Abridge Secures $300M Series E Led by a16z to Pioneer a New Paradigm of Care Intelligence
The ambient documentation vendor’s valuation reaches $5.3 billion after its latest investment follows a $250 million round just five months ago.
HHS lists the details of the pledge by insurers to streamline PAs.
RFK Jr. wants a wearable on your wrist
The HHS secretary wants every American to wear a health tracker within four years.
Ambient documentation vendor Abridge raises $300 million in a Series E round, boosting its valuation to $5.3 billion.
The company raised a $250 million Series D round just five months ago at a valuation of $850 million.
Abridge’s annual revenue has been reported as $175 million.
From Justa Bill: “Re: insurers fixing prior authorization. I can’t wait until they’re done so that I can get my medically unreasonable denials in real time.”
From Pinky: “Re: AI taking jobs. It will also enhance or create some healthcare positions.” Probably so, although most of those jobs will be pretty small in number and will require specialized education or experience, such as clinical informaticists, data architects, compliance leads, and cybersecurity experts. Consulting could go either way, where AI might replace some entry-level analysis and document work, but top performers will use it to rise even faster. We’re already seeing this with attorneys, where the junior folks are using AI to analyze documents and mine the firm’s vast data assets to perform higher-level work, and with investment pros who use AI to monitor markets and parse sentiment in real time. Regardless, surveys show that executives in all lines of work expect AI to lower their costs by allowing them to eliminate employees, a self-fulfilling prophecy that will make companies look successful regardless because they have enough fat to work around the dearly and forcibly departed.
From Cut Me Mick: “Re: Ascension acquiring AmSurg. How much overlap exists in the markets they each serve?” Not much, based on ChatGPT’s analysis of the maps I sent it. AmSurg locations are in red, Ascension hospitals in blue (note that I showed only the eastern part of the country. The biggest areas of new opportunity are in Central and South Florida, California, New York, New Jersey, and California, areas where AmSurg is strong and Ascension is absent. Indiana, Alabama, and Tennessee show more overlap that would be conducive to vertical integration. But if Ascension wants to compete as a value-based care challenger without trying to build or buy hospitals in the back yards of entrenched competitors, those AmSurg-heavy states offer better upside in high-growth, high-margin markets. I think we can skip over the obligatory “mission” and “compassion” part of the announcement’s verbiage and assume that Ascension saw the chance to buy higher-performing, already-scaled assets to diversify beyond legacy hospitals. Recall also that AmSurg was until recently under the leaky umbrella of hospital physician services outsourcer Envision Healthcare, whose bankruptcy and asset stripping under the leveraged buyout oversight of PE firm KKR ran up $7 billion in debt for Envision and the forced sale of its only real surviving asset to Ascension at about half the typical per-center cost. UPDATE: I’ve updated the graphic above to show more area. And I blame ChatGPT for drawing it to incorrectly look like Wisconsin is west of Austin, TX
Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor VitalChat. Vitalchat offers a flexible audio and video platform for powering virtual nursing and intelligent hospitals — bringing the right presence into the room at the right moment — without adding complexity to care. Whether it’s a virtual nurse providing reassurance after surgery, monitoring vitals remotely, or coordinating with the bedside team in real time, the platform enables care that feels connected, responsive and organized. With powerful, behind-the-scenes technology and an intuitive, clinician-friendly design, Vitalchat helps hospitals extend their teams, support their patients, and deliver meaningful touchpoints throughout the care journey. Thanks to VitalChat for supporting HIStalk.
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Therapy EHR vendor Prompt Health acquires PredictionHealth, which offers an ambient AI scribe for therapists. PredictionHealth’s co-founders Pedro Teixeira, MD, PhD and Ravi Atreya, MD, PhD met while earning dual MD and biomedical informatics degrees at Vanderbilt.
Remote care company CoachCare acquires MD Revolution, which offers remote care software. Investor-backed CoachCare, which was founded in 2013 by former private equity investors, has made nine recent acquisitions. MD Revolution was formed in 2011 to help providers bill Medicare for monthly chronic care condition management services.
SuperDial, which develops AI agents that manage provider phone calls to insurers, raises $15 million in a Series A funding round. Its platform supports benefits verification, prior authorization, claims follow-up, and credentialing.
Population health management technology vendor Jaan Health secures $25 million in funding.
Shares of telehealth provider Hims & Hers drop 35% after Novo Nordisk halts Wegovy sales to the company, which it accuses of illegally selling cheaper compounded versions of its weight loss drug alongside its own branded product. The CEO of Hims & Hers accuses Novo of trying to force it to steer patients toward the branded product.
Symplr names Theresa Meadows, MS, RN (Cook Children’s Health Care System) as CIO in residence.
Leidos hires Andrew Burchett, DO (Meditech) as VP/chief technology and innovation officer.
FinThrive announces Fusion, an RCM platform, and will deploy agentic AI digital agents to enhance its RCM products.
Virtual care infrastructure company Wheel embeds Amazon Pharmacy’s medication access solution into its white-labeled solutions for digital health companies and health plans.
A GAO report warns that the VA’s Oracle Health stalled rollout has left its schedulers juggling multiple VistA versions as well as the new system. GAO says that the VA’s May 2024 modernization timeline is “not reliable” by the GAO and has not been updated with a new plan. The VA cancelled its $624 million scheduling contract with Leidos and Epic in 2018 after three years when it chose Cerner.
HHS lists the details of the newly announced pledge of some health insurers to streamline prior authorization:
Taiwan accuses China-sponsored “cyber armies” of launching cyberattacks on its hospitals to humiliate the country, which Taiwan says is in preparation for an eventual takeover.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. tells House members that he wants every American wearing a health tracker within four years, with HHS planning a massive ad campaign to promote adoption. He cites continuous glucose monitors, which are priced at $100 to $300 per month, as a bargain for weight loss compared to GLP-1 drugs, and hints that federal subsidies may follow. An example I found for non-diabetics is Dexcom’s Stelo, which costs $80 per month for 14-day patches that pair with a smartphone.
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Prompt Health Acquires PredictionHealth to Amplify AI-Driven Rehab Therapy Innovation
Rehab therapy-focused practice management software vendor Prompt Health acquires PredictionHealth, which offers AI scribe and coding capabilities and compliance analytics.
CoachCare Acquires MD Revolution, Creating the Nation’s Leading Remote Care Platform
Remote care management company CoachCare acquires competitor MD Revolution.
VA needs to better plan appointment scheduling modernization, watchdog says
A new Government Accountability Office report stresses that the VA needs to improve the modernization of its appointment scheduling capabilities as many facilities grapple with legacy VistA systems and some prepare to move to new Oracle Health-based software.
You really don’t know how much you rely on certain technologies until they’re not available.
At one of our local hospitals, a PACS upgrade during daytime hours threw quite a few clinicians for a loop. I don’t think the IT teams really understood how important muscle memory is for clinicians who are trying to work efficiently in the EHR while seeing patients. Although a workaround was provided, it required physicians to go to a different part of the EHR to view images.
It sounds like some users had security issues and weren’t able to do their work from the new location, which caused frustration that was made worse by long wait times when they called the help desk. Even for those who were able to use the new link to access images, there were complaints that it took half the shift to get used to the new workflow. Later in the evening, it reverted back, which required another shift.
I’ve done plenty of upgrades in my career and I’m not sure what would be happening behind the scenes that would justify doing an upgrade during daytime hours. Most of the upgrades I’ve been involved in were conducted overnight so that they caused minimal impact to clinical workflows.
Based on the fact that nearly all of the IT decisions I’m seeing lately are made with significant attention to cost, I can hypothesize that it likely played a role. Still, I wonder if the people looking at that cost-benefit equation looked beyond the IT resources to include the cost for clinician inefficiency and the risk of clinical quality issues.
A colleague shared the downtime notification with me because they knew I wouldn’t believe it otherwise. I was surprised to see that it included mention of another clinical system that was being taken down from midnight to 2 a.m. the following weekend, so I’m sure there was some reason that this one was being done during peak hours.
If I had been on the leadership team that approved the communication, I would have recommended a mention of why we were doing the upgrade during the day. Users would at least understand that we had thought about them and were forced by extreme circumstances to do it that way.
I also was a fan of running our communications past people in different settings before finalizing them — including academic physicians, hospitalists, and community physicians — to make sure that we were covering all perspectives.
Just out of curiosity, I looked back through some communications from one of my hospitals to see if I could identify patterns from the biweekly newsletters. I was surprised to see that the newsletter had the same top blurb over a six-week period without any changes, which to me would create a risk for people ignoring the newsletter because they may have felt like they had already seen the materials.
I also noticed that over the last six months, the newsletter had become a compilation of unrelated blurbs rather than a more cohesive document. In the current version, each entry had different font and color schemes, including color choices that don’t meet accessibility guidelines for colorblindness. It also looks like it’s in a different order every time, with no standard formatting.
I would think that adding a framework to it might be useful so that people can quickly identify the items that are important to their work. Maybe start with a section for global updates that impact everyone, then move to updates by specialty, care setting, or a host of other categories that would keep people from having to wade through tons of irrelevant information.
I thought about offering some feedback (after all, I’m still a dues-paying member of the medical staff) but there wasn’t any information in the newsletter about who to contact if you have questions. I’ll just stay in the back row with my “Courtesy/Non-Admitting” privileges and hope I don’t have to look at any patient charts any time soon.
I have several major presentations coming up. For once, my week wasn’t completely full of back-to-back meetings. I decided to do some personal development while I was creating the slide decks and see what AI has to offer.
I try to make my slides as non-wordy as possible, often choosing images that tell a story, or images that prompt me to talk about certain content rather than having too many formal text elements on the slide. I always create an outline-style summary first, so it seemed ideal to be able to take that outline and hit it with some AI and maybe save a little time. I tend to be a little stuck in my ways about backgrounds and formatting, so I was looking forward to spicing things up a little bit.
Unfortunately, what my AI friend came up with was entirely unusable. Not only did it just drop the outline into slides in a somewhat disjointed fashion, but the backgrounds it selected bloated a 25-slide deck up to over 80 MB in size. I could see that being possible if I were incorporating high-resolution radiology images or something like that, but this was just from backgrounds and non-critical design elements.
I guess I’m back to creating my presentations in the old-school way, at least until I have time to research whether there is some other way to use the tools differently, or until one of the savvy college interns agrees to give me a quick tutorial on how to not wind up in that place again. When I finished that slide deck in my usual way, it ended up well below 2 MB, so I’m still not sure what happened the first time around.
One of the presentations I was creating was for first-year medical students, introducing them to clinical informatics and explaining the kind of work done by physicians in this space. The incoming students are coming into an educational environment that’s so different from where I trained, and I have to say that I envy them a little bit. Here’s to hoping that I don’t wind up being talked about as someone who was out of touch or uninteresting. Fortunately, my session is a lunchtime one with free food, so I don’t think attendance will be a problem.
If you could go back in time to when you were first learning in your field, what do you wish you had done differently? Leave a comment or email me.
Email Dr. Jayne.
Modernizing Healthcare’s Third-Party Risk Approach
By Ryan Redman, JD
Ryan Redman, JD is product manager of marketing at Onspring.
Oracle Health’s announcement of its second data cyber incident in March of this year shocked healthcare providers and customers. Even more alarming was the specific data was impacted that is housed in its legacy cloud infrastructure.
According to publicly available information, approximately 6 million records containing protected health information (PHI) were likely compromised despite Oracle’s attempts to downplay the severity of the potential compromise. The repercussions left hospitals struggling to identify exposed data as the incident reminded compliance officers of the challenge of considering all data outside of centralized oversight, including legacy infrastructures, when accounting for third-party risk.
Many of these healthcare compliance professionals must rely on third-party risk strategies with limited visibility into the many networks of contractors, partners, and hosted environments that they are tasked with managing. Beyond compromising legacy infrastructure data, Oracle’s cyber incidents exposed the damaging compliance gap in how healthcare organizations manage third-party relationships. Healthcare compliance teams must adopt real-time, integrated GRC tools that boost visibility, reduce manual work, and enable proactive risk response to close this gap and protect their data.
The Hidden Dangers of Legacy Infrastructure and Outdated Third-Party Risk Strategies
It’s easy for legacy systems to fall by the wayside within healthcare’s intricate network of active systems that span internal platforms, external platforms, and cloud-hosted data. Using third parties only heightens critical risks. In Oracle’s case, the servers had not yet fully migrated to the company’s new environment, leading attackers to exploit compromised credentials to access those systems. Teams overlooked what appeared to be outdated, dormant infrastructures. Bad actors accessed sensitive data, and traditional assessment methods were unable to detect this risk.
Healthcare organizations face serious compliance consequences when third parties fail to safeguard patient data, whether due to misconfigured access, missed vulnerabilities, or neglected systems. In 2024, the healthcare sector emerged as the most targeted industry for data breaches, proving that third-party risk assessments are not cutting it. Often only conducted periodically and involving emailed surveys, spreadsheets, and disconnected records, these assessments result in hours of manual work and provide a limited, static view of risk. Outdated methods fail to catch emerging vulnerabilities in legacy systems over time. Risks often materialize by the time the next scheduled compliance review comes, meaning sensitive data has already been exposed.
Five Essential Steps to Improve Compliance Oversight
Healthcare organizations must take action to strengthen their third-party risk posture, and the following actions can help turn policy into practice.
Ultimately, maintaining trust is vital to compliance, and losing it comes at too high a cost.
Beyond Self-Scheduling: Analysis Shines Spotlight on The Future of Patient-Driven Access
By David Dyke
David Dyke is chief product officer at Relatient.
“Access to care” has become a central theme in healthcare leadership discussions. While the term “access” can mean many different things in healthcare, it begins with the patient.
A new nationwide analysis of self-scheduling tool usage underscores a shift occurring in the industry that provider organizations must acknowledge and act on to stay relevant: patient-driven access. Findings across more than 150 million patient bookings reveal a 30% year-over-year uptick in patients who booked appointments through digital self-scheduling options from 2023 to 2024.
Patient interest in self-scheduling is likewise driving adoption from healthcare organizations. The analysis further revealed a 53% increase in implementations of self-scheduling tools across a wide variety of healthcare organizations and specialties.
Self-scheduling has evolved into an essential access tool for today’s practices that are striving to meet rising patient expectations. The key is making the right investments upfront to ensure that organizations reap the full benefits of patient-driven access. Early adopters stand to not only delight patients, but also to realize significant operational value and bottom-line impact – such as 24/7 patient access and new patient acquisition — faster.
Understanding Increased Adoption of Self-Scheduling
Patients increasingly prefer digital self-scheduling options, with an overwhelming desire for improved digital self-service. As the first touchpoint in the patient journey, scheduling has a critical impact on overall patient experience.
Consumerism trends point to the need for greater convenience and empowerment. This means manual processes that require having to call multiple times or wait on the phone to schedule an appointment are quickly being replaced with digital solutions by today’s healthcare organizations.
Healthcare leaders value the patient experience advantages of self-scheduling. They also gain operational efficiencies and greater revenue opportunities. Data uncovered from the analysis revealed:
These numbers significantly highlight ongoing industry opportunities to improve no-show rates and appointment cancellations.
Expanding the Impact of Self-Scheduling
Putting patients in the driver’s seat is a start, but the future of self-scheduling optimization relies on more intelligence and integration across the entire patient journey. Organizations can expand the impact of these tools by:
Whether booking a single primary care visit or managing ongoing specialty care, patients benefit from convenience and autonomy, while providers see increased appointment adherence and streamlined operations. Consequently, providers should think beyond traditional scheduling within the call center by embracing self-scheduling and the scalable infrastructures that are needed to support success for the long-term.
As the future of patient access continues to unfold, with more and more power placed in hands of the patient, a single self-service touchpoint won’t be enough. Savvy patients will come to expect a seamless, interconnected experience at every step of the way.
Expanding patient self-service functionality now allows organizations not just to keep up, but to actively fulfill the future of patient access, leading the pack in both patient access performance and operational efficiency.
Insurers Pledge to Ease Controversial Prior Approvals for Medical Care
Major US health insurers pledge to improve prior authorization practices, noting that they are aiming for 80% real-time decisions by 2027.
New Mexico Vintage Fund invests in New Mexico-based Electronic Caregiver, which specializes in virtual care and remote patient monitoring technologies.
Enhancing the provider search experience through Smart Choice
UnitedHealthcare announces AI-powered provider search for members.
Major US health insurers pledge to improve prior authorization practices. They aim for 80% real-time decisions by 2027, fewer procedures that require approval, and 90-day care continuity for patients who switch plans.
Insurer trade group AHIP says that it understands patient frustration. It did not mention mounting regulatory and political pressure.
Insurers blame half of PA delays on providers who submit requests via mail, phone, or fax. They say that they will help those providers transition to electronic submissions.
From Frank: “Re: AI. Is a vendor’s platform AI-enabled just because the junior PR person used ChatGPT to write the press release?” AI-crafted announcements and lengthy punditry articles on social media – which are easily recognizable, by the way – are starting to get annoying. The AI versions are just a bit too polished, soulless, and peppered with em dashes and overly dramatic recitation of background facts that often contain hallucinations.
Few poll respondents think more highly of Oracle Health now than in the pre-acquisition days when it was Cerner. I ran this same poll one year ago and the numbers were identical, so at least they’re holding steady. It has been three years since EVP Mike Sicilia promised the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs that it would “start over” in rewriting Cerner’s pharmacy module in 6-9 months.
New poll to your right or here: How concerned are you that AI will diminish or eliminate your job within five years? The poll results may be tricky to interpret. People who are convinced that their role requires their unique insight, nuance, or relationship skills are possibly like medical transcriptionists in failing to see what’s coming. I might get more objective responses if I instead asked if AI could eliminate the job of co-workers or direct reports. I’ll predict with admittedly superficial insight that the first health tech jobs to be affected will be prior authorization specialists, records retrieval and chart abstracting folks, RCM coders, marketing staff, and call center / help desk people.
The onset of summer means that we offer incentives for companies who can take their minds off vacations and beach weekends and make the decision to sponsor HIStalk. I don’t discount normal sponsorship cost because that wouldn’t be fair to existing sponsors, but we will usually offer one-time extra months, webinar exposure, or email messages, not to mention special offers for startups or former sponsors who rejoin the fold. Contact Lorre.
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Business Insider describes the “New Mountain special” for VC firms, as private equity firm New Mountain Capital is acquiring and rolling up health tech AI companies that are unlikely to IPO or be acquired. The firm operates more like a venture studio, targeting higher-risk innovation with larger investments, minimal debt, and a focus on long-term value creation. Some of its big deals involve Datavant from its acquisition of Ciox Health and its recent combination of Access Healthcare, SmarterDx, and Thoughtful AI to create RCM technology vendor Smarter Technologies.
Ohio’s attorney general conditionally approves the $485 million acquisition of Akron-based Summa Health by a business venture that is owned by VC firm General Catalyst.
Non-profit, money-losing Ascension will acquire Amsurg, which runs 250 ambulatory surgery centers in 34 states, for $3.9 billion. Bring on those facility fees.
SmarterDx hires Kit Kieling, MD (Orderly Health) as CMIO. He is an Air Force veteran and US Air Force Academy graduate who volunteered to serve as a pediatric ICU director for host-national children in combat field hospitals in Iraq and Afghanistan with the 332nd Expeditionary Medical Operations Squadron.
Dan Phippen (R1 RCM) joins Evergreen Healthcare Partners as chief growth officer.
AdventHealth hires Erica Williams, MBA (Ascension) as VP/divisional CIO.
UnitedHealthcare announces AI-powered provider search for members.
Epic summarizes some of the main points it made in its response to HHS’s RFI on health tech interoperability and infrastructure.
Humanate Digital pilots its AI front desk receptionist. The assistant checks patients in for clinic visits and adjusts its tone based on patient facial expressions. Other versions handle medical records requests and billing.
Every newborn in England will have DNA screening within 10 years to allow NHS to predict and prevent disease and personalize treatment.
Hartford HealthCare installs an OnMed CareStation in Bradley International Airport, the first such device to be placed in a US airport. The health system hopes to attract six patients per day to the CareStation, which accepts insurance and cash payments.
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Commure raises $200 million in growth financing to advance its RCM, ambient documentation, and practice management tools.
Hoppr Secures $31.5M Series A to Scale AI Infrastructure for Medical Imaging
Hoppr, which offers a platform for developing medical AI imaging applications, raises $31.5 million in a Series A funding round.
Overland Park digital health startup closes $2.5M seed round with local, national investors
AI healthcare copilot developer CarePilot raises $2.5 million in seed funding.
Commure raises $200 million in growth financing to advance its RCM, ambient documentation, and practice management tools.
The company now calls itself “the fast-growing enterprise AI healthcare technology company,” which is a phrasing shift from previous press releases that described it more generically as “a leading healthcare technology company” or “a leader in healthcare technology innovation.”
From Significant: “Re: Commure. A $200 million investment to build what, exactly? RCM, ambient notes, and practice tools aren’t exactly underrepresented in health tech. Maybe Commure can use the cash to invent a fourth buzzword.” The company’s current website is at the top of the page, while the year-ago, AI-absent version that vaguely described the company’s product as a “healthtech operating system” is directly above. This was prior to its late 2024 acquisitions of Memora Health (care navigation) and Augmedix (AI-powered medical scribing). Certainly the current website is more specific about what the company actually sells, which was difficult to determine not long ago. The company launched as a FHIR-native developer platform in 2020.
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Patient referral technology vendor Tennr raises $101 million in a Series C funding round.
Hoppr, which offers a platform for developing medical AI imaging applications, raises $31.5 million in a Series A funding round. Founder, CEO, and board chair Khan Siddiqui, MBBS spent executive time at Microsoft and Higi.
Consulting firm Huron will acquire Eclipse Insights, which offers revenue cycle consulting services.
Abby Polich, MBA (TridentCare) joins Health Data Movers as SVP of client services.
Oracle announces GA of Oracle Health Community Care, a cloud-based mobile extension of the Oracle Health Foundation EHR that can be operated offline.
Willis Knighton Health goes live with Meditech Expanse in its 132 clinics.
This may have healthcare implications and will almost certainly kill some competing apps. OpenAI announces ChatGPT Record, which records speech in real time (including from multiple speakers), creates a transcript, generates a summary, and allows rewriting into an email or project plan. A “reference record history” option allows ChatGPT to look back on previous transcripts to improve its responses and to recall previously shared information. The Record option is available only for paid users who run MacOS for now.
I wrote back in the dark COVID days of early 2021 about Anosh Ahmed, MD, the COO of Chicago’s 122-bed Loretto Hospital who resigned after getting caught diverting scarce vaccine doses to his cronies. He’s back in the news for filing $900 million in bogus COVID testing claims, which netted him and his co-codefendants an astounding $300 million. Ahmed allegedly stole patient data from the hospital to bill the federal government for performing COVID tests on uninsured people who never actually received them. Beyond the $300 million, he also is accused of pocketing $147 million in kickbacks from a lab company. He put his $9 million Houston house on the market after the first round of charges, for which he generously threw in one of his Rolls Royces. He now lives in Dubai as a “wealth management strategist” and operates a charity whose books might warrant review. Kudos to Kelly Bauer of Block Club Chicago for originally breaking the story and chasing it aferward
Epic files a motion to move the CureIS lawsuit against it to a different venue, arguing that the Northern District of California doesn’t make sense given that both companies are based in the Midwest. CureIS’s lawsuit accuses Epic of anticompetitive behavior, requiring customers to use its own products instead of those of CureIS, blocking integration, stealing trade secrets, and violating Cures Act information blocking provisions. Epic says in the motion that the lawsuit contains “seven kitchen-sink causes of action” that “read like a bad spy novel.” In its motion, Epic argues that:
A late January ransomware attack on medical coding and risk adjustment firm Episource exposed the information of 5.4 million people.
MIT researchers say that ChatGPT makes its users dumber, with brain scans of essay writers suggesting that they incur “cognitive debt” that dulls critical thinking, reduces creativity, and makes them more susceptible to manipulation. They found that 83% of the subjects couldn’t recall anything from the essays they had asked ChatGPT to write.
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As a consultant working with care delivery organizations, I see many of them using “access” as some kind of a performance mantra. Whether it’s access to book a visit with a physician in an office or access to the emergency department, there is constant pressure to make sure patients are formally scheduled for some kind of revenue-generating service with the organization.
I was recently part of a discussion with other physicians who were talking about how access is being conflated with value. One example was the push for patients to book a visit with a provider, without giving full consideration to whether the provider had the correct experience and knowledge to actually treat the patient. It doesn’t matter if you get the patient in quickly, but to the wrong office since you’re ultimately going to have to book a second appointment elsewhere to meet their needs.
Another example was the boom in patient portal messages. Patients can reach their physicians quickly, but that’s not helpful when it causes providers to be burned out and creates risk that patients won’t receive the correct treatments because someone is trying to read between the lines of a series of message exchanges to create a diagnosis and treatment plan rather than having a direct conversation with a patient (either in person or via virtual care).
Another physician mentioned secure texting, which creates a staff access problem “where it’s easy to just fling messages out there rather than thinking through what you’re really asking. It seems like people formulated their questions better when they knew they had to make a phone call.” There may have been cocktails involved in this discussion, leading one of my colleagues to ponder the fact that that “patients have access to their notes, but they’re useless when the notes suck.”
We often look at ways to use technology to create more access, but these comments remind us that there might be “good” kinds of access along with those that are less desirable. I’m hoping that someone might read this and think it through the next time they’re in a meeting pushing for increased access. It’s not just about getting bodies through the door, messages to the provider, or notes to the patient. We need to get to a point where greater access is providing greater value and driving patient outcomes. Otherwise, it’s just a buzzword.
From Navy Fan: “Re: remote work. I’ve enjoyed being a remote worker for 15 years now and I hate seeing people mess it up for the rest of us. Did you see the story about Sentara Health, where remote workers accessed patient information using false identities?” I hadn’t seen it before a reader highlighted it, which reminds me how much we appreciate our readers when they bring us a good story. Apparently, the system hired remote workers to manage lab requisitions, but eventually discovered that they were not based in the US and may have been misrepresenting their identities. The situation impacted patients who had lab tests performed between January and April of this year. The bad actors had access to plenty of protected health information, including names, dates of birth, and Social Security numbers. A manager became concerned in early April when they noticed that the workers attending virtual department meetings did not match the photos that were submitted during hiring. Sentara Health is offering free credit monitoring and identity protection services.
I wanted to add my two cents to some of Mr. H’s comments earlier this week about virtual care prescribing of ADHD medications. He mentioned a study done at Massachusetts General Hospital that showed that at least with their virtual care model, there was not an increased risk of addiction in patients receiving stimulant medications. Mr. H noted that the findings don’t necessarily apply to freestanding telehealth companies that have been accused of cranking out prescriptions, especially those that are investor-backed startups where clinicians are paid on a per-visit basis.
Although I haven’t treated ADHD via telehealth, I’ve worked for several different freestanding telehealth companies and the pressure to prescribe is real. Large percentages of providers working for some of the big firms are 1099 contractors and some of them are trying to complete visits every three or four minutes, which means they’re not doing a detailed visit with the patient. Some of the companies are focused on patient satisfaction metrics, which means that if you don’t give the patients exactly what they request, you’re going to receive scrutiny due to your perceived poor performance. Some in-person organizations are hype- focused on the same metrics and place similar pressure on their physicians, but the risk is much lower with in-person care because you can do an actual examination and can leverage your care team to ensure you have a more comprehensive history from the patient.
Bad news for those of us that like a good nap: a recent research article showed that certain kinds of daytime napping are tied to an increased risk of death in middle- to older-aged adults. The study looked at 86,000 non-shift workers. Those who took longer naps, had high variability in the duration of their naps, and who took more naps around noon or early afternoon were those most impacted. One of the takeaways from the study is that physicians should be asking not only about sleep habits, but specifically about daytime napping. Given all the other data-driven recommendations, I don’t see this one being added to the formal recommendation set anytime soon.
My best time for napping is around 3 or 4 p.m. when my energy is fading and I just need a break. Conference calls during those times are the worst, but sometimes they’re unavoidable for me since I work in all of the US time zones. Based on the data, I should be able to mitigate my risk somewhat by taking consistent short naps in the late afternoon. That seems like a much more enjoyable option than some of the other things I can do to reduce my risk of all-cause mortality, especially since I’m already doing most of them.
What’s your favorite time and place for a nap? Do you like a hammock on the beach, or are you one of the folks I spotted catching a few winks on a park bench after leaving the local winery? Leave a comment or email me.
Email Dr. Jayne.
Referral optimization company Tennr raises $101 million in a Series C funding round, bringing its total raised to $160 million.
Vestar Capital puts Quest Analytics up for sale
Vestar Capital reportedly prepares to sell Quest Analytics, which offers management solutions for provider networks.
Huron to Acquire Revenue Cycle Consulting Firm Eclipse Insights
Professional services firm Huron acquires revenue cycle consulting business Eclipse Insights.
AI-powered musculoskeletal care software startup RevelAi raises $3.1 million in seed funding.
Lee Health (FL) launches Leah, an AI-powered conversational engagement platform that helps patients with hip, knee, and shoulder pain navigate the system’s services and receive guidance and education.
CONCERN EWS, an AI-powered early warning system that is powered by nurse observations and developed at CU Anschutz, analyzes nurses’ documentation patterns to predict patient deterioration up to 42 hours earlier than standard methods, reducing mortality and hospital stays while improving ICU transfers.
Abstractive Health launches Clinical Time Machine, an AI-powered game that lets users explore structured charts that are generated from centuries-old handwritten medical records. The company, which describes the tool as “a Microsoft Flight Simulator for Medicine,” says that fewer than 1% of physicians have ever seen a full AI-generated medical record summary.
SAS launches Health Cost of Care Analytics, a tool that analyzes claims data to build episodes of care, helping identify cost, quality, and outcome drivers to inform protocols and provider contracts.
Abridge releases Inside for Inpatient, which converts bedside conversations into structured Epic notes. The company is also piloting integration of outpatient orders into Epic.
Hamilton Health Sciences is piloting an AI-powered phone receptionist that was developed by two local doctors and a software engineer. The system, which is being commercialized as Strello Health, books appointments, manages prescription refills, and answers questions. The company says it saves four hours per day and ensures that no caller is ever put on hold or sent to voicemail.
Intermountain Health will implement Layer Health’s AI-powered chart abstraction system for chart review and will invest in the company.
Aidoc releases an open-source, expert-authored framework that it developed with Nvidia and 17 healthcare organizations that guides safe, scalable, trust‑focused deployment of clinical AI across technical, regulatory, operational, and monitoring domains.
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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.
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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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Weird that Google can acknowledge its crowdsourced medical advice was wrong, but escape penalties for doing it wantonly at scale.