa HealthCare will showcase its vision for “One Platform” Enterprise Imaging, a cloud-ready, SaaS-enabled approach designed to simplify complex imaging ecosystems; strengthen interoperability; and support secure, resilient clinical and IT workflows. What’s new includes continued advancements in its unified Enterprise Imaging platform; zero-footprint streaming technology for fast, full-fidelity image access anywhere care is delivered; and RUBEE Workflow Orchestration with embedded, vendor-neutral AI capabilities that streamline enterprise worklists and enhance diagnostic confidence without adding workflow friction.

Visitors to the booth can participate in personalized, one-on-one product demonstrations to explore real-world use cases and modernization strategies. Visitors are invited to connect with the team on Wednesday, March 11, during a Belgian Beer Tasting event. The speaker lineup will also feature a Main Stage session, “Defining Your Cloud Enterprise Imaging Strategy,” with Tampa General Hospital Senior Director of IT Steve Johnson and Agfa HealthCare Director of Enterprise Imaging Strategy Charles Morris, who will offer practical insights into cloud transition and enterprise-wide imaging transformation.

AGS Health

Contact Matt Bridge to arrange a meeting.

Contact: Matt Bridge, SVP of strategic solutions
matthew.bridge@agshealth.com

AGS Health is more than a revenue cycle management company — we’re a strategic partner for growth. Our distinctive methodology blends award-winning services with intelligent automation and high-touch customer support to deliver peak, end-to-end revenue cycle performance and an empowering patient financial experience.   

We employ a team of 15,000 highly trained and college-educated RCM experts supporting customers across diverse care settings and specialties, including nearly half of the 20 most prominent US hospitals and 40% of the nation’s 10 largest health systems. Our thoughtfully crafted RCM solutions deliver measurable revenue growth and retention, enabling customers to achieve the revenue to realize their vision.

Altera Digital Health

Booth 4431

Contact: Lindsey Honig, marketing communications manager
lindsey.honig@alterahealth.com

A global healthcare IT leader, Altera Digital Health develops and elevates technology that brings next-level healthcare within reach. At HIMSS26, we’re excited to showcase how our AI and EHR advancements help healthcare organizations navigate their top challenges while supporting the human moments that matter most for patients, providers, and their communities.

Visit booth 4431 as EVP of AI Ben Scharfe provides crucial guidance on maximizing AI’s value while managing new liabilities in his educational theater session, “AI Unbound: Agentic workflows and deregulated risk,” on Wednesday, March 11, from 1:00–1:10pm.   

Join our in-booth happy hour on Tuesday, March 10, from 4:30–5:30pm to meet Altera solution and subject matter experts while enjoying complimentary beverages and light fare. For our full theater schedule and to learn more about Altera’s presence at the event, visit our events page.

Arcadia

Booth 2447

Arcadia Customer AMAs 
Stop by our booth for live “Ask Me Anything” sessions with Arcadia customers and hear directly from the people using our solutions every day. Ask your questions, learn from real-world experiences, and get an honest take on what it’s like to work with Arcadia – from peers who’ve been there.    

Sips and Socks 
It’s back! Don’t miss one of the most anticipated moments of the conference – our annual Arcadia HIMSS sock reveal. Stop by the booth to grab a drink and score a pair of our 2026 socks. Arrive early – these fan favorites are first-come, first-served, and they will go fast!   

Speaker Sessions
Tuesday, March 10, 4:00-5:30pm   
Wednesday, March 11, 4:00-5:30pm    
“Improving Medicaid Outcomes with Digital Equity and Nutrition Support,” Tuesday, March 10, from 11:00-11:30am, Level 3, Murano 3304  
“Artificial Intelligence in Action: Clinical Process Maps Get Modern,” Tuesday, March 10, from 11:00 – 11:30am, Level 5, Palazzo D

Visit our HIMSS page to learn more.

Artera

Booth 6421

Contact: Adrianna Hosford, chief communications officer and head of marketing
Adrianna.Hosford@artera.io
833.234.9355

Artera is the proven agentic healthcare company, leveraging a decade of deep expertise to support 2 billion patient communications annually. Our solutions empower humans and AI agents to work together to fix patient communications across text, phone, and web, unifying the entire patient journey – from scheduling and intake to billing and more. Trusted by over 1,000 healthcare organizations (including specialty groups, FQHCs, large IDNs, and federal agencies), Artera directly increases staff efficiency, boosts patient engagement, and improves the provider bottom line, helping patients get the care they need with simplicity and speed.   

2B+ Annual Comms. | 200M+ Patients | 10yrs Experience | FedRAMP High in Process | www.artera.io

Join us at HIMSS to experience our fully autonomous AI agents in action – we’ll demonstrate how these agents manage a range of complex workflows (scheduling, FAQ resolution, appointment management, and more) to reduce staff burden and improve the patient experience.

Stop by our booth to connect with our experts and explore strategies for optimizing patient access, implementing AI-driven patient communication and much more. Plus, when you schedule and attend a meeting with an Artera team member, you’ll receive a $25 Amazon gift card. As an added bonus, you’ll be entered to win an iPad Pro in our post-event raffle. Schedule a meeting with our team at booth 6421 here.

Cardamom

Contact Adam Dial to arrange a meeting.

Contact: Adam Dial, chief customer officer
adam@cardamom.health
608.469.6154

The Cardamom team is excited to attend HIMSS! Reach out to connect with us during the event.    Cardamom is a minority-owned, technology-forward health IT professional services company serving healthcare providers, payers, and health IT organizations. With a team-based, AI- and automation-first approach focused on committed outcomes, Cardamom helps customers more effectively use data, analytics, AI, and applications to improve care quality, reduce costs, and enhance patient and provider experiences. Cardamom is also committed to growing industry talent by hiring high-potential team members without prior health IT experience and providing comprehensive training and mentorship to deliver industry-leading results. For more about Cardamom, visit https://cardamom.health.

CereCore

Booth 6126

Contact: Phil Sobol, chief customer officer
Phil.Sobol@CereCore.net
855.276.9112

CereCore works behind the scenes to empower hospitals and health systems with IT services. Need to drive operational efficiency, improve financial outcomes, and uncover more bandwidth for your IT team? Our experts understand the major EHR platforms inside and out. Tap into support desk solutions that will result in happier users and providers.

For the second year, we earned a top KLAS Research rating in managed IT services, and we were the only vendor whose clients responded “Yes” 100% of the time when asked if their managed IT services provider exceeded expectations.      

Facing an EHR transition that requires additional expertise? CereCore partners with healthcare organizations across the US and globe to provide comprehensive EHR consulting, IT and application support, technical professional and managed services, strategic IT consulting, and advisory services. Our hospital operations experience means we can help you create customizable roadmaps for RCM optimization, overcome talent shortages, and maximize your HIT investment.      

Get a healthcare IT assessment and benefit from an outsider’s perspective, because the cost of not knowing often far exceeds the investment in finding out. Connect with us at HIMSS and find meaningful change with CereCore’s healthcare IT managed services.

Clearsense

Booth 1058

Contact: Kara Freeman, senior director of revenue operations
kfreeman@clearsense.com
612.747.2134

Stop Legacy Bloat: Clearsense Delivers the Blueprint for Cost Optimization at HIMSS26   
Gartner reports that cost optimization is now the top priority for health system CIOs. Yet, while application rationalization is a powerful driver of savings, it remains healthcare’s most underutilized strategy. At HIMSS26, Clearsense will demonstrate how health systems are transforming legacy application decommissioning into a disciplined, repeatable engine for sustained cost reduction and operational modernization.   

Visit booth 1058 to see how Clearsense helps health IT leaders move beyond simple archiving to build a governed, trusted data foundation that:   

• Delivers recurring cost takeout: Eliminate ongoing maintenance, infrastructure, and TSA expenses through structured application rationalization and active archiving programs that generate sustained operating expense savings.   
• Strengthens security and compliance: Reduce legacy application risk by retiring redundant and unsupported systems while preserving secure, audit-ready access to retained clinical and operational data.   
• Creates an AI-ready core: Consolidate fragmented historical data into a centralized, governed archive – establishing a reliable foundation for advanced analytics and scalable AI initiatives.   

In addition, Clearsense will officially unveil its AI strategy at HIMSS26, integrating intelligence across the platform to drive faster operational execution while delivering a more intuitive, insight-driven experience at the point of care.   

Schedule a meeting with the Clearsense team by clicking here!

Clearwater

Booth 10001-07 in the Cybersecurity Command Center

Contact: John Howlett, SVP and chief marketing officer
773.636.6449

You’ll find Clearwater exhibiting in the Cybersecurity Command Center at booth 10001-07, where our team will be showcasing how healthcare organizations can proactively manage cyber risk, protect patient data, and strengthen compliance across increasingly complex digital ecosystems. Stop by to learn how Clearwater helps healthcare leaders:  

• Reduce cyber risk across clinical, operational, and third-party environments.  
• Navigate evolving regulatory and compliance requirements.  
• Build resilient, security-first digital health programs.   

Also, be sure to catch our session “Healthcare AI Governance & Risk Management: Securing Innovation Without Slowing Care” in the Cybersecurity Command Center on Wednesday, March 11, from 10:00-10:20am. Clearwater VP of Consulting Solutions & Strategy Dave Bailey will be joined by Onvida Health CISO Blaine Hebert for a discussion of how to harness AI innovation while managing new and evolving risks.

CloudWave

Booth 6235

Contact: Christine Mellyn, VP of marketing
cmellyn@gocloudwave.com
508.251.8899

Visit CloudWave, the healthcare data security experts, at booth 6235 for an interactive, informative experience! Our team of experts will be available to discuss important topics such as cybersecurity, cloud solutions, compliance, and more. In addition, we’re excited to offer a hands-on tabletop card game that immerses you in incident response and cybersecurity strategies. Using the Backdoors & Breaches deck of expertly designed cards, players will simulate real-world cyber incidents, sharpen response skills, and gain a deeper understanding of modern cyberattack techniques.      

We’ve got a lot happening:    

• Win a Prize! – Participate in raffles at the conclusion of each day. You don’t need to be present to win!  
• Ask Questions, Get Answers – Visit our solution stations and speak with our experts about how CloudWave can help address your IT and cybersecurity challenges.    
• Meet with Our Team – Request a personal meeting (customersfirst@gocloudwave.com) with us to discuss your unique needs.    
• Tabletop Simulations – Join us for hands-on simulations and take home your own card deck, plus a bonus gift if you complete the game.

CognomIQ

Booth 11724

Contact: Bonny Roberts, VP of customer success
Bonny.Roberts@CognomIQ.com
614.565.7884

Healthcare Data Sucks. CognomIQ can UNsuck it. One end-to-end platform replacing more than two dozen SaaS tools like Snowflake, DataBricks, PowerBI, Tableau, ESRI, Datavant, TriNetX, and more. Save seven-figures per year immediately with a 15X speed increase or we’ll refund 100% after the first year. We’re that confident. Come by booth 11724 on the AI Trail and tell us to UnSuck it! We’ll brand you with swag.

Concord Technologies

Booth 1461

Contact: Liza Marie Hayward, marketing program manager
lhayward@concord.net

Concord is the market leader in Intelligent Data Exchange for the healthcare industry, securely processing over 4 billion pages of protected data every year. Our portfolio includes AI-powered fax and document workflows, Intelligent Document Processing, and Straight-Through Processing of patient data into the EHR. With 30 years of proven expertise, Concord empowers healthcare organizations to eliminate manual workflows, improve operational efficiency, and enhance the delivery of care.   

We hope you’ll join us for some of our activities throughout HIMSS:   

• Tuesday, March 10: Attend our Main Stage session, “Rethinking Interoperability: Is it time to trust LLMs over standards?” from 2:40–3:10pm.   
• Wednesday, March 11: Concord-sponsored Happy Hour in booth 1461 from 3:00-5:00pm.   
• All exhibition hall hours at booth 1461: Race to win in our Simulator Challenge. Put yourself in the driver’s seat and take a few laps around the track in our in-booth race simulator. Take your place on our leaderboard after you pass the checkered flag!

CTG Health Solutions

Booth 3516, Venetian Level 2​

Contact: Sarah Blafer, marketing team lead, demand generation
Sarah.Blafer@ctg.com
860.942.2180

CTG, a Cegeka company, delivers IT and business solutions that enhance digital agility. With 55+ years of experience – and 35+ years in healthcare – we empower healthcare organizations to modernize systems, improve performance, and advance digital initiatives through innovative services and modern technologies. We’ve supported 1,000+ healthcare organizations, including children’s hospitals, health systems, and academic medical centers. Our expertise spans EHR implementation and managed services, cybersecurity, ERP, cloud, infrastructure, IT/application support, and clinical optimization. Combining local market knowledge with 10,000+ Cegeka Group professionals in 15+ countries, we serve healthcare and other high-growth industries. For more information, visit us at booth 3516.

DrFirst

Booth 3243

Contact: Erin Hall, director, event strategy and experience
eleasehall@drfirst.com
216.650.7687

Meet with DrFirst at HIMSS! Behind every prescription is a tangle of benefit checks, prior authorizations, and pharmacy back-and-forth. Meet with us at HIMSS to see how DrFirst cuts through the complexity within the prescribing workflow before problems start.      

Prior authorizations are resolved right away, not days or weeks later. Coverage and cost are visible at the point of prescribing. Prescriptions arrive at the pharmacy ready to fill. Automated text messages keep patients engaged and on therapy. The result: Fewer abandoned prescriptions, better patient outcomes, and less administrative burden.

To learn more, don’t miss the session featuring Magnolia Regional Health’s Ben Long, MD showing how SMS text notifications reduced odds of CHF readmissions by 6% on March 12 at 8:30am in Palazzo D, Level 5.

Let’s chat in Las Vegas!   

About DrFirst
For 25 years, healthcare IT pioneer DrFirst has empowered providers and patients to achieve better health through intelligent medication management. The company has won over 25 awards for excellence and innovation, including Time’s list of the “World’s Top HealthTech Companies of 2025,” recognizing the company’s medication management solutions and integrated workflows that make every step of the patient journey easier, from first prescription to ongoing adherence. DrFirst solutions help 100 million patients a year and are used by more than 450,000 prescribers, 71,000 pharmacies, 270 EHRs, and over 2,000 hospitals in the US. To learn more, visit DrFirst.com.

Ellkay

Booth 5423

Ready to build the future of healthcare? Ellkay is a trusted enterprise data management partner, driving innovation and connectivity across the healthcare ecosystem.   

Join us at HIMSS26! We will have daily coffee bars and Happy Hours on Tuesday and Wednesday at booth 5423. Come get a drink and discuss how your organization can transform care delivery through true interoperability and data management solutions.

FDB

Booth 3235

Contact: Sammy Keating, product marketing manager
Sammy.Keating@fdbhealth.com
802.343.2619

At FDB (First Databank), we’re proud to be the leading provider of drug knowledge that helps healthcare professionals make precise, confident medication decisions. At HIMSS26, we’re bringing our theme, “Intelligence to Free Your Mind,” to life – showcasing how our medication intelligence, built on decades of trusted drug knowledge and delivered in patient-specific clinical context, helps reduce cognitive burden, restore focus, and strengthen both human and AI-enabled workflows.   

As healthcare organizations look for safe, scalable ways to adopt AI and automation, we’re excited to introduce new innovations at booth 3235. We’ll be featuring FDB MedProof MCP, our AI-native server that standardizes governance and access to medication intelligence across AI-enabled systems. We’ll also highlight workflow advancements like FDB Script Agent, an AI-enabled prescription automation agent designed for ambulatory settings, and FDB VerifyAssist, an inpatient pharmacy order verification assistant designed to help hospital pharmacists quickly spot orders that need closer review.   

Attendees can also explore how our trusted solutions – FDB MedKnowledge, FDB Targeted Medication Warnings, FDB AlertSpace 2.0, Pharmacogenomics CDS, and FDB Meducation – support health systems in improving medication safety, reducing non-actionable alerts, and delivering truly patient-specific decision support and education. We’ll also be showcasing FDB Vela, our modern e-prescribing network built to power resilient, connected medication workflows.

While you’re at our booth, join one of our daily micro-sessions covering topics like agentic workflows, medication reconciliation, and pharmacy order verification. And of course, we’re creating space to recharge and connect. We’ll be hosting “Calm Continues at Happy Hour” on Wednesday, March 11, from 4:00 to 5:30pm at our booth, with beer, wine, soft drinks, and light bites. Throughout the conference, stop by for complimentary chair massages, infused water, themed giveaways, and a chance to win a Theragun Mini (3rd Gen) portable massage device. We’re looking forward to connecting with you at HIMSS26!

Fortified Health Security

Booth 11302

Contact: Rachel Bryant, marketing coordinator
rbryant@fortifiedhealthsecurity.com
904.316.3310

Join Fortified Health Security at HIMSS26 to explore the latest in digital health innovation, cybersecurity, and healthcare transformation. Fortified is built for healthcare, offering tailored solutions to help you address your unique challenges, navigate the ever-changing legislative landscape, and work alongside you to create a stronger cybersecurity posture.  

Tee off HIMSS26 with us at Top Golf Las Vegas on March 8, or connect with our team at booth 11302 and enter our daily giveaway. Get all the details to secure your spot here. We look forward to seeing you in Las Vegas!

Lincata

Booth 1365

Contact: Adam DeRocher, chief revenue officer
adam.derocher@lincata.com
712.541.9132

Lincata’s Bedside Operating System (OS) transforms hospital televisions into digital experience tools that launch MyChart Bedside TV directly in-room. It’s simple. LincTV by Lincata, coupled with MyChart Bedside TV, existing TV screens, cameras, microphones, and other equipment helps health systems create the foundation for smart room capabilities and virtual care. LincTV consists of a proprietary set-top box and purpose-built MDM that provides flexibility, scalability, security, and ease of deployment. More than TV. Make it LincTV.

Med Tech Solutions

Booth 5448

Contact: Shana Tachikawa, director of marketing
stachikawa@medtechsolutions.com

Med Tech Solutions (MTS) is a managed services provider delivering comprehensive IT and EHR support to healthcare organizations nationwide. With a singular focus on healthcare technology, MTS empowers clients with IT and EHR managed services, cloud hosting, 24/7 help desk, and revenue cycle solutions, along with tailored software and security offerings. With Stoltenberg Consulting now part of the MTS family, MTS expands this reach with deep Epic, Oracle Cerner, NextGen, ECW, and Meditech consulting; staff augmentation; go-live support; and legacy system services. Together, MTS and its brands help healthcare providers optimize technology, streamline operations, and enhance patient care across full IT lifecycles.   

Elicit greater value from your EHR investment. Ensure long-term success of your EHR program across organizational growth. Leverage skilled, flexible, EHR-certified resources to cost-effectively fill IT expertise gaps with:    

• EHR Service Desk  
• EHR-Certified Staffing  
• Legacy EHR Managed Services 
• EHR Data Archiving  
• EHR Data Integration  
• Go-Live Support  
• M&A Systems Alignment      

Backed by 3x Best in KLAS standing for Partial IT Outsourcing, maximize your EHR’s full potential. Schedule an executive meeting with Med Tech Solutions in booth 5448!

Medcurio

Booth 222

Contact: Joe Lovato, director of customer solutions
joe@medcurio.com
503.704.3920

Medcurio helps health systems access and act on their EHR data in real time, without waiting months for integrations or settling for partial interfaces. Its VennU platform installs inside the customer’s environment and gives teams direct, governed access to the data they already own. The result is faster insight, faster action, and fewer workarounds. VennU is used to power dashboards, alerts, automations, and any downstream workflows that depend on complete and timely EHR data. Customers decide what data is accessed, who can use it, and how it is applied, with full auditability and security controls. Nothing leaves the customer’s control.   

Medcurio has been invited by InterSystems to showcase its technology live at their booth. We’re demonstrating how we’ve made it incredibly simple to get ANY data – in real time – out of the EHR. Not limited to: FHIR, HL7, latent or batch-based data. This is true real-time access without the traditional constraints.   

We’ll be giving live demos of our cutting-edge platform. If your organization has ever struggled to extract real-time data from your EHR, stop by!

Medicomp Systems

Booth 5435

Contact: James Aita, director of strategy and business development
marketing@medicomp.com
703.803.8080

Medicomp delivers the industry’s only physician-curated universal data foundation, transforming healthcare data into trusted intelligence through Quippe, its evidence-based Clinical Intelligence Engine. Quippe connects information across domains, normalizes every input, and validates AI outputs to ensure accurate, interoperable insights at the point of care – fueling innovation, improving accuracy, and unlocking the full value of clinical data.   

Medicomp will be showcasing entirely new functionality that streamlines clinical workflow, combining technologies like ambient listening, natural language processing (NLP), and Model Context Protocol (MCP); and leveraging its universal data foundation and knowledge graph to deliver the efficient, intelligent, clinical workspace that clinicians have been craving.     

The gap between data and understanding is probably costing you – in denied claims, compliance penalties, technology ROI, clinician burnout, and patient safety risks. Stop by the Medicomp booth to learn how your systems can benefit from:   

• Clinically-validated LLM outputs. 
• Diagnostic intelligence that understands context, is evidence-based, and makes disparate data computable.  
• Clinical-grade agents based on a universal data foundation.   

Solve the data reliability problem with diagnostically intelligent clinical data solutions. To learn more, visit Medicomp.com.

Nordic Global

Booth 631

Contact: Rebecca Whaley, head of marketing
Rebecca.Whaley@nordicglobal.com

Join Nordic, a global leader in healthcare transformation, at #HIMSS26 in booth 631 to explore the future of healthcare technology. Enjoy free, all‑day coffee at our booth and meet the Nordic team to discuss how we can support your workforce and operational priorities for 2026. We’ll also be unveiling our new look at our HIMSS brand launch party.    

Highlights:    

• Enjoy free, all‑day coffee and meet the Nordic team at booth 631.    
• Join us at the Buzzed After Dark Networking Reception, sponsored by Nordic, on Sunday, March 9, from 9:00pm-12:00am.    
• Donut panic. Fewer apps are possible. Grab a free donut and learn about application portfolio management with Nordic and our partner Clearsense on Monday, March 10, from 10:00–11:00am at booth 631.    
• Connect with Nordic and Workday at the FQHC Happy Hour on March 10, from 5:00–6:00pm at the B Bar at the Wynn. (invite only)    
• Join us as we officially launch Nordic’s new brand during Under the Nordic Star, a client and partner reception, sponsored by Clear and ServiceNow, on March 10, from 6:00–9:00pm. at La Cave Bar + Restaurant at the Wynn.    
• Meet Nordic CMO Craig Joseph, MD, author of “Designing for Health,” to explore why human‑centered design matters in healthcare on Monday, March 10, from 1:00–2:00pm and Tuesday, March 11, from 10:00–11:00am at booth 631.    
• Join Nordic for a networking happy hour during the HIMSS Chapter Social hosted by HIMSS Wisconsin on March 11, from 4:00-5:30pm at booth 631.    

Visit our event page to see what Nordic is doing at HIMSS and book a meeting with our team!

Optimum Healthcare IT

Meeting Room MP11356

Contact: Larry Kaiser, chief marketing officer
lkaiser@optimumhit.com

Best in KLAS, Overall Implementation Firm, Optimum Healthcare IT will be at HIMSS. You bring your goals and outcomes, we will bring the strategy and team to make it happen. Optimum’s comprehensive service offerings include enterprise application services; digital transformation; and workforce management, which features our Optimum CareerPath skill development program. Backed by a leadership team with extensive expertise, we deliver tailored healthcare consulting solutions to diverse organizations.   

HIMSS Highlights  
Meeting Room MP11356 
AWS Demos March 12
AWS Booth: UC Davis Health – Primary care scheduling reduces no-shows effectively. Patient verification streamlines appointments, enhances revenue.           
Wrapt Health: Oncology scheduling with predictive rescheduling modeling. Reduces cancellations, minimizes medication waste costs. 
Microsoft Demo March 10 at 10:00am, March 11 at 11:10am, and March 12 at 12:50pm.
Microsoft Booth: Deliver secure, high-performance clinical workspaces in AVD – anywhere.
Reception on March 11 at 6:00pm. Contact your Business Development Executive for more information.

PerfectServe

Booth 1665

Contact: Jenn Corcoran, senior marketing manager
jcorcoran@perfectserve.com
802.379.5352

Struggling with after-hours coverage, missed handoffs, or “Who’s on call?” confusion? At HIMSS, PerfectServe is offering complimentary 15-minute workflow reviews for healthcare leaders who want to identify gaps in their communication and scheduling processes – and leave with clear, practical next steps. During the 15-minute Workflow Review, we’ll: 

• Walk through your current communication and scheduling workflow. 
• Identify failure points that create delays, burnout, or risk. 
• Highlight opportunities to simplify, automate, or integrate with your EHR. 
• Share how peers are addressing similar challenges.   

You’ll leave with: 

• A clearer picture of where things break down. 
• Practical ideas you can take back to your team. 
• A benchmarked perspective from other health systems.   

Who should book time: 

• CMOs, CIOs, COOs 
• Clinical operations leaders 
• IT leaders responsible for clinical communication 
• Physician and nursing leadership 
• Scheduling managers   

Why PerfectServe? 
PerfectServe helps health systems accelerate speed to care by bringing communication and scheduling into a single, EHR-integrated platform. We help organizations: 

• Create a single source of truth for staff scheduling. 
• Enable secure, role-based care team communication. 
• Power a reliable clinical contact center. 
• Finally answer, with confidence, “Who’s on call right now?”   

For more, visit our dedicated event page.

Praia Health

Contact Conrad Swanson to arrange a meeting.

Contact: Conrad Swanson, VP of sales
conrad@praiahealth.com

Praia Health is the patient experience orchestration platform for health systems. We help health systems attract, engage, and retain patients by supercharging their portals and digital tools with seamless, personalized journeys in one platform. The result is higher retention, lower costs, and measurable ROI.   

Praia Health was named Best in Show at the HIMSS26 Emerge Pitch Competition, winning in the Health Systems: Address Hospital Capacity Crisis category. Praia Health CEO Justin Dearborn will be presenting during the HIMSS Emerge Innovation Pitch Competition: Best-in-Show Solutions for Hospital Systems Challenges on Wednesday, March 11, from 11:50am-12:35pm. Team members will also be available throughout the conference to share more about our patient experience orchestration platform.

SlicedHealth

Contact Jason Whiteaker to arrange a meeting.

Contact: Jason Whiteaker, regional VP, channel partnerships
jason.whiteaker@slicedhealth.com
901.493.3110

SlicedHealth is a payer contract revenue intelligence platform designed to help hospitals, health systems, specialty practices, and surgery centers navigate payer complexity and secure the revenue they’ve rightfully earned. Through AI-driven contract modeling and real-time analytics, SlicedHealth identifies underpayments, denial patterns, and price transparency gaps while bringing clarity to complex payer agreements.   

Our team will be onsite at HIMSS meeting with healthcare finance and revenue cycle leaders focused on reimbursement strategy and contract performance. To connect during the conference, please reach out directly to Jason Whiteaker (jason.whiteaker@slicedhealth.com) to coordinate a time to meet and discuss how revenue intelligence can drive measurable financial impact in 2026 and beyond.

Sonifi Health

Booth 2861

Contact: Jared Allen, SVP of sales
jallen@sonifihealth.com
801.386.1450

Sonifi Health provides industry-leading, interactive patient engagement technology proven to improve patient outcomes and staff productivity. The EHR-integrated platform is designed to anticipate the needs of patients and clinicians, infusing the principles of hospitality into care experiences. As part of Sonifi Solutions, Inc., the company supports more than 300 million end user experiences annually. Learn more at sonifihealth.com.

Surescripts

Booth 1139

Contact: Kate Giaquinto, PR manager
kate.giaquinto@surescripts.com
603.548.5273

Join Surescripts at the forefront of healthcare innovation and learn how we can inform and accelerate decisions to keep patient care on track.   

Connect with us at HIMSS26 in booth 1139 to discover how we can partner to:   

• Deliver clinically appropriate prior authorization decisions faster. 
• Empower the healthcare ecosystem with intelligence and interoperability. 
• Add real-time cost and care intelligence to existing workflows.

Tegria

Booth 4802

Contact: Berit Rhody, Manager, Events and Engagement
berit.rhody@tegria.com

Tegria is a global healthcare consulting and services company that partners with provider and payer organizations to transform healthcare. Tegria’s global team of more than 1,000 experienced professionals has helped drive meaningful change for more than 650 provider and payer clients across North America and Europe. Tegria has been ranked and recognized in consecutive Best in KLAS reports, including a #2 ranking in the “2026 Best in KLAS: Software & Services” report for Overall IT Services Firm and Best in KLAS recognition for Payer IT Consulting (2025) and Application Hosting (2024).   

Join us for some engaging sessions while you are at HIMSS :  

“Lunch & Learn: How Leading Health Systems are Closing the Access Execution Gap” on Tuesday, March 10, from 12:30-1:45pm on Venetian Level 1, Casanova 601. As patient access becomes a strategic driver of financial performance and growth, health systems must move beyond scheduling to optimize the entire patient journey. This session shares executive insights and real-world examples to help organizations strengthen foundational access metrics, align strategy with execution, and turn digital access into a sustainable enterprise advantage. Register here to reserve your spot.

“Don’t Gamble on ROI: Win Big with Change Management” on Wednesday, March 11, from 12:00-12:20pm in the Business Ops Pavilion, Level 2, Hall C, booth 4400. Healthcare organizations often struggle to achieve lasting value from technology investments because the challenge lies not in the systems, but in how change is managed. In this session, KLAS Research and Tegria will introduce a proven change management framework that helps leaders drive adoption, protect ROI, and sustain workforce and patient trust throughout transformation.

“Denied No More: A Revenue Recovery Playbook” on Wednesday, March 11, from 2:00-2:30pm on the Connect Theater Stage. This session explores how a data-driven approach can uncover hidden patterns behind costly bundled procedure denials, including specific service combinations and payer behaviors. Through a real-world case study, attendees will gain practical strategies to reduce denials, improve billing accuracy, and strengthen overall revenue cycle performance.

View full details for all of Tegria’s HIMSS26 sessions on our event page.

Visage Imaging

Booth 3753

Contact: Brad Levin, general manager, North America
blevin@visageimaging.com
540.454.9670

Visage is not only leading imaging’s move to the cloud, we’ve defined it. Visage is delivering Visage 7 | CloudPACS, an AI Optimized Enterprise Imaging Platform purpose-built and proven. Visage 7 | CloudPACS provides unparalleled speed, interpretation efficiency, and much needed relief from the current challenges facing radiologists, clinicians, and imaging IT professionals.   

At HIMSS26, Visage will be demonstrating our latest Visage 7.1.20, including Visage Chat+, Visage 7 | Digital Pathology, and Visage Ease VP for Apple Vision Pro, as well as our latest work-in-progress efforts for Visage 7 | AI. Join us at booth 3753 and enjoy the best gourmet coffee available at HIMSS26, with coffee beans carefully roasted by Visage staff.

News 2/25/26

Top News

The SEC concludes its investigation of Veradigm with no enforcement action recommended.

Reader Comments

From Sidelineguy: “Re: AI note-taking in meetings. I am interested in how healthcare organizations and vendors are thinking about this. I’ve seen vendors pushing back on providers, citing security and confidentiality concerns. In extreme cases, I’ve seen vendors refuse to be on calls with the note-taking took turned on.” I’m not surprised that vendors are reluctant to have meetings recorded, especially large or publicly traded companies. Customer pitches and meetings that once were forgotten almost immediately can now be converted into searchable transcripts, internal knowledge assets, potential AI training inputs, or discoverable material for litigation, and the company is the party that will be held accountable. It is easy to understand why even an honest vendor wouldn’t want to give a prospect or customer control of the institutional memory of the discussion that could be used in contract negotiations or enforcement disputes. Participants may also be required in advance to avoid topics related to product trade secrets, pricing, or information that would require a business associate agreement. Calls could have been recorded before AI, but new technology raises a company’s risk profile and justifies a “no recording” policy, even though that might annoy the client.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Qure.ai. Qure.ai is a global AI company that is innovating diagnostic solutions in healthcare for early detection and care management. Qure’s solutions power early diagnosis in lung cancer, neurology, and infectious disease to support clinicians and propel developments in the pharmaceutical and medical device industries. The company empowers healthcare workers or health systems by helping to identify conditions fast, prioritize treatment planning, and ultimately improve quality of patient life.  Qure.ai has deployments in over 107 countries, with regional offices in New York, London and Mumbai. It is a TIME100 Most Influential Company 2025. Thanks to Qure.ai for supporting HIStalk.

Sponsored Events and Resources

Publication: HIStalk’s Guide to ViVE 2026 lists the activities of sponsors at the conference.

Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

BlockIt, which offers a health system access and capacity performance system, renames itself Alluvium Healthcare.

HealthStream announces Q4 results: revenue up 7.4%, adjusted EPS $0.18 versus $0.16, beating expectations for both.

People

Meghan Molitor (Symplr) joins TeamBuilder as VP of sales.

Altera Digital Health names Sean Sykes (Advanced Utility Solutions) as EVP of Ventus.

Experity promotes Bobby Ghoshal, MBA to CEO.

Health Catalyst promotes Ben Albert, MBA to CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

San Juan Regional Medical Center (NM) implements Wellsheet’s AI-powered predictive clinical workflow and operations software.

Pixel Health incorporates Praia Health’s patient experience orchestration technology into its new One Thread patient experience software.

Golden Valley Memorial Healthcare (MO) launches a remote pregnancy monitoring program using technology from Nuvo.

LexisNexis Risk Solutions develops a healthcare-specific identity management platform.

Government and Politics

ASTP/ONC opens the EHIgnite Challenge, which will award cash prizes for tools, platforms, and workflows that turn exported electronic health information into actionable insights.

Other

A survey of 880 hospital nurses finds that 57% feel that virtual nursing programs don’t reduce their workload, while 10% say it actually worsens it. Just over half say it improves care quality, with 11% noting that improvement is substantial.

Cedars-Sinai (CA) pilots Kneu Health’s disease-monitoring app as part of its Parkinson’s disease program. The health system is an investor in the UK-based company, which participated in its accelerator program two years ago.

Sponsor Updates

• Altera Digital Health announces that 14 customers have renewed their contracts for its Sunrise EHR.
• Waystar will exhibit at EClinicalWorks Day Chicago February 26.
• Concord Technologies celebrates 30 years of innovation and leadership.
• Meditech announces that 15 rural hospitals opted for Meditech Expanse in 2025.
• Arrive Health publishes a new white paper titled “Real-Time Prescription Benefit: Cutting Through the Noise to Deliver Real Value.”
• Black Book Research releases a new market intelligence report titled “Healthcare IT Capital Signals 2026: What VCs, PE and Banks Are Underwriting.”
• Clearwater will sponsor HPE Miami March 4-5 in Miami Beach.

Blog Posts

• 7 Medicaid Eligibility Changes Human Services Leaders Must Prepare For (Netsmart)
• Why Technology Alignment Is Becoming Healthcare’s Unspoken Challenge (CereCore)
• From out of the background to right where you need it: Cloud availability for the journey ahead (Altera Digital Health)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 2/23/26

Top News

Healthcare payment solutions vendor RevSpring acquires TrustCommerce, an integrated payment platform vendor.

RevSpring acquired Kyruus Health in September 2025 and Loyale Healthcare in early 2020.

RevSpring was acquired by investment firm Frazier Healthcare Partners in May 2024.

Reader Comments

From BoothWeary: “Re: exhibiting at ViVE and HIMSS. We spend mid six figures on booth, travel, advertising, and private events. I can’t tie any of that to booked revenue. Are we fooling ourselves?” You are fooling yourself if you expect badge scans and foot traffic to turn directly into leads. Value comes from using the booth as a landing zone and meeting hub rather than a lead farm. Exhibiting can even save money if you can book meetings with prospects and existing customers without separate travel costs. Show up with a list of the top 10 accounts that you hope to influence and try to get your executives face time with theirs. ROI is generated in back-of-hall private meeting rooms, not the carpeted glad-handing area that is populated mostly by nondecision-makers. Still, be nice, since they might have been charged as underlings to scout and report back to their big boss.

From Seeking Answers: “Re: HIMSS26. The keynote speaker list is wacky, maybe trying to match the celebrity appeal of ViVE.” On the list is Jon McNeill (who quit as a Telsa sales exec, then lasted just 18 months as COO of Lyft); actor and snowcat casualty Jeremy Renner; and streetwear mogul Daymond John of “Shark Tank.” You will need to squint to see any connection to healthcare or health tech. The one keynoter who might be fun is the coach of the Savanna Bananas, although I wouldn’t stick around for his last-day slot.

From Bonecrusher: “Re: the Alliance for Advancing Rural Healthcare. Isn’t this, and others like it, just a thinly veiled sales opportunity for the vendors involved? Seems like a gussied up consulting push to take advantage of those with fresh influxes of federal cash.” SAIC forms the newly announced AARH to “help state governments … execute the Rural Health Transformation program.” SAIC’s sudden interest in rural healthcare coincides with the federal government’s plan to plow $50 billion into it. SAIC earns $7.5 billion in revenue selling mostly to the federal government, so it is approaching AARH like a prime contractor:

• Form an “alliance” to exclude competitors as states issue RFPs.
• Capture some of the revenue that each partner generates by locking in its own implementation, infrastructure, and integration services..
• Build a long sales runway with the multi-year program.
• Create the perception of turnkey execution and the appearance of aligning with federal goals.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Around 30% of poll respondents have been demoted at some point in their careers. I have seen variations that involve losing all direct reports, such as being moved to special projects, tapped as an advisor, or assigned to formulate strategy. All of those are compliments. Organizations are smart to let a high-performing executive who doesn’t manage people well the chance to focus on their strengths. Value shouldn’t always be measured by headcount or budget.

New poll to your right or here: For exhibitors at ViVE and/or HIMSS, what is the #1 benefit received? What one thing keeps your company coming back, and has that changed?

Attending ViVE? Your updates, photos, and rumors are welcome and I won’t name you unless you ask. Tell me.

Sponsored Events and Resources

Publication: HIStalk’s Guide to ViVE 2026 lists the activities of sponsors at the conference.

Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Waystar reports Q4 results: revenue up 24%, EPS $0.10 versus $0.11, beating revenue expectations but falling short on earnings. WAY shares have lost 39% in the past 12 months, valuing the company at $4.8 billion. CEO Matt Hawkins talked up AI in the earnings call, saying that 50 of the company’s solutions use AI, 40% of its revenue is generated by AI-embedded tools, and 30% of bookings were attributed to AI capabilities. He added that its Altitude AI prevented $15 billion in claims denials, reduced appeal time by 90%, and drove double-digit increases in denial overturn rates.

From a Veradigm update call:

• CEO Don Trigg emphasized the company’s ongoing “Reset, Recover, and Reignite” plan to stabilize operations and refocus strategy.
• The company will discontinue six unnamed low-revenue products.
• Veradigm’s preliminary 2025 results show flat revenue and a significant decline in cash due to debt financing and share repurchases.
• Trigg says that the company is making progress toward becoming current on its SEC filings but provided no specifics. It will file 2023 and 2024 information in a Super 10-K, which is a single annual report that includes data that would have been included in overdue previous reports.
• The company has established Pune, India and Raleigh, NC as its hubs. It closed three locations in 2025, will close two more in 2026, and will vacate its Chicago headquarters in 2027.
• Veradigm eliminated 15% of its workforce in 2025.
• Trigg says that Veradigm was previously run as “a holding company as opposed to an operating company,” but will now focus on growth and market impact.

Sales

• Mayo Clinic implements the productivity platform of Dock Health in cardiovascular, e-consult, and specialty contract programs.

Announcements and Implementations

Belgium-based cardiologist Michal Nedoszytko, MD, PhD creates Postvisit.ai, an agentic AI post-visit companion for patients. The tool, which he developed in Claude Code in seven days as a hackathon entry, helps patients understand and follow up on their treatment by using a “reverse AI scribe.”

Element Biosciences introduces a high-throughput benchtop sequencing system that can generate a whole genome sequence for $100.

Other

A Fierce Healthcare report says that the Coalition for Health AI has shelved its flagship plan to create a national network of independent AI assurance labs and shifted its focus to other initiatives. CHAI, which was founded in 2024 with several health systems as founding members, has drawn scrutiny from Republican lawmakers who question whether CHAI’s work overlaps FDA responsibilities and whether participation by large technology companies creates potential conflicts of interest. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went further, calling CHAI a “cartel” while backing the department’s position that private groups should not receive implicit government endorsement or taxpayer support for assurance labs. Founding members Amazon and Microsoft resigned after the White House signaled its broader opposition to the group and to AI regulation generally. CHAI says that the change in direction reflects stakeholder feedback, particularly stronger interest in post-deployment monitoring over upfront certification.

The Wall Street Journal reports early testing of an “underwear-able” flatulence monitoring system and tracker for studying diet-related gas and bloating. The top 3% of studied gas-passers in the study cohort will earn a “Prodigious Hydrogen Producer” plaque. Hat tip to my favorite medical research explainer @EricTopol for headlining this piece with “you gotta be kidding me,” which was also my initial reaction as I quickly verified that it wasn’t April 1.

Sponsor Updates

• RLDatix releases the results of the “2026 Leadership Pulse Survey from the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives.”
• TruBridge and Arcadia join the new Alliance for Advancing Rural Healthcare.
• Afga HealthCare lists its new US installations, included an expended rollout of enterprise imaging at Tampa General Hospital.
• Waystar’s AI capabilities deliver industry-leading outcomes and earn client accolades.
• Optimum Healthcare IT publishes a new white paper titled “Your Ultimate Checklist for a Successful Healthcare CMMS Migration.”
• Nordic releases a new “Designing for Health” podcast featuring Becket Mahnke, MD.
• Optimum Healthcare IT opens a managed services center of excellence in Costa Rica. 
• SlicedHealth releases a new episode of its “Substance Over Form” podcast titled “Your 2026 Guide to Price Transparency.”
• WellSky will expand its clinical coding and documentation advisory services to additional Adoration Home Health locations.

Blog Posts

• Healthcare data platform considerations + options in 2026 (Arcadia)
• A Unified Digital Front Door: Reimagining Patient Engagement Through LLM-Based Orchestration (Impact Advisors)
• Four Revenue Cycle Management Tips for Small Healthcare Organizations (Med Tech Solutions)
• The Game Changing Impact of Early Autism Diagnosis (Netsmart)
• Meeting health systems where they are on the digital modernization journey (Nordic)
• What Is Transparent AI for Medical Coding? Why Black Box Tools Fail the 2026 Audit (Nym)
• Create a Policy for Medicare Conflicting Indicators: CPT 63032 Under OPPS vs. MPFS (TruBridge)
• Individual Access Services Under TEFCA (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.

HIStalk’s Guide to ViVE 2026

Agfa HealthCare

Booth 2203

Contact: Kara Clarke, director or marketing, North America
kara.clarke@agfa.com
978.761.9432

At ViVE 2026, Agfa HealthCare will showcase the latest advancements in its cloud-ready, SaaS-enabled Enterprise Imaging platform, designed to reduce complexity, strengthen interoperability, and elevate both IT performance and the clinician experience. Highlights include its zero-footprint streaming technology for fast, full-fidelity image access anywhere care is delivered; as well as RUBEE workflow orchestration; and embedded, vendor-neutral AI capabilities that streamline operations and support confident clinical decision-making within unified imaging workflows. Global Chief Medical Officer and Global Director of Enterprise Imaging & AI Anjum Ahmed, MBBS, MBA will attend and is available for meetings to discuss clinician-first imaging strategy, AI in practice, and the evolving role of enterprise imaging in connected care environments.

Altera Digital Health

Meeting Cube 350

Contact: Heewon Shin, segment marketing manager
heewon.shin@alterahealth.com

A global healthcare IT leader, Altera Digital Health develops and elevates technology to bring next-level healthcare within reach. Altera’s approach to our solutions is changing the way healthcare is delivered. We see the summit of what healthcare can be, but rather than total transformation, we’re focused on helping organizations take the steps they need to get there.    

At ViVE, we’re excited to showcase how Altera is addressing the top challenges healthcare providers and payers are facing today by enabling interoperability and data-sharing, strengthening financial stability, and leveraging AI to help alleviate clinical and administrative burden. Stop by our meeting cube (#350) to meet with our experts and learn more about how Altera can help you deliver next-level care. Click here to schedule a meeting. For more, visit www.alterahealth.com.

Arcadia

To arrange a meeting, visit https://arcadia.io/resources/vive-2026.

Join Arcadia at ViVE 2026 as healthcare leaders, policymakers, and innovators come together to shape the future of digital health. As the industry accelerates toward true interoperability and consumer-grade digital experiences, Arcadia is helping organizations turn connected data into real progress — reducing friction, improving outcomes, and empowering patients at scale.   

Arcadia Chief Strategy Officer Aneesh Chopra will moderate a discussion with CMS’ Amy Gleason titled “How CMS Is Modernizing Healthcare” on Tuesday, February 24 from 11:40am–12:00pm on the West Coast Stage. CMS’ healthcare technology push has moved quickly from announcement to execution. Following the launch of its White House-backed Health Tech Ecosystem initiative — and early commitments from more than 60 major health and technology organizations — CMS is now calling on the industry to deliver real progress toward a truly patient-centric digital ecosystem in early 2026. This session explores how a voluntary, standards-based alliance — paired with CMS’ broader interoperability push — aims to unlock seamless data sharing, consumer-grade digital tools, and patient-facing applications focused on chronic disease management, digital-first navigation, and streamlined check-in. The ultimate question: can this effort finally reduce administrative burden and deliver on healthcare technology’s long-promised potential to empower patients?

Artera

Booth V-835

Contact: Adrianna Hosford, chief communications officer and head of marketing
adrianna.hosford@artera.io
833.234.9355

Artera is the proven agentic healthcare company, leveraging a decade of deep expertise to support 2 billion patient communications annually. Our solutions empower humans and AI agents to work together to fix patient communications across text, phone, and web, unifying the entire patient journey – from scheduling and intake to billing and more. Trusted by over 1,000 healthcare organizations (including specialty groups, FQHCs, large IDNs, and federal agencies), Artera directly increases staff efficiency, boosts patient engagement, and improves the provider bottom line, helping patients get the care they need with simplicity and speed.   

2B+ Annual Comms. | 200M+ Patients | 10yrs Experience | FedRAMP High in Process | www.artera.io |   

Join us at ViVE to experience our fully autonomous AI Agents in action. We’ll demonstrate how these agents manage a range of complex workflows (scheduling, FAQ resolution, appointment management, and more) to reduce staff burden and improve the patient experience. Stop by our booth to connect with our experts and explore strategies for optimizing patient access, implementing AI-driven patient communication, and much more. Plus, receive a $25 Amazon gift card when you schedule and attend a meeting with an Artera team member. As an added bonus, you’ll be entered to win an iPad Pro in our post-event raffle. Schedule a meeting with our team here.

Cardamom

Contact Adam Dial to arrange a meeting.

Contact: Adam Dial, chief customer officer
adam@cardamom.health
608.469.6154

Cardamom is a minority-owned, technology-forward health IT professional services company serving healthcare providers, payers, and health IT organizations. With a team-based, AI- and automation-first approach focused on committed outcomes, Cardamom helps customers more effectively use data, analytics, AI, and applications to improve care quality, reduce costs, and enhance patient and provider experiences. Cardamom is also committed to growing industry talent by hiring high-potential team members without prior health IT experience and providing comprehensive training and mentorship to deliver industry-leading results. For more about Cardamom, visit https://cardamom.health.   

Team Cardamom is excited to attend ViVE! Join us and Vitea for cocktails and appetizers on Monday, February 23 from 6:00-8:00pm in the Pico Boardroom (7th floor) at the Moxy Hotel. We can’t wait to connect!

CereCore

Booth 1154 in the Club CHIME Lounge

Contact: Phil Sobol, CCO
Phil.Sobol@CereCore.net
615.344.4169

CereCore works behind the scenes to empower hospitals and health systems with IT services around the nation and globe. Looking for IT and application support, technical professional and managed services, strategic IT consulting and advisory services, or EHR consulting? Let’s meet so we can help you find EHR experts to maximize your investment, tap into support desk solutions that will result in happier users and providers, supplement your technical and support teams, and connect you with the right talent so you can better manage IT operations. Find meaningful change with CereCore’s healthcare IT managed services. See you in the Club CHIME Lounge at ViVE26.

Clearsense

Booth 1741

Contact: Kära Freeman, senior director, revenue operations
kfreeman@clearsense.com
612.747.2134

Gartner’s “2026 CIO and Technology Executive Survey” shows cost optimization is the number one priority shaping CIO objectives over the next two years.

Join us live on the Palm Stage at ViVE on Monday, February 23 at 4:30pm for the CHIME-curated case study panel, “IT Cost Optimization and Enterprise Strategy.” This featured session brings together Clearsense CEO Jason Rose with Trinity Health Chief IT Strategy Officer Mike Prokic and CTO and VP of Product Engineering Nick O’Connor for a candid discussion on how application decommissioning can be transformed into a scalable financial strategy. Trinity Health will share its roadmap for eliminating nearly $80 million in recurring operating expenses, offering a practical blueprint for any health system looking to drive cost optimization while protecting its workforce — without compromising patient care.

Clearsense will also be available for one-on-one discussions throughout the event. For health systems looking to reduce financial waste, manage merger-related complexity, or advance digital transformation initiatives, this is an opportunity to explore one of the most powerful — and underused — levers available to health systems today.

Visit us at booth 1741 or schedule a meeting in advance using our booking link.

About Clearsense
Clearsense is a healthcare data-enablement platform designed to help health systems optimize operating costs while revitalizing access to data. The 1Clearsense Platform enables large-scale decommissioning of redundant legacy applications using a disciplined, assembly line–style approach that prioritizes speed and cost impact. By retiring legacy systems while preserving access to historical data through active archiving, Clearsense helps organizations eliminate ongoing costs tied to licensing, infrastructure, and support while establishing a stronger data foundation for analytics, AI, and research. Learn more at clearsense.com.

Clearwater

Booth 618 in the Cybersecurity Zone

Contact: Lisa Munro, director of marketing
lisa.munro@clearwatersecurity.com
205.767.9141

Clearwater is healthcare’s largest pure play cybersecurity and compliance firm helping organizations across the healthcare ecosystem move to a more secure, compliant, and resilient state so they can achieve their missions. We provide a deep pool of experts across a broad range of cybersecurity, privacy, and compliance domains; purpose-built software that enables efficient identification and management of cybersecurity and compliance risks; managed cloud services; and a 24/7 Security Operations Center with managed threat detection and response capabilities.   

Visit us in the Cybersecurity Zone to experience our latest innovations and connect with our team about the future of cybersecurity, data integrity, and digital resilience in healthcare. Be sure to catch our presentations in the Cybersecurity Data Innovation theater:    

Wearing Two Hats: A CIO/CISO Case Study in Cyber Resilience (Monday, February 23, 1:35-1:55pm) 
When ransomware struck and key security leaders departed, Enloe Health faced the reality many community hospitals know well –  limited resources, expanding risk, and one leader wearing multiple hats. In this candid discussion, Enloe Health’s CIO and CISO will share how the organization rebuilt its cybersecurity program, regained leadership trust, and strengthened resilience without overextending staff. Attendees will walk away with practical insights for navigating cyber incidents, staffing constraints, and executive accountability in small-to-mid-sized healthcare environments.   

When the Cloud Becomes the Attack Surface (Tuesday, February 24, 10:05-10:25am) 
Healthcare organizations are moving fast to the cloud, but security models haven’t always kept pace. In this fireside chat, a healthcare cloud security architect and healthcare security leader will unpack the most common cloud misconfigurations, identity mistakes, and visibility gaps hospitals encounter and why they’re so hard to detect. Attendees will leave with a clearer understanding of how to manage cloud risk across complex, multi-cloud environments without overwhelming internal teams.

Clinical Architecture

Booth 1241

Contact: Marck DuBois, chief revenue officer
marck_dubois@clinicalarchitecture.com
317.580.8400

Meaningful outcomes start with high-quality data. Our data quality solutions give you the ability to objectively assess and improve patient information, normalize and uplift data, and transform message formats. Visit booth 1241 to learn more about the PIQXL Gateway, our implementation of the PIQI framework, which allows you to measure the quality of patient information and pinpoint the root cause of issues for improvement.

EFax by Consensus Cloud Solutions

Booth 1918

Contact: Alyssa Stephens, events
alyssa.stephens@consensus.com
844.804.1234

Visit the EFax by Consensus Cloud Solutions booth at ViVE to see how we’re turning healthcare’s biggest data bottleneck into your greatest clinical advantage. We’re going far beyond traditional faxing by using AI, NLP, and machine learning to transform static, unstructured documents into structured, HL7-ready data. Don’t let critical patient insights stay trapped in digital scans — learn how our automated data extraction slashes administrative burden, accelerates treatment, and drives revenue for providers and payers alike. Stop by booth 1918 for a free latte and watch a live demo of your data in motion to see why the future of the continuum of care is no longer unstructured.

CTG

Booth 1125 & Booth 318 in the Cybersecurity Zone

Contact: Sarah Blafer, marketing team lead, demand generation
Sarah.Blafer@ctg.com
860.942.2180

CTG, a Cegeka company, delivers IT and business solutions that enhance digital agility. Over the last 35-plus years, we’ve supported more than 1,000 healthcare organizations, empowering them to modernize systems, improve performance, and advance digital initiatives with innovative services and technologies. Our expertise spans EHR implementation and managed services, cybersecurity, ERP, cloud, infrastructure, IT/application support, and clinical optimization. Visit CTG at booths 1125 and 318 to learn more.

Divurgent

Club CHIME

Contact: Danny Arnold, EVP of growth and strategy
Danny.Arnold@divurgent.com
518.495.2594

Divurgent is a full-service, healthcare-focused/HIT consulting firm led by people you actually want to work with. We’re one of the only firms out there that has your back for the whole journey. We can help you select an EHR or tool, implement it, staff it, bring you live, optimize it, and more. Three-hundred sixty degrees. Most of our focus is on EHRs, but we do much more than that. We think beyond the system and below the surface. Think workflow, digital strategy, operational readiness, change management and more. Sure, we can help augment your talent or get boots on the ground, but we’re most excited by helping you solve your most complex challenges. Our consultants have worked for health systems, so they’ve been in your shoes and understand operations and clinical demands. Give us a problem and we’ll solve it together. And before we do any of that, we listen.

Ellkay

Booth 1516

Contact: Morgan Hassell, marketing director of communications
morgan.hassell@ELLKAY.com
602.663.0529

Ellkay is a trusted healthcare data enablement partner helping payers, providers, labs, and health IT companies simplify interoperability and build AI-ready data foundations. Through our modern platform and deep healthcare expertise, we help organizations connect, manage, and optimize data across their ecosystem — without adding complexity.   

At ViVE, meet with Team Ellkay to learn how we help organizations:

• Streamline workflows and reduce operational friction.
• Simplify data exchange across systems, partners, and networks.
• Build scalable, secure data strategies that support innovation.   

Why stop by? If you’re navigating fragmented data, legacy systems, or growing interoperability demands, Ellkay brings both the technology and the expertise to help you move faster with confidence.   

Special Events 
Join us for Happy Hour at booth 1516 — both days! Stop by to connect with our team, enjoy a drink, and see how Ellkay is powering seamless interoperability behind the scenes.

Want to plan ahead? Set some time with us here. Let’s connect — and raise a glass to better healthcare data.

Elsevier’s ClinicalKey AI

Booth 1041 in the AI @ ViVE Zone

Contact: Meg Maguire, events manager
m.maguire@elsevier.com

Discover how ClinicalKey AI can support clinical decision-making at the point of care. Visit booth 1041 in the AI @ ViVE Zone and join our expert speaker session. Physician Executive Claudine Lott, MD will present on implementing AI at scale on Monday, February 23, and CTO Rhett Alden will present on API-enabled AI content integration on Tuesday, February 24. See how trusted content and AI can streamline workflows and elevate patient care.

Five9

Booth 2049

Contact: Roni Jamesmeyer, senior healthcare marketing manager
roni.jamesmeyer@five9.com
972.768.6554

Five9 provides a comprehensive suite of CX solutions, powered by Five9 Genius AI, to elevate customer experiences that deliver better business outcomes in the cloud contact center space. The New CX redefines how brands connect with customers through seamless and efficient AI-driven journeys that anticipate and meet each customer’s unique needs. Our unified cloud-native offering enables AI and human agents to create hyper-personalized customer experiences, so every customer interaction is more connected, effortless, and personal. Trusted by 3,000+ customers and 1,400+ partners globally, Five9 brings together the power of our AI, our platform, and our people to drive AI-elevated CX. For more information, visit www.five9.com.

Fortified Health Security

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Booth 1347

Contact: Rachel Bryant, marketing coordinator
rbryant@fortifiedhealthsecurity.com
904.316.3310

Join Fortified Health Security at ViVE 2026 to explore the latest in digital health innovation, cybersecurity, and healthcare transformation. Fortified is built for healthcare, offering tailored solutions to help you address your unique challenges, navigate the ever-changing legislative landscape, and working alongside you to create a stronger cybersecurity posture.   

Connect with our team at booth 1347. Set up a meeting ahead of time by emailing connect@fortifiedhealthsecurity.com. Join us at one of our events on Monday, February 23, when we will host an exclusive reception at the Grammy Museum, followed by a Nightcap in the City of Angels at the Moxy hotel. Get all the details to secure your spot here: https://fortifiedhealthsecurity.com/event/vive26/. We look forward to seeing you in Los Angeles!

Get-to-Market Health

Contact Steve Shihadeh to arrange a meeting

Contact: Steve Shihadeh, founder and CEO
steve@gettomarkethealth.net

We partner with healthcare technology leaders to accelerate growth, strengthen go-to-market execution, and build lasting customer relationships. Whether navigating post-investment expansion or launching new solutions, GTMH helps companies market, sell, and scale in ways that drive sustainable success. “Driving Growth in Healthcare Technology”

Health Data Movers

Contact Brooke Foster to arrange a meeting.

Contact: Brooke Foster, marketing coordinator
Brooke@HealthDataMovers.com
847.404.0326

Health Data Movers (HDM) is a healthcare technology services firm. We are trusted partners to healthcare organizations, biotechnology companies, and digital health enterprises through our services – data management, integration, project management, and clinical and business applications. We are the smart choice for creating unique solutions that empower patients and providers by unleashing the potential of healthcare data and technology.

Find us at our focus group, “Conversions without Chaos: Strategic Planning for High Stakes Healthcare Data Migration,” on Sunday, February 22 at 4:15pm.

Join Health Data Movers and CitiusTech on Tuesday, February 24 from 6:00-9:00pm for Data & Drinks After Dark at ViVE! RSVP here, space is limited!       

We Make IT Happen! Visit www.healthdatamovers.com.

Impact Advisors

Contact John Stanley to arrange a meeting.

Contact John Stanley, chief growth officer
john.stanley@impact-advisors.com
562.243.4937

Impact Advisors is a leading healthcare management consulting firm committed to solving the industry’s emerging and evolving challenges through tech-enabled operations performance improvement. Our high-performing team of clinical, financial, operations, and technology experts collaborate to architect quality solutions and deliver measurable value for our clients. We are the most awarded consulting firm in healthcare, with services recognized among Best in KLAS for 18 consecutive years and a culture deemed a “Best Place to Work” by Modern Healthcare for 16 years.

Lincata

Booth 2206

Contact: Adam DeRocher, chief revenue officer
adam.derocher@lincata.com
712.541.9132

Lincata’s Bedside Operating System (OS) transforms hospital televisions into digital experience tools that launch MyChart Bedside TV directly in-room. It’s simple. LincTV, coupled with MyChart Bedside TV, existing TV screens, cameras, microphones and other equipment, enables health systems to create the foundation for smart room capabilities and virtual care. LincTV consists of a proprietary set top box and purpose-built MDM, which provides flexibility, scalability, security, and ease of deployment.

Med Tech Solutions

Contact Kaitlyn Nelson to arrange a meeting.

Contact: Kaitlyn Nelson, director of account solutions and development
knelson@medtechsolutions.com

Stoltenberg Consulting, a leading healthcare technology consulting firm and proud Med Tech Solutions (MTS) brand, helps hospitals and health systems maximize the value of their EHR systems. With deep clinical and financial module expertise across Epic, Oracle Cerner, Meditech, NextGen, eClinicalWorks, and Veradigm, Stoltenberg’s EHR-certified consultants bring an average of 15+ years of real-world hospital experience to every engagement. Earning 3x Best in KLAS recognition for Partial IT Outsourcing, Stoltenberg specializes in EHR implementation, managed services including help desk and legacy system support, go-live command centers and ATE support, and flexible staffing solutions. Focused on reducing EHR burden, lowering support costs, and improving clinician and patient experience, Stoltenberg partners with healthcare organizations nationwide to drive meaningful, measurable outcomes for EHR improvement. No matter where you are in your EHR journey, partner with Stoltenberg and the MTS family of brands to help you make the most of your technology investment.

Director of Account Solutions and Development Kaitlyn Nelson and Chief Client Officer Imran Siddiqui will be on site at ViVE26. Please submit meeting requests here.

Medicomp Systems

Booth 2329

Contact: James Aita, director of business development and strategy
info@medicomp.com
703.803.8080

Medicomp delivers the industry’s only physician-curated universal data foundation, transforming healthcare data into trusted intelligence through its evidence-based Clinical Intelligence Engine, Quippe. Quippe connects information across domains, normalizes every input, and validates AI outputs to ensure accurate, interoperable insights at the point of care — fueling innovation, improving accuracy, and unlocking the full value of clinical data.

Medicomp will be showcasing entirely new functionality that streamlines clinical workflow, combining technologies like ambient listening, natural language processing (NLP), Model Context Protocol (MCP), and leveraging its universal data foundation and knowledge graph to deliver the efficient, intelligent clinical workspace that clinicians have been craving. 

The gap between data and understanding is probably costing you – in denied claims, compliance penalties, technology ROI, clinician burnout, and patient safety risks.

Stop by the Medicomp booth to learn how your systems can benefit from:

• Clinically validated LLM outputs.
• Diagnostic intelligence that understands context, is evidence-based, and makes disparate data computable.
• Clinical grade agents based on a universal data foundation.

Solve the data reliability problem with diagnostically intelligent clinical data solutions.

To learn more, visit Medicomp.com.

Meditech

Booth 1436

Contact: Rachel Wilkes, associate VP of marketing
rwilkes@meditech.com
781.774.4555

Join Meditech in booth 1436 as we showcase how the latest evolution of the Expanse EHR is helping healthcare organizations thrive. Built on a secure, cloud-native platform, Expanse provides the technological infrastructure necessary to help organizations balance clinical excellence with long-term financial sustainability.

Meditech will spotlight Expanse’s intelligent EHR tools that minimize cognitive strain, boost satisfaction, foster loyalty, and improve health outcomes. Key features include AI tools that function as intelligent collaborators, interoperability solutions like Meditech’s nationwide Traverse Exchange network for seamless data integration and consolidation, and patient empowerment tools like MyHealth patient portal’s AI-assistant that supports active patient participation.

Hear from the leaders defining the future of health IT. Meditech and customer executives will lead several high impact discussions at ViVE 2026, including:

• Fueling Rural Transformation panel discussion with Meditech EVP and COO Helen Waters.
• EHR Maturity Moment panel discussion with Meditech EVP and COO Helen Waters.
• The Supply & Demand for Patient Data featuring Meditech Senior Director of Interoperability Mike Cordeiro
• When Small Gets Tough: Digital Health in Resource -Thin Environments with panelists Wooster Community Hospital Health System VP and CIO of Information Systems Eric Gasser and Meditech Chief Marketing and Nursing Executive Cath Turner, MBA, RN-BC.
• How AI Fixed a Hidden Fax Drain on Staff Time featuring Northfield Hospital and Clinics Manager of Information Technology Debbie Oathoudt.

Meditech invites guests to an in-booth networking reception on Monday, February 23, from 4:45-5:45 pm in booth 1436. Learn more about Meditech’s presence at ViVE by visiting its event page.

MRO

Booth V-330

Contact: Brad Hawkins, VP of payer solutions
BHawkins@mrocorp.com
601.405.2470

MRO is “The Single Source for Smarter Data” – driving a new era of clinical data intelligence where data is connected, structured, and transformed into actionable insights. The result – confident decisions, operational precision, accelerated research, and most importantly, better patient care. This innovative model for clinical data management is built for speed and scale, combining FHIR-native connectivity, deep clinical expertise, and advanced automation to turn a fragmented healthcare ecosystem into a connected pathway where every data point delivers impact. The outcome is a faster, smarter, more secure platform for managing enterprise clinical data that drives better outcomes and creates revenue-generating opportunities for our client partners, while enhancing security, compliance, and clinical integrity. With 24 years of trusted solutions and partnerships, MRO knows that a stronger healthcare ecosystem begins with smarter data, leading to data-driven decisions and better performance. Learn more at www.mrocorp.com.

Nordic

Meeting Room 547

Contact: Rebecca Whaley, SVP of marketing
Rebecca.Whaley@NordicGlobal.com

Navigating the flux of the healthcare landscape takes a seasoned partner who can envision technology’s role in your organization’s success and execute the right plan.

With a singular focus on healthcare and proven experience, Nordic understands the big picture and is ready to take on your toughest technology and business challenges.

Connect with us at meeting room 547 to discuss our end-to-end solutions and how they can help you solve for today and tomorrow. Reserve your spot!

Nordic is also proud to sponsor CHIME’s ViVE Welcome Reception for CHIME members. Connect with members of our team on Sunday, February 22, from 5:30-7:00pm at the JW Marriott Los Angeles.

Learn more about what Nordic is doing at ViVE 2026 here.

Optimum Healthcare IT

Booth 2202

Contact: Larry Kaiser, CMO
lkaiser@optimumhit.com

Optimum Healthcare IT is a Best in KLAS healthcare IT digital transformation and consulting firm based in Jacksonville Beach, Florida. Optimum’s comprehensive service offerings include Enterprise Application Services, Digital Transformation, and Workforce Management, which features our Optimum CareerPath skill development program. Backed by a leadership team with extensive expertise, we deliver tailored healthcare consulting solutions to diverse organizations.   

Optimum Healthcare IT has the right pit crew at the right time for your organization. We prepare you for the track and keep you on the track with each of our specialized crew members. You have desired and required outcomes; we make sure you meet them.    

Make a Pit Stop at:  

• Booth 2202  
• CHIME Stage on February 24 at 3:30pm – From Tune-Up to Top Speed: How 2 Major Health Systems Achieved Cloud Success 
• Sunset Stage on February 25 at 9:25am – Reducing Clinician and IT Burden with Just One Click

PerfectServe

Booth 1665

Contact: Jenn Corcoran, senior marketing manager
jcorcoran@perfectserve.com
802.379.5352

Struggling with after-hours coverage, missed handoffs, or “who’s on call?” confusion? At ViVE, PerfectServe is offering complimentary 15-minute workflow reviews for healthcare leaders who want to identify gaps in their communication and scheduling processes – and leave with clear, practical next steps. In 15 minutes, we’ll: 

• Walk through any visitor’s current communication and scheduling workflow. 
• Identify failure points that create delays, burnout, or risk. 
• Highlight opportunities to simplify, automate, or integrate with the EHR. 
• Share how peers are addressing similar challenges.   

Visitors will leave with a clearer picture of where things break down, practical ideas to take back to teammates, and a benchmarked perspective from other health systems.   

Who should book time? This is ideal for CMOs, CIOs, and COOs; clinical operations leaders; IT leaders responsible for clinical communication; physician and nursing leadership; and scheduling managers. Book a review here.

Why PerfectServe?
PerfectServe helps health systems accelerate speed to care by bringing communication and scheduling into a single, EHR-integrated platform. We help organizations create a single source of truth for staff scheduling; enable secure, role-based care team communication; power a reliable clinical contact center; and, finally, answer, with confidence, “Who’s on call right now?”

Praia Health

Contact Scott North to arrange a meeting.

Contact: Scott North, VP of partnerships
scott.north@praiahealth.com

Praia Health is the patient experience orchestration platform for health systems. We help health systems attract, engage, and retain patients by supercharging their portals and digital tools with seamless, personalized journeys in one platform. The result is higher retention, lower costs, and measurable ROI.

Sonifi Health

Viosk 2136

Contact: Jared Allen, SVP of sales
jallen@sonifihealth.com
801.386.1450

Sonifi Health provides industry-leading, interactive patient engagement technology proven to improve patient outcomes and staff productivity. The EHR-integrated platform is designed to anticipate the needs of patients and clinicians, infusing the principles of hospitality into care experiences. As part of Sonifi Solutions, Inc., the company supports more than 300 million end-user experiences annually. Learn more at sonifihealth.com.

TeamBuilder

Booth 1667

Contact: Taylor Bockweg, VP of sales
taylor@teambuilder.io

TeamBuilder is the Operational Intelligence platform for healthcare scheduling, purpose-built for ambulatory care. Traditional scheduling tools rely on static rules, staffing ratios, or forecast-only models that fail to reflect how care is actually delivered. TeamBuilder takes a fundamentally different approach. Its intelligence evaluates multiple operational signals — including appointment complexity, provider mix, staffing capabilities, throughput constraints, and available clinical space — to understand true demand and capacity. By modeling supply as capability rather than headcount and continuously re-optimizing as conditions change, TeamBuilder enables predictive scheduling for both staff and space. This allows healthcare organizations to move from reactive schedule management to proactive operational planning. The result is clearer visibility into capacity, improved access, and reduced labor inefficiency across clinics, specialties, and regions.

News 2/20/26

Top News

University of Mississippi Medical Center closes all of its clinics following a Thursday cyberattack that kept users out of Epic and other systems.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Here’s a two-question quiz: (a) is your company participating in HIMSS26?; and (b) does it sponsor HIStalk? If both answers are yes, then complete this form to describe your participation and I’ll include it in my online guide. If B is a no, then contact Lorre because you are spending three expensive HIMSS days wooing non-decision-makers who are trolling for swag ands soiree invitations, but you’re missing the inexpensive opportunity to catch the attention of the actual decision-makers who frequent HIStalk all year.

Dr. Jayne’s latest post references this earworm of a song, which now has me hooked. I also learned that  longtime HIStalkapalooza contributor Bonny Roberts recently joined the company, CognomIQ, as VP of customer success.

Sponsored Events and Resources

Publication: HIStalk’s Guide to ViVE 2026 lists the activities of sponsors at the conference.

Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

A Boston Globe article calls the former Steward Health Care hospitals that other systems acquired “the fixer-upper from hell,” as new owners discover hidden financial problems, deteriorating facilities, and deeper-than-expected operating losses. Boston Medical Center will spend $80 million to replace Steward’s EHR, which it says is so dysfunctional that it struggles to get paid, while Brown University Health spent “tens of millions of dollars” just to operate the system and prepare to replace it. Steward implemented Meditech Expanse in 18 hospitals in 2022 and used Athenahealth for ambulatory care.

Investment firm Exa Capital acquires clinical workforce management software vendor StaffReady. The buy-and-hold enterprise software company also owns human service EHR vendor PrecisionCare.

Hims & Hers will acquire Australia-based online clinic operator Eucalyptus for $1.15 billion.

People

Healthmonix hires Pierre Menard (Trella Health) as CTO.

Announcements and Implementations

HIMSS President and CEO Hal Wolf appears on the short-form, pay-to-play TV program “Viewpoint with Dennis Quaid” to promote AI in what comes across as a self-congratulatory infomercial. Past episodes have highlighted wineries, a cruise line, and casinos. The show wins awards, at least the kind where you attach your check to your self-nomination with full expectation of “winning.” Quaid delivered the keynote at HIMSS09, speaking about patient safety after a Cedars-Sinai medication error nearly killed his newborn twins. He later settled with Cedars and Baxter, which sold the 10,000-unit heparin vial and 100-unit Hep-Lock that hospital staff mixed up because they violated hospital policy that requires pharmacist verification. HIMSS gave a $10,000 donation to Quaid’s patient safety foundation, which accomplished nothing as far as I can tell, merged with another organization within a year, and was later sold to a for-profit college.

Government and Politics

An Indiana otolaryngologist is sentenced to 97 months in federal prison for billing Medicare and private insurance $50 million for balloon sinuplasty procedures that she hadn’t actually performed, which netted her $20 million that she now has to repay.

Sponsor Updates

• AdvancedMD launches a new release that includes an ambient listening tool, presenting suggested action items from patient transcripts, managing PBM requests, enhanced appointment scheduling and cancellation, and AI-driven analysis.
• Tegria releases a new report titled “The Access-Driven Enterprise: How Health Systems Are Defining, Enabling, and Advancing Access Strategy.”
• Findhelp publishes a new case study titled “How Essentia Health Increased Patient Trust by 66% with Findhelp.”
• Jason Peterson, MBA, MS (Tegria) joins Canopii Collaborative as AVP of client partnerships.
• The Validation Institute names Judi Health a Health Value Award winner in Pharmacy Benefit Management.
• Medicomp Systems releases a new “Tell Me Where HIT Hurts” podcast episode featuring Civitas Networks for Health CEO Jolie Ritzo.
• Fortified Health Security announces TPRM with VendorIQ, a third-party risk management solution that helps healthcare organizations assess and track vendor cybersecurity risk.
• Meditech congratulates customer Ontario Shores Centre for Mental Health Sciences on winning its second HIMSS Davies Award.

Blog Posts

• Building a foundation of trust: How responsible AI is built (Altera Digital Health)
• 20 Risk adjustment software vendors to consider in 2026 (Arcadia)
• Beyond the counter: Pharmacy teams can impact care delivery (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• The Denial-Free Revenue Cycle: Tools and Tactics to Keep Costs in Check (FinThrive)
• Why Healthcare Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM) Must Change (Fortified Health Security)
• Preparedness in Ambulatory Healthcare: Are Your IT Systems Ready for What’s Next? (HCTec)
• How a Leading Cancer Center Achieved $122 Million in Revenue Optimization in Eight Months: A Revenue Integrity–Driven Success Story (Impact Advisors)
• A collaborative path to improving maternal health through meaningful connections (Meditech)
• Oracle Cerner Staffing Resource Guide: Tackling 8 Key Cerner Support Problems Amid Ongoing EHR Market Movement (Med Tech Solutions)
• Achieving the real ROI of AI: 5 takeaways for clinical, financial, and VBC success in 2026 (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.

News 2/18/26

Top News

Drug and diagnostics company Danaher will acquire Masimo for $9.9 billion.

Masimo is a leading vendor of blood oxygen monitoring technology.

A federal jury ordered Apple to pay Masimo $634 million in November 2025 for infringing on its smartwatch blood oxygen monitoring patents.

Reader Comments

From Bueno: “Re: Sachin Jain article. Did you see this?” I hadn’t seen it, but “When Patients Win, Hospitals Lose” describes the conundrum in which hospitals make more money when their outcomes are poor. Some quotes:

• No one said “we need more sick people.” But economically, that was the implication. When better health becomes a financial threat, something is profoundly broken.
• Airlines don’t justify crashes to protect repair revenue. Fire departments don’t root for fires to keep budgets stable. Yet healthcare routinely normalizes illness as financial necessity. If your organization only survives when people are hospitalized, the business model is misaligned with the mission.
• We need some people to stay sick so others can get care. That is not a sustainable ethical position.
• If hospitals lose when patients get healthier, whose side is the system really on?

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I read the “Lonesome Dove” series last week, all 3,000 pages of it, and then watched the six-hour miniseries for probably the 30th time. I watched the first episode again last night in honor of Robert “Captain Augustus McRae” Duvall, who died this week at 95. The first time I watched it many years ago, it was straight through, after which I restarted it and watched all six hours again without a break. The surly bartender scene is my favorite — watch the bemused Woodrow Call smile tightly, turn to the door, and place hand on gun at the bartender’s first derogatory comment knowing full well what is about to happen. Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones are just outstanding. For Mr. Duvall, who has always said that the Gus role was his career favorite, here’s to the sunny slopes of long ago.

Sponsored Events and Resources

Live Webinar: February 18 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “From Blind Spots to Insights: Gaining Real-Time Visibility into Healthcare Risk.” Sponsor: CloudWave. Presenters: Jacob Wheeler, MBA, director of sales engineering, CloudWave; Mike Donahue, chief operating officer, CloudWave. Resilience starts with the ability to see clearly, across every endpoint, cloud workload, user, and clinical system. Join CloudWave’s cybersecurity leaders for an in-depth session on how real-time visibility transforms your ability to detect threats early, respond decisively, and strengthen resilience across the care ecosystem. Attendees will learn the practical steps that hospitals can take to move from reactive defense to resilient action.

Publication: HIStalk’s Guide to ViVE 2026 lists the activities of sponsors at the conference.

Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Drug, therapy, and remote patient monitoring company Perigon Health 360 spins out Medesto Health, which offers an intelligent patient engagement and care coordination platform.

Baystate Health (MA) cuts 117 corporate positions and decides to outsource management of its clinical assets to TriMedX. Employees working on Baystate’s clinical engineering team will become TriMedX employees in May.

Redditors attribute Northwell Health’s recently reported IT layoffs to the system’s conversion to Epic, with one mentioning that most of those pink-slipped had been working with legacy systems. The New York-based provider began making cuts and reorganizing operations last year. It is still dealing with lawsuits related to a former employee who secretly filmed patients in the bathrooms of its sleep center. Northwell took more than a year to notify 13,000 patients of the incident.

Innovative Consulting Group acquires Pivot Point Consulting. The combined organizations will operate under the Pivot Point brand.

Sales

• Hartford HealthCare (CT) selects AI tools from Sift Healthcare to improve reimbursement workflows and outcomes.

People

BayCare (FL) promotes Robert Carvajal to CISO.

Hippocratic AI names Anoop Sangha, MD (Transcarent) associate chief medical officer, Eduardo Reis, MD (Cognita) VP of strategy, and Niloy Sanyal (LeanTaaS) chief marketing officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Oracle Health makes its Clinical Note AI agent available to providers in the UK after a successful pilot program with several NHS facilities.

Medical University of South Carolina launches virtual nursing in its NICU using technology from VirtuAlly.

Aliso Ridge Behavioral Health (CA) implements Xferall’s patient transfer and care coordination software.

Fujitsu automates its software development lifecycle with its Takane LLM and agentic AI, which it says increased productivity 100-fold. The company will target deployment across its government and healthcare systems by the end of the fiscal year.

Government and Politics

VA Deputy Secretary Paul Lawrence says upcoming rollouts of the department’s Oracle Health-based EHR will return to pre-deployment levels of productivity more quickly than the initial sites that went live on the new software several years ago. He adds that the system is meeting contractual uptime targets and that 10 of the last 12 months have been free of incidents.

The Social Security Administration will connect to the TEFCA network through Qualified Health Information Network EHealth Exchange in early spring.

The federal requirement that hospitals post their prices publicly hasn’t reduced cost or improve the ability to patients to shop around, but it has benefited health systems and insurers that use the data for contract negotiations.

Other

End-users rate Netsmart the top vendor in behavioral health and community-based care, according to a Black Book Research survey of 1,100 behavioral health professionals.

Sponsor Updates

• Agfa HealthCare details its latest enterprise imaging sales, including an expanded partnership with Tampa General Hospital.
• Arcadia releases “Healthcare data management software: A comprehensive guide.”
• The “NCPDP Unscripted” podcast releases a new episode titled “How Real-Time Data Improves Access to Medications: A Conversation With Arrive Health.”

Blog Posts

• AI and A/R Automation in Healthcare: Six Reality Checks Behind the Hype (AGS Health)
• Streamline Clinical Workflows with MEDITECH Expanse 2.2: A How-to Guide (CereCore)
• From shift to shift: How consistent technology extends nurses’ care (Altera Digital Health)
• The healthcare data lake vs. other data storage structures (Arcadia)
• EHR Compliance Checklist for CIOs (Bizmatics)
• Cultivating the garden of leadership: Lessons for female leaders in growth, resilience, and boldness (Cardamom)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 2/16/26

Top News

HHS’s DOGE team posts a freely downloadable database of aggregated provider-level Medicaid claims data.

Reader Comments

From GLance: “Re: Script Corner. Web mentions of this major initiative from Surescripts and GoodRx have been scrubbed. Why?” I’ve emailed the Surescripts media contact. Script Corner sends patients a text message when a new prescription is received that includes a link to pricing details for local pharmacies and GoodRx. The companies announced a launch in Illinois and Texas in late January. UPDATE: A Surescripts spokesperson provides this response:

Surescripts is committed to working across the healthcare industry to create a more transparent and empowering patient care experience. We have received enough concerning feedback that we have decided to stop our patient price transparency pilot and refrain from taking further steps to bring the product to market. We are continuing to focus on delivering high integrity, clinically aligned solutions that inform and accelerate decisions to help keep patient care on track. We believe that technology can help address cost concerns, boost adherence and improve patient satisfaction.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Most poll respondents assume that an employee’s transition to independent consultant is transitory, voluntarily or otherwise.

New poll to your right or here: Has an employer ever demoted you? In my health system experience, demotions are often a well-intentioned acknowledgment that someone may have Peter Principled up one level too far, such as from technical lead to management, or from director to C-level. The demoted employee immediately feels insulted and begins looking elsewhere, but often stays after their resentment cools and the job search drags on. The optimal outcome, at least for the unmotivated among us, is a demotion that doesn’t involve a pay cut.

Welcome to new HIStalk Gold Sponsor KeyCare. KeyCare is an Epic-based virtual care partner designed to improve access and quality by expanding virtual care options for patients. KeyCare enables health systems to easily augment care teams and widen their digital front doors by offering access to an independent, nationwide network of primary care, urgent care, and behavioral health providers. This provides coordinated and seamless virtual care to patients without health systems having to buy and install additional software or hire more clinicians. KeyCare offers always-on acute care access with 24/7 on-demand video visits and E-visits, primary care extension and preventative services including overflow and bridge care in addition to preventative and wellness visits, chronic care management for high-risk patient programs, and payer and employer programs. Thanks to KeyCare for supporting HIStalk.

Thanks to these companies that recently supported HIStalk. Click a logo to learn more about them.

Sponsored Events and Resources

Live Webinar: February 18 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “From Blind Spots to Insights: Gaining Real-Time Visibility into Healthcare Risk.” Sponsor: CloudWave. Presenters: Jacob Wheeler, MBA, director of sales engineering, CloudWave; Mike Donahue, chief operating officer, CloudWave. Resilience starts with the ability to see clearly, across every endpoint, cloud workload, user, and clinical system. Join CloudWave’s cybersecurity leaders for an in-depth session on how real-time visibility transforms your ability to detect threats early, respond decisively, and strengthen resilience across the care ecosystem. Attendees will learn the practical steps that hospitals can take to move from reactive defense to resilient action.

Publication: HIStalk’s Guide to ViVE 2026 lists the activities of sponsors at the conference.

Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Healthcare Triangle conducts a 1-for-60 reverse stock split to remain listed on the Nasdaq Capital Market. HCTI shares have lost 99.9% of their value in the past 12 months, valuing the company at $1.5 million.

Solace Health receives $130 million in Series C funding, valuing the digital healthcare navigation and advocacy company at over $1 billion.

Sales

• Ireland’s three-hospital Blackrock Health will implement RLDatix’s offline and downtime system for Meditech.
• Sutter Health will implement OpenEvidence to allow clinicians to retrieve clinical evidence and guidelines with Epic integration.

People

Loma Linda Medical Center CIO Mark Zirkelbach died last month. He was 68.

Announcements and Implementations

Wolters Kluwer Health announces Medi-Span Expert AI, a Model Context Protocol server that will allow AI application and agent developers to connect to Medi-Span’s medication data.

Medical University of South Carolina will establish an AI Center for Health Innovation and Informatics, which will lead MUSC’s AI strategy, governance, innovation incubation, and workforce development.

Government and Politics

Oura is spending $1 million per year on lobbyists who hope to convince the FDA to relax regulation of non-diagnostic wellness devices. A TechRadar report notes that the Finland-based company’s largest customer is the Department of War and that it has a contract with Palantir to provide monitoring of military personnel.

Sponsor Updates

• NBC4 Washington partners with Findhelp as part of its Working for You initiative.
• Impact Advisors celebrates its 19th anniversary.
• Praia Health wins “Best in Show” at the HIMSS26 Emerge Pitch Competition, winning in the Health Systems – Address Hospital Capacity Crisis category.
• Rhapsody releases its “State of Interoperability” report.
• Switchboard Health wins the AI Lab Challenge at the American Hospital Association Rural Health Leadership Conference.

Blog Posts

• Beyond burnout scores: The hidden risk in clinician engagement surveys (Nordic)
• Building a People-First Approach to Autonomous Medical Coding (Nym)
• TrustCommerce + Qure4u: AI-Enabled Patient Payments That Drive Faster, Easier Collections (TrustCommerce, a Sphere company)
• Navigating the Medication Adherence Whiteout (Surescripts)
• Don’t Report HCPCS “C” Codes for Professional Services in 2026 (TruBridge)

Contacts

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

News 2/13/26

Top News

Health data exchange vendor HealthMark Group acquires Purview, which offers a cloud-based medical imaging sharing solution.

Reader Comments

From T-Bone: “Re: overused phrases to stop using. ‘Dropped’ is an eye-roller for me.” Me too, especially when it strays from podcast self-promotion, as in “new pod ep dropped” and drifts into ambiguity. If Spotify “dropped” a new AI DJ, did it launch one or scrap one? Thus the word is a contronym, meaning that it can mean one thing as well as the opposite (see: dust, clip, and sanction). “Dropped” was a hip-hop thing in the 1980s that referred to dropping the turntable’s needle onto a new LP track, adding no value over “released” either then or now.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

My optometrist referred me to an academic medical center’s ophthalmology clinic to rule out glaucoma after noting minor blood vessel irregularities. The visit went well, the team was efficient and empathetic, and my eyes are just fine. The checkout person said I needed to return every six months, although I’m not sure why. Specialists seem to rarely let patients walk out without promising to return every 6-12 months even when no particular intervention is planned. I suspect that their motivation is clinical rather than financial and that they truly believe, as specialists, that every (insured) human would benefit from their ongoing supervision.

Sponsored Events and Resources

Live Webinar: February 18 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “From Blind Spots to Insights: Gaining Real-Time Visibility into Healthcare Risk.” Sponsor: CloudWave. Presenters: Jacob Wheeler, MBA, director of sales engineering, CloudWave; Mike Donahue, chief operating officer, CloudWave. Resilience starts with the ability to see clearly, across every endpoint, cloud workload, user, and clinical system. Join CloudWave’s cybersecurity leaders for an in-depth session on how real-time visibility transforms your ability to detect threats early, respond decisively, and strengthen resilience across the care ecosystem. Attendees will learn the practical steps that hospitals can take to move from reactive defense to resilient action.

Publication: HIStalk’s Guide to ViVE 2026 lists the activities of sponsors at the conference.

Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Healthcare services and insurance provider Harbor Health acquires Rippl, which offers a dementia care platform. Harbor Health raised $130 million in September 2025, while Rippl raised a $23 million Series A in October 2024.

Shares of Teladoc and Doximity fall after Amazon announces plans to expand same-day prescription delivery to 4,500 cities by the end of the year. TDOC shares have lost 65% in the past 12 months, while DOCS is down 66%.

Sales

• Western Missouri Medical Center will implement Meditech Expanse EHR.
• KPC Health will deploy Altera Digital Health’s Paragon Denali EHR in its seven hospitals in Southern California.
• Hillsboro Health (IL) will implement Oracle Health’s EHR, Clinical AI Agent, and Seamless Exchange.
• Tampa General Hospital chooses Agfa HealthCare’s Enterprise Imaging Cloud software as a service.

People

Providence promotes Maulin Shah, MD to SVP/CHIO.

Announcements and Implementations

Medicomp Systems announces AI enablement tools that use its clinically validated, structured knowledge base to ensure that AI-generated documentation and insights are evidence-based before they are incorporated into the EHR. Core elements include validating ambient listening output, retrieving clinical data by natural language or dictation, converting narrative text into structured clinical data, and improving the flow of poorly mapped or unstructured data. The company has also released a Model Context Protocol to expose its APIs to AI models while limiting unstructured AI output and removing LLM access to PHI.

Government and Politics

Alabama hopes to use federal rural health funds to deploy telerobotic ultrasound technology to address severe rural obstetric clinician shortages and high infant mortality, but clinicians and policymakers question its effectiveness and whether it can replace trained health workers. A small Canadian review found that the technology avoided patient travel 70% of the time, and nearly all patients said that they would use it again. Only 15 of 55 rural Alabama counties have hospital-based obstetric services, down from 45 in 1980.

Privacy and Security

A Utah state auditor finds that records of 2 million people that are electronically stored by the Department of Health and Human Services, including psychiatric treatment records from Utah State Hospital, are accessible to any employee who has system access, with no safeguards to prevent or log inappropriate viewing.

A TikTok celebrity who was injured while creating a travel video requests that his personal information not be published after an unnamed hospital where he was treated notified him that multiple employees improperly accessed his medical record. He also says that staff entered his treatment room while he was medicated to ask for selfies.

Sponsor Updates

• Cibolo Health chooses CloudWave as the preferred cybersecurity provider for its rural clinically integrated network members.
• WellSky announces GA of its WellSky Long-Term Care solution, powered by SkySense AI.
• Fulton County Medical Center (PA) will upgrade to Meditech Expanse in May.
• InterSystems wins four Global 2026 Best in KLAS awards, with TrackCare receiving Acute Care EHR in France, Asia, and Oceania and HealthShare recognized for shared care records in Europe.
• Five9 announces an expanded partnership with Google Cloud and a new joint Enterprise CX AI solution for large enterprises.
• Health Data Movers releases a new episode of its “QuickHITs” podcast titled “Pediatric Health Mergers & AI with John Henderson.”

Blog Posts

• The Managed Services advantage: Why more healthcare leaders are making the Shift (Altera Digital Health)
• AI trends shaping the Health IT Transaction Landscape (Healthcare Growth Partners)
• 2026 Mental and Behavioral Health Registry (MBHR) (Healthmonix)
• Cultivating the garden of leadership: Lessons for female leaders in growth, resilience, and boldness (Cardamom)
• How Healthcare Leaders Can Stabilize Performance Today While Transforming Care for Tomorrow (Impact Advisors) 
• How nurses at Berkshire Health Systems harness peer-driven change to improve patient care (Meditech)

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 2/11/26

Top News

Patient navigation and doctor quality analytics platform vendor Garner Health raises $118 million in Series D funding that values the company at $1.35 billion.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

HIStalk sponsors that are participating in HIMSS26: send me your details and I’ll include them in my guide to the conference. The ViVE version of the form is still live, with results so far here.

Sponsored Events and Resources

Live Webinar: February 18 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “From Blind Spots to Insights: Gaining Real-Time Visibility into Healthcare Risk.” Sponsor: CloudWave. Presenters: Jacob Wheeler, MBA, director of sales engineering, CloudWave; Mike Donahue, chief operating officer, CloudWave. Resilience starts with the ability to see clearly, across every endpoint, cloud workload, user, and clinical system. Join CloudWave’s cybersecurity leaders for an in-depth session on how real-time visibility transforms your ability to detect threats early, respond decisively, and strengthen resilience across the care ecosystem. Attendees will learn the practical steps that hospitals can take to move from reactive defense to resilient action.

Publication: HIStalk’s Guide to ViVE 2026 lists the activities of sponsors at the conference.

Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Synthpop, which specializes in healthcare AI for diagnostics, fertility, and durable medical equipment workflows, announces $15 million in Series A funding.

Sales

• MultiCare Health System (WA) selects Ambience Healthcare’s AI platform for documentation, coding, and clinical workflows.
• M Health Fairview (MN) will implement Nabla’s ambient AI assistant and dictation software.

People

Marshall Health Network (WV) promotes David Quirke to chief digital and information officer.

Agfa HealthCare names Christopher Thompson VP of sales east for North America.

Danny Gladden, MBA, MSW (Oracle Health) joins Streamline Healthcare Solutions as chief clinical officer.

AssureCare promotes Parth Shah, MBA, MRes to SVP of customer success and enterprise AI delivery.

Andy Brailo (Premier) joins R1 as chief commercial officer.

MPulse names Brian Higgins (Clarity Software Solutions) chief architect and promotes Erin Kowalow to EVP of product delivery.

Ambience Healthcare appoints Mike Valli (Symplr) chief revenue officer and chief value officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Warm Valley Health Care (WY) goes live on Oracle Health.

Government and Politics

The VA’s latest inventory of 138 active AI use cases finds that its EHR Modernization Program is looking at five separate use cases for the technology, including a clinical agent that will be integrated with its Oracle Health-based system. The department is also incorporating the technology into its suicide prevention efforts.

Rajput Kuldeep Singh, the former CEO of remote patient monitoring vendor Biofourmis, is charged in Singapore with several counts of falsifying company invoices to inflate revenue figures. He left Biofourmis in August 2023 and later founded OutcomesAI, which raised $10 million in seed funding in October 2025. Biofourmis was acquired by competitor CopilotIQ in October 2024

Sponsor Updates

• AdvancedMD offers a new case study titled “How AdvancedMD Helped Televero Behavioral Health Fortify Its Financial Health.”
• CereCore releases a new podcast titled “The Dual Perspective of a Rural CMO and CMIO.”
• Cardamom will present at Oregon HFMA’s Winter Workshop February 12 in McMinnville.
• SlicedHealth is named #3 on the UGA 2026 Bulldog 100 list.
• CloudWave will sponsor the MUSE SOCial Community Peer Group Event February 18 in Covino, CA.

Blog Posts

• Scaling Behavioral Health: What a Unified EHR Should Deliver (Netsmart)
• Physician Leader on Why Healthcare Needs Doctors at the Decision-Making Table (CereCore)
• The hidden cost of poor contract management in healthcare (Altera Digital Health)
• The healthcare data lake vs. other data storage structures (Arcadia)
• California Collaborative (Canopii Collaborative)
• 76% Critical, 20% Ready: The Massive Execution Gap Revealed at CHIME25 (Clearsense)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 2/9/26

Top News

Apple is reportedly abandoning the delayed launch of a rumored virtual health coach app and will instead incorporate some of its planned features, such as gait analysis, into its Health app.

Reports indicate that the company realizes that it can’t match the features of the IPhone apps offered by Oura and Whoop.

Apple reportedly has shuffled the executive team that oversees its health technology efforts.

Reader Comments

From Not Listed: “Re: Becker’s ‘CIOs to know’ list. What does it mean, exactly?” It means that unnamed, likely early-career list writers can use Google and LinkedIn and call it “editorial research.” I suspect that some people nominated themselves, given bios that read as uncomfortably self-congratulatory. The list is a far cry from journalism or anything resembling science, but it is clever marketing since dozens of winners will publicize it with LinkedIn humble-bragging as if it means something. I don’t trust any award or survey result that doesn’t include defensible methodology.

From Diphthong: “Re: Harvard program. This just popped up on Facebook. If I wasn’t retired, I might sign up.” Harvard Medical School offers an eight-week, $3,000 online program titled “AI in Health Care: From Strategies to Implementation.” The description calls for 4-6 hours per week plus a capstone project in which the student pitches an AI-first solution to their employer. AI knowledge has a short shelf life, but people like putting a Harvard certificate on LinkedIn. Plus John Glaser is one of the faculty.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

HIStalk sponsors that are participating in HIMSS26: send me your details and I’ll include them in my guide to the conference. The ViVE version of the form is still live, with results so far here.

I provided several common phrases that companies use to signal more optimism than their business results warrant, but these are the winners. I’m always surprised when a company spins “rightsizing” as an insightful long-term tactic rather than a desperate attempt to save the sinking ship by jettisoning valuable cargo and crew. I’m less skeptical of a CEO or COO hire since, as with sports coaches, they can sometimes turn an unfocused business around. Other C-level hires, no.

New poll to your right or here: What is your first reaction when a long-time W-2 employee starts a consulting business? Mine is that enthusiasm peaks with the LinkedIn announcement and before the realization that the most common incoming mail is bills rather than checks, but I’m interested to hear if readers see it differently. For those who have done it, did you expect to stick it out, or was it intended to avoid a resume gap while looking for a new job? I’m also curious about the reaction of former industry peers when you try to sell them services, which seems uncomfortable at best and unsuccessful at worst.

Ms. M’s third-grade magnet STEM class in Pasadena, CA reports on their use of agriculture programming kits that HIStalk readers provided via Donors Choose donations. They have built solutions for farmland auto-irrigation, greenhouse temperature and humidity monitoring, and farmland protection devices.

Sponsored Events and Resources

Live Webinar: February 18 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “From Blind Spots to Insights: Gaining Real-Time Visibility into Healthcare Risk.” Sponsor: CloudWave. Presenters: Jacob Wheeler, MBA, director of sales engineering, CloudWave; Mike Donahue, chief operating officer, CloudWave. Resilience starts with the ability to see clearly, across every endpoint, cloud workload, user, and clinical system. Join CloudWave’s cybersecurity leaders for an in-depth session on how real-time visibility transforms your ability to detect threats early, respond decisively, and strengthen resilience across the care ecosystem. Attendees will learn the practical steps that hospitals can take to move from reactive defense to resilient action.

Publication: HIStalk’s Guide to ViVE 2026 lists the activities of sponsors at the conference.

Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Doximity reports Q3 results: revenue up 10%, adjusted EPS $0.46 versus $0.45, beating Wall Street expectations for both but sending shares down nearly 40% in after-hours trading as investors reacted to tepid guidance and rising marketing and AI development expenses. DOCS shares have lost 68% in the past 12 months. The company’s market capitalization is down nearly $15 billion from its peak just after its June 2021 IPO. CEO Jeffrey Tangney said in the earnings call that the medical AI market is “noisy, crowded, and rapidly expanding,” that its tools are among the most used by physicians, and that he expects hospitals to more vigorously enforce the “wild west” of AI.

A Wall Street Journal venture capital report warns that new health AI offerings from OpenAI and Anthropic will pressure health AI startups to deliver their promised measurable results and to clearly differentiate themselves. At the same time, the report says that the big company products could validate AI’s value to health systems, which could then create opportunities for smaller vendors.

Announcements and Implementations

Nova Scotia’s IWK Health Centre stops performing outpatient blood work and sends patients elsewhere due to problems with its newly implemented Oracle Health system, which is displaying all online appointments as unavailable.

Aetna launches a digital-first onboarding experience for members using Rich Communication Services text messaging. RCS uses IP instead of cellular voice channels, which enables transmission of high-resolution images, real-time typing and read receipt indicators, group chat, and branded, verified messaging for companies.

Privacy and Security

A former Nuance employee faces additional federal charges related to allegations that he downloaded 1 million Geisinger Health patient records to a personal device after Nuance fired him in 2023. Geisinger and Nuance settled a class action privacy lawsuit related to the incident for $5 million in November 2025.

KFF Health News reports that hospitals are unsure whether they should advise immigrant patients about a recent requirement that gives Immigration and Customs Enforcement access to Medicaid data.

Security researchers find that 414 AI agent skills that are available on OpenClaw’s ClawHub Marketplace – including the most-downloaded one that automates functions on X – contain malware that steals crypto credentials, API keys and browser passwords. They urge users not to run any skills on a work computer, but didn’t offer suggestions on how employers can protect their systems when employers inevitably do it anyway.

Other

I will assume that none of the self-proclaimed gurus from the site above specializes in attention to detail. Hims & Hers is making headlines, including misspelled ones, for two reasons: (a) its hard-sell Super Bowl commercial titled “Rich People Live Longer” that urges consumers to buy its lab tests and compounded GLP-1 medications; and (b) a crackdown by FDA and the Department of Justice on the company’s sale of unapproved, compounded GLP-1 drugs, including its just-announced knockoff of a Wegovy tablet that originator Novo launched just weeks ago. UPDATE: Hims & Hers announced Saturday that it it will stop offering its version of the Wegovy tablet days just after its launch following “constructive conversations with stakeholders,” not to mention an alarming downward slide in share price. It’s not clear why the company thought it was immune to FDA’s clear warning that it would take action against companies that mass market compounded products of trademark drugs.

Sponsor Updates

• Black Book Research analysis find that rural and critical access hospitals are entering a consequential health IT decision cycle, with purchasing decisions heightened by the newly announced federal Rural Health Transformation Program awards.
• Nordic releases a new “Designing for Health” podcast featuring Lisa Kilgore.
• SlicedHealth will exhibit at the AHA Rural Health Care Leadership Conference February 8-11 in San Antonio.
• TrustCommerce, a Sphere company, will exhibit at Payments MAGnified February 17-20 in San Diego.

Blog Posts

• Healthcare Cybersecurity Basics: What CISOs Worry About at 3 A.M. (Clearwater)
• 10 Financial Metrics Every Healthcare CFO Must Master (FinThrive)
• Rethinking Claims Processing: Why It’s More Than Just a Core Admin System (Impact Advisors)
• Hospice Medicare Audit Readiness: Proactive Steps to Avoid Denials (Netsmart)
• 3 ways a strategic partner can strengthen your IT staffing operations (Nordic)
• How to Shift RCM from a Process to a Strategic Function in 2026 (Nym)
• The hidden cost of recoupments in healthcare – Q+A with Cleveland Clinic + SCA Health (Waystar)

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 2/6/26

Top News

KLAS posts its “2026 Best in KLAS: Software and Services.” Some results:

• Epic won overall health system suite for the 16th consecutive year, plus awards in 11 individual market segments. Scores: Epic 89.7, Meditech 76.7, Oracle Health 63.3.
• Athenahealth topped the Overall Independent Physician Practice Suite and four market segment awards. Scores: Athenahealth 83.4, NextGen Healthcare 68.6, Greenway Health 64.6.
• Chartis was named top firm in Overall IT Services.
• Optimum Healthcare IT topped the Overall Implementation Services Firm.
• Impact Advisors was top Overall Healthcare Management Consulting Firm.

HIStalk sponsors that were named as winners in the Best in KLAS report:

• Agfa Healthcare (PACS small, universal viewer imaging, vendor neutral archive).
• Artera (patient communications).
• Clearwater (security and privacy consulting services)
• Findhelp (social determinants of care networks).
• FinThrive (insurance discovery).
• Fortified Health Security (security and privacy managed services).
• Impact Advisors (overall healthcare management consulting firm, data and analytics services, human capital consulting).
• Meditech (acute care EHR and patient accounting, small).
• MRO (release of information).
• Optimum Healthcare IT (overall implementation services).
• PerfectServe (clinical communications in ambulatory and post-acute care, physician scheduling).
• Rhapsody (integration engine).
• Waystar (patient access).
• Wolters Kluwer (infection control and monitoring, pharmacy surveillance, patient-driven care management, patient education).

Reader Comments

From Banty Rooster: “Re: job changes. Please announce the formation of my new consulting business.” I suspect that readers share my lack of interest when someone exits a long corporate career, often because of a decision they did not make, and announces that they are now a solo consultant. I pass because the industry impact of that “business” is minimal and the audience is mostly personal acquaintances who already know. Many of these entrepreneurial bursts end quietly with a return to salaried work when demand fails to materialize or travel becomes intolerable. Consulting as a skill and business endeavor is not necessarily predicted by a management career, and many shingle-hangers discover that their former influence came from their title, not their personal brand. It’s tough to leave a big paycheck and benefits to start out with no clients, pipeline, or income.

From Sierra Mister: “Re: NavvTrack. Has gone out of business.” The website of the health system fleet management solutions vendor, which was spun out from Henry Ford Health in 2019, goes to 404. LinkedIn shows that co-founder and CEO Daniel Siegal, MD, COO/CFO Heather Grisham, and VP/CTO Pratik Agrawal all left the company in August 2025.

From Nobodyyouknow: “Re: Waystar. Gearing up for another acquisition? A large number of legacy team members are being promoted to VP.”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Medcurio. Medcurio helps health systems access and act on their EHR data in real time, without waiting months for integrations or settling for partial interfaces. Its VennU platform installs inside the customer’s environment and gives teams direct, governed access to the data they already own. The result is faster insight, faster action, and fewer workarounds. Unlike traditional interoperability approaches, Medcurio does not rely on slow pipelines, brittle custom builds, or transaction-based APIs. Teams can surface operational, clinical, and financial signals as they occur, not days or weeks later. What typically takes months can be stood up in days.Medcurio is used to power dashboards, alerts, automations, and/or any downstream workflows that depend on complete and timely EHR data. Customers decide what data is accessed, who can use it, and how it is applied, with full auditability and security controls. Nothing leaves the customer’s control. For organizations serious about real-time operations, analytics, and AI, Medcurio provides the data foundation those efforts usually lack. Thanks to Medcurio for supporting HIStalk.

I downloaded Lotus Health’s app to give their 24×7 free primary care service a try. I was waitlisted, but I completed the registration and intake form and gave the chatbot a spin for a made-up medical issue. The process was well designed and the chatbot’s advice and plan were sound even if not much different than what ChatGPT offered. I’ll be interested to see how the most important part works, the handoff from chatbot to human physician when warranted. What I will be looking for: (1) how the service collects medical records; (2) how the lab test and prescription generating process works; and (3) how the video visit feels compared to an in-person one, especially for a continuity of care perspective. I experimented with an online service a few years ago and was underwhelmed because it felt like symptom Whac-a-Mole, where the faceless physician jumped overly quickly to a diagnosis and prescription from the limited set of drugs he was authorized to prescribe for a limited set of conditions. Lotus Health’s LinkedIn shows just nine company employees or contractors, none of them with any medical background, but it claims to be using doctors from Stanford, Harvard, UCSF, and Johns Hopkins. If you’ve used the full Lotus Health service, tell me more. The question of “how does a free service make money” will likely be answered with paid advertising, a freemium model, and partnering with insurers and employers.

Sponsored Events and Resources

Live Webinar: February 18 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “From Blind Spots to Insights: Gaining Real-Time Visibility into Healthcare Risk.” Sponsor: CloudWave. Presenters: Jacob Wheeler, MBA, director of sales engineering, CloudWave; Mike Donahue, chief operating officer, CloudWave. Resilience starts with the ability to see clearly, across every endpoint, cloud workload, user, and clinical system. Join CloudWave’s cybersecurity leaders for an in-depth session on how real-time visibility transforms your ability to detect threats early, respond decisively, and strengthen resilience across the care ecosystem. Attendees will learn the practical steps that hospitals can take to move from reactive defense to resilient action.

Publication: HIStalk’s Guide to ViVE 2026 lists the activities of sponsors at the conference.

Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Lotus Health AI, which offers free 24×7 primary care using patient data, AI diagnostics, peer-reviewed evidence and guidelines, and clinician review, raises $41 million.

People

Amit Mathradas, MBA (Nintex) joins Five9 as CEO.

Gozio Health hires Jay Kleinman (TechCXO) as chief revenue officer and Michele Forlenza (Prealize Health) as VP of client success.

Bayhealth hires Thomas “Mac” Marlow, MBA (UT Southwestern Medical Center) as VP/chief digital and information officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Epic releases AI Charting, which uses ambient listening to draft visit notes and suggest orders, as part of its Art AI for clinicians.  

A small study finds that primary care physicians who used Eko’s digital stethoscope correctly diagnosed moderate to severe valvular heart disease with 92% sensitivity versus 46% using a traditional stethoscope.

Government and Politics

The federal government awards Accenture Federal Services a 4.5-year contract of unspecified value to support the VA’s implementation of Oracle Health. The company will provide integration services, lead standardization across VA facilities, and oversee federal-community interoperability.

RCM services vendor Gryphon Healthcare will pay $2.9 million to settle claims related to its July 2024 cyberattack that exposed the patient information of one of its customers.  

ASTP/ONC posts a draft of USCDI Version 7 for public comment.

ASTP/ONC chooses nine pilot sites to test behavioral and physical health integration data exchange standards.

Former Ole Miss football All-American tight end Rufus French is convicted of fraudulently billing Medicare and the VA $200 million. The Department of Justice says that he used overseas call centers to pressure elderly Americans, including patients with Alzheimer’s disease or dementia, to provide their insurance information and consent to receiving unnecessary orthotic braces that were ordered by doctors and nurse practitioners who worked for sham telemedicine companies who never contacted the patients.

Other

A Health Affairs article says that healthcare’s AI bubble needs to burst in a dot-com-like “coming clinical correction,” citing these reasons:

• Most enterprise AI pilots fail to deliver financial returns and usually don’t survive beyond pilots.
• Health systems are touting AI deployments as innovation, but the projects often involve products from vendors that are surviving only because of investor funding.
• Many AI vendors will fail but will continue to operate as zombie operations that bill hospitals under existing contracts, but don’t spend the money to keep their algorithms current, exposing hospitals to liability for errors.
• Companies that offer crucial technologies that don’t involve AI are forced to squeeze AI into the products unnecessarily to attract investment.
• AI products are being deployed in the absence of evidence.

Sponsor Updates

• SlicedHealth posts Episode 1 of its price transparency guide podcast titled “What Hospital Leaders Need to Know About Price Transparency Enforcement in 2026.”
• Black Book Research releases findings from its “Q1 2026 Rural Transformation Readiness Survey” of rural, small, and critical access hospitals.
• Judi Health releases a new episode of “The Astonishing Healthcare Podcast” titled “Providing the Right Level of Guidance & Expertise in this Business is About as Hard as Driving Change, with Hannan Allen.”
• FinThrive promotes D’Wan Grimes to partner success manager.
• Health Data Movers will sponsor the NEECO Spring 2026 Conference March 31 in Waltham, MA.
• Healthmonix releases its 2026 MIPSpro Enterprise Qualified Clinical Data Registry, approved by CMS for the 2026 performance year.
• Infinx will present at the Oregon HFMA 2026 Winter Workshop February 12 in McMinnville, OR.
• LiveData will exhibit at the OR Business Manager Summit February 9-11 in Austin, TX.

Blog Posts

• OCR’s 2026 Cybersecurity Update to Healthcare: From Risk Analysis to Enforced Risk Management (Clearwater)
• Small steps become giant leaps: Reimagining how to approach innovation in healthcare (Altera Digital Health)
• ‘Best in KLAS for SDoH’: One Year is Potential, Five Years is Proven (Findhelp)
• Revenue on Autopilot: How Smarter Denial Management Reduces the Cost to Collect (FinThrive)
• Preparation Changes Outcomes In Ransomware Attacks (Fortified Health Security)
• Why Specialized Staffing Matters in Healthcare Technology (HCTec)
• 7 Mistakes to Avoid When Releasing Medical Records (HealthMark Group)
• The Digital Front Door Reckoning (Impact Advisors)
• The Provider’s Guide to AI Conversations (Med Tech Solutions)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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News 2/4/26

Top News

Tenet Healthcare regains full ownership of subsidiary Conifer Health Solutions by unwinding its joint venture with CommonSpirit Health.

Conifer will pay $540 million to redeem CommonSpirit’s 24% stake, while CommonSpirit will pay Tenet $1.9 billion over three years in exit obligations.

CommonSpirit will continue receiving RCM services from Conifer through the end of 2026, after which it plans to transition away from Conifer. Conifer has provided RCM services to CommonSpirit and and its predecessor organization, Catholic Health Initiatives, since 2012.

Tenet had considered spinning Conifer off in 2022 due to lackluster performance, but nixed the idea when business improved.

Reader Comments

From CallMeSuspicious: “Re: Epic ‘research’ posts. I was taken in initially until I started to see odd studies that added little to the knowledge base, and then veered off into questionable junk. A simple search on the named authors (when presented) reveals another carefully concealed attempt at Epic influence, given that they are all authored by Epic employees.” I’ll ask readers to weigh in: are studies that are performed by Epic-employed clinician-informaticists less trustworthy or valuable? Epic Research publications may sometimes support Epic-friendly narratives, especially when they involve Epic software, but the authors don’t try to conceal their connection to the company. Their studies could be construed as less rigorous because they are descriptive rather than hypothesis-based, are not peer reviewed, and incorporate any basis or limitations of using data sourced only from Epic customers, but they have the benefit of directly accessing timely, real-world data and seem free of publication lag time. Criticism is fair, but should focus on study methodology and design. It’s not like studies that are sponsored by drug or device companies, who directly profit from positive studies they sponsor.

From Cruel Winter: “Re: Wellsoft. It ranks high in Black Book and KLAS, but who is actually using it?” I passed your inquiry along to CareCloud’s media contact and will let you know what they say. Medsphere acquired Wellsoft in early 2019, then was itself acquired by CareCloud in August 2025. Wellsoft EDIS has performed well in KLAS reports for years, but I assume that hospital consolidation and single-vendor strategies may have reduced the pool of standalone ED software.

Sponsored Events and Resources

Live Webinar: February 18 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “From Blind Spots to Insights: Gaining Real-Time Visibility into Healthcare Risk.” Sponsor: CloudWave. Presenters: Jacob Wheeler, MBA, director of sales engineering, CloudWave; Mike Donahue, chief operating officer, CloudWave. Resilience starts with the ability to see clearly, across every endpoint, cloud workload, user, and clinical system. Join CloudWave’s cybersecurity leaders for an in-depth session on how real-time visibility transforms your ability to detect threats early, respond decisively, and strengthen resilience across the care ecosystem. Attendees will learn the practical steps that hospitals can take to move from reactive defense to resilient action.

Publication: HIStalk’s Guide to ViVE 2026 lists the activities of sponsors at the conference.

Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Healthcare Growth Partners publishes its market review. Nuggets:

• Near-universal deployment of health IT mostly delivered the expected workflow and data capture benefits, but has done little to influence overall outcomes and cost.
• Technology investment mirrors the segment that the company addresses, either value-based care or consumer-directed health.
• Health IT deal activity rebounded strongly in 2025, while M&A valuation has settled above pre-pandemic levels.
• Divestitures as a percentage of M&A and buyout deals have doubled, as companies realign portfolios that were less focused during COVID-related expansion.
• AI is not a valuation driver of most deals, but creates value when its use improves company fundamentals.
• HGP summarizes the public market as, “While investors have been eager for the IPO floodgates to reopen, the Health IT market appears to be operating in a longer transition phase. The gates are not shut, but they remain narrow. Timelines continue to extend as late-stage private companies opt to remain on the sidelines, activity remains highly selective, and volumes are muted relative to historical peaks. Confidence, while improving, remains fragile and closely tied to broader macroeconomic conditions and public market stability.”

Sales

• Jefferson Health (PA) selects Qualified Health’s AI operations platform.

People

Balajee Sethuraman, MBA (Emids) joins Acentra Health as EVP and chief business services officer.

Viz.ai names Tim Showalter, MD, MPH, MBA (ArteraAI) as its first chief medical officer.

Pieces Technologies founder and former CEO Ruben Amarasingham, MD, MBA joins Smarter Technologies as chief medical officer. Smarter Technologies acquired Pieces last October.

MedeAnalytics appoints Chris Lance, MBA (Avalon Healthcare Solutions) chief product officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Group Health Cooperative of South Central Wisconsin implements Epic’s new AI charting tool, which was first previewed last August at Epic UGM.

Penn Medicine transitions 63 practices to its Penn Medicine OnDemand virtual care service for after-hours and weekend care, eliminating the need for primary care physicians to be on call during those times.

AdventHealth Castle Rock (CO) launches virtual admit nursing using technology from Hellocare.

InterSystems launches Payer Connector, which helps health plans integrate Epic Player Platform with their applications.

NYU Langone offers patients access to Isaac Health’s virtual specialty clinics for brain health and dementia through its neurology program.

MSU Health Care replaces its Athenahealth system with Henry Ford Health’s Epic software as part of a broader, 30-year partnership launched in 2021.

UCI Health implements GW RhythmX’s Get Well Stay patient engagement technology at its new hospital in Irvine, CA.

South Central Regional Medical Center (MS) goes live on Epic.

Oracle Health adds order creation capabilities to its clinical AI agent, which extends the note generation functionality of ambient listening to draft orders for labs, imaging, prescriptions, and appointments.

Government and Politics

VA Secretary Doug Collins again reassures lawmakers that the department is ready to resume implementing its new Oracle Health-based EHR at several sites in Michigan in April. Collins downplayed the spate of concerns and unaddressed recommendations listed in the VA Office of Inspector General’s latest report, noting that the recommendations “were based on a screwed up, backwards system that is not in place anymore. … anything in reference to the OIG report, in all fairness, is like looking at a 1945 novel.”

President Trump signs an appropriations bill that includes a two-year extension of Medicare telehealth flexibilities and a five-year extension of the Medicare Acute Hospital Care at Home waiver.

Other

The Sequoia Project releases “Simplifying Data Access for Better Patient Experience: Best Practices and Implementation Toolkit for Providers,” a draft set of best practices for improving patient access to health data. Feedback is welcome through April 2.

In Canada, nurses express frustration related to the December 2025 go-live of Oracle Cerner Canada at Nova Scotia’s IWK Health Centre. The president of the nurses’ union says that “there’s just so many problems that it’s like putting your finger in a dam” as solving one issue creates another. Project leaders identify the main problems as routing, ambulatory care workflows, and ambulatory care waitlist management, also noting that concerns exist about the system’s overall stability. IWK is the first go-live of a planned province-wide rollout of the $270 million system.

Cedars-Sinai’s Postpartum Hypertension Program sees encouraging levels of patient engagement, with 500 women enrolled in the program, which enables them to conduct and record blood pressure readings at home through a dedicated patient portal that is connected to their EHR. Nearly 75% of enrollees scheduled a follow-up physician visit within six months of giving birth, while 83% did so within 12 months.

Sponsor Updates

• Black Book Research establishes a comprehensive framework to safeguard survey, polling, and satisfaction-based research against emerging risks accelerated by generative AI while using AI responsibly to improve research operations.
• CereCore publishes a new case study titled “Mary Rutan Health: Valuable Focus and Confidence Restored with Knowledgeable IT Help Desk.”
• Agfa HealthCare offers a new guide titled “Implementing Enterprise Imaging in the Cloud: 5 Strategic Considerations for a Successful Implementation.”
• Shenandoah Medical Center will implement Altera Digital Health’s Sunrise Axon for data exchange.
• Arcadia publishes a new e-book, “The Art of AI: Blending Innovation with Know-How in Healthcare.”

Blog Posts

• Redefining Patient Access: The Strategic Power of Centralization in Healthcare (AGS Health)
• How Healthcare Revenue Cycle Analytics Can Improve Financial Performance (FinThrive)
• Top 5 Healthcare IT Trends Shaping 2026 (Med Tech Solutions)
• Cyber Risk in Healthcare Is Entering a New Phase (Clearwater)
• The AdvancedMD 2026 CPT/HCPCS Codebook: Everything You Need for an Efficient, Error-Free Medical Billing Strategy (AdvancedMD)
• Giving provider satisfaction a dose of GenAI (Altera Digital Health)
• An Investor’s View on Artera: Q&A with Avery Rosin at Lead Edge Capital (Artera)
• Aligning Security Investment with Clinical Outcomes: The Strategic Role of Managed SOC and CISO Office as Service (CTG)
• DrFirst Mourns the Loss of Thomas E. Sullivan, M.D. (DrFirst)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 2/2/26

Top News

Newly issued FDA guidance on clinical decision support software clarifies that it won’t be regulated as medical device if it meets four criteria:

• It does not acquire, process, or analyze a medical image or signal from other devices.
• It displays, analyzes, or prints information such as patient demographics, symptoms, test results, discharge summaries, and medical literature that would be generally communicated by licensed clinicians.
• It makes recommendations to a licensed clinician without replacing their judgment.
• It allows licensed clinicians to review the basis of the recommendation.

Reader Comments

From George: “Re: Oracle Health. The idea that Oracle might sell the business has no factual basis or sourcing and appears to be little more than investment firm speculation, which is often wrong. I also don’t see who would realistically be able to buy it.” I doubt that Oracle Health will be offered for sale, and even if it is, it’s no longer a clean standalone asset, either financially or technically. Few companies could afford to buy it even a discounted price. The business is too complex and unpredictable for private equity or venture capital. Leidos is large enough and could preserve whatever piece of the DoD revenue flows through Oracle Health, but I don’t see it wanting to jump into the EHR product business, although it might like a piece of Cerner government services. We also don’t know who, if anyone, bid against Oracle for Cerner last time, although it was rumored that one other company showed interest. The underlying logic of this speculation is that Oracle needs capital to address its $125 billion in debt and $1.4 trillion in AI data center commitments, but nothing they could do with Oracle Health would make much of a dent. I think Oracle will pay more attention to broad layoffs, access to borrowing, and protecting share price. Or, rework their data center commitments by stretching timelines or bringing in partners. ORCL share price is up a little bit over the past 12 months and has lost 34% in the past three months, so all of the AI hype seems to have been outweighed by the costs involved.  

From Landof10kHITers: “Re: Neil Pappalardo. An absolute giant in the industry. Arguably he is the one who founded the EMR/EHR industry. He doesn’t get near the credit he deserves, though it doesn’t seem he ever wanted that. From the technologies he created that spawned other technologies that are still in use by industry giants today, to the early days help and mentoring with Judy at Epic (as I understand it, Epic functions, in a lot of ways, the same as Meditech — hire new college grads, private company, only promote from within, etc.), and obviously founding and leading Meditech for decades to be a stable software company, and one of the oldest / earliest software companies ever. He will be missed.” Also often missed is that Meditech’s use of his MUMPS programming language spawned another massive business (and another billionaire other than Judy Faulkner) in 2,500-employee InterSystems, which developed its database in 1978. I think that Curt Marble is the only surviving Meditech co-founder – Morton Ruderman, Jerome Grossman, Ed Roberts, and now Neil Pappalardo have passed on.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Just 15% of poll respondents aren’t using AI to some degree or haven’t found it useful for work, but quite a few say that AI has improved their job performance a lot. Mark provided some fascinating details about how he’s using it:

Use case #1: I am creating a guide for others to use, a how to manual for reviewing healthcare vendor contracts. When I documented my parameters, I ended up with a result that shaved hours off the time needed to complete my finished product. Use case #2: I’m not good at creating pretty tables from Excel spread sheets, so I asked Copilot to create one. In under a minute I received output that was nicer and more presentable than anything I could have created on my own. Use case #3: Needed a vendor comparison for a health system with a very complicated set of circumstances. Entered the parameters into the AI tool and received a thoroughly complete analysis from several perspectives. Back when I was a healthcare IT consultant, that kind of effort would have taken weeks to accomplish. Here it was done in minutes.

New poll to your right or here: What statement most strongly indicates that a company is in trouble? I’m honoring the art of spinning a negative into a positive, like Spinal Tap’s manager declaring that the band is still a hot commodity, but “their appeal is becoming more selective.”

Sponsored Events and Resources

Live Webinar: February 18 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “From Blind Spots to Insights: Gaining Real-Time Visibility into Healthcare Risk.” Sponsor: CloudWave. Presenters: Jacob Wheeler, MBA, director of sales engineering, CloudWave; Mike Donahue, chief operating officer, CloudWave. Resilience starts with the ability to see clearly, across every endpoint, cloud workload, user, and clinical system. Join CloudWave’s cybersecurity leaders for an in-depth session on how real-time visibility transforms your ability to detect threats early, respond decisively, and strengthen resilience across the care ecosystem. Attendees will learn the practical steps that hospitals can take to move from reactive defense to resilient action.

Publication: HIStalk’s Guide to ViVE 2026 lists the activities of sponsors at the conference.

Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

People

Andrew Golden (Experian) joins Hyro as RVP of sales.

Announcements and Implementations

Meditech posts a tribute to founder and chairman A. Neil Pappalardo, who died Tuesday at 83. Read and leave thoughts and memories here.

A Surescripts survey finds that more than half of of patients have experienced delays or disruption in getting their prescriptions filled, and 77% would use digital prescription pricing tools.

An Epic Research study finds that early blood pressure treatment by telehealth is as effective as in-person visits as long as blood pressure is measured and recorded.

Government and Politics

The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) posts an anticipated future contracting opportunity for a correctional EHR for ICE detainees, estimating its cost at $50 million to $100 million.

Other

Snow day / slow day dreams. The widow of IDX founder Rich Tarrant sells the Hillsboro Beach, FL estate they built in 2007 for $36.5 million.

Sponsor Updates

• Beauregard Health System integrates Artera’s AI-powered patient communication platform and DrFirst’s prescription engagement solution with its Meditech Expanse system.
• Optimum Healthcare IT publishes a new white paper titled “From Vendor to Vital Partner.”
• Findhelp pledges to CMS that it will help states prepare for and implement Medicaid community engagement requirements enacted through the Working Families Tax Cut legislation.
• Waystar will exhibit at Traumasoft UGM February 2-4 in Orlando.

Blog Posts

• How MCP Creates Safer, More Useful AI for Clinicians and Developers (Medicomp Systems)
• 9 HIMSS Attendee Survival Tips (Med Tech Solutions)
• HFMA WRS 2026: Leading Now in Healthcare Finance (FinThrive)
• Accelerating Cash and Optimizing the Revenue Cycle Post-Epic (Impact Advisors)
• Health Benefits 101: Service Excellence & Scaling an Award-Winning Call Center Model (Judi Health)
• How to Transform Communication with PALTC Providers and Patients (Netsmart)
• Breaking the cycle: reducing costs in NHS re-procurement (Nordic)
• New TrustCommerce Features in Practice Fusion: Streamlined Payments for a Better Patient Experience (TrustCommerce)
• What 1,007 Patients Told Us About the Prescription Experience—And What We’re Doing About It (Surescripts)

Contacts

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

News 1/30/26

Top News

Sword Health acquires Germany-based digital MSK and pulmonary care company Kaia Health for $285 million. Sword will sunset Kaia’s MSK product in the US in favor of its own platform.

Sword plans to raise $500 million in Q1 for expansion and acquisitions.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Reader donations funded the Donors Choose teacher grant request of Mr. S, who teaches high school in Greenwood, DE and asked for help buying chemistry lab supplies and learning tools. He reports, “My students and I were able to experience chemical reactions like never before with a hands on approach rather than watch a video of someone on the internet … This experience allowed me to see the spark for learning that my classroom has been missing. By me engaging the students in the classroom this one time might create the next great chemist or inventor, and for that I cannot thank you enough.”

Amazon will lay off 16,000 employees while “reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy,” which translates to firing rank-and-filers because of an org chart that executives built, tolerated, and now blame. How about starting with the belatedly enlightened suits who created those layers and bureaucracy in the first place? Our industry is littered with “Now we get it” announcements in which so-called rightsizing that somehow always spares the people who did the wrongsizing. Pro tip: ignore anyone quoted in statements like these who has been with the company for two or more years and thus helped create the mess that we are now supposed to believe they have magically fixed by jettisoning worker bees. It is a useful reminder that feel-good Kumbaya capitalism about being a family and valuing associates is performative BS that is touted when times are good and then dumped emotionlessly when knee-jerk cost cutting is required to line the pockets of investors and executives.

Sponsored Events and Resources

Live Webinar: February 18 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “From Blind Spots to Insights: Gaining Real-Time Visibility into Healthcare Risk.” Sponsor: CloudWave. Presenters: Jacob Wheeler, MBA, director of sales engineering, CloudWave; Mike Donahue, chief operating officer, CloudWave. Resilience starts with the ability to see clearly, across every endpoint, cloud workload, user, and clinical system. Join CloudWave’s cybersecurity leaders for an in-depth session on how real-time visibility transforms your ability to detect threats early, respond decisively, and strengthen resilience across the care ecosystem. Attendees will learn the practical steps that hospitals can take to move from reactive defense to resilient action.

Publication: HIStalk’s Guide to ViVE 2026 lists the activities of sponsors at the conference.

Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Virtual OCD provider NOCD acquires trauma self-help platform vendor Rebound Health and renames itself to Noto.

Premise Health and Crossover Health, which offer primary care and occupational health services, will merge. Crossover was co-founded in 2010 by ED physician Scott Shreeve, MD, who had co-founded Medsphere and will remain with the merged organization.

An investment firm speculates that Oracle may undertake mass layoffs and sell its Oracle Health business unit to fund the $156 billion in capital that it needs to build data centers for OpenAi.

People

Woman’s Hospital hires Glynis Cowart, MPA (Montefiore St. Luke’s Cornwall) as SVP/CIO.

CloudWave promotes Brian Pruitt to CTO.

Clearwater announces the hiring of Davis Chaffin, MBA (Load One) as CFO and Krissy Safi, MBA (Protiviti) as SVP of consulting services, and the promotion of Dave Bailey, MBA to VP of consulting solutions and strategy.

Meditech founder, chairman, and former CEO Neil Pappalardo died Tuesday. He was 83. Pappalardo and four MIT-educated co-founders launched Meditech in 1969 to create hospital software using the MUMPS program language that he and fellow founder Curt Marble developed at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Announcements and Implementations

Humana’s healthcare services business CenterWell goes live on Athenahealth’s AthenaOne at 350 senior primary care locations in 15 states.

Virtual primary care and healthcare navigation company Included Health creates a health plan and provider network that it will offer to employers.

AEYE Health, which offers fully autonomous AI-based diabetic eye exams, integrates its product with Epic.

EMurmur earns FDA clearance for its telehealth-capable heart murmur detection software for digital stethoscopes. Companies can integrate the technology with their own software and hardware without requiring additional FDA clearance.

A UK study reports that use of Eko’s AI stethoscope failed to improve detection of heart failure, atrial fibrillation, or valvular heart disease in primary care as adoption fell steadily, with 40% of practices dropping it within a year despite its effectiveness because of workflow friction that was driven by poor EHR integration. The AI stethoscopes whose use physicians resisted increased detection of heart failure by 2.3 times, atrial fibrillation 3.5 times, and VHD 1.9 times.  

Government and Politics

The VA will spend $1 billion in FY2026 to maintain its EHRs and to prepare for implementing Oracle Health in new facilities.

ASTP/ONC posts an RFI that seeks public input on accessing and exchanging diagnostic images to inform possible rulemaking.

Privacy and Security

DataBreaches.net reports that “digital helper” AI care coordination vendor Lena Health stored audio recordings that contain patient information, most of it from Houston Methodist, on unsecured web servers. A security group that is working with law firms to coordinate a class action lawsuit summarizes:

Listening to these confused patients talking to Lena, this company’s “digital helper,” about their private medical issues is a deeply disturbing and uncanny experience. They repeatedly ask Lena what’s wrong with her, why she sounds so weird, but even worse somehow are the patients who do not seem to notice they are not speaking with a human. It is deeply dehumanizing, and profoundly depressing to hear these elderly people … discussing their most personal medical issues with what they think is a compassionate human coordinator, but is actually an LLM trained to extract information so a hospital can save a few pennies on hiring a real human.

Sponsor Updates

• Altera Digital Health announces GA of Sunrise Medical Photography documentation tools, powered by True-See, within its Sunrise platform.
• Clearwater names Davis Chaffin (Load One) CFO.
• WellSky announces new AI-powered referral management workflows aimed at helping home health and hospice providers.
• Findhelp welcomes new partners Colorado Access and Wauwatosa Neighborhood Association Council.
• Healthcare Growth Partners releases its “January 2026 Health IT Market Review.”
• Health Data Movers releases a new episode of its “Quick HITs” podcast featuring Scott Becker.
• Healthmonix’s MIPSpro and ACO Impact receive 2026 CMS Qualified Registry approval.
• Meditech offers a new customer success story titled “Palo Pinto General Hospital Increases Google Reviews, Reduces No-Shows With Expanse Patient Connect.”
• Judi Health releases a new episode of “The Astonishing Healthcare Podcast” titled “A Quick Government Programs Update: The IRA & MPPP, Managing D-SNPs, and More, with Jason Barretto.”

Blog Posts

• The Smarter, Faster Way to Bring Clinical Intelligence to Life (Medicomp Systems)
• Performance to empower confidence: Why responsive technology makes all the difference (Altera Digital Health)
• Impact and challenges of large language models in healthcare (Arcadia)
• Begin Your NextGen AWS Migration Early With MTS (Med Tech Solutions)
• 2026 Healthcare & Health IT Predictions (First Databank)
• How Midsize Healthcare Orgs. Are Cutting Costs with AI-Powered RCM Solutions (FinThrive)
• Healthcare Data Privacy: What Industry Signals Reveal About Deeper Cybersecurity Risk (Fortified Health Security)
• OBBBA Compliance: What Healthcare Providers Need to Know About Qualified Overtime Reporting (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• The CEO Playbook: Medical Group Growth in a Hyper-Competitive Environment (Impact Advisors)
• Are you still charting like it’s 2010? What’s changed with ambient AI (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.

News 1/28/26

Top News

Bloomberg reports that the valuation of prior authorization technology vendor Tandem Technology has reached $1 billion, with an anticipated $100 million in new funding.

Tandem founder and CEO Sahir Jaggi was previously a director at insurance company Oscar Health.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

It’s that time of year when LinkedIn is flooded with graphics posted by proud show-uppers. The HIMSS ones are also piling up. I’m only slightly annoyed at pitches by scheduled presenters who are trying to drum up attendance, but just being in the convention center is not newsworthy. It won’t be long before the “influencers” start posting their mandatory ViVE-fawning posts (three before, three during, three after) to pay for their free badge and accompanying sense of self-importance.

Sponsored Events and Resources

Live Webinar: February 18 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “From Blind Spots to Insights: Gaining Real-Time Visibility into Healthcare Risk.” Sponsor: CloudWave. Presenters: Jacob Wheeler, MBA, director of sales engineering, CloudWave; Mike Donahue, chief operating officer, CloudWave. Resilience starts with the ability to see clearly, across every endpoint, cloud workload, user, and clinical system. Join CloudWave’s cybersecurity leaders for an in-depth session on how real-time visibility transforms your ability to detect threats early, respond decisively, and strengthen resilience across the care ecosystem. Attendees will learn the practical steps that hospitals can take to move from reactive defense to resilient action.

Publication: HIStalk’s Guide to ViVE 2026 lists the activities of sponsors at the conference.

Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

People

HURC names Kevin Coloton, MPT, MBA (Reveleer) CEO.

Elissa Baker, RN (American Telemedicine Association) joins Nesa as president and chief clinical officer.

MedeAnalytics names David Figueredo (Experian) chief innovation officer.

Nicholas Testa, MD (CommonSpirit Health) joins Sentact as chief clinical officer.

Sevaro Health names Carl Dugart (Medically Home) CTO and Vineet Agrawal, MBA (DocSpera) head of growth.

Artera promotes Tom McIntyre, MS, MBA to president, Michael Jensen to CFO, Zach Wood, MBA to chief product and strategy officer, and Emily Coy to VP of communications and integrated marketing.

Dartmouth Health hires Randa Perkins, MD, MBA (Moffitt Cancer Center) as CHIO.

Announcements and Implementations

Qure.ai secures a multi-million dollar Gates Foundation grant to develop AI-powered point-of-care ultrasound tools that are aimed at detecting tuberculosis and pneumonia in low-resource settings. The project also includes building an open, multimodal data platform to support global lung health research and deployment at scale. The company’s products are being used by 4,800 sites in 105 countries.

Health Gorilla says that the lawsuit that Epic Systems and several health systems filed against it contains unfounded allegations about the company’s role in data exchange. Health Gorilla says that it suspended the disputed connections of some of its clients and accuses Epic of using litigation to stifle competition in interoperability. Health Gorilla says that it operates in conformance with all laws and requirements and accuses Epic of using litigation as a weapon so it can “monetize clinical data exchanges for their own benefit.” An Epic spokesperson provided this statement:

Health Gorilla enabled their customers to sell identifiable patient medical records to class-action law firms without patients’ consent or health systems’ knowledge. They had an obligation to protect patients’ intimate health information. Instead, they violated the privacy of hundreds of thousands of people. Epic and health systems together filed this lawsuit to hold Health Gorilla and other bad actors accountable and to stop further abuse and misuse of patients’ sensitive information.

Midwives at some NHS hospitals that use Epic are given the option to record the gender identity, sexual orientation, and pronouns of newborns, but according to a midwife quoted in The Times, lack a dedicated field to record biological sex in the same workflow. An executive of a sex rights charity criticized the configuration, saying, “The concept of babies having a gender identity is farcical, whereas a baby’s sex is essential medical information,” and argued that some trusts have prioritized ideological preferences over clinical clarity. A spokesperson for the One Devon Electronic Patient Record project says that any claims that Epic requires information about the gender identity or sexual orientation of newborns are incorrect, and the only mandatory entries are date of birth and legal sex. Epic has not publicly commented on the article.

Government and Politics

The VA Office of Inspector General’s annual report lists information systems and innovation among the top five management and performance challenges facing the department, particularly highlighting its beleaguered EHR modernization efforts. The Oracle Health-based program will restart this April at four sites in Michigan.

Other

The Connecticut College of Emergency Physicians develops a public dashboard that displays ER boarding trends across hospitals throughout the state to gain insight into ED overcrowding. State lawmakers passed a law in 2023 that requires hospitals to annually report their boarding data through 2029.

Nassau University Medical Center sues seven former executives, including its CIO, alleging that they received $1 million in improper payouts when they resigned in May and later refused to give the money back. Many of the hospital’s executives quit after the state took over the financially struggling hospital’s board. The hospital filed a $10 million lawsuit against the former hospital CEO who authorized the payouts. Her name is Meg Ryan, should you have a surplus of “When Harry Met Sally” Katz’s Delicatessen scene bon mots.

Sponsor Updates

• Black Book Research publishes its Trust Framework, a formal standard that defines how the firm designs research programs, benchmarks performance, and recognizes high-performing healthcare technology and services providers.
• Optimum Healthcare IT posts a new white paper titled “From Vendor to Vital Partner.”
• Cardamom is recognized as the “#1 Best Place to Work” in the Madison area by Madison Magazine.

Blog Posts

• A Guide to the Use of AI in Healthcare: Deploying a Realistic Approach (Med Tech Solutions)
• Health system size impacts AI privacy and security concerns (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• The reality of cyberthreats: Why preparing for a breach is your best defense (Altera Digital Health)
• Advancing Rural Health Transformation: Reflections from a JPM Health Week Roundtable (Arcadia)
• AI Voice Agents in Healthcare: Inbound vs. Outbound (Artera)
• Looking back, leaping forward: Healthcare AI predictions for 2026 (Cardamom)
• JPM 2026 Takeaways: Cybersecurity in Healthcare PE Diligence (Clearwater)
• What 14 Ironmans, 50+ Marathons, and 30 Years in Healthcare IT Have Taught Me About Leadership (Divurgent)

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