News 4/25/25

Top News

Eli Lilly sues four telehealth startups — Mochi Health, Willow Health, Fella & Delilah Health, and Henry Meds — for selling compounded versions of its $1,000-per-month GLP-1 weight loss drug Zepbound.

The FDA has reminded compounders that the practice is allowed only while a drug appears on its shortage list. FDA declared the Zepbound shortage over on December 19, 2024. It gave compounders 90 days to comply during the enforcement discretion period that ended on March 19, 2025.

Lilly says that the companies are sidestepping its patents by offering customized or vitamin-fortified doses, a tactic that has been used with other compounded products. It seems to be focusing on companies that are manufacturing such products on a large scale.

Lilly sold $16 billion worth of Zepbound and its diabetes twin Mounjaro last year.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I paid a Fiverr freelancer $10 to throw together a one-page sponsorship flyer that uses my survey data and a new batch from Black Book Research. I’m squirmy about the “’buy now, operators are standing by” vibe it throws off, but I’m all about getting to the point and it’s factual, if a bit immodest.

Sponsored Events and Resources

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Kansas City-based HEI Global Health, a provider of revenue cycle solutions for healthcare systems, will open its first international branch office in Dubai. CEO Aaron Habben founded the company 20 years ago after spending several years at Cerner.

Pennsylvania high school student Max Kopp, who turned a science fair project on needle-free glucose monitoring into his startup VitaSense, launches a website to share his lessons learned and to mentor students in science and entrepreneurship.

Sales

• Valley View (CO) will implement Epic under UCHealth’s Community Connect program, apparently replacing Meditech.

Announcements and Implementations

AdvaMed, a non-profit medical technology trade association, publishes an AI roadmap that includes these recommendations, and others, for HHS:

• Ensure data protection without stifling innovation.
• Evaluate whether HIPAA needs to be updated to reflect AI.
• Develop guidelines for patient notice and authorization when their data is used to develop AI.
• FDA should continue to be the lead regulator for safety and effectiveness.
• FDA should implement Predetermined Change Control Plans for Medical Devices (PCCP) for AI devices to enhance pre-market efficiency.
• FDA should promote standards and issue guidance to promote common understanding between FDA and manufacturers.
• Congress should consider legislative solutions to address the budget neutrality requirements for Medicare.
• CMS should develop a payment pathway for algorithm-based healthcare services.
• CMS Innovation Center should test alternative payment models for AI technologies.

A new KLAS Arch Collaborative report finds that virtual EHR training now matches in-person methods as measured by Net EHR Experience Scores for both physicians and nurses, while cutting costs and scaling more effectively.

Government and Politics

A New York assemblyman who is also a pharmacist proposes a bill that would require hospitals to send a patient’s full electronic medical records to their insurers for pre-authorization, replacing faxes and mailed forms. Insurance companies and employers support the move, while hospitals worry that payers would use the more comprehensive information to deny more claims.

Axios reports that DOGE-directed layoffs at FDA have left it unable to keep its drug databases and NDC directory updated as affected employees are using their remaining government time to hunt for jobs. A significant HHS layoff is set for June 2. FDA drug reviewers have also reported that their work is on hold because they no longer have access to academic journals.

A Kansas anesthesiologist pleads guilty to healthcare fraud for exploiting his role as a telehealth contract doctor to mine company portals for patient information that he then used to submit fraudulent orders for DME, pain creams, and genetic tests. Scott Roethle, MD made $674,000 from five companies that paid him $30 per order, which cost cost Medicare $1.5 million.

In Canada, medical researchers and lawyers urge strengthening privacy laws and consider moving EHR data in-country to protect it from US-based AI training, saying that the data is housed on American cloud services that could be vulnerable if the Trump administration wants to access the information.

Other

Tennova Healthcare’s six Tennessee hospitals go offline when Oracle Health engineers accidentally delete a critical database storage component of its Cerner system.

Sponsor Updates

• Black Book Research uncovers nine under-the-radar AI innovations set to transform healthcare revenue cycle management.
• Capital Rx releases a new episode of “The Astonishing Healthcare Podcast” titled “Judi Health: Going Beyond Pharmacy and into Medical Claims, with AJ Loiacono and Dr. Sunil Budhrani.”
• Altera Digital Health’s Sunrise Suite earns ISO 9001 recertification for 2025-2028.
• Ellkay will exhibit at the American Alliance of Orthopaedic Executives Annual Conference May 2-5 in Atlanta.
• Health Data Movers and Symplr will sponsor the CHIME Innovation Summit Southeast April 30-May 2 in Jacksonville, FL.
• Healthmonix names Marina Verdara (Tebra) account manager.
• Impact Advisors releases a new episode of its “Impactful AI” podcast titled “Clinicians Take the Lead!”
• Infinx CMO Radhika Tandon will speak at the HFMA Nor Cal Chapter Women’s Event April 25 in Pleasanton, CA.
• Lincata announces that its LincTV plug-in device designed for Epic’s MyChartBedside is now available in Epic Toolbox and will showcase it at XGM.
• Optimum Healthcare IT publishes a white paper titled “Transforming Operations and Care with the Cloud.”
• Linus Health will present at the virtual League Connect Digital Summit May 7.
• Med Tech Solutions publishes a new white paper titled “Proven IT Strategies Improve Care Delivery and Build a Foundation for Growth.”
• First Databank and Surescripts will present at the NCPDP 2025 Annual Technology & Business Conference May 5-7 in Scottsdale, AZ.

Blog Posts

• Hope, Healing, and Hastings the PAT Dog (Altera Digital Health)
• Not All Text Messages Are Created Equal (Some Are Driving Communication Barriers in Healthcare) (Artera)
• AI Agents: Integrating AI into Customer Service (Five9)
• The Hidden Challenges of Epic Implementation During M&A (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• Mastering Record Retrieval: Smarter MRR Strategies for Risk Adjustment Success (Inovalon)
• Celebrating HIP Week: How MRO Supports Health Information Professionals with Automated Clinical Data Exchange (MRO)

Contacts

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

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 4/24/25

I enjoy reading research articles that confirm what many of us have long suspected. It increases the ammunition that we need when we are trying to convince people to make changes.

A recent Research Letter in JAMA Internal Medicine looked at what happens when the EHR was changed to default to a 90-day supply of a particular medication that is used to treat a chronic condition. In the literature, previous studies show that 90-day prescriptions are linked to greater medication adherence and reduced mortality, so getting an adequate supply to patients is a significant benefit.

To no one’s surprise, the change in the default led to an increase in the number of patients who were prescribed a 90-day supply. The authors noted that before the intervention, the patient groups that were least likely to receive a 90-day supply included Hispanic patients, non-Hispanic black patients, those on Medicaid, and those with ZIP codes whose median household incomes is lower than $50,000.

After the change, all of those groups were equally likely to receive the recommended 90-day prescription except for Hispanic patients, and even then the gap for those patients decreased. The recommendation to prescribe 90-day supplies with a year’s worth of refills to patients who have stable, chronic conditions has been there for decades, but a lot of prescribers still don’t do it. I’m glad to have one more tool in my belt when I try to convince people to do the right thing.

I recently started studying French. As part of that, I’m making a point to read articles from European sources. I was excited to learn about Robeauté, which is creating microrobots to aid in neurosurgery. The devices are the size of a large grain of rice and are shaped a bit like protozoa. The company’s goal is to use them for minimally invasive brain surgery procedures.

The company has only raised $29 million, so my guess would be that they aren’t as far along as others might expect them to be given the typical trajectory for and cost of development of a new medical device. One of the sources that I saw mentioned the potential for a clinical trial in 2026 with a focus on brain tumors, using the devices to take micro biopsy samples. Thus far, they have been using sheep for preclinical trials as they measure the safety and effectiveness of the devices.

I spent the majority of my clinical time in emergency and urgent care, so I’ve experienced the phenomenon of emergency department boarding first hand. It’s a problem that hospital executives work diligently to solve, although the causes are multifactorial and you often have to make many adjustments to see improvement. It’s exacerbated by nursing shortages, housekeeping shortages, physical plant issues, and a host of other factors, including the number and types of patients arriving at the emergency department for care.

A recent article in Louisville Public Media caught my eye. It mentioned the rising numbers of older patients who have dementia, noting that 50% of patients who are boarded in the emergency department are age 65 and older. As the US population ages, this is going to be a greater issue. Organizations should be looking at their patient demographics and forecasting how their population will age in order to begin solving the future version of this problem, which is likely to be much worse than the current state.

Virtual nursing, home-based care, quicker discharges, improved staffing, streamlined discharge processes, internal float pools, telehealth, and improved advance care planning all play a role. From the healthcare IT perspective, all of them have technology components, so it’s good to learn about potential solutions if you want to expand your ability to jump into different work streams.

We’ve all heard the old adage that “time is money,” but apparently the marketing folks at my preferred parking vendor don’t value my time as much as I do. They sent an email about updates to the Parking Spot App that are “available now in the App Store and coming later this month to Google Play.” They went on to recommend that users “download these updates when available.”

I guess Android users just have to keep checking back to see when the new app is available? Would it have been too much to consider sending another email when the Android version is available? Some days when you’re exhausted from travel that serves up a host of tiny annoyances, it really is the little things that matter. This detail tells me that the folks who are in charge of customer communications don’t put themselves in the customer’s shoes anywhere near what they should. 

I got tapped to present at a residency program’s “procedure night” event this week. My particular area of expertise is how to do procedures in environments where you don’t have the resources you woud typically have at a tertiary medical center’s emergency department. Depending on their career choices, the adjustment can be pretty significant when you move from being at a facility that has everything you need at your fingertips to one where you have to get creative to just do the basics.

I’ve done a bit of wilderness first aid. I have also practiced medicine in a tent, cleaning, and stitching wounds by light of a hand-held shop light, so I’m definitely qualified to present the topic. I think some of my stories were a bit eye-opening, but hopefully will serve as inspiration to residents who are feeling a little stuck and overwhelmed as they approach the end of their training year.

We were doing some joking about practicing in alternate environments. I said that maybe I should come back and do a class on paper charting. Since the program’s faculty members are young, I’m betting that I have significantly more experience on paper charts than some of them added together. It’s a skill, and if you ever have to make your way in a downtime situation for more than a couple of hours, you might wish you had a few more skills. It’s something to consider.

Does your hospital teach about paper-based charting as part of its downtime plans, or do you just hope for the best? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Morning Headlines 4/24/25

HHS Office for Civil Rights Settles Phishing Attack Breach with Health Care Network for $600,000

PIH Health, a network of providers in California, will pay $600,000 to settle potential HIPAA violations related to a 2019 employee email phishing attack that wound up exposing the data of 190,000 patients.

Computer system goes out at Tennova hospital system after database deleted

Tennova Healthcare (TN) attributes the need to revert to downtime procedures to an Oracle Health engineer who mistakenly deleted storage connected to a key database, resulting in a systems outage.

Promptly Acquires the Software Solutions of MDprospects and Patient Spectrum, Significantly Expanding Its All-in-One Practice Management Platform and Revolutionizing Patient Experience

Patient experience software vendor Promptly acquires medical practice CRM software from MDprospects and Patient Spectrum.

This Week in Health Tech 4/23/25

Healthcare AI News 4/23/25

News

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.

Business

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.

Research

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.

Other

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.

Contacts

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

Morning Headlines 4/23/25

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.

News 4/23/25

Top News

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.

Reader Comments

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.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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:

• The entire staff impressively used Stryker-owned Vocera’s communication for both clinical and administrative conversations, including in the patient rooms. I didn’t hear a single overhead page.
• They used Epic’s secure messaging function to ask questions and coordinate care in real time to get answers quickly rather than promising to find out later.
• Barcode verification was performed for just about everything.
• Clinical information flowed spectacularly across care that included ED, procedures, and clinical team rounds.
• The ability to order patient meals and guest trays via room service was very different than in my early hospital days.
• The nurse made appointments for follow-visits and had prescriptions filled and delivered at discharge, all via Epic, I presume.

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.

Sponsored Events and Resources

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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.

People

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.

Announcements and Implementations

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.

Government and Politics

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.

Other

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:

• The hosts call Judy Faulkner the most successful female entrepreneur in history.
• Judy’s mother was part of a group that won the Nobel Peace Prize. This is the only new fact that I learned.
• Harvard Medical School Professor Warner Slack, MD sent Judy to Boston to learn how to run a business from Meditech’s Neil Pappalardo, who mentored her for three days. The hosts gave Meditech and Pappalardo a lot of props, but surprisingly didn’t mention InterSystems.
• Hosts: “Epic basically never did hire any business people. It is essentially a big gigantic company of programmers, logicians, implementation people who could be programmers, who would think like programmers. That is the DNA of the company to this day.”
• Epic won the Kaiser deal because Carl Dvorak knew that system architecture and performance was a big deal and pulled a team all-nighter to model it out in Excel using Kaiser’s data, which Cerner didn’t do. Kaiser wanted equity, so Cerner offered 10% of the company while Judy said no, that wouldn’t be good for Epic, its customers, or Kaiser.
• [Hosts on the VA contract] “Talking to Epic customers and CIOs in the research, they are like down on their hands and knees, thankful that Epic did not win this deal. Because Cerner just got dragged so into the muck … your founder and your leader is passing away in the midst of this very complex process. After that, Cerner cycles through a whole bunch of different leaders over the next few years. Meanwhile, Epic, kind of unburdened by this DoD and VA shitshow for lack of a better word, just keeps winning deal after deal in the large system providers and in their own way.”

Sponsor Updates

• AGS Health will exhibit at the 2025 ACDIS Conference May 4-7 in Orlando.
• CereCore publishes a new case study titled “Better User Satisfaction, Valuable Focus and Confidence Restored with Knowledgeable IT Service Desk.”
• A new Black Book Research survey finds that healthcare organizations are accelerating plans to shift from traditional revenue cycle outsourcing to AI-powered RCM platforms.
• The “This Just In” podcast features Arcadia Chief Strategy Officer Aneesh Chopra.
• Optimum Healthcare IT launches the first episode of its “Visionary Voices” podcast featuring guests from Northeast Georgia Health System.
• Capital Rx will present at the Business Group on Health Annual Conference April 22-24 in Nashville.
• Divurgent names Patricia Allvin (MLH Healthcare Consulting) senior director of client service.

Blog Posts

• Embracing Coding AI: A Strategic Vision for the future (AGS Health)
• CIOs Reveal Insider Initiatives: Transforming Budget Woes into New Victories (CereCore)
• How AI is Improving Clinical Documentation Accuracy and Compliance (Nym)
• Teamwork & Team Leaders: Making the Difference in Retaining & Supporting Nurses (Symplr)
• Improving EHR Training To Reduce Clinician Burnout (Tegria)
• The journey ahead: Truly transforming healthcare organizations (Altera Digital Health)
• Celebrating 10 Years of Artera: A Decade of Innovation in Patient Engagement (Artera)
• Virtual Care Solutions to Nurse Staffing Shortages (AvaSure)
• Smart revenue cycles start with smart build (Cardamom Health)
• Navigating AI-Driven Cybersecurity Threats in Healthcare with Enhanced Security Operations (CloudWave)
• What My Recent ER Visit Taught Me About Healthcare and Data (Dimensional Insight)
• Pharmacy’s Missed Moment—and What Comes Next (DrFirst)

Contacts

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

Morning Headlines 4/22/25

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.

South Australia Becomes the First Jurisdiction in the Nation to Activate Sunrise EMR Statewide Across All Public Hospitals and Health Services, Including in the Regions

SA Health implements Altera Digital Health’s Sunrise EHR and patient administration system across 100 public hospitals.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 4/21/25

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:

• There was no proactive process to monitor for guideline changes and ensure they made it into the EHR in a timely fashion. This is important when there are major changes and there hasn’t been time for EHR vendors to get them into an update release.
• The organization was woefully behind on taking their vendor-recommended updates, as I knew a couple of the issues had been fixed in patches that weren’t terribly recent.
• There was a disconnect in the ability of the IT team to know whether the system was really working for its users or not.

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.

Morning Headlines 4/21/25

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.

Trellis Health Emerges From Stealth With $1.8M Pre-Seed Funding to Provide Women With Unrivaled Access to Health Data

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.

Monday Morning Update 4/21/25

Top News

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.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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:

• HIStalk was #1 in Trust Index Rankings among all health tech media.
• HIStalk was #1 in engagement and influence. Some of the sources that seem popular or that are run by big corporations actually scored 0% or 1% in engagement (i.e., despite appearances, nobody’s paying attention).
• Respondents are fed up with media sources that run vendor-sponsored material without disclosing their paid relationships (it would be tacky of me to list the bottom finishers in this category, but you can take a guess). 
• The poll’s summary, which I’m shamelessly bragging about, is this: “HIStalk stands out for its influence, independence, and continued relevance to the decision-makers shaping the future of health IT … influencing perception, credibility, and market momentum at the highest levels.”

Sponsored Events and Resources

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

Sales

• NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde taps Doccla to power a 1,000-bed virtual hospital as part of its hospital-at-home rollout in Scotland.

Announcements and Implementations

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.

Government and Politics

FDA will phase out animal testing for drugs and move to AI-based models.

Privacy and Security

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.

Other

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.”

Sponsor Updates

• Black Book Research’s survey of UK healthcare leaders dives into the potential impact of NHS restructuring on digital health planning.
• Nordic releases a new “Designing for Health” podcast episode titled “Interview with Resa Lewiss, MD.”
• Praia Health and Abundant Health Acquisition partner to deliver the first end-to-end, personalized consumer experience for healthcare systems.
• Visage Imaging will exhibit at SIIM 2025 May 21-23 in Portland, OR.
• Vyne Medical will sponsor and exhibit at NAHAM’s annual conference April 30-May 3 in Phoenix.

Blog Posts

• What You Need to Know About Interoperability and How it Affects You (Netsmart)
• Patient care continuity: Safeguarding Epic EHR access during disruptions (Nordic)
• How Autonomous Medical Coding Can Speed Up Claims Processing (Nym)
• Turning Data Into Insights at USA Health (RLDatix)
• We’re a Designated QHIN! Here’s What That Means for You (Surescripts)
• Recapping AONL 2025: Key Takeaways & Insights (Symplr)
• Key Takeaways From IPMI Healthcare Finance Institute 2025 (Tegria)

Contacts

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

Morning Headlines 4/18/25

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.

Chairmen Guthrie, Bilirakis, and Palmer Launch Investigation into 23andMe and its Handling of Americans’ Sensitive Medical and Genetic Information

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.

News 4/18/25

Top News

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%.

Reader Comments

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.”

Sponsored Events and Resources

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Assort Health, which offers AI-powered incoming call management for patient scheduling in specialty practices, raises $26 million in funding.

Sales

• The Minnesota Department of Human Services chooses Findhelp to power Find Help Minnesota, a statewide behavioral health program locator.
• Commonwealth Healthcare Corporation chooses Meditech Expanse.

People

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.

Announcements and Implementations

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.

Government and Politics

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.

Privacy and Security

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.

Sponsor Updates

• Black Book Research releases its fully updated and expanded 2025 Key Performance Indicator Framework for Revenue Cycle Management.
• Ellkay will present at Executive War College April 30 in New Orleans.
• The “HIT with Grace” podcast features First Databank VP of Product Management Virginia Halsey.
• Impact Advisors releases a new episode of its “Impactful AI” podcast titled “Decoding AI Empathy.”
• Infinx will exhibit at NAHAM 2025 April 30-May 3 in Phoenix.
• Meditech will present at the Montana Frontier Healthcare Conference June 18-19 in Billings.
• Mednition welcomes Wellstar Health System and Good Shepherd Health Care System to its community of KATE AI partners.
• MRO will exhibit at the American Urological Association conference April 26-29 in Las Vegas.
• Navina will exhibit at the NAACOS Spring Conference April 22-24 in Baltimore.

Blog Posts

• Three IT Focus Areas for Acquisition Due Diligence Decisions in Ambulatory Care (CereCore)
• The Latest from Vital Signs: Healthcare provider pay increases, staffing challenges, GPOs and practice-payer relationships (AdvancedMD)
• ROI for your RCM: Benefits of single platform approach (Altera Digital Health)
• What the 2026 Medicare Advantage rate update means for payers and providers (Arcadia)
• How Cost Transparency Enhances Patient Retention and Boosts Revenue Capture (Artera)
• Leveraging Data Analytics to Enhance CDM Effectiveness (FinThrive)
• Meeting Customer Demands: How to Stay Ahead in the New Era of CX (Five9)
• Patient Portals Redefined: A New Era of Trust and Engagement in Healthcare (HCTec)
• Healthmonix has done it: Quality reporting success for MSSP ACOs at scale (Healthmonix)
• The Foundation of Trust: Why Governance Matters in Healthcare Security (Impact Advisors)

Contacts

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

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 4/17/25

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.

Morning Headlines 4/17/25

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 Secures $26 Million in Funding to Expand Specialty-Specific Generative AI Platform for Managing Patient Phone Calls

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.

Healthcare AI News 4/16/25

News

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.

Research

A University of Florida researcher develops an open source AI tool that analyzes patient movement videos to help doctors detect subtle motor changes.

Other

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.

Contacts

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

HIStalk Interviews Amanda Sharp, CEO, AdvancedMD

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.