Ambient scribe technology vendor Nabla raises $70 million in a Series C funding round, increasing its total to $120 million.
Diabetes management software vendor Glytec announces $36 million in new funding.
Sword Health nabs $40M at $4B valuation, pushes IPO plans to at least 2028
Sword Health, a digital health startup specializing in virtual physical therapy, pelvic healthcare, and mental healthcare, raises $40 million.
Ambient scribe technology vendor Nabla raises $70 million in a Series C funding round, increasing its total to $120 million.
The company will use the money to develop an agentic AI platform that will include real-time coding support, smarter documentation, EHR command execution, and nursing capabilities.
From Skrill: “Re: virtual ADHD prescriptions. A new study out of Massachusetts General Hospital says that remote prescribing doesn’t increase someone’s chances of becoming addicted to drugs like Adderall. Doesn’t this fly in the face of the federal scrutiny (and fines) faced by Cerebral, Truepill, Ahead, etc. several years ago?” Reasons this study’s findings don’t necessarily vindicate for-profit telehealth providers who were cranking out prescriptions for stimulants:
Live Webinar: June 18 (Wednesday) noon ET. “Fireside Chat: Closing the Gaps in Medication Adherence.” Sponsor: DrFirst. Presenters: Ben G. Long, MD, director of hospital medicine, Magnolia Regional Health Center; Wes Blakeslee, PhD, vice president of clinical data strategies, DrFirst; Colin Banas, MD, MHA, chief medical officer, DrFirst. Magnolia Regional Health Center will describe how its Nurse Navigator program used real-time prescription fill data from DrFirst to identify therapy gaps and engage patients through timely, personalized outreach. The effort led to a 19% increase in prescription fills and a 6% drop in 30-day readmissions among participating patients. Attendees will learn why prescribing price transparency is key to adherence, how real-time data helps care teams support patients between visits, and how Magnolia aligned its approach with value-based care and population health goals.
Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.
Parkview Health (IN) launches UpVia Health, a management services company that is focused on independent hospitals and provider groups. UpVia will initially offer services for virtual care, EHR sharing, revenue cycle, and group purchasing as well as pharmacy management and supply chain management.
Diabetes management software vendor Glytec announces $36 million in new funding.
CereCore names Matt Dearborn (Pivot Point Consulting) regional VP.
Eyecare EHR/PM vendor Sightview hires Tycene Fritcher (Outcomes) as CEO.
St. Mary’s Health and Clearwater Valley Health in Idaho implement a shared Meditech Expanse EHR system.
Stanford Health Care (CA) uses virtual pulmonary rehabilitation services from Kivo Health as part of its home-based care program for COPD patients.
Veterans Memorial Hospital (IA) goes live on Epic through a collaboration with University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics.
Med Tech Solutions begins offering personalized NextGen Healthcare and EClinicalWorks EHR utilization training through its new ProviderCare program.
Altera Digital Health announces GA of Sunrise 25.1.
The FDA issues its most serious level of recall on select Zyno Medical Z-800 infusion pumps, citing software that has not undergone verification or validation testing.
VA Deputy Secretary Paul Lawrence, PhD stresses that progress is being made on preparing facilities in Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio to go live on its Oracle Health-based EHR in 2026. Implementation activities are also set to begin this month at care sites in Anchorage and Cleveland. Thirteen facilities are scheduled to go live on the software next year.
Population health management platform vendor HealthEC and four of its customers will pay a combined $5.48 million to settle a proposed class action lawsuit that stemmed from a 2023 breach that affected the data of 4.6 million people.
A local news outlet questions the University of Mississippi Medical Center’s decision to add a “citizenship” field to Epic, noting that hospitals are not required to collect the information and patients are not obligated to answer.
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Parkview Health (IN) launches Upvia Health, a management services company focused on independent hospitals and provider groups.
Cosentus Expands National Reach with Strategic Acquisition of Utah based Alta Management Solutions
Ambulatory health IT company Cosentus Holdings acquires practice consulting and RCM vendor Alta Management Solutions.
Infusion Pump Recall: Zyno Medical Removes Certain Z-800 Series Infusion Pumps due to Software Issue
The FDA issues its most serious level of recall on select Zyno Medical Z-800 infusion pumps, citing software that has not undergone verification or validation testing.
Healthcare isn’t the only industry grappling with how AI should, or should not, fit into our daily work.
Some friends who are teachers sent me the transcript of a recent discussion about how AI is impacting the ability of humans to think and whether it will alter our abilities for critical thinking. The discussion linked to an article “AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking” that was a great read. The author set out to examine how AI tool use relates to critical thinking skills and focused on the concept of cognitive offloading as a potential mediating factor. Cognitive offloading happens when thought processes are outsourced to technology instead of being developed independently.
The study found that higher AI tool use had a negative impact on critical thinking abilities. Younger study participants (ages 17-25) were more dependent on AI tools and had lower critical thinking scores compared to those study participants who were older than 46 years. It also noted that regardless of AI usage, better critical thinking skills were associated with higher educational attainment, which should be important to anyone who has a stake in ensuring a well-educated population. The study found that higher educated people maintained those critical thinking skills even when using AI, which supports the idea that how we are using AI is more important than whether we’re using it or not. The study also found that AI use encourages passive learning, where students consume information rather than creating it.
The study had multiple hypotheses about the role of cognitive offloading, including one that suggested that moving thinking tasks to external tools would reduce the cognitive burden on individuals. Instead, they found that the reduced cognitive load can lead to reduced critical engagement and cognitive analysis. According to the author, this phenomenon has been described as the “Google effect,” where being able to easily find information online leads to reduced memory retention and problem solving skills.
That would seem to go along with what many of us already think, which is that the internet is making us dumber. Although to truly explore that statement, you would also have to look at the proliferation of TikTok videos and the nonsense seen all over social media on a daily basis.
I had the chance to speak to a couple of teachers who were blissfully enjoying their summer vacation, so I figured I would ask about their thoughts around AI and their thoughts about how it was impacting education, beyond the obvious concerns about AI-generated work.
One said that plagiarism has always been an issue, and taking from AI sources isn’t a lot different than taking from other authors, although AI might be easier to catch because of stilted language that would have been caught by editors of more traditional sources. She also noted that she’s applying some of her existing “how to spot fake news” lesson plan content to AI, encouraging students to be skeptical about what AI is telling them, to ask about bias, and to consult multiple sources to ensure accuracy. She recommends that students do their best to answer questions in more traditional ways first, then use AI to validate their findings.
The other teacher felt that better education is needed on how AI works and the risks of using it. He likened it to when GPS units first came out, and there were reports of people driving off the edges of roads that were closed because they were blindly following the GPS and not paying appropriate attention to their surroundings. He also noted that although there are certainly concerns about AI use interfering with academic rigor, he is more worried about his teenage students being emotionally harmed by AI-generated content, such as deepfake photos or videos.
He noted, “When I was in school, people spread rumors, but now you can have altered videos going around that are a lot more difficult to combat.” As a proud member of Generation X, I don’t envy the students growing up in this environment. Still, I’m grateful for teachers that recognize these challenges and work to prepare students not only to be ready for the future but to protect their own mental health.
The use of AI by medical students and residents has been a hot topic for my colleagues who are working in academic settings. There are concerns that students have become used to looking up facts and aren’t memorizing information the way they used to, which places them at risk when resources aren’t readily available. Whether it’s a downtime event or a rapidly evolving clinical situation, I know I’m glad that I have certain pathways memorized to the point where they just happen naturally in my thought process.
Of course, I’ve allowed some things to go by the wayside and I would have to look them up if I ever needed them. (Cockcroft-Gault equation, I salute you.) One faculty member said his school is using AI within its case-based learning modules for medical students in hopes that the approach will build diagnostic reasoning skills rather than sabotage their development.
The faculty physicians I spoke with had different thoughts about the use of AI by resident physicians, since they’ve graduated from medical school and have the MD or DO behind their name and are therefore able to treat patients with some degree of independence even if they may not be fully licensed. Universally, they had concerns about using non-medical AI solutions due to the risk of hallucinations and the safety risks to patients. They were also concerned about students using those resources to learn procedures and algorithms, since students wouldn’t be aware if what they were reading was incorrect compared to what they might learn reading a more authoritative resource such as a medical textbook or journal articles.
All but one said they conduct their teaching rounds in an AI-free environment where participants are expected to contribute to the discussion without the benefit of external resources.
That conversation was limited to faculty in my immediate area. I suspect that attitudes might be different in parts of the country that are more apt to adopt new technologies more aggressively. I would be interested to hear from informaticists that work with medical schools or graduate medical education programs on how your institutions are approaching AI and what best practices are being developed.
Is AI really going to make healthcare better, or is it another shiny object that will eventually lose our admiration? Leave a comment or email me.
Email Dr. Jayne.
“The Illusion of Thinking”: Implications for Healthcare
By Vikas Chowdhry
Vikas Chowdhry, MS, MBA is founder and CEO of TraumaCare.ai.
If you are even moderately interested in AI, I am sure you have by now at least seen various comments and responses in social media to Apple’s paper titled “The Illusion of Thinking.” But in case you have been under the AI rock, here’s a brief summary.
In this paper, the authors show that today’s large reasoning models (LRMs such as OpenAI o3-mini, DeepSeek-R1, Claude 3.7 Sonnet-Thinking) — systems that explicitly generate long chains-of-thought — really do think more, but not necessarily better. On carefully designed puzzle tasks, they beat ordinary LLMs only in a narrow middle band of difficulty and then collapse outright as problems grow harder.
As expected, the comments span the gamut, from “the sky is falling” to “not a big deal, they will figure out a way to overcome or fix this.” While I am not in the “sky is falling” camp, I do think that this paper raises some important questions with special implications for healthcare. Any healthcare organization (or vendor) that is using or developing a product that is based on LLMs/LRMs will need to think deeply about these issues and have a strategy to run their own similar evaluations and hopefully share them publicly.
Here are four key findings from the paper and my take on the implication of each finding for healthcare.
#1. Impact of complexity on reasoning performance
The authors identify three performance regimes as problem complexity rises:
Performance of LRMs (solid lines) and LLMs (dotted lines) across low, medium and high complexity puzzles (figure from the Apple paper).
LRMs spend more tokens as tasks get more complex until a critical point, after which, they give up and begin to reduce their reasoning effort despite increasing problem difficulty. This behavior suggests a fundamental scaling limitation in the thinking capabilities of current reasoning models relative to problem complexity.
Let’s say your product helps detect malignant tumors, or, transcribes ambient conversations using LLMs/LRMs.
#3. Over-thinking & self-correction limits
For simpler problems, reasoning models often find the correct solution early in thinking, but then continue exploring incorrect solutions (overthinking). As problems become moderately more complex, this trend reverses: correct answers appear only late. For hard tasks they never appear (“collapse” as discussed earlier).
#4. No benefit from explicit algorithms
Prompting with a known algorithm to solve the problem does not improve the performance. This indicates weaknesses in faithfully executing step-by-step logic, not just in discovering it.
A healthcare organization may have explicit clinical guidelines for certain use cases and would want the AI product to follow them when those guidelines are met. However, the results of this paper show that an LLM/LRM based on AI product may not be able to execute an algorithm based on those guidelines even when explicitly programmed into the system.
AI progress is breathtaking, yet deploying it in high-risk domains like healthcare demands transparent, domain-specific safety testing. This paper is a timely reminder that such work takes time, expertise, and openness. Sharing evaluation results will accelerate safe adoption for the entire industry.
The Future of Member Support: How Intelligent Search Can Transform VAB Delivery
By Andi Gillentine
Andi Gillentine, MS is VP of national accounts at Findhelp.
Value-added benefits (VABs) are services that are offered by Medicaid managed care plans above and beyond required Medicaid state plan services. They are extremely popular – Medicaid plans in at least 48 states offer VABs — and historically poorly promoted and utilized.
How do we ensure improved utilization of VABs, which have the power to impact quality measures, quality of care, and overall health? By maximizing intelligent searching via closed-loop referral systems to surface the right programs to the right person at the right time, for both care managers navigating on a member’s behalf and members who are self-navigating.
About VABs
While VABs are typically non-medical, they are often related to member wellbeing. Examples of VABs are car seats and bike helmets for children, extended dental and vision services, over-the-counter medication funding, and carpet cleaning. More and more commonly, these services are used to address health-related social needs (HRSNs).
In Ohio, for example, VABs are allowed for dental, vision, transportation, health and wellness programs (includes housing supports and medical meals), incentives to strengthen health and wellbeing (includes rewards for seeking preventative care), prenatal and postpartum incentives, application services, telehealth, and 24-hour medical advice lines. Each of the seven Medicaid plans in Ohio offers at least 30 VABs, with one plan offering nearly 50.
This wealth of benefits can help Medicaid members achieve improved health outcomes and quality of care that is measurable in HEDIS and other health quality measures, if the members are aware of the benefit and know how to access it, and if administering it is easy on the health plan. Unfortunately, this is often not the case.
Improving VABs Access and Awareness
Today, in most states, a Medicaid member seeking support would have to spend hours researching their health plan website or reading their plan’s member handbook. As any health plan member can attest, this is a challenging, time-consuming task, frequently made more challenging by engaging solely through a smart phone. Accessing VABs usually requires a call to a customer service representative, with potentially long wait times, and then a waiting period to receive the goods or services.
This high administrative effort to find and access benefits results in high costs for health plans. Many Medicaid members miss important preventive care appointments due to transportation issues, use the ED for non-emergent needs because they can’t afford medications, or lose housing or utilities. VABs can provide the resources and support to prevent these occurrences, but it’s not enough for support to just be available. Members need relevant recommendations and easy access.
In an ideal world, a Medicaid member would be able to go to one place, validate their insurance coverage, search for services that address their needs, and receive intelligent results that provide resources tailored to their specific situation, with the ability to self-refer to access these goods and services. This intelligent search needs to include all available resources from their community, county, state, and health plan’s VABs. No more hunting through multiple sites or staying on the phone for long periods of time just to put food on the table, get a ride to an appointment, or find a car seat.
Intelligent Search is the Answer
There are no technological hurdles to solving this problem. We have already solved it. We simply need to integrate these workflows at the right time and in the right place for navigators and Medicaid members, using interoperable social care platforms with intelligent search capabilities. Where a patient can walk in the doors of a safety net hospital and, because of the integrated social care information in their medical chart, tailored recommendations, including VABs, are automatically presented to care teams. The care team may refer or recommend some of these resources to the patient and encourage the patient to self-navigate for additional benefits and support. Or where a health plan care manager, engaging with a chronically-ill, dual-eligible member, can assess need and eligibility for VABs and other integrated social care support and, with consent, directly refer the member to services.
One personalized, intelligent search for all services, in easy-to-access workflows for navigators and members. The future is already here. Let’s make the most of it.
Jaideep Tandon, MS is co-founder and CEO of Infinx.
Tell me about yourself and the company.
I come from a technology background in engineering, with a focus on doing back office work over the years in hardware and software. Our entry into healthcare happened by chance, where somebody we were talking to said, can you guys help us out on medical transcription? We said sure, why not? We’re enterprising. Let’s see what we can do.
That was the beginning of Infinx. We saw an opportunity around the overall burden that healthcare providers face when they are dispensing care. We started by providing back office help, but quickly realized that there’s an amazing opportunity here to reduce friction in overall RCM through the use of technology and trained resources.
That has been the journey that we’ve been on over the last 14 years since I co-founded this company. Today we provide a variety of RCM solutions to about 800 customers.
How has health system demand for RCM technology and assistance changed over the years?
Change is constant. It is inherent with the way that our health system is designed. It’s that principal-agent problem, where we’re all giving up some level of control to another party between patient, provider and payer. It is generally set up as a slightly adversarial system. As much as we talk about data interchange and things working smoothly, the incentives aren’t quite aligned for payers to share as much information with providers and vice versa.
There’s always this friction that has been created inherently in the system. That leads to constant changes in payer guidelines, denials going up, and increased requirements for authorizations. We see no point in the future where suddenly everything will be solved. It’s an environment of managing and continuing to get more efficient as things change.
What progress has been made in making the prior authorization process less frictional?
The prior authorization burden is tremendous on providers as well as payers. Patients are the ones who suffer, because their access to care decreases or gets more complicated.
The end-to-end solution probably doesn’t ever get solved. Payers will always want some level of authorization, which they should in terms of making sure of medical necessity and that providers aren’t overprescribing certain things. But even before you get to that aspect of it, a lot of information asymmetry exists as providers receive orders and submit prior authorizations. Missing information and incomplete orders are coming to providers, which can lead to denials on prior authorization.
There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit that can be addressed through technology, as well as better business processes and having tighter controls in the front end of your RCM. That can stop revenue leaking, and more importantly, get patients the care they need when they need it.
How are these capabilities being integrated into the EHR?
EHRs are definitely making a lot of progress in being that single source of truth. Sadly, we still see that fax is still the lowest common denominator of communicating, which is absurd because I don’t think fax machines actually exist anywhere now. It’s just the fax protocol of the thing, “Oh, I’m receiving an e-fax.”
We’re seeing a lot of interesting things happening in document capture. As much as we’re saying that paper has been or will be eliminated, that’s the primary form of information exchange that we see when it’s a handoff between a referring physician to a specialist, and then from that specialist to a hospital or a health system. Obviously there are exceptions, but the industry standard involves a lot of disparate systems, so faxes end up becoming the way of life because they are low cost and you can get work done. Perhaps not the most efficient, but at least things keep moving along versus burdening IT teams to build broader integrations.
What RCM opportunities might AI provide beyond the earlier phases of offshoring and robotic process automation?
We look at technology solutions as first line of defense across any of the business processes that we are addressing for our customers, but we don’t leave it there. Our view is that our customers should demand outcomes, and that’s what we should deliver to them.
For instance, in an authorization request, our customers and their patient customers don’t care how we get that authorization done. What they want is a clean authorization on file before date of service so that the patient can be seen in a timely manner and care can be dispensed as needed. Sometimes the ugly truth is that it will require somebody picking up the phone. It’s a stat requirement and you will need to talk to the payer and give all the clinical details about why the patient needs to be seen today, and we will support that.
But we see a lot of things that can be done from a technology perspective. That’s where early days we had machine learning and brought in RPA. Today we’re gradually bringing in AI agents to do more and more of those cognitive tasks that humans were doing. Reiterating the outcome-based approach, it doesn’t matter how we get it done, as long as we get it done with a quality output in a timely manner for our customers so that they can continue to focus on dispensing care.
Are health systems holding prospective vendors more accountable for outcomes that create measurable return on investment?
A lot of the technology spend these days in larger health systems is coming out of their innovation groups. Healthcare has been slow in technology adoption, but we are seeing more of a push to be on the cutting edge and not being left behind that is being driven by these innovation departments. But the folks who are actually driving the business processes, who have been living and breathing those inefficiencies, are pushing back about consuming yet another piece of technology. What is the value proposition that you are delivering to us? How will you ensure that we won’t increase our team size versus actually bringing efficiency?
A lot of creative things are happening, but more often than not, our customers are defining an outcome and a success metric and saying that we are both going to work towards it. Nine out of 10 times, we’re going to get to those success metrics. Sometimes there are inherent workflow issues or business processes that can’t be changed, and perhaps the technology can’t deliver the value that it promised at the outset. It’s a joint effort between vendors and health systems to better define the problem, because once that’s defined, the guardrail is established, and technology can work really well within those framings.
Will payers use technology that is compatible with that of providers?
With Epic and other EHRs, we are seeing payers coming to the table to support various data interchange standards such as FHIR or previously HL7. There’s more and more of that happening in our ability to connect with benefit managers to get automated responses, be it on claim status checks or prior authorization requests. All of those things are definitely leading towards addressing some of the low-hanging fruit around what can be done through technology and EHR integrations.
But again, we feel that there are a lot of long-tail problems here in healthcare, RCM as well, that going back to my example on prior authorization, we just have to get it done. Let’s not wait for a technology to be 100% effective. If it is 80% effective, it’s a lot better than where some of the health systems are today.
As someone who has started, run, scaled, and sold businesses, how would you assess today’s environment?
Had you asked me that question maybe 10 months ago, my answer would have been very different. The general geopolitical environment worldwide is creeping into business decisions. Organizations are not taking a long view on things because they don’t know what the world will look like 12 months from now, and that makes it difficult for them to get tied into longer term contracts or buying into certain things that then they have to unwind. Commitment levels are getting tested.
But by the same token, innovation is at an all-time high. In the 15 years that I have been doing this, this is the first time that I have seen the investor community, healthcare leaders, the vendor community, and everyone aligned towards making this time different, with healthcare leading the charge versus being stodgy followers that never change. That is refreshing and exciting.
How do those factors affect the company’s strategy?
As we look at our various lines of business, and as we are looking to make investments across the organization, we ask ourselves the question — is AI going to disrupt us as we go down this path? Is AI going to be an opportunity for us as we go down this path?
More often than not, at least for now, we are seeing that the answer is the latter. We can definitely co-opt AI in many aspects of our business, which we continue to do. But it’s not the one silver bullet that will solve everything. Healthcare is an extremely fragmented industry and RCM is extremely fragmented across various specialties and geographies, so M&A is a key piece of our overall growth strategy.
We feel that there is a lot of domain expertise that exists between various pockets around the country, whether it’s pathology billing, serving academic medical centers, or something complex like oncology billing. We keep looking at opportunities where we can partner with really smart people who have deep subject matter expertise in these specialties, then bring in our technology stack and our ability to globally scale to deliver value to our customers. AI continues to be a cornerstone of how we bring our solutions to market and how we service our customers, but domain knowledge will continue to exist and develop along with AI.
I have never been more excited about what we’re trying to do here at Infinx, along with the healthcare market in general. The ability to reduce friction between payers and providers, bring information to the forefront, and give agency to patients to better administer their own care is an industry opportunity. It obviously brings a lot of competition along the way, and a lot of noise as well, but we feel that we are well positioned. We are excited to be going forward and helping our provider partner customers across the board.
Amazon reorganizes health-care business in latest bid to crack multitrillion-dollar market
Amazon restructures its healthcare business into six groups in an effort to streamline its business after several executive departures.
23andMe co-founder and former CEO Anne Wojcicki regains control of the bankrupt company as her newly formed non-profit acquires its assets for $305 million, outbidding Regeneron Pharmaceuticals in a court-ordered final round.
Congress Eyes EHR Overhaul with VA Regulatory Plan
Draft legislation would increase Congressional control over the VA’s Oracle Health project by mandating regular reporting of project status.
UCSF professor and University of California Health System chief data scientist Atul Butte, MD, PhD died Friday. He was 55.
Butte held the Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg Distinguished Professorship of pediatrics, bioengineering and therapeutic sciences, and epidemiology and biostatistics at UCSF. He was director of UCSF’s Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute and chief data scientist of UC Health.
The above UCTV video is from 2019, when Butte presciently described AI as “what’s old is new again” and discussed its potential in healthcare.
From Efficient Hospital: “Re: AI. Everyone and their grandmothers have ideas on how to regulate it (CHAI, Joint Commission, AMA, AHA, CMS, FDA). Meanwhile, every AI company is learning that the only way to make money is to become an RCM vendor. All these regulations will end up applying to prior auth, denial management, and RCM workflows because nobody is willing to scale up deployment of clinical AI beyond itsy bitsy pilots.”
We clearly need to work out how to integrate and label AI-generated (or proposed) content into what clinicians generate manually.
New poll to your right or here: How has your perception of the former Cerner changed since its acquisition by Oracle? We’re now three years in, so comparisons are justified.
Live Webinar: June 18 (Wednesday) noon ET. “Fireside Chat: Closing the Gaps in Medication Adherence.” Sponsor: DrFirst. Presenters: Ben G. Long, MD, director of hospital medicine, Magnolia Regional Health Center; Wes Blakeslee, PhD, vice president of clinical data strategies, DrFirst; Colin Banas, MD, MHA, chief medical officer, DrFirst. Magnolia Regional Health Center will describe how its Nurse Navigator program used real-time prescription fill data from DrFirst to identify therapy gaps and engage patients through timely, personalized outreach. The effort led to a 19% increase in prescription fills and a 6% drop in 30-day readmissions among participating patients. Attendees will learn why prescribing price transparency is key to adherence, how real-time data helps care teams support patients between visits, and how Magnolia aligned its approach with value-based care and population health goals.
Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.
Amazon restructures its healthcare business after several executive departures. Amazon Health Services will be focused on six groups:
Health data platform vendor Datavant acquires Ontellus, which offers records retrieval technology for self-insured companies and law firms.
Autonomize AI, which offers AI copilots for healthcare enterprises, raises $28 million in a Series A funding round.
Oracle names Mike Sicilia, who oversees the company’s vertical businesses including Oracle Health, as co-president alongside another executive in new SEC filings. Oracle has previously elevated executives to the role of president as part of CEO succession planning.
23andMe co-founder and former CEO Anne Wojcicki regains control of the bankrupt company as her newly formed non-profit acquires its assets for $305 million, outbidding Regeneron Pharmaceuticals in a court-ordered final round.
China-based health tech company Ping An Good Doctor relaunches its health services platform with updates for proactive family doctor support, direct access to medical specialists, and full-cycle care coordination. The platform has 400 million registered users who can access 50,000 physicians, 105,000 health service partners, 235,000 pharmacies, and 4,000 hospitals. The company also announced AI tools for chronic disease monitoring, case triage, post-treatment care, and workplace health management.
Lee Health hires Chris Akeroyd (Children’s Health) as CIO.
Draft legislation would increase Congressional control over the VA’s Oracle Health project by mandating regular reporting of project status.
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MRO Acquires Enterprise Clinical Data Management Platform Q-Centrix
Clinical data exchange technology vendor MRO acquires Q-Centrix, which offers an enterprise clinical data management platform.
Ellipsis Health, which offers AI-powered healthcare voice agents for care management, raises $45 million in a Series A funding round.
Health data company Datavant acquires Ontellus, a medical records retrieval and claims data firm that offers its services to law offices, employers, and insurance carriers.
Healthcare agentic AI company Autonomize AI announces $28 million in Series A funding.
Scotland-based Craneware, which develops hospital revenue integrity software, rejects a $1.4 billion acquisition offer from Bain Equity after concluding that the proposal undervalues the company.
Live Webinar: June 18 (Wednesday) noon ET. “Fireside Chat: Closing the Gaps in Medication Adherence.” Sponsor: DrFirst. Presenters: Ben G. Long, MD, director of hospital medicine, Magnolia Regional Health Center; Wes Blakeslee, PhD, vice president of clinical data strategies, DrFirst; Colin Banas, MD, MHA, chief medical officer, DrFirst. Magnolia Regional Health Center will describe how its Nurse Navigator program used real-time prescription fill data from DrFirst to identify therapy gaps and engage patients through timely, personalized outreach. The effort led to a 19% increase in prescription fills and a 6% drop in 30-day readmissions among participating patients. Attendees will learn why prescribing price transparency is key to adherence, how real-time data helps care teams support patients between visits, and how Magnolia aligned its approach with value-based care and population health goals.
Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.
Health benefits solution vendor Capital Rx acquires Amino Health and will add its provider search, appointment scheduling, cost estimates and prescription savings capabilities to its Judi pharmacy benefit operations management platform.
Oracle announces Q4 results: revenue up 11%, EPS $0.19 versus $0.11, beating Wall Street expectations for both. The only mention of its health business in the earnings call was that Oracle Health is among the segments that are gaining users from competitors that have struggled with the shift from on-premise to cloud.
Clinical data exchange technology vendor MRO acquires Q-Centrix, which offers an enterprise clinical data management platform.
Ellipsis Health, which offers AI-powered healthcare voice agents for care management, raises $45 million in a Series A funding round.
A new AMA policy calls for clinical AI tools to include explainable output and safety and efficacy data to support informed decision-making by clinicians.
A publication in Sweden says that Oracle Health executives have admitted that its Millennium system was classified incorrectly under the EU’s Medical Device Regulation and should have not been brought live. Swedish authorities previously launched an investigation when the $190 million implementation in the Västra Götaland region experienced data handling problems.
A Florida-based substance use disorder clinic will pay $1.9 million to settle FTC allegations that its CIO and chief marketing officer ran Google ads that impersonated other clinics to generate inbound consumer calls. The FTC says that the company ran at least 68,000 Google search ads that generated 3,500 calls to its call center from people who were attempting to contact competing clinics, which it says violates the FTC Act and the Opioid Addiction Recovery Fraud Prevention Act of 2018.
A GOP-submitted draft House Veterans’ Affairs bill would reintroduce into law several previously removed VA EHR accountability and governance requirements, including standardized reporting, leadership roles, and data protections. The bill’s EHR provisions are nearly identical to those that were submitted by Democrats in May 2024 that were removed “due to lack of political viability.”
Central Maine Healthcare continues to work to restore its systems that were taken offline by a cyberattack on June 1.
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From Boomer Sooner: “Re: Stanford’s EHR summary tool. The Department of Defense also recently launched an AI summary tool to help with the review of applicant records.” I know a thing or two about the process that military applicants go through, especially those who are applying to the military service academies or are going through the selection processes for highly selective fields. The onus of trying to get all the records to the right place is on the applicant, and it can be tricky when a practice doesn’t release records quickly. One of my favorite candidates said that in that process, the applicants who were military dependents had a bit of an advantage because their records were more easily accessible by reviewers.
The new tool, which was developed by the Innovation Facilitation Team at the US Military Entrance Processing Command (USMEPCOM), creates AI-enabled summaries of medical documents, reducing the time required for provider review. The summary can be seen in the MHS Genesis system as an encounter summary.
I was excited to learn about a recently enacted Arizona law that is aimed at protecting physicians and patients from unintended consequences that are related to AI. House Bill 2175 is designed to keep health insurance companies from using AI as the ultimate decision maker as they review claims and deal with medical necessity appeals and denials. It also applies to prior authorization requests and recognizes that cases that require medical judgment should be reviewed by licensed medical professionals with the appropriate training, experience, and ethical responsibility that is needed for clinical decision making. The law was introduced with the support of the Arizona Medical Association and various care delivery organizations and advocacy groups and goes into effect in 2026.
Nebraska is also addressing hot button healthcare issues with the Ensuring Transparency in Prior Authorization Act, which requires insurers to make their prior authorization requirements visible on their websites. Similar to the Arizona law, it prevents AI from being the sole basis for a denial of coverage. It also requires a 60-day notice period before payers can add new requirements. We often think about healthcare IT in terms of provider side organizations, but plenty of tech folks are working on the payer side. It will be interesting to see how much work is done on websites and how quickly it happens. I’m betting that payers drag it out until the last minute, knowing that it doesn’t go into effect until January 2026.
One more state wading into the healthcare fray is Indiana, which recently enacted a bill that requires non-profit hospitals to either lower their prices or lose their tax advantaged status by 2029. Hospitals will be required to submit audited financial statements that show a decrease in their prices to match or be less than the statewide average. Failure to submit the audited statements can result in a $10,000 per day penalty. The bill has other interesting features, namely creating a state directed payment program for hospitals as well as a managed care assessment fee. A provision requires insurers and health maintenance organizations to submit specified data to the all-payer claims database and another one to reduce drug costs for the state employee health plan.
I wasn’t aware of Guidehealth until the company announced this week that it had received a $10 million investment from Emory Healthcare. As one would expect, the solution has an AI-enabled component. It advertises “AI-driven intelligence with human-centered care” using medical assistants that are “trained in data science and empathy.” They are branded with the trademarked Healthguides moniker. The company plans to use the additional investment to add AI-powered virtual care navigation to support analysis of patient-reported data and with interventions that target fall risk or depression screenings.
Guidehealth was already working with Emory’s Population Health Collaborative to boost quality scores under a Medicare Advantage contract. I would be interested to understand the medical assistant training and whether unique hiring algorithms are being used to find individuals with a particular level of empathy. In my experience, that’s not only hard to find at times, but difficult to enhance with training.
Speaking of AI, over the last year a couple of articles looked at AI-generated messages to patients and found that those with an AI origin were more empathetic. A new study that looked at medical queries across the US and Australia found the opposite. The AI-enabled responses were more accurate and professional than human responses, but lacked emotional depth and also raised concerns of data bias. I’m sure we’re not done with this one, and many more research efforts will be looking at the phenomenon.
While many organizations are looking at technology solutions to close gaps in care, particularly in preventive services, a recent study showed that for cervical cancer screening, lower tech interventions can still drive the needle. Researchers looked at patients in a safety net care setting and compared rates of cervical cancer screening. Patients who received a mailed self-collection kit along with a telephone reminder had greater participation (41%) than those who received a telephone reminder alone (17%). It just goes to show that nudges aren’t enough. We need to make it easy for patients to get the recommended services rather than just telling them they need to do it.
From Weird Al: “Re: earwax as the newest precision medicine tool I wonder how much these tests will cost?” A BBC article notes that wax could contain biomarkers for cancer, metabolic disorders, and even Alzheimer’s disease. Since ear wax is relatively stable, it might be able to show longer-term trends with various chemicals. There’s a team at Hospital Amaral Carvalho in Sao Paulo that is looking at cerumen for cancer diagnosis and monitoring, and several other institutions are conducting research.
Having spent many long hours in the emergency department and urgent care centers, I feel like worked with more than my share of ear wax. Running tests on it isn’t as cool as diagnosing conditions using a Star Trek-style tricorder, but here’s to the next generation of research and seeing if we can develop tests that are not only less invasive, but cost effective.
What healthcare technology advancements do you feel have really changed how we approach patients or conditions? Are they glamorously high tech or startlingly low key? Leave a comment or email me.
Email Dr. Jayne.
Capital Rx Acquires Care Navigation Company Amino Health
Capital Rx, a pharmacy benefits management and administration company, acquires Amino Health and rebrands Amino’s health navigation platform to Judi Care.
Craneware founder rejects US takeover bid — and a £80m payday
Scotland-based hospital financial software vendor Craneware rejects an over $1 billion acquisition offer from Boston-based Bain Capital.
Central Maine Healthcare launches temporary website amid cyber breach
Central Maine Healthcare sets up a temporary website as it works to recover from a May 25 cyberattack.
A KPMG survey of 183 health system leaders in eight countries contains these key points about the use of AI in their organizations:
The Joint Commission and the Coalition for Health AI will partner to develop AI playbooks, tools, and a certification program.
OpenAI releases 03-pro, which performs PhD-level math and science tasks. The company also announced that it has dropped the price of o3 by 80%.
Apple announces Apple Intelligence enhancements to perform on-device live translation for Messages, FaceTime, and Phone and to perform contextual actions that are triggered by what appears on the iPhone’s screen. Apple’s WWDC announcements did not include anything pertaining to adding AI to Siri, which the company started mentioning last year.
The FDA launches an AI tool that it calls Elsa to summarize adverse events, compare product labels, and generate database code for non-clinical use. Rolled out ahead of schedule and under budget, Elsa is expected to be fully deployed by June 30. It is already being used to accelerate clinical protocol reviews and help perform scientific evaluations. A recent news report quoted FDA insiders who said that its AI tools are buggy, don’t connect to internal systems, and cannot access the Internet to retrieve studies.
Mayo Clinic will invest in and collaborate with Hellocare.ai to develop ambient clinical intelligence technology. The company’s AI-powered platform passively listens to clinical conversations and detects care-related events that then trigger documentation and workflow actions. CEO Labinot Bytyqi, MS founded the Florida-based company, which was originally named Solaborate, in 2012 after working for several years at SAP.
Boehringer Ingelheim’s animal health unit will embed its canine heart murmur detection algorithms into Eko Health’s digital stethoscopes.
Clinical decision support developer OpenEvidence signs an agreement to incorporate data from 13 journals that are published by JAMA Network.
Researchers develop an agentic AI system for choosing treatments for cancer treatments that agreed with the conclusions of experts 91% of the time. The system improved decision-making accuracy over GPT-4 from 30% to 87% and correctly cited recognized oncology guidelines in 75% of its answers.
A ProPublica report says that software engineer Sahil Lavingia, who lacked healthcare or government experience, was tasked with canceling VA contracts using outdated, inexpensive AI models from OpenAI. He was fired two months into his assignment at the Digital Operations Growth Environment (DOGE) program for what he says were statements he made in an interview that fraud and abuse at the VA were “relatively nonexistent” and that he was surprised at “how efficient the government was.”
China-based AI startup DeepSeek is hiring interns to label medical data for applications that involve “advanced auxiliary diagnosis.” China-based researchers recently warned against the rapid adoption of DeepSeek by hospitals, warning that it is prone to hallucination and creates privacy risks.
Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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Hellocare.ai Enters into Collaboration with Mayo Clinic for AI Co-Innovation Project
Mayo Clinic will invest in and partner with Hellocare.ai, whose platform supports virtual nursing, virtual sitting, patient engagement, ambient documentation, and remote monitoring.
Guidehealth Receives $10 Million Investment from Emory Healthcare
Guidehealth will use new funding from Emory Healthcare (GA) to develop prescriptive analytics and AI-powered virtual care navigation capabilities.
‘Uber for Getting Off Antidepressants’ Launches in the US
Virtual clinic Outro launches in seven states to help patients taking antidepressants taper off their medications.
HIStalk Sponsor Announcements Webinars
This is a great point—many discussions about patient wait times still focus on staffing or technology, while the real issue…