Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 2/9/26

Most of us have figured out by now that it’s difficult to spend a day without using some kind of AI-powered tool. I was a fairly early adopter of the Amazon Echo devices after receiving one for a gift. I used them until recently to control some of the lighting in my home. (RIP, Wemo smart home devices.)

I mostly use the Alexa assistant to get quick answers to straightforward questions, such as “What is the temperature?” and “What is the forecast?” so I can do a little planning before I drag myself out of bed in the morning. In the kitchen, I primarily use it for timers or to play music while cooking. I haven’t been impressed by the “skills” that it offers, however.

A couple of weeks ago, I started receiving teasers to upgrade my device to new voices and personas. I held out since I didn’t want to be a beta user. Ultimately, I gave in and was pleased to find a somewhat sassy voice that is officially described as “grounded” or “easygoing.” It reminded me of one of my favorite audiobook narrators, so I decided to give it a try.

Over the last few days, I’ve noticed some quirks. I’m not sure if it’s specific to the voice I selected or if something is going on with the cloud services, but Alexa started giving me more information than I was asking for. Instead of simply giving me the current temperature and the forecast high, it added commentary like “it’s going to be a great day” or something similar.

Then I noticed it providing information that seemed disordered. For example, telling me that the current temperature was 38F with a forecast high of 47F, but that it currently feels like 44F, which just doesn’t make sense. It also tells me that tomorrow’s forecast high will be in the 40s when the Weather Channel thinks it will be a dozen degrees higher.

Tonight, I was thinking about some travel plans and asked Alexa what the correct time zone is for Nashville since I can never remember and was multitasking. Alexa confidently told me that “Nashville is in the Central Time Zone,” but went on to offer information that I didn’t ask for and told me the time. Since I’m on Central time, I was surprised that it was wrong.

I was curious to see what Alexa would say if I called out an incorrect answer. It replied, “You’re right, I should have been more specific. Nashville, Tennessee is indeed in the Central Time Zone.” I had to specifically ask the time and it finally answered correctly.

It’s one thing for a system to provide inaccurate information in response to a question, but it’s another to offer incorrect information that wasn’t even asked for.

I’ve seen some positioning for virtual assistants, including Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, as general purpose tools that can help the elderly age in place and manage daily routines. They are also supposed to be helpful for reducing social isolation and providing voice-activated medication reminders. What happens, however, when those tools don’t do the right thing? What happens when the tools are confused about what time zone they’re in and it leads to a patient taking medications more than once? In that situation, a simple non-AI alarm app might be more reliable and provide greater safety for patients.

Later in the day, I found an email from Amazon listing how “Early Access” customers made Alexa+ better, including such items as being more responsive during chats, a better sense of when you want to engage, and that it “adapts to your vibe” by learning and adjusting to the user’s communication style.

Honestly, I’m not impressed. As soon as I get some free time, I’m going to experiment with some of the other voices to see if they’re as problematic as the one I selected or if the entire system is just not meeting my needs any more.

Meanwhile, I’m starting to make a list of all the grossly inaccurate responses that I receive from AI tools. I recently read a novel that was based on a true story and asked an AI-powered search tool what happened to some of the main characters later in their lives. The answers should have been straightforward, since the characters I asked about were part of a World War II effort to project works from the National Gallery of Art by storing them at the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina.

Instead of providing facts, I got some wild speculation about the Gallery’s director, David Finley, which required visits to a couple of primary sources to fact check. As an upside for the next time I need a random nugget of obscure information, I now know that 40 cubic feet of Finley’s personal papers and artifacts now reside in the Gallery archives, including dried flowers, a cigarette case and lighter, and postcards from a honeymoon in Greece.

The Super Bowl is a big deal in the US. A lot of watercooler conversations happened at the end of the week around whether people had plans for the big event and which team they might be supporting. I was one of the people who don’t really have a connection to either team, but was really rooting for the combined squad of US Air Force and US Navy pilots who were slated to perform the pre-game flyover.

I have to say it did not disappoint. The seven-ship formation led by the B-1 was on point. Those of us with aviation geek tendencies knew there was more to come, and the US Navy livestream made our day as the camera panned back to catch the second B-1 approaching in full afterburner.

Having spent my career in medicine, I appreciate the fact that a seemingly short display like this is actually the end result of hundreds of hours of research, planning, and practice. It’s like one of those domino transplant surgeries where all the organs have to make it to the right patients in the right city at the right time with all the associated facilities and staff preparation.

The flyover planes originated in South Dakota and California. They were supported by refueling aircraft from Ohio, with everyone gathering nearby for the final maneuver. Each aircraft is supported by teams of maintainers who are in turn supported by other disciplines. Everyone is essential, much like in a hospital. Thousands of hours of training and education are behind each person’s ability to do their job when called upon. The pilots’ fist bump in the cockpit following the flyover was charming and I can only imagine how excited their families were to see that. (Photo taken from US Navy livestream).

If you partied for the Super Bowl, what was your favorite snack? Did your event include any heart healthy options, or was it all about Buffalo wings and pizza? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Readers Write: Virtual Nursing Thrives When Thoughtful Design Guides Implementation

Virtual Nursing Thrives When Thoughtful Design Guides Implementation
By Christine Gall, RN, DrPH

Christine Gall, RN, DrPH, MS is chief nursing officer of Collette Health.

Virtual nursing has quickly evolved as a force multiplier that is capable of addressing top pain points that are impacting care delivery, operations, quality, and patient experience. But as more health systems explore this model, outcomes have varied widely. Some organizations report measurable improvements in documentation time, throughput, retention, and workload relief. Others struggle to see benefits or encounter frustration at the bedside.

The difference rarely comes down to technology alone. It comes down to design. Successful virtual nursing programs begin with clear-eyed assessment. What problem are we trying to solve first? Throughput congestion? Night shift support? Documentation burden? The strongest programs anchor the initial design to a significant operational issue that is specific, measurable, achievable, and relevant.

Of equal impact is the identification of a leader and team that are ready for the responsibility of substantial workflow redesign. Virtual nursing models are more likely to succeed and scale when both factors are addressed and when the initial focus is narrow and well defined, setting up an iterative strategy that supports program expansion and scale over time.

Virtual nursing is also capable of delivering powerful, longer-term benefits like improved staff resilience and nurse retention, but those gains require longer timeframes to see improvement. Programs that try to solve multiple issues initially at launch often struggle, while those that sequence thoughtfully and use data-driven rapid cycle improvement to continually monitor success and iterative improvement are better positioned to scale successfully.

When organizations run into difficulty, it generally involves a failure to define attainable goals, a gap in stakeholder perception that creates barriers to acceptance and adoption of new workflows, and/or a failure of the new work processes to address the areas of concern without creating new burdens. In my experience, three design choices consistently determine whether virtual nursing lightens workload or adds friction:

Task Clarity and Workload Optimization

For bedside nurses, the value of virtual nursing is measured in minutes of administrative burden reduced and the expansion of impactful time spent with their patients. Programs succeed when they clearly define which tasks are moving from bedside to virtual roles. That may include time-intensive admission, discharge, and patient education activities, care coordination, and focused clinical oversight. But decisions regarding role and scope of the virtual nurse must be explicit.

When the virtual nurse’s role is not well defined and understood by the entire team, bedside teams experience little relief, and sometimes more duplication. A symptom of poor task clarity is an increase in the need for communication between the virtual and bedside staff. Well-run virtual nursing initiatives build in automated methods of communication directly into the workflows rather than requiring one-off, manual communication activities. Real value comes from task transfer, not task shadowing.

When programs invest in this level of clarity, bedside nurses increasingly recognize the impact, and barriers to adoption are mitigated.

Workflow Integration, Not Overlay

Many early virtual nursing implementations struggled because the virtual workflows were created as parallel processes rather than developing novel, integrated workflows. If virtual nurses document in separate systems, communicate through separate channels, or escalate through ad-hoc pathways, the bedside becomes the bridge between worlds, an experience that likely creates additional burden.

Integration, by contrast, means shared communication pathways, aligned documentation practices, clear escalation rules, and participation in unit workflows rather than operating in parallel but separate processes. When virtual nurses are embedded operationally, lines of workflow delineation are crisp and do not create new burdens for communication, coordination, or clarification.

Shared Governance and Co-Design with the Bedside

Virtual nursing is as much a cultural change as an operational one. How it is introduced matters. When bedside nurses are asked to adopt a model that they did not help shape, skepticism is a rational response. The programs that thrive invest in shared governance, inviting bedside teams into discussions and decisions about workflow redesign, task allocation, communication norms, and measurement. This transparent approach may not only produce more realistic workflows, but can also establish trust between virtual and bedside roles from the start.

Trust and shared responsibility for iteratively creating a robust care delivery model is the foundation for program stability, refinement, and scale. Connecting leaders and teams with the “what” and “why” before defining “how” a virtual care program will evolve is crucial to buy-in, acceptance, adoption, and ultimately ownership of the new processes.

Virtual Nursing as a Near-Term Workforce Solution

Unlike conventional software deployment, the success of virtual nursing cannot be measured by technical readiness alone. Integrations, reliability, and usability matter, but they are only one part of the equation.

Virtual nursing changes how work is distributed, how handoffs occur, and how clinicians collaborate. It is a care model that is built on an agile technology platform, not a rigid technology solution in search of a problem to solve. Successful virtual care models mature through continuous evaluation of outcomes and success metrics, data-driven iteration, and widespread dissemination of shared learnings.

It may be easy to forget that the workflows, staffing models, and best practices we consider routine took years to stabilize. This is an important perspective to remember as virtual nursing practice and integrations evolve. The nursing workforce has carried extraordinary strain for more than a decade, and many traditional solutions focus on long-horizon strategies, such as expanding education pipelines, addressing retention, or modernizing licensure. Those efforts matter, but will also require the full redesign of the model of clinical care delivery to effectively address the looming issues of the day.

Virtual nursing is one of the most promising and actionable models that can reduce burden, increase capacity, and improve care in the near future, provided the foundational elements are fully embraced and executed. If we allow early friction and avoidable barriers to eclipse that potential, we risk discarding an approach that could meaningfully support nurses when eloquent solutions are urgently needed.

The opportunity is not merely to deploy technology, but to build a sustainable clinical workforce that is properly resourced and supported to deliver world-class care and elevate the patient experience of care.

Readers Write: Healthcare Needs a Data Liquidity Disruption

Healthcare Needs a Data Liquidity Disruption
By Sriram Devarakonda

Sriram Devarakonda, MSEE is co-founder and CTO of Cardamom.

Healthcare has long promised that data would transform research, precision medicine, and patient outcomes. Yet progress remains painfully slow. Data silos and fear-driven restrictions keep critical information trapped in systems that were designed more to contain than to share.

Real transformation in targeted care, population health, and clinical research won’t come from yet another interoperability initiative or API. It requires a more fundamental shift: a data liquidity disruption that treats data as something meant to move, not sit still.

What’s holding healthcare back?

Healthcare’s challenges have evolved dramatically over the past three decades, and they will continue to change just as profoundly in the decade ahead. Thirty years ago, the priority was basic connectivity: enabling continuity of care across disparate systems through point-to-point integrations, with HL7 playing a foundational role.

Ten years ago, the rise of web and mobile technologies demanded a modernized approach to interoperability, giving rise to newer API-based standards, such as FHIR, that enabled digital health innovation.

Today, and looking forward, the focus has shifted yet again. Healthcare’s most pressing challenges, from cancer to diabetes to Alzheimer’s, require the effective use of data and AI at scale, challenges that impact millions of lives and drive national healthcare costs. Solving them demands more than messaging standards alone. Our future cannot depend on HL7 and FHIR by themselves. It requires true data liquidity, real-time intelligence, and platforms that are designed for learning health systems.

Before we delve into how we prepare for the future, we should look at a few reasons that data liquidity is a challenge today.

• Proprietary mindsets. Healthcare systems and vendors have long viewed data as an asset to guard, not a resource to share. Competitive, contractual, and legal anxieties create barriers that go beyond technology. They are cultural and structural.
• Fragmented data standards. Despite progress with HL7 and FHIR frameworks, true standardization remains elusive. Data formats, definitions, and governance models still vary widely, making even “standard” exchanges complex and time-consuming to implement.
• Privacy and compliance fears. With HIPAA, GDPR, and a growing patchwork of state regulations, organizations often err on the side of caution. The result is a compliance-first posture that, while understandable, often stifles innovation and progress.
• Legacy infrastructure. Many health systems are still operating on decades-old IT foundations that were designed for billing and clinical care, not for modern data exchange. Retrofitting these systems to support real-time data liquidity is costly and complex.
• Sheer complexity of technologies. A large barrier to progress is the sheer number of different technology systems even within the same ecosystem. EHRs, ERPs, and countless vendor-managed applications add an additional layer of complexity that’s challenging to overcome.

Why a disruption is inevitable and necessary

Healthcare’s approach to data is slowing progress. Patients want connected experiences, researchers need faster access to data, and providers and payers are under pressure to deliver better outcomes.

Other industries already allow data to flow securely in real time, enabling smarter decisions and personalization. Healthcare must make the same shift, from owning data to stewarding it, and from locking it away to sharing it responsibly. Those who adapt will lead; those who don’t will fall behind.

Preparing for the data liquidity era

How can healthcare organizations prepare for the inevitable disruption?

• Invest in platforms, not point solutions. Healthcare systems must invest in modular, cloud-based platforms that allow for data to move freely and securely. That means creating enterprise-shared data access on modern data platforms that can evolve alongside transactional systems that are not frozen in time.
• Embrace interoperability as a strategy, not a checkbox. Compliance-driven interoperability creates connections, not capability. Treating data sharing as a strategic asset is what turns exchange into impact, fueling innovation, partnerships, and better care coordination.
• Move from data control to data accountability. As data moves more freely, data maturity becomes even more critical. Clear standards for data quality, consent, and usage help ensure that liquidity doesn’t come at the expense of privacy or ethics. AI has a large role to play here when it comes to interpretation and standardization.
• Standardize clinical workflows. The more healthcare organizations can standardize their clinical workflows and protocols now, the fewer challenges they will have later. Clear, consistent processes make it easier to adopt new tools, train staff, and share data safely.
• Align data strategy to business and clinical outcomes. Data liquidity drives real, downstream impact on both business and clinical outcomes. When tied to clear, measurable goals, such as reducing denials, accelerating clinical trial enrollment, or improving patient throughput, it becomes a powerful, provable source of ROI.
• Reimagine the patient’s role. Patients are no longer passive data points; they are active and willing participants. Giving them control over their health data and the ability to share it across providers, researchers, and care teams will accelerate innovation while fostering transparency, trust, and improved outcomes.

The ripple effects of data liquidity

When healthcare achieves true data liquidity, the impact will be profound. Researchers will be able to identify patterns across populations in days, not years. Providers can make more informed decisions at the point of care. Health systems will predict and prevent crises before they occur. Most importantly, patients will benefit from a system that understands them as whole individuals, not just episodes of care that are scattered across disconnected databases.

Healthcare is long overdue for the same data transformation other industries have already embraced, one that allows data to move freely, connect seamlessly, and create value wherever it goes.

The road to disruption won’t be easy, but it is necessary. The barriers to data movement have been standing for too long and the cost of inaction is too high.

Morning Headlines 2/9/26

Apple Is Scaling Back Plans for New AI-Based Health Coach Service

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

Chamber Raises $60 Million in Series A Funding to Drive the Future of Cardiology Value-Based Care

Value-based cardiology care startup Chamber announces $60 million in Series A funding.

VA’s latest AI inventory includes new suicide, EHR-focused use cases

An annual review of the VA’s use of AI finds that it is working on integrating a clinical AI agent with its new Oracle Health-based EHR, and that the technology is being incorporated into suicide prevention efforts.

Monday Morning Update 2/9/26

Top News

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

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

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

Reader Comments

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

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

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

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

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

Sponsored Events and Resources

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

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

Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

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

Privacy and Security

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

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

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

Other

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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

Morning Headlines 2/6/26

2026 Best in KLAS Awards – Software and Services

KLAS posts its “2026 Best in KLAS: Software and Services” report with Epic, Athenahealth, Chartis, Optimum Healthcare IT, and Impact Advisors taking top honors in several respective categories.

Accenture Federal Services Selected to Support the Mission-Critical Modernization of Veteran Health Records for the Department of Veterans Affairs

The federal government awards Accenture Federal Services a multi-year contract of unspecified value to support the VA’s implementation of Oracle Health.

ASTP/ONC Announces Selection of Nationwide Pilot Programs to Improve Behavioral Health Data Exchange

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

News 2/6/26

Top News

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

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

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

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

Reader Comments

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

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

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

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

Sponsored Events and Resources

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

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

Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

People

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

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

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

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

Government and Politics

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

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

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

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

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

Other

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

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 2/5/26

It’s been a couple of years since I’ve written much about digital therapeutics. The number of vendors in the space is small, and the market got quiet after Pear Therapeutics, the one I knew best, declared bankruptcy in 2023.

Digital therapeutics require a prescription and are regulated by the FDA. At the end of 2025, the US Food and Drug Administration announced a pilot program to encourage the use of these solutions. The Technology-Enabled Meaningful Patient Outcomes (TEMPO) model began accepting statements of interest in January. Under the model, a subset of medical professionals can prescribe digital therapeutics before they are officially approved by the FDA, with the resulting real-world data being used to potentially support their clearance.

One reason these tools failed to gain traction was the reimbursement landscape, which left developers unable to build a sustainable financial model. Some companies pivoted into the direct-to-consumer space and marketed their tools as wellness apps to avoid regulation.

The TEMPO pilot was developed by the FDA Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH). It is limited to prescribers who participate in the CMS Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation model for Advancing Chronic Care with Effective, Scalable Solutions (ACCESS). If you’re a providers who meets the acronym test and is planning to prescribe digital therapeutics, feel free to drop us a note.

A recent article in JAMA Oncology looked at the MyLungHealth tool, which can help identify patients who are eligible for lung cancer screening. The procedure is underused, with about 16% of eligible patients receiving the screening. The trial described in the writeup, which was conducted at the University of Utah and NYU Langone Health, showed how digital tools can help close gaps in care.

Lung cancer remains a leading cause of cancer deaths around the world. Screening is recommended for adults aged 50 to 80 years who have at least a 20 pack-year smoking history and who currently smoke or have quit within the previous 15 years. Barriers to screening include inaccurate or missing tobacco use history in patient records, missed opportunities to order screening, and lack of patient awareness.

The tool includes a patient education component with both videos and text-based content. Clinicians are alerted when patients engage. The study had 30,000 participants. Patients who received an intervention using a patient-facing tool integrated with the EHR patient portal completed more screening tests.

The authors noted that the end point of having a study ordered was a limiting factor. They encourage more research to look at strategies to ensure that patients complete the recommended CT scan. Props to them for also noting the need to test this approach in other care delivery settings, such as community-based primary care offices, to make sure that the findings are generalizable and to maximize impact.

They also noted the need to adapt the approach to address the needs of underserved patients, especially since patient portal use was required and rates of such use can be variable across demographic groups.

Most of the healthcare leaders who I talk to are trying to trim their budgets due to declining reimbursement and continued cost pressures. Vizient recently released data on healthcare expenditures and I was surprised to see that pharmacy costs are no longer the fastest growing expense category. Facilities and IT lead again, with IT hardware and software at a 5.66% inflation rate. IT services are close behind at 4.5%, with facilities management at 4.13%.

Other interesting tidbits: with the rise in medication use to treat obesity, bariatric surgery volumes are down 20%. The inflation rate for laboratory services is predicted to be less than 2%, which surprised me given the continued evolution of testing platforms and multi-result panels.

I work with a physician who is vocal about the tools we have for patient care. He is outspoken why AI is causing the downfall of civilization. He collects examples where AI tools have been wrong, specifically in situations where patient harm could have resulted.

His message of the week includes an example of uploading an image to identify a mushroom that a hypothetical patient might have eaten. The tool incorrectly identified it as being safe to consume, when in fact it was quite toxic. I’ve never been a mushroom hunter, but I’ve worked at a poison control center, so I hope that mycophiles and foragers are using multiple sources to confirm edibility before they sample their finds.

I appreciate his point of view and the fact that he provides interesting examples that make us think. But we’re not going to put this particular genie back in the bottle anytime soon.

One of my colleagues who is more accepting of AI told me about something called Moltbot, which apparently underwent a renaming in the time it took me to find time to research it. Now called OpenClaw, it’s an AI agent that goes beyond chatting and starts taking action. The solution is seeing rapid adoption given the fact that it’s free and runs locally. The tool can run using either ChatGPT or Claude models and can be assigned a vibe to embody as it goes about its work, which might involve executing commands or making changes to files.

The writeup in Scientific American had me chuckling as it noted that the tool “follows almost any order like a well-paid mercenary.” I’m curious about its potential, but leery of some of the risks as far as privacy and access. If you’ve given it a try, drop us a line.

One of our local care delivery organizations is looking to rebrand. I’m a little surprised because it has had no significant mergers or acquisitions that would indicate a responsible use of funds or a need to avoid confusion. It seems like more of a vanity project since the organizations have already been linked for decades.

They are apparently doing marketing outreach to local physicians, asking their opinions on logo and color combinations to see which have the most impact or best represent the partnership. I’m not sure if they’re also reaching out to patients for their opinions, but I would be curious to see how those might differ from those of the physician community.

Bottom line, however, is that this makes me a little angry. The organization’s cheapskate tactics have negatively impacted patient care in recent years. I wish they would spend the money on issues that directly impact patient care and improve the health of the community versus trying to look better than their competitors.

Has your organization been through a rebranding effort? Did it deliver the outcomes it promised or was it not worth the cost and effort? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Morning Headlines 2/5/26

Lotus Just Raised $41M

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

BeHuman Raises $4 Million Seed Round to Expand Equitable, AI-Driven Early Cancer Detection Nationwide

Virtual cancer screening and care coordination startup BeHuman raises $4 million in seed funding.

Salvo Health closes $8.5m for new chronic gut care model

Salvo Health, which offers a continuous care platform for gastroenterologists and their patients, raises $8.5 million in Series A funding.

Healthcare AI News 2/4/26

News

Oracle Health enhances its Clinical AI Agent to draft review-ready orders for labs, imaging, prescriptions, and referrals using ambient listening.

The Japan Medical Safety Research Organization will use AI to analyze hospital investigation reports of unexpected deaths to identify common problems. 

NHS England publishes a registry of 19 ambient documentation vendors that have self-certified that their products meet safety, technology, and data protection standards.

A Massachusetts woman whose primary care physician died is told by 10 practices that they are not accepting new patients, predicting a two-year wait. Mass General Brigham rejected her, but included a link to its 24×7 virtual primary care service, Care Connect. She completed an AI intake session that was routed to a physician who conducted a video visit two days later. Care Connect employs 12 physicians who each see 40 to 50 patients per day, offering urgent and longitudinal primary care. It uses K Health’s AI platform, which is also used by health systems that include Mayo Clinic, Cedars-Sinai, and Northwell Health.

Business

Lotus Health AI, which offers free 24×7 primary care using patient data, AI diagnostics, peer-reviewed evidence and guidelines, and clinician review, raises $41 million in funding. The company claims that its model makes doctors 10 times more productive. Founder and CEO K.J. Dhaliwal started the company in 2024 after working for a dating site operator.

Other

A viral image that purported to show British politician Nigel Farage visiting a girl with terminal brain cancer is exposed as AI-generated after investigators found that Farage’s likeness had been digitally substituted for the father in the original photo of an American boy who died of cancer in October 2025. The annoyingly overwrought and clickbait-formatted description should have offered another clue.

High school student Daniel Joseph develops MedMate, an AI-driven interactive patient simulator that allows providers and students to interact with avatar-powered virtual patients in a hospital setting.

Contacts

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

HIStalk Interviews David Emanuel, CEO, VectorCare

David Emanuel is founder and CEO of VectorCare.

Tell me about yourself and the company.

VectorCare is a patient logistics platform that manages services such as air ambulance, ground ambulance, and Uber and Lyft rides for patients, either inpatient or outpatient. Our core business is that we have no-code workflow to help move fast and get deep inside EHRs.

What are the major elements of patient logistics and what problems can you solve?

Think about discharge for a patient, where a nurse or a case manager is doing scheduling or coordinating that ride home for the patient. Historically, it’s done via phone and fax. Everything is pretty manual. EHRs aren’t designed for managing logistics the way that you would use Uber and Lyft today, so they are quite antiquated in that regard.

The problem that we solve is that at discharge, we make it easy for that case manager to schedule the transfer from inside the EHR and connect with their network of contracted vendors. Decision trees drive the right care at the right time. Not everybody needs a BLS transport. It might be a gurney. They can schedule that transport for the patient seamlessly.

What’s great is that it’s not just the scheduling part. We pre-populate data from Epic or any EHR, and once it is scheduled, you can see real-time updates of vehicle location. You can message directly with the crews through our messaging tools. We then capture all these relevant data points that help measure success and hold vendors accountable for how they perform.

We believe that the future is multi-event scheduling, so it’s not just scheduling the transport. A discharged patient may need to have a home health visit scheduled within 24 hours to reduce readmissions. Our platform automates that whole process. It finds the care team that will do the home visit as well as schedules the oxygen to be at the patient’s house when they get there. Those three major services help the patient’s care journey.

What benefits are customers seeking and realizing?

We have a large client in California that operates across eight states. It was taking them an average of 31 minutes to manually schedule an ambulance transport. We took it down to three minutes. There’s a huge ROI from keeping the workflow inside the EHR.

The second value proposition is getting the right care at the right time. Skilled nursing facilities shut down at 3:00. If you delay completing the discharge or scheduling the transport just by a few hours, they won’t accept a patient. That means that the patient has to stay over an extra night. That’s a cost to the healthcare system.

We reduce length of stay, improve time on task, and connect with a network of contracted vendors instead of non-contracted vendors that have different rates.

How much benefit do hospitals see from freeing up a bed earlier in the day when they might be in short supply?

Having access to a network of contracted vendors via a workflow that is embedded in the EHR, the patient record, provides a trickle-down effect. Quicker scheduling of that transport to take the patient to the right facility or home makes that bed available.

It also improves internal communication. Our platform allows for notifying the cleaning team that the bed is available so they can clean the room for the next patient. This is a huge value for hospital CFOs. They can track success. When did the patient arrive, when did they leave, and were they readmitted? We’re capturing all of these relevant data points to create an end-to-end view from a financial perspective for the healthcare system.

Are patients aware when the logistics process is inefficient? Does patient satisfaction improve when it goes better than expected?

It makes a huge difference in patient satisfaction. Recovery at home is far better than a recovery in a hospital. Getting them out quicker improves their quality of recovery. No one loves staying an extra night in a hospital unnecessarily. It’s a huge benefit for the patient.

How does your credential management system work?

It’s a key part of the vendor network that you have when you build out a marketplace on our platform. You are inviting all these vendors, which requires documenting that they have the right license and the right insurance to perform services for the hospital. Credentialing is a module within our onboarding process to make sure that the vendor is compliant and is credentialed correctly.

How do hospitals decide whether to establish a formal relationship with vendors, and if they do, which vendors to choose?

Big markets like California have a lot of saturation and lots of vendors competing, so you may have a large network of vendors that you’re working with. In smaller markets, you’ll have a one-to-one relationship. It varies from market to market.

What percentage of patients need some form of transport other than just a ride home?

From an inpatient perspective, a hospital with 300 beds is probably doing 30 transports a day where the patient goes home or is moved between facilities. Roughly 10% of their bed size. The logistic requirements are varied from high-acuity transport, so critical care transport all the way through a gurney van. In some cases, air ambulance, either rotary wing or fixed wing.

Outpatient is where the question becomes more relevant. Is the patient going to dialysis on a regular basis? Three trips a week involves six rides to be scheduled via a gurney, a Lyft or Uber, or some sort of sedan car service to get them there. That would be classified as an outpatient service. Or getting to your doctor’s appointment.

Even at discharge, you’re scheduling the patient’s ride to go home or to a skilled nursing center, but you also can schedule the outpatient rides to get them to that follow-up, such as a doctor’s appointment, chemotherapy, or to get their medication.

The benefit of our platform is that you can do both inpatient and outpatient, handling all of these nuances around the transportation needs as well as home health and DME needs as well.

Who typically pays for the logistics services that patients need?

If it’s not covered by insurance, the hospital or the patient will pay for the ride. We’ve built our platform where you determine medical necessity. That is customizable through our no-code workflow, because every state and every county is different. Once you know that it meets medical necessity and the insurance covers it, great. The ambulance provider, as an example, will bill the insurance. If it is not covered and it doesn’t meet medical necessity, someone has to bear that cost. In that scenario, it’s the healthcare system or the patient.

Hospitals are moving more towards covering the cost of the ride if it doesn’t meet medical necessity or isn’t covered by insurance. Freeing up that bed with the small cost of moving the patient out and getting them to a skilled nursing facility is cheaper than them staying for an extra night.

What level of EHR and workflow integration do providers expect when evaluating applications?

This is a layered question. I say that because healthcare systems, particularly CIOs and CTOs, have been given a mandate to move away from managing siloed systems that don’t talk to the EHR. They are managing many vulnerabilities in terms of different authentication approaches. That isn’t scaling very well for healthcare systems. Our objective is to bring all of these services inside the EHR and into the workflows. This is a lot for healthcare system IT teams to manage.

For vendors who are looking to get inside healthcare systems, win RFPs, and build a moat around their business, the beautiful part of our application is that you can build your own SMART on FHIR app, white label it with your branding, build your custom workflows with our no-code workflow, and put that inside the EHR. That’s a huge win for their customers, in terms of not having to move to a different system, log into a different application, or pick up the phone.

How do you position that capability within your overall business?

It’s still part of our core business. We offer our no-code workflow tools for web and mobile workflows and scheduling services already, so this is just another channel for us.

We’ve been building out these tools for over a decade. The next phase of our business was that we were building our own SMART on FHIR app and the tools that are needed to make it successful and do it really quickly. It’s an extension of our no-code workflow. We are building infrastructure. We’re not just an application. We’re building out the systems for everybody else to be successful.

What is your perception of the experience of using SMART on FHIR to integrate with Epic?

It’s complex. FHIR as a protocol has been slow to adopt, and SMART on FHIR allows you to have the right tooling to get inside the EHR.  If you don’t understand the complexities of that process and dealing with Epic, it can cost a lot of money. You have to maintain it and do security reviews. We have automated these things and baked that into our platform.

We saw the pain point in developing our own application. For our customers, this was a problem that needed solving. Once you are working with us, you’ll see how quick it is to build your own workflows and deploy into Epic. It’s remarkably quick because we’ve done all the heavy lifting, in terms of making sure that the infrastructure is there.

How do you expect to use AI?

We’ve thought long and hard about this, going back to before AI was even a thing. We were building out an agent, which we call ADI, automated dispatching intelligence. It is policy driven. It is primarily focused around automation and removing these manual processes that human beings were still doing on our application, like negotiating best times or prices. We’ve built a framework that will have agents handling different parts of the workflow. We’ve got good data in terms of what the future looks like and how this agent will be more embedded in our workflows.

We have deployed ADI over the last three years. Last year, we hit a record of saving over 100,000 hours just on using ADI for several of our large customers. The framework is there.

The huge win for us is that the way we build the SMART on FHIR application makes it agentic ready. In the future, you’ll be able to use the agents that we have inside the SMART on FHIR app to automate discharge for the patient, coordinate with the vendors, negotiate price, negotiate time, all while the nurse or the case manager carries on taking care of the patient.

Do hospitals still use discharge centers that give patients a place to wait for their ride instead of tying up a bed?

That’s still a thing in some hospitals. We work closely with some of our larger clients that have command centers or patient logistics centers. It’s like an air traffic tower, with patients coming in and patients going out being coordinated in one place. Our platform is so uniquely designed for solving that particular problem, because you can handle both inbound and outbound, or inpatient and outpatient, in one place and get full visibility across all these different services. 

What elements will be important to the company’s strategy over the next few years?

SMART on FHIR will be key in a world of agentic workflows and having a framework for us to be able to make a difference in healthcare. We need to make sure that we do it really well. We are the go-to platform for vendors to build SMART on FHIR apps that get deeper inside the EHR. Speed, protecting your business, and winning hearts and minds are important. Being able to do that will be key for vendors.

This Week in Health Tech 2/4/26

Morning Headlines 2/4/26

CHC Consulting Launches Options RCM to Strengthen Rural and Community Hospital Financial Health

Community Hospital Corporation’s CHC Consulting business launches a revenue cycle services subsidiary for rural and community hospitals.

Carbon Health Implements Financial Restructuring

Tech-enabled primary care provider Carbon Health files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Louisiana Startup SleepNavigator Secures Statewide Investment to Scale Sleep Care Technology Nationally

Sleep medicine software startup SleepNavigator secures new funding from a group of investors that includes Ochsner Health.

Midi Health Surpasses $1B Valuation, Igniting a New Era for Women’s Health

Women’s virtual care company Midi Health announces $100 million in Series D funding.

News 2/4/26

Top News

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

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

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

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

Reader Comments

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

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

Sponsored Events and Resources

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

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

Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Healthcare Growth Partners publishes its market review. Nuggets:

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

Sales

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

People

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

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

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

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Government and Politics

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

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

Other

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

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

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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

Morning Headlines 2/3/26

Tenet Announces Accretive Transaction and Previews Strong 2025 Results

CommonSpirit Health sells its stake in Conifer Health Solutions back to original owner Tenet Healthcare for $1.9 billion as it prepares to bring its RCM functions back in-house in 2027.

New Epic Artificial Intelligence Tool Transforms the Health Care Experience

Epic’s AI charting tool, first previewed last August at Epic UGM, makes its debut at Group Health Cooperative of South Central Wisconsin.

The Sequoia Project Releases Draft of Workgroup-Developed Best Practices for Providers Aimed at Simplifying Patient Access to Health Data

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

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 2/2/26

I’ve been doing a bit more clinical work lately because of how the flu season has played out in my community. Rates of Influenza A have been rising over the last several weeks, but we were cautiously optimistic when we started to see a small decline in flu-like symptoms.

However, the flu season decided to deliver a classic one-two punch, because influenza B is now on the rise. Looking at the statistics, this year’s flu season is one of the worst in the last decade as far as hospitalizations for pediatric patients. Our local hospitals are swamped. Hospitals are boarding patients in the emergency department for a prolonged times because they lack staffed beds elsewhere in the hospital. With float pools exhausted, nurses are being reassigned to units that are outside of their core area of expertise.

Hospitals can be full of overly rigid policies and procedures, so I was surprised to learn that one of my colleagues was hired by a local hospital and fast-tracked through their credentialing process in under two weeks. Although it’s great to see that when there’s a will there’s a way, it raises the question of why hospitals can take up to 120 days to credential providers under normal processes.

Putting on my process improvement hat, I wonder whether the process contains steps that are less critical than assumed, and perhaps those steps are skipped during fast-track credentialing. Alternatively, pieces of the process might be able to be expedited at an additional cost that hospitals are not usually willing to pay.

Either way, I was glad to see her get back into the trenches quickly. Having a physician on the sidelines when they are willing and able to work is a loss to community’s patients.

For those of us that work for multiple care delivery organizations or who work infrequently, a fair amount of anxiety can be created when you decide to pick up a shift. When you’re a PRN or as-needed staffer, you are theoretically supposed to keep up with changes to the organization’s policies and procedures. You are also expected to be aware of any changes that have been made within the electronic health record or other tools.

An organization that I work with makes this easier for clinicians. They have a high level of maturity around their EHR governance processes and it’s rare for them to deliver updates more than once a month unless something has gone wrong. Their documentation is great. I typically store all of their update emails in a folder and read through them before I go back on shift so that the changes are fresh in my mind. I arrived at this process after trying a “read as you go” approach that wasn’t as productive.

Another facility where I’ve worked at makes a hash of this with a far less robust process. Instead of sending a single monthly email with release notes that follow a standard format, every builder who is working on a change creates their own messaging without any overarching review. Sometimes the descriptions of changes and fixes are vague, making it challenging to figure out whether they will affect everyone or if they even apply to your department.

For this facility, I still store everything in a folder and refresh my knowledge before reporting. Regardless of how well I try to read and comprehend, the first hour or two of my shift feels like being in a carnival fun house, with all kinds of surprises popping out at you.

One of my favorite organizations to cover is a direct primary care practice. The practice is not a Covered Entity under HIPAA and doesn’t do any third-party billing, their EHR is remarkably simple, and updates to the system are few and far between. The platform they use is remarkably patient-centric. Documentation is a breeze since you’re focused on documenting the clinical encounter rather than meeting billing and documentation guidelines.

The practice has templated the visit notes to have three areas of focus. The “Short Term” section is like a traditional SOAP note and captures issues that are addressed during the encounter. This might occur in person, by phone, or via video visit. A “Patient Progress” section captures the bigger picture of chronic or recurrent conditions.

I like the patient progress nomenclature. It feels more positive than the traditional problem list even though it’s doing the same thing in capturing whether a given issue is improving, worsening, or remaining stable. That section also includes tools to help visualize and close care gaps, monitor preventive services, and track procedures or orders that are due in the next month, quarter, or year.

I can still go to traditional problem list or past medical history or social history sections in the chart. But it’s nice to have things pulled directly into the note where you can see them and understand how they might connect with today’s issues without having to click around.

The last section is simply called “Horizon.” It’s a bit of a catch-all for everything that doesn’t fit into the other two sections, but it includes information that helps the clinician chart a broad course with the patient.

Rather than just having demographic and family history information, it graphically illustrates the patient’s support system. It includes information on their cultural beliefs and practices as well as their general preferences in care. You can go here to figure out whether the patient is motivated to make lifestyle choices or prefers medications to address issues. It’s also where you can see notes on their living will and healthcare directives as well as the nature of any end-of-life care discussions.

Patient portal messages are blissfully absent in this practice. Patients use a secure texting platform to communicate directly with the physician or their coverage. Those interactions are added to the chart at the end of the conversation.

It’s elegant in its simplicity, but it works, primarily because the physician has a smaller patient panel than most insurance-based practices in the area.

I always get whiplash when I go from covering this practice to working in a setting where I’m incentivized to see as many patients as quickly as possible. Still, it reminds me of what it must have been like to be an old-timey physician who really got to know their patients.

For those of you who work with different care delivery organizations, what are some of the most striking differences you see? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Readers Write: Why Patient Wait Times Still Define the Clinic Experience in 2026

Why Patient Wait Times Still Define the Clinic Experience in 2026
By Inger Sivanthi

Inger Sivanthi, MBA is CEO at Droidal.

Outpatient clinics in 2026 look different from those of a decade ago. Scheduling is online. Records are electronic. Patient portals are standard. Most organizations have already spent the money that was required to modernize access.

Long patient wait times have not disappeared. Waiting rooms still fill early. Appointment times slip before the morning is half over. Front desk staff often begin the day responding to issues rather than managing a steady flow. This happens even when staffing levels are reasonable and schedules appear balanced.

When delays show up this early, technology is rarely the cause. The problem usually lies in how the day begins.

Discussions about wait times often focus on staffing gaps, provider availability, or late arrivals. Those explanations only go so far. In many clinics, the bigger issue is incomplete preparation that spills into the first hours of the day.

Much of the information required for a visit is not fully settled when patients arrive. Demographic details are outdated. Insurance coverage has changed. Required documentation is often left unresolved. The issues show up at the front desk, not in reports.

The front desk absorbs the impact of this unfinished work. Questions that should have been resolved earlier get handled under time pressure. Small corrections stack up. By mid-morning, the schedule is already off course.

Digital intake has reduced paperwork, but it has not changed the timing of the work. Patients may submit forms ahead of time, yet staff still need to review, verify, and correct information close to arrival. Insurance questions require follow-up. Consents must be confirmed. Records must align before a visit can proceed smoothly.

Attempts to improve wait times often focus on making check-in faster. More kiosks are installed. Workflows are tightened. Tasks are automated where possible. These steps improve efficiency, but the constraint remains. As long as preparation is concentrated at the start of the visit, the front desk stays under pressure.

Some organizations now treat intake as work that should be largely completed before the patient enters the clinic. When information is settled earlier, the start of the day becomes more stable and less reactive.

To help with earlier preparation, some clinics use pre-visit review tools that scan intake information before the appointment. Missing data, coverage discrepancies, and unresolved items are flagged while staff still have time to respond. Problems that would otherwise surface at the front desk are handled earlier, when schedules are not yet under strain.

These systems do not replace staff judgment. They point attention to likely trouble spots so issues can be resolved before patient flow is affected. Moving this work earlier reduces the amount of recovery required once the clinic is busy.

Check-in becomes steadier. Front desk staff spend less time resolving avoidable issues. Schedules hold closer to plan across the morning. Patients spend less time waiting because fewer problems reach the front of the workflow.

There is concern that completing intake earlier removes personal interaction. Staff often report the opposite. When documentation and coverage issues are addressed ahead of time, conversations at check-in are calmer and less rushed. Visits begin with clearer expectations.

Patient wait times persist in 2026 because too much essential work still occurs at the moment of arrival. Clinics that complete preparation earlier and use pre-visit review selectively tend to operate with greater stability. The difference shows up in a day that runs closer to plan.