The UK’s health secretary says that AI-driven health checks – called MOTs for measurements, observations, and tests — could transform care for frail patients who are over 65 by using machine learning and genomics to speed diagnosis, guide treatment, and predict illness. Japan offers a similar early detection program called Ningen Dock, a cash-only program that uses imaging, endoscopy, and lab work to generate personalized risk assessments. That service is also offered to foreign residents in a medical tourism package that is covered by some US insurers, such as Aetna (above).
Google DeepMind CEO Sir Demis Hassabis – who won a Novel Prize in chemistry last year after starting his career as a designer of widely popular video games — predicts in a “60 Minutes” interview that AI will reduce drug development time from years to weeks, making all diseases curable within 10 years.
Agentic coding platform Cursor draws online scorn and customer cancellations after its AI support agent incorrectly blames a user’s inability to run multiple sessions as company policy rather than a software bug. Cursor says that it will start labeling AI-generated responses after users questioned whether it was trying to pass off its “Sam” assistant as human. It also fixed the bug that the user had reported.
Just 30% of healthcare AI pilot projects reach production, a new study finds, most often stalled by security concerns. Providers are much more interested in trying and buying AI solutions than they were with EMRs.
Middle East specialty provider Burjeel Holdings will use Hippocratic AI’s agents for patient-facing, non-diagnostic clinical tasks that will be delivered in multiple languages.
A new study finds that AI models beat PhD-level virologists in solving complex wet lab problems, scoring 44% versus the experts’ 22%. While the findings offer hope for advancing infectious disease control, they also raise alarms about AI’s potential use to develop bioweapons.
Stanford Health Care researchers find that endocrinologists view AI-generated draft responses to patient portal messages as helpful, but see tools that use patient data, such as for triage, as risky. AI was rated most useful for administrative tasks like writing authorization letters and patient education, with the greatest potential use being the management of patient scheduling.
A Spain-based Microsoft engineer who was frustrated by repeated misdiagnoses of his son’s rare condition develops DxGPT, an AI tool that analyzes user-reported symptoms to suggest possible diagnoses. Access is free.
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RFK Jr.’s autism study to amass medical records of many Americans
NIH is aggregating data from insurance claims, the VA, Indian Health Service, pharmacy chains, and even wearables to support the HHS-mandated autism research initiative launched by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Reveleer Acquires Novillus to Expand Its AI-Powered Clinical Intelligence and Quality Solutions
Value-based care workflow automation vendor Reveleer acquires Novillus, which offers provider engagement and care gap management software to payers.
Lena Health Closes Oversubscribed $2M Seed Round to Transform Healthcare Coordination with AI
Lena Health, an AI care coordination startup affiliated with Texas Medical Center, raises $2 million in seed funding.
Ascertain Raises $10 Million in Series A Funding to Scale Agentic AI Platform
Automated case management software startup Ascertain raises $10 million in Series A funding.
NIH is aggregating data from insurance claims, the VA, Indian Health Service, pharmacy chains, and even wearables to support the HHS-mandated autism research initiative that was launched by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
NIH will also create a disease registry to track Americans with autism.
Kennedy has stated that HHS will determine the cause of autism by September.
From Oingo Boingo: “Re: engagement. You said your site was tops in health tech media, but didn’t explain what that means.” The Black Book Research survey included these questions: (a) whether respondents had read anything on a given site in the past month, and (b) whether they spent more than 20 minutes there. Becker’s Health IT & CIO Report beat HIStalk on raw visits, but trailed badly on time spent on site, which I take to mean that they write a strong headline but less-strong content. One site that I assumed was a capable competitor turned out to be a non-factor, with 0% of respondents saying they had read it in the past month. HIStalk was also #1 in overall credibility and industry respect and also topped the category of providing unbiased and accurate information with a score of 9.9 on a 10 scale. As a lazy, part-time amateur, I’ll take it.
I visited a family member who was a patient in a small, university-affiliated hospital several times last week. Given that I’ve only spent one night in a hospital myself, and that was years ago, these were my technology observations:
Dear people of the Internet: if your graph’s y-axis doesn’t start at zero, I assume that you’re trying to support a shaky opinion rather than presenting facts and I move on.
None scheduled soon. Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.
Brellium announces $16.7 million in Series A funding. The company offers automated chart auditing software to help providers maintain clinical and payer compliance.
Value-based care workflow automation vendor Reveleer acquires Novillus, which offers provider engagement and care gap management software to payers. Headquartered in California, Reveleer opened an operations hub in India last month.
Automated case management software startup Ascertain raises $10 million in Series A funding.
Patient experience software vendor Promptly acquires medical practice software from Patient Spectrum.
MyMichigan Health promotes Pankaj Jandwani, MD, MMM to VP/CIO.
Clearwater appoints Jeff Englander, MBA (New York University) executive advisor, business development.
Adam Weinstein, MBA (Cityblock Health) joins Teladoc Health as chief product officer.
South Australia Health implements Altera Digital Health’s Sunrise EHR and patient administration system across all of its public hospitals. The contract for the $225 million project was signed in 2011.
Emory University Hospital Midtown (GA) integrates AI-powered fall-prevention capabilities from VirtuSense Technologies with its virtual nursing service. Emory Healthcare plans to deploy the VSTOne technology across eight inpatient units this year.
University of California Health describes how its nurses are using AI.
Adventist HealthCare rolls out Mednition’s Kate AI to several of its EDs to support and validate nurse decisions for high-risk and complex patients.
A new KLAS report on ambulatory core solution mindshare finds that while functionality is the highest consideration factor, interoperability trails just behind, while usability is #3.
A VA memo to regional directors stresses the need for clinicians who provide virtual consults to do so in private workspaces as they return to working in VA facilities in the coming weeks, per a mandatory return-to-office order that has left some providers concerned about working in open, call-center-like spaces. The memo doesn’t specify what providers should do if such spaces aren’t available. Meanwhile, the VA reports a 12% increase in veteran satisfaction with its virtual care services, particularly the VA Video Connect app.
The apparently popular “Acquired” podcast devotes a four-hour (!!) episode to the history of Epic. It doesn’t say much that you and I don’t already know about the company, but it’s aimed at generalists who won’t realize until the hosts finally say it that Epic has never acquired or been acquired and never will be, according to the policy of its board. I downloaded the audio into my AI tool to transcribe, saving me about 3:45 of that ridiculous runtime. I found only a few nuggets:
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Brellium Raises $16.7 Million to Build Healthcare’s AI-Powered Clinical Compliance Platform
Brellium, which offers AI-powered clinical and payer compliance software, announces $16.7 million in Series A funding.
Veteran satisfaction and trust in VA telehealth continues to rise
The VA sees a 12% increase in veteran satisfaction with its virtual care services, particularly the VA Video Connect app.
SA Health implements Altera Digital Health’s Sunrise EHR and patient administration system across 100 public hospitals.
I’m doing a consulting gig in a different part of the country and was excited to get out and see a bit of the local color. Those colors trended towards red, white, and rosé, which for me typically lead to a low-key afternoon.
I was certainly glad to visit an area where the weather doesn’t seem to be out to get me with torrential rain, flooding, or tornadoes as I’ve experienced in my travels over the last year.
As I work in different parts of the US, I’m constantly aware of the differences in healthcare resources depending on where people live. I’ve worked in affluent areas where no one ever seems to be uninsured and I’ve worked in places where the majority of patients are uninsured or underinsured. You’ll find compassionate and committed physicians in both of those settings, but there are different skill sets needed depending on the makeup of your patient population.
Even when I’m working on strategic planning projects, I like to start from the ground up with a little bit of workflow observation and some stakeholder interviews. This week, I worked with an organization where it feels like the physicians are 80% social worker and only spend 20% of their efforts on what people would consider typical physician tasks. Every exam room had cheat sheets to help physicians know which social services organizations might be able to help their patients.
One of my first questions when analyzing their workflow was why those resources weren’t somehow captured electronically so that physicians could make them part of their discharge documentation as patients left the office. Although some physicians had incorporated some of the information into their personal documentation shortcuts, it sounded like there isn’t any appetite in the IT budget to spend time on things that aren’t considered critical to patient care, such as maintaining the medication formularies and order sets. The organization tightly controls access to EHR resources, so even if there were physicians or other clinicians who might be capable of building additional tools to better support clinicians and patients, they wouldn’t be allowed into the system anyway.
Given the size of the location and the patient mix where I was observing clinicians that day, I asked if the organization had considered embedding social workers or care navigators in the practice to assist with patients’ needs. Apparently they used to have a part-time nurse navigator in the practice, but the role was eliminated and the nurse was moved to a centralized location to help with phone triage.
One could make a theoretical argument that having someone in a role like that would pay for itself because it would free up the physicians to see more patients, but the reality is that the physicians already have full schedules and full patient panels. They are doing the extra work either on top of their clinical responsibilities or instead of them. They are already optimizing their coding and billing processes to document all the work they’re doing “coordinating care” for the patients, which is a good thing, but doesn’t create the opportunity to bring in more revenue unless there’s some way to adjust the payer mix.
I looked at a lot more factors, not only in this location, but in several others. I found several areas in the EHR that could be optimized and others that needed significant work just to bring the existing content up to support the current standard of care. As an example, it didn’t look like the immunizations or health maintenance portions of the system had been kept current with changes to guidelines over the last year.
That lack of regular EHR maintenance was creating additional work for both physicians and clinical support staff. Knowing the system in question, fixing it all would probably be less than 10 hours of analyst time if you include requirements writing, approvals, build, testing, and implementation. The physicians I spoke with didn’t know if anyone had opened a ticket with the help desk to request the updates, and the EHR team had such a backlog of requests that they didn’t know if they had the respective requests on file.
After a lot of back and forth trying to sort it out, several things were clear to me:
As I often see in consulting engagements, researching each issue led to other issues. We found many more opportunities for changes that would benefit both physicians and patients.
As I returned to the hotel each night, I had a little bit of consulting whiplash, which happens when you’re working with one client during the day, finishing up projects for other clients in the evening, and reflecting on the stark differences between the projects.
The evening project on one of those days was for a client that is definitely more on the resource-rich end of the spectrum. They hired me to work on some custom content for a particular disease process where they’re trying to improve their clinical quality scores by a very small percentage. Their clinicians are not only using the most updated EHR content available, but also have access to human scribes at some locations as well as ambient documentation solutions nearly everywhere else. Clinics have health coaches and others to support some of the same processes that I had seen physicians doing during the day.
Those of us who have worked on population health projects know how significant your ZIP code can be as far as predicting your health status. This week brought it home to me in a way that it hasn’t done in several years.
These kinds of disparities aren’t something you can solve by throwing AI at them, although AI can help illustrate the nature of the problem more quickly than manually crunching the numbers. I’m going to have to think creatively about the strategic planning project I’m working on for my daytime client, although it’s going to be one of the trickier engagements I’ve done in a while. On days like this I wish I could find a magic lamp with which I could make three wishes to improve the healthcare system. Instead, I’ll have to come up with some incremental changes that can be done quickly and on the cheap while we formulate a strategy for the larger issues.
What are the major challenges facing your organization this year? If you could make three wishes, what would they be? Leave a comment or email me.
Email Dr. Jayne.
CISA Releases Guidance on Credential Risks Associated with Potential Legacy Oracle Cloud Compromise
A Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency advisory recommends that users of the legacy Oracle cloud environment take several precautionary actions following a recent breach that exposed user credentials.
Sky Lakes Medical Center to lay-off 70 employees in June; A.I. Partnership
Sky Lakes Medical Center (OR) will lay off 70 employees, most of them in patient financial services and coding, due to the implementation of IKS Health technology that includes ambient documentation.
Digital maternal healthcare startup Trellis Health launches with $1.8 million in pre-seed funding.
Leidos invests $10 million in AI disease detection with University of Pittsburgh
Leidos will invest $10 million over five years in a partnership with University of Pittsburgh to develop AI-powered digital pathology tools for early disease detection.
A Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency advisory recommends that users of the legacy Oracle cloud environment take several precautionary actions following a recent breach that exposed user credentials.
A hacker has claimed to have exfiltrated 6 million records that could affect 140,000 Oracle Cloud tenants. Security researchers believe that the claim is accurate, although Oracle continues to deny that information was exposed.
Company trust apparently erodes when its leadership’s designer footwear has rarely trod the uncarpeted parts of the hospital.
New poll to your right or here: What’s the hardest lesson you’ve learned in your health tech career? Add a comment if your favorite wasn’t listed. Mine would be that it doesn’t matter that you work for a great company if your boss is a challenge.
Thanks to industry veteran Doug Brown of Black Book Research for designing and conducting an excellent industry survey about HIStalk’s position among health tech media sources, as requested by some of my sponsors. Lorre sent him basic information and he was off to the races with a well-designed study methodology and sample size. The results intrigued him so much that he ran a second survey that covered general trust in health tech media. I’ll post a summary later, but some points are:
None scheduled soon. Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.
Leidos will invest $10 million over five years in a partnership with University of Pittsburgh to develop AI-powered digital pathology tools for early disease detection.
Sky Lakes Medical Center (OR) will lay off 70 employees, most of them in patient financial services and coding, due to the implementation of IKS Health technology that includes ambient documentation.
UK regulators approve the use of robotic surgery for 11 procedure types in NHS specialty centers, hoping to trim patient backlogs and streamline care.
FDA will phase out animal testing for drugs and move to AI-based models.
A misconfigured database that is owned by Scotland-based healthcare staffing software vendor Logezy exposes 8 million records, including ID documents, work authorizations, certificates, timesheets, user photos, and electronic signatures.
LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman says that ChatGPT diagnosed and resolved his persistent jaw-clicking in one minute, a problem that specialists hadn’t been able to fix in over five years. He credits the chatbot with recommending a simple mouth-opening technique that realigned his jaw. Hoffman disputed a reader’s comment that doctors must hate ChatGPT: “If implemented correctly, AI could help doctors diagnose individual patients faster, do less paperwork, and see more patients in a day.”
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UnitedHealth Group Reports First Quarter 2025 Results and Revises Full Year Guidance
UnitedHealth Group reports Q1 results: revenue up 9.8%, EPS $6.85 versus $6.91, missing expectations for both and sending shares down more than 20% in the company’s first earnings miss since 2008.
The House Oversight Committee asks 23andMe co-founder and former CEO Anne Wojcicki for details on the company’s bankruptcy and any plans to transfer personal and genetic data, warning that a sale to the highest bidder could be a “national security disaster.”
Risa Labs Raises $3.5M to Eliminate Treatment Delays with AI-Powered Workflow Automation in Oncology
Risa Labs, a healthcare AI startup focused on helping cancer care providers eliminate prior authorization delays, raises $3.5 million in seed funding.
UnitedHealth Group reports Q1 results: revenue up 9.8%, EPS $6.85 versus $6.91, missing expectations for both and sending shares down more than 20% in the company’s first earnings miss since 2008.
UHG also cut its 2025 outlook.
CEO Andrew Witty called the results, which were negatively affected by unexpectedly high Medicare Advantage medical costs, “unusual and unacceptable.”
On the earnings call, Witty said the company’s tools boosted digital engagement among senior members by 40% in Q1. He added that AI will route over half of incoming calls to the appropriate resource this year. UnitedHealth also reported that AI-powered claims tools improved Optum Insight productivity by 20%.
From JSON Argonaut: “Re: AI. We just signed a multi-year AI partnership so we can say we did. If it improves care or efficiency, great, but let’s be honest, the board wanted a press release.”
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Assort Health, which offers AI-powered incoming call management for patient scheduling in specialty practices, raises $26 million in funding.
Healthcare cost containment technology vendor Claritev, which was formerly known as Multiplan, hires Jigar Patel, MD (Oracle) as SVP/chief medical officer.
Vanessa Carmean, PhD (KeyCare) joins Lirio as RVP of sales.
Caregentic hires Russ Johannesson, MBA (Glooko) as CEO.
A preprint describes how UMass Memorial PCPs used Linus Health’s tablet-based tool to incorporate cognitive assessments into routine visits.
Altera Digital Health integrates Nabla’s ambient documentation solution with Paragon Denali.
A new KLAS report finds that non-US health systems are using technology, especially AI, to fight staff burnout. AI and analytics investment are outpacing EHR and digitization projects. Cloud adoption is rising, although most deployments remain hybrid or lift-and-shift rather than cloud-native.
The House Oversight Committee asks 23andMe co-founder and former CEO Anne Wojcicki for details on the company’s bankruptcy and any plans to transfer personal and genetic data, warning that a sale to the highest bidder could be a “national security disaster.”
The National Association of Attorneys General urges Congress to prohibit pharmacy benefit managers from owning or operating pharmacies. Meanwhile, a new Arkansas law prohibits that same practice.
The White House proposes slashing HHS discretionary spending by one-third and reorganizing its agencies, following a previous 20,000-employee headcount cut.
KU Health, Lawrence Memorial, and Epic are named in a class action lawsuit after a KU Health physical therapist allegedly used its patient portal to snoop on patients of an affiliated plastic surgery clinic, including their nude photos. The suit, which was brought by patients of the plastic surgery clinic, claims that Care Everywhere’s cross-organizational data-sharing enabled the breach.
The CEO of an Oklahoma cybersecurity company is charged with installing screen logging malware on two computers of St. Anthony Hospital.
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I’ve been a follower of prescription digital therapeutics for years. I have watched with great sadness as companies have come and gone without getting the traction their products needed to help broad groups of patients.
Click Therapeutics recently received FDA marketing authorization for the first prescription digital therapeutic for prevention of migraine headaches. The solution, called CT-132, is designed to be used in conjunction with other preventive or acute migraine treatments for patients aged 18 years and older. The study used for its application looked at the therapeutic’s use in patients who were already receiving treatment that met the standard of care and was able to significantly reduce the number of migraine days per month.
The company already offers solutions for a number of conditions including depression, diabetes, schizophrenia, insomnia, multiple sclerosis, and opioid use disorder. I’ll be eager to see how it does over the next couple of years.
I was also interested to see a write-up of research on using an AI-powered wearable to improve function for patients with essential tremor. I have relatives with the condition, and it can significantly impact quality of life. The Felix NeuroAI device is considered investigational but was shown to reduce tremors and improve the ability of users to perform daily activities by delivering electrical stimulation to the peripheral nerves in the wrist. Additional research is being conducted at the University of Kansas School of Medicine. Of note the company that makes the device was founded through the University of Minnesota, so here’s to cool tech coming from the Midwest.
I’ve taken a cautious approach to using real-world evidence in my practice, making sure that I’m using it in conjunction with traditional evidence-based recommendations. Those of us who have been in practice for a while know the risk of the “everyone’s doing it” approach to medicine (Vioxx, anyone?) rather than ensuring that the risks of new treatments don’t outweigh their potential benefits.
For drugs that are already in broad use, however, real-world evidence can be useful to identify adverse effects and unanticipated outcomes. A recent study looked at three GLP-1 receptor agonist weight loss drugs, examining adverse events. They found that one drug had significantly fewer reports of adverse drug reactions , but another was associated with some serious adverse events, including suicidal ideation and vision loss. It remains to be seen whether these results will be flagged to help develop larger or more comprehensive studies, but they’re important, nonetheless.
One of the most rewarding elements of my work as a consultant specializing in EHR optimization was identifying non-value-added steps in workflows and eliminating burdensome documentation that couldn’t be clearly linked back to a regulation, official requirement, or quality measure. A recent study in The Permanente Journal addressed the misinterpretation of regulations by compliance professionals. The authors presented 16 study subjects with five clinical scenarios and scored their interpretations for variability of interpretation. Only one-third of the subjects had formal training as a compliance professional, which I found interesting. As the authors presented the scenarios, they found that given the same scenario, some subjects identified noncompliance where others voiced no concerns.
One of the scenarios presented was the bane of many healthcare workers, namely whether food and drink can be consumed in work areas. Others included order entry by non-physicians, compliance with HIPAA requirements, the need to document a pain assessment, and whether physicians have to document the history of present illness independently. If you’re finding that your organization has workflows that have “always been done that way” but no one can link them back to a requirement and there’s an easier or better way to do them, it might be time to push back and ask for a review with the goal of removing such burdens. The last thing that burned out care teams need is overzealous interpretation of requirements or enforcement of those that don’t exist.
I was excited to learn that one of the states where I am licensed is implementing new functionality in their Bamboo Health-powered Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP) system. Prescribers will now be able to see a risk score for unintentional overdoses that takes into account the different drugs for which a patient has filled prescriptions as well as the duration of those prescriptions and the number of pharmacies at which they’ve been filled.
My primary practice is in a state where this is not yet implemented, but then again, we don’t even have the PDMP integrated into the EHR. Even though we have to log in separately, the system has still helped me identify concerning patterns for a number of patients in my care. It’s also been used in my state to identify physicians behaving badly, so I’m grateful to have a system that helps protect my patients and colleagues from those who might do unscrupulous things.
Yesterday was National Healthcare Decisions Day, which was created to encourage patients and their care teams to discuss advance care planning. I hadn’t heard of it before this year and was amused to learn that the April 16 date was selected with a famous Benjamin Franklin quote in mind: “In this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes.” Individuals are encouraged to do their US taxes by April 15 and review their health care directives the next day. The observance was founded in 2008 and encourages not only patients and providers to participate, but also community groups, healthcare facilities, and religious organizations. More information is available at The Conversation Project, which is part of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.
I’ve seen enough things in my medical career to know that I never want to be without a document that details my wishes for care (or lack thereof). When I arrived at the hospital for what could be one of the most medically risky events in any woman’s life, the labor and delivery nurse acted stunned when I handed her a copy. She said it was the first time she’s seen one from a patient. Let’s normalize talking to our families and loved ones about our wishes and help them to document theirs.
Do you have a living will, advance directive, or healthcare power of attorney? If not, why? Leave a comment or email me.
Email Dr. Jayne.
Well Health Announces Results for Q4 and Full Year 2024 Reflecting Record Annual Revenue
Canadian provider and health IT company Well Health Technologies reports a 19% increase in annual revenue and that it will consider strategic alternatives for its California-based Circle Medical virtual primary care clinic.
Assort Health, which offers specialty-specific AI voice agents for managing inbound patient phone calls, announces that it has raised a total of $26 million.
Youlify Raises $4.3M Seed Round to Fix Healthcare’s $262B Billing Bottleneck With Generative AI
AI RCM startup Youlify raises $4.3 million in seed funding.
Anthropic adds a research feature to Claude that searches both internal and web-based content, using an agentic approach to run iterative queries, resolve open questions, and deliver well-sourced answers with citations.
A proposed federal bill would create a consistent Medicare reimbursement path for FDA-approved, AI-enabled medical devices by placing them in a new technology ambulatory payment classification under the Hospital Outpatient Prospective Payment System for at least five years, allowing time to collect data before determining if a permanent code should be created.
A University of Florida researcher develops an open source AI tool that analyzes patient movement videos to help doctors detect subtle motor changes.
North Carolina Central University is using Wolters Kluwer’s VRClinicals for Nursing, a virtual reality hospital simulation, to train its nursing students.
A medical writer with a PhD in math says that she doesn’t want AI scribes to write visit notes for her pulmonologist.
My pulmonologist’s notes are much more than a summary of our privileged clinical encounters. Each of his notes is an important and carefully crafted document for my care planning and for coordination with other providers. Equally important, the notes are a communication to me, his patient. As I read his notes, I can feel his acumen and experience as a practitioner of medicine — his interest and understanding, his concern and compassion, his discernment and responsiveness. I don’t think an algorithm can re-create those specifically human experiences.
It’s interesting that the 2023 story about ChatGPT outdiagnosing 17 doctors is suddenly trending again despite no new developments. Maybe the AI has moved beyond diagnosis to ghostwriting clickbait.
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Amanda Sharp is CEO of AdvancedMD.
Tell me about yourself and the company.
AdvancedMD provides a comprehensive technology platform for independent physicians and providers to run their business on. It’s akin to Salesforce, a CRM for medical practices. It includes a practice management, a billing solution, electronic health record, patient engagement solutions, analytics, and payments. The business was founded more than a quarter century ago. It was built originally on the cloud.
I started at the company back in 2006 as an intern in our accounts receivable department. I progressively grew in the company with 15 different roles across finance, accounting, service, sales, strategy, business, and business development before being asked to lead the company in 2019. In December, Francisco Partners bought the company from Global Payments. It’s the second time that Francisco Partners has owned AdvancedMD. With that acquisition, I was named CEO of the company.
Our mission is to empower healthcare professionals to realize their full potential. We provide a platform that helps them do that.
How has the ambulatory software business changed in the past few years?
We’ve seen some consolidation in the past couple of years. We see replacement deals rather than greenfields. They are existing businesses that are looking to replace an electronic health record and a practice management system. We see much more sophistication in the buying process, where people know the gotchas that they experienced previously. We see much higher emphasis on things like cybersecurity, the introduction of AI, and ensuring that the technology solutions are fully integrated. There’s less of an appetite for point solutions, where you have to do a lot of integration work to connect them. That trend has worked in our favor.
Meaningful Use decreased the number of vendors from thousands to whatever it is today. How many can the market support and how much consolidation will occur?
Ambulatory care can support more that on the inpatient side. There are a lot of specialty-specific solutions out there. There are also a lot of solutions like ours that are configurable and customizable to meet the needs of many specialties. AdvancedMD serves 118 different specialties.
I think there’s room for plenty of vendors, but in terms of size and scale that are serving the ambulatory space, you’re at fewer than 10 right now. I expect to see further consolidation over the next several years, whether it’s us acquiring or someone else making some of those acquisitions.
How is the approach of specialty-specific software competitors different?
It depends on the specialty. When you look at something like dermatology, obviously Modernizing Medicine dominates in that space. They have a very anatomical EHR built by dermatologists. For us to compete in that space, we are partnering with other EHR solutions.
AdvancedMD works really, really well for primary care, behavioral health, physical therapy, and some of the specialties as well. But it really depends on if you need something that’s more anatomical in nature since AdvancedMD is more template based. Also, what systems you need to integrate with.
There’s room for both. The market is huge and there’s tons of opportunity. I don’t buy the notion that independent physicians or providers are going away any time soon. The market absolutely can sustain businesses like AdvancedMD, as well as those that are a little bit more specialty specific.
How has telehealth and the technology that is needed to support it evolved?
We expected to see our telehealth usage fall off as COVID subsided, but we’ve actually had tremendous growth. We were incredibly fortunate, whether it was was luck or truly great foresight, that we had built an integrated telehealth solution a couple years before 2020. We have seen that usage has grown, primarily in behavioral health. But we’ve seen the integration between behavioral health and primary care and bringing those two specialties together.
There’s a very strong demand for integrated telehealth in that space and we expect that to continue. Your mental health is just as important as your physical health. Being able to match patients with the appropriate talk therapy provider anywhere in the country is incredibly valuable. We’ve seen that continue to grow. We haven’t seen the growth as much in some of the specialties or in primary care.
What are the benefits of a cloud-based system?
One of the biggest opportunities is in understanding data and large data consolidation, which can help predict outcomes for people. Our ability to leverage technology to improve patient outcomes is absolutely enhanced because people are on the cloud.
Some systems are more ASP based and not a true cloud. Some require a thin client server download.
We’re incredibly grateful that AdvancedMD was architected for the cloud initially. You avoid some of those more technical components. You want a solution that you can access anywhere from any device at any time.
How much of your client base uses outside billing services?
In our client base, we have about 1,000 billers. They range in size from what we would call a bedroom biller serving one practice up to serving hundreds of practices.
Ultimately, it comes down to choice. Some people prefer to have total control and autonomy. They want to use software to do their own billing. They have expertise in coding, probably a medical coder on staff.
Some people want to leverage and use the capabilities of other people, so we have billing services. We actually have our own billing service, our own revenue cycle management team, where we offer that as well.
Then we have clients who just leverage our software. For us, about 30% of our total providers at AdvancedMD are using third-party billers.
How has consumerism affected medical practices?
There has definitely been a rise of retail and consumer-driven care. I can go to my local Walmart, Walgreens, or CVS and get care. We as healthcare IT leaders need to provide our physicians and providers with a frictionless experience so that they can provide a similar experience to their patients. As a healthcare IT provider, it’s our goal to equip our providers and our physicians with some of the same or similar tools and technologies so that patients will opt to see their primary care position instead of going to some of these other places. That could be things like the ability to schedule appointments online, have virtual visits, having mobile-friendly applications and portals to communicate with your provider, as well as real-time, fast communication.
How will AI change your business and your customers?
We’ve been working on an AI product suite for our clients. That would include things like improvements in documentation, where instead of spending an hour to two hours in the evening documenting and updating everyone’s patient charts, you could have it done with a couple of clicks.
Then you think about claims management processing , ensuring that the coding is correct and that you’ve included all of the right modifiers and everything is exactly where it needs to be. Leveraging AI in that is going to be incredibly helpful, too.
Internally for our business, we’ve uncovered multiple opportunities with AI in terms of our product, technology, release cycles, and how we QA the product to make sure that bugs don’t slip out. Using AI as a tool to help predict at-risk clients, figuring out where we need to have better communication, more transparency, and more connection with those clients.
In the right segments, AI will revolutionize this space. There’s always going to be a place for physicians, providers, nurses, MAs, and billers. But I believe that through AI, we will all be more efficient and will be able to focus on the things that are most important in our respective areas.
You’ve been at the same company for 19 years, intern to CEO, and most atypically to me, you’ve lived through several changes of ownership. What lessons have you learned?
The most important thing that I’ve learned is that people are the most important asset a business has. Starting as a company with 70 employees delivering service to 2,000 physicians and providers, to today, where we’re over 65,000 physicians and providers, doesn’t happen without incredibly talented people who are passionate and dedicated to what the organization is trying to accomplish.
Everything starts with the people. You have to take care of your people in the company. When you take care of your people, they’re more inclined to take care of your clients, and your clients provide for your shareholders.The financial results of the organization aren’t the objective, they’re the outcome.
By keeping that order of priority, AdvancedMD has been able to be more successful. I’ve been able to navigate throughout the organization for what has been a long tenure, but at the same time, it feels very short. I feel incredibly blessed to have worked and to continue to work with so many incredible people.
What factors will be most important to the company’s strategy over the next few years?
From a product and technology perspective, a few things. Simplifying our onboarding and service and introducing improved tools and resources for those who are learning the product. We will be enhancing our technology to reduce administrative time. We will be expanding interoperability and our healthcare connectivity. Delivering a best-in-class platform that ultimately helps independent positions and providers stay independent.
We’re excited about Francisco Partners. Like I said, it’s the second time that they invested in the business. We believe that they’re a tremendous private equity firm, especially in healthcare. I’m excited about the connections, the relationships, and the investment that they are enthusiastic to make in AdvancedMD.
Surescripts Health Information Network Designated a Qualified Health Information Network
The Sequoia Project recognizes the Surescripts Health Information Network as a QHIN.
Virtual care delivery company Hellocare.ai raises $47 million.
Eight out of ten nursing leaders are piloting new nursing care models, cites Wolters Kluwer survey
Nursing leaders looking to implement new care models say they are most in need of nurse informaticists, telehealth nurses, nurse care coordinators, and nurse educators in telehealth and virtual care.
LGBTQ Texans line up to oppose electronic health record bill
LGBTQ Texans oppose a Texas bill that would mandate binary “biological sex” fields in EHRs that cannot be changed except to correct clerical errors, arguing that it endangers care for transgender and intersex patients by disregarding medical complexity.
Kidney care company DaVita works to recover from a weekend ransomware attack that encrypted some of its systems. The attack was disclosed in an SEC filing.
The company operates 2,657 outpatient dialysis centers in the US.
DaVita posted an update to its website on Monday indicating that it was experiencing high call volumes and asked providers to send medical records by fax.
From Egress Latched: “Re: CuriMeta. Closed.” Unverified, but reported by several employees on LinkedIn who have adorned their headshots with the #OpenToWork label. St. Louis-based CuriMeta is (or was) a real-world data platform vendor that was launched in 2020. Washington University School of Medicine and BJC HealthCare, which contributed data research and research support, invested $6 million in seed funding in August 2022. That’s not a lot of funding after nearly three years. Founder Davis Walp moved on in January 2025.
Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Lincata. Lincata is the missing ‘linc’ that powers up the in-room patient experience 2.0. LincTV, Lincata’s flagship product, is a proprietary hardware device which transforms most existing hospital televisions into interactive digital hubs supporting MyChart Bedside TV, virtual nursing, alert motion sensors, and entertainment. Lincata proudly participates in Epic Showroom’s Toolbox vendor program for Bedside TV Hardware. Power up LincTV and power on healthcare’s next generation of smart room solutions.
None scheduled soon. Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.
Virtual care delivery company Hellocare.ai raises $47 million.
Michael Quinn (Inovalon) joins NVoq as VP of strategic business development.
Oura hires Ricky Bloomfield, MD (Apple) as chief medical officer.
Civitas Networks for Health appoints Jolie Ritzo, MPH as interim CEO with the departure of founding CEO Lisa Bari, MPH, MBA.
IMAT Solutions announces GA of a new health data reporting platform incorporating business, data, security, and AI intelligence.
Ochsner Health (LA) implements digital advance care planning software from MyDirectives.
The Sequoia Project recognizes the Surescripts Health Information Network as a QHIN.
Healthcare benefits navigation platform vendor Castlight Health embeds Fabric’s virtual urgent care technology into its app. Castlight is owned by Apree Health, which is in turn owned by care solutions vendor Mosaic Health.
LGBTQ Texans oppose a Texas bill that would mandate binary “biological sex” fields in EHRs that cannot be changed except to correct clerical errors, arguing that it endangers care for transgender and intersex patients by disregarding medical complexity.
CTG opens a Cegeka Modern Security Operations Center in Buffalo, NY and announces new cybersecurity solutions that include identity and access management and managed CISO Office-as-a-Service capabilities.
Northeast Radiology (CT) will take corrective action and pay $350,000 to settle federal HIPAA Security Rule violations that stem from a data breach of its PACS server that exposed the PHI of 300,000 patients.
Nursing leaders looking to implement new care models are most in need of nurse informaticists, telehealth nurses, nurse care coordinators, and nurse educators in telehealth and virtual care, according to a new report from Wolters Kluwer Health.
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