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 Their studies could be construed as less rigorous because they are descriptive rather than hypothesis-based, are not peer reviewed, and incorporate any basis or limitations of using data sourced only from Epic customers, but they have the benefit of directly accessing timely, real-world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.

Morning Headlines 2/2/26

Clinical Decision Support Software Guidance for Industry and Food and Drug Administration Staff

Newly issued FDA guidance on clinical decision support software clarifies that it won’t be regulated as a medical device if it meets certain criteria.

Spring Health Joins Forces with Alma, Expanding Access to Precision Mental Health Care

Spring Health, which offers its digital mental healthcare solutions to payers and employers, acquires mental healthcare practice management company Alma.

Rapid City Medical Center to join Monument Health

In South Dakota, Rapid City Medical Center officials say a unified EHR is among the top reasons the center is eager to become a part of Monument Health.

ICE Plans to Compete IHSC Electronic Health Record Modernization Effort

The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) posts an anticipated future contracting opportunity for a correctional EHR for ICE detainees, estimating its cost at $50 million to $100 million.

Monday Morning Update 2/2/26

Top News

Newly issued FDA guidance on clinical decision support software clarifies that it won’t be regulated as medical device if it meets four criteria:

• It does not acquire, process, or analyze a medical image or signal from other devices.
• It displays, analyzes, or prints information such as patient demographics, symptoms, test results, discharge summaries, and medical literature that would be generally communicated by licensed clinicians.
• It makes recommendations to a licensed clinician without replacing their judgment.
• It allows licensed clinicians to review the basis of the recommendation.

Reader Comments

From George: “Re: Oracle Health. The idea that Oracle might sell the business has no factual basis or sourcing and appears to be little more than investment firm speculation, which is often wrong. I also don’t see who would realistically be able to buy it.” I doubt that Oracle Health will be offered for sale, and even if it is, it’s no longer a clean standalone asset, either financially or technically. Few companies could afford to buy it even a discounted price. The business is too complex and unpredictable for private equity or venture capital. Leidos is large enough and could preserve whatever piece of the DoD revenue flows through Oracle Health, but I don’t see it wanting to jump into the EHR product business, although it might like a piece of Cerner government services. We also don’t know who, if anyone, bid against Oracle for Cerner last time, although it was rumored that one other company showed interest. The underlying logic of this speculation is that Oracle needs capital to address its $125 billion in debt and $1.4 trillion in AI data center commitments, but nothing they could do with Oracle Health would make much of a dent. I think Oracle will pay more attention to broad layoffs, access to borrowing, and protecting share price. Or, rework their data center commitments by stretching timelines or bringing in partners. ORCL share price is up a little bit over the past 12 months and has lost 34% in the past three months, so all of the AI hype seems to have been outweighed by the costs involved.  

From Landof10kHITers: “Re: Neil Pappalardo. An absolute giant in the industry. Arguably he is the one who founded the EMR/EHR industry. He doesn’t get near the credit he deserves, though it doesn’t seem he ever wanted that. From the technologies he created that spawned other technologies that are still in use by industry giants today, to the early days help and mentoring with Judy at Epic (as I understand it, Epic functions, in a lot of ways, the same as Meditech — hire new college grads, private company, only promote from within, etc.), and obviously founding and leading Meditech for decades to be a stable software company, and one of the oldest / earliest software companies ever. He will be missed.” Also often missed is that Meditech’s use of his MUMPS programming language spawned another massive business (and another billionaire other than Judy Faulkner) in 2,500-employee InterSystems, which developed its database in 1978. I think that Curt Marble is the only surviving Meditech co-founder – Morton Ruderman, Jerome Grossman, Ed Roberts, and now Neil Pappalardo have passed on.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Just 15% of poll respondents aren’t using AI to some degree or haven’t found it useful for work, but quite a few say that AI has improved their job performance a lot. Mark provided some fascinating details about how he’s using it:

Use case #1: I am creating a guide for others to use, a how to manual for reviewing healthcare vendor contracts. When I documented my parameters, I ended up with a result that shaved hours off the time needed to complete my finished product. Use case #2: I’m not good at creating pretty tables from Excel spread sheets, so I asked Copilot to create one. In under a minute I received output that was nicer and more presentable than anything I could have created on my own. Use case #3: Needed a vendor comparison for a health system with a very complicated set of circumstances. Entered the parameters into the AI tool and received a thoroughly complete analysis from several perspectives. Back when I was a healthcare IT consultant, that kind of effort would have taken weeks to accomplish. Here it was done in minutes.

New poll to your right or here: What statement most strongly indicates that a company is in trouble? I’m honoring the art of spinning a negative into a positive, like Spinal Tap’s manager declaring that the band is still a hot commodity, but “their appeal is becoming more selective.”

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.

People

Andrew Golden (Experian) joins Hyro as RVP of sales.

Announcements and Implementations

Meditech posts a tribute to founder and chairman A. Neil Pappalardo, who died Tuesday at 83. Read and leave thoughts and memories here.

A Surescripts survey finds that more than half of of patients have experienced delays or disruption in getting their prescriptions filled, and 77% would use digital prescription pricing tools.

An Epic Research study finds that early blood pressure treatment by telehealth is as effective as in-person visits as long as blood pressure is measured and recorded.

Government and Politics

The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) posts an anticipated future contracting opportunity for a correctional EHR for ICE detainees, estimating its cost at $50 million to $100 million.

Other

Snow day / slow day dreams. The widow of IDX founder Rich Tarrant sells the Hillsboro Beach, FL estate they built in 2007 for $36.5 million.

Sponsor Updates

• Beauregard Health System integrates Artera’s AI-powered patient communication platform and DrFirst’s prescription engagement solution with its Meditech Expanse system.
• Optimum Healthcare IT publishes a new white paper titled “From Vendor to Vital Partner.”
• Findhelp pledges to CMS that it will help states prepare for and implement Medicaid community engagement requirements enacted through the Working Families Tax Cut legislation.
• Waystar will exhibit at Traumasoft UGM February 2-4 in Orlando.

Blog Posts

• How MCP Creates Safer, More Useful AI for Clinicians and Developers (Medicomp Systems)
• 9 HIMSS Attendee Survival Tips (Med Tech Solutions)
• HFMA WRS 2026: Leading Now in Healthcare Finance (FinThrive)
• Accelerating Cash and Optimizing the Revenue Cycle Post-Epic (Impact Advisors)
• Health Benefits 101: Service Excellence & Scaling an Award-Winning Call Center Model (Judi Health)
• How to Transform Communication with PALTC Providers and Patients (Netsmart)
• Breaking the cycle: reducing costs in NHS re-procurement (Nordic)
• New TrustCommerce Features in Practice Fusion: Streamlined Payments for a Better Patient Experience (TrustCommerce)
• What 1,007 Patients Told Us About the Prescription Experience—And What We’re Doing About It (Surescripts)

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 1/30/26

Picture This: Improved Access, Exchange, and Use of Diagnostic Images

An ASTP/ONC RFI seeks input on image exchange for possible rulemaking.

Premise Health and Crossover Health sign an agreement to create one unified company

Premise Health and Crossover Health, which offer primary care and occupational health services, will merge.

A Tribute to A. Neil Pappalardo

Meditech founder, chairman, and former CEO Neil Pappalardo died Tuesday at 83.

News 1/30/26

Top News

Sword Health acquires Germany-based digital MSK and pulmonary care company Kaia Health for $285 million. Sword will sunset Kaia’s MSK product in the US in favor of its own platform.

Sword plans to raise $500 million in Q1 for expansion and acquisitions.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Reader donations funded the Donors Choose teacher grant request of Mr. S, who teaches high school in Greenwood, DE and asked for help buying chemistry lab supplies and learning tools. He reports, “My students and I were able to experience chemical reactions like never before with a hands on approach rather than watch a video of someone on the internet … This experience allowed me to see the spark for learning that my classroom has been missing. By me engaging the students in the classroom this one time might create the next great chemist or inventor, and for that I cannot thank you enough.”

Amazon will lay off 16,000 employees while “reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy,” which translates to firing rank-and-filers because of an org chart that executives built, tolerated, and now blame. How about starting with the belatedly enlightened suits who created those layers and bureaucracy in the first place? Our industry is littered with “Now we get it” announcements in which so-called rightsizing that somehow always spares the people who did the wrongsizing. Pro tip: ignore anyone quoted in statements like these who has been with the company for two or more years and thus helped create the mess that we are now supposed to believe they have magically fixed by jettisoning worker bees. It is a useful reminder that feel-good Kumbaya capitalism about being a family and valuing associates is performative BS that is touted when times are good and then dumped emotionlessly when knee-jerk cost cutting is required to line the pockets of investors and executives.

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

Virtual OCD provider NOCD acquires trauma self-help platform vendor Rebound Health and renames itself to Noto.

Premise Health and Crossover Health, which offer primary care and occupational health services, will merge. Crossover was co-founded in 2010 by ED physician Scott Shreeve, MD, who had co-founded Medsphere and will remain with the merged organization.

An investment firm speculates that Oracle may undertake mass layoffs and sell its Oracle Health business unit to fund the $156 billion in capital that it needs to build data centers for OpenAi.

People

Woman’s Hospital hires Glynis Cowart, MPA (Montefiore St. Luke’s Cornwall) as SVP/CIO.

CloudWave promotes Brian Pruitt to CTO.

Clearwater announces the hiring of Davis Chaffin, MBA (Load One) as CFO and Krissy Safi, MBA (Protiviti) as SVP of consulting services, and the promotion of Dave Bailey, MBA to VP of consulting solutions and strategy.

Meditech founder, chairman, and former CEO Neil Pappalardo died Tuesday. He was 83. Pappalardo and four MIT-educated co-founders launched Meditech in 1969 to create hospital software using the MUMPS program language that he and fellow founder Curt Marble developed at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Announcements and Implementations

Humana’s healthcare services business CenterWell goes live on Athenahealth’s AthenaOne at 350 senior primary care locations in 15 states.

Virtual primary care and healthcare navigation company Included Health creates a health plan and provider network that it will offer to employers.

AEYE Health, which offers fully autonomous AI-based diabetic eye exams, integrates its product with Epic.

EMurmur earns FDA clearance for its telehealth-capable heart murmur detection software for digital stethoscopes. Companies can integrate the technology with their own software and hardware without requiring additional FDA clearance.

A UK study reports that use of Eko’s AI stethoscope failed to improve detection of heart failure, atrial fibrillation, or valvular heart disease in primary care as adoption fell steadily, with 40% of practices dropping it within a year despite its effectiveness because of workflow friction that was driven by poor EHR integration. The AI stethoscopes whose use physicians resisted increased detection of heart failure by 2.3 times, atrial fibrillation 3.5 times, and VHD 1.9 times.  

Government and Politics

The VA will spend $1 billion in FY2026 to maintain its EHRs and to prepare for implementing Oracle Health in new facilities.

ASTP/ONC posts an RFI that seeks public input on accessing and exchanging diagnostic images to inform possible rulemaking.

Privacy and Security

DataBreaches.net reports that “digital helper” AI care coordination vendor Lena Health stored audio recordings that contain patient information, most of it from Houston Methodist, on unsecured web servers. A security group that is working with law firms to coordinate a class action lawsuit summarizes:

Listening to these confused patients talking to Lena, this company’s “digital helper,” about their private medical issues is a deeply disturbing and uncanny experience. They repeatedly ask Lena what’s wrong with her, why she sounds so weird, but even worse somehow are the patients who do not seem to notice they are not speaking with a human. It is deeply dehumanizing, and profoundly depressing to hear these elderly people … discussing their most personal medical issues with what they think is a compassionate human coordinator, but is actually an LLM trained to extract information so a hospital can save a few pennies on hiring a real human.

Sponsor Updates

• Altera Digital Health announces GA of Sunrise Medical Photography documentation tools, powered by True-See, within its Sunrise platform.
• Clearwater names Davis Chaffin (Load One) CFO.
• WellSky announces new AI-powered referral management workflows aimed at helping home health and hospice providers.
• Findhelp welcomes new partners Colorado Access and Wauwatosa Neighborhood Association Council.
• Healthcare Growth Partners releases its “January 2026 Health IT Market Review.”
• Health Data Movers releases a new episode of its “Quick HITs” podcast featuring Scott Becker.
• Healthmonix’s MIPSpro and ACO Impact receive 2026 CMS Qualified Registry approval.
• Meditech offers a new customer success story titled “Palo Pinto General Hospital Increases Google Reviews, Reduces No-Shows With Expanse Patient Connect.”
• Judi Health releases a new episode of “The Astonishing Healthcare Podcast” titled “A Quick Government Programs Update: The IRA & MPPP, Managing D-SNPs, and More, with Jason Barretto.”

Blog Posts

• The Smarter, Faster Way to Bring Clinical Intelligence to Life (Medicomp Systems)
• Performance to empower confidence: Why responsive technology makes all the difference (Altera Digital Health)
• Impact and challenges of large language models in healthcare (Arcadia)
• Begin Your NextGen AWS Migration Early With MTS (Med Tech Solutions)
• 2026 Healthcare & Health IT Predictions (First Databank)
• How Midsize Healthcare Orgs. Are Cutting Costs with AI-Powered RCM Solutions (FinThrive)
• Healthcare Data Privacy: What Industry Signals Reveal About Deeper Cybersecurity Risk (Fortified Health Security)
• OBBBA Compliance: What Healthcare Providers Need to Know About Qualified Overtime Reporting (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• The CEO Playbook: Medical Group Growth in a Hyper-Competitive Environment (Impact Advisors)
• Are you still charting like it’s 2010? What’s changed with ambient AI (Navina)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 1/29/26

The Journal of the American Medical Association published a research letter this week that looks at how authors are disclosing their use of AI when preparing submissions to professional journals. The JAMA Network has required such disclosures since August 2023. The authors reviewed the data to better understand how AI is being used and disclosed.

Papers in which AI use was declared increased from 1.7% to 6%. Common uses were creating drafts, searching the literature, editing language, developing statistical models, and evaluating data. AI use was more likely in Viewpoints and Letters to the Editor submissions than in Original Investigations.

The paper concludes that without a standard for confirming AI use, it’s difficult to know if authors are underreporting. They add that the results may show a greater need for journals to confirm how authors are using AI and whether it’s appropriate and accurate.

Clinician burnout continues to be a major focus for care delivery and professional organizations. One of the top symptoms that I hear about from colleagues is their inability to disconnect in the digital age. Physicians feel that they need to check their inboxes for patient results and respond to portal messages during off hours to avoid having them piling up.

A new article in the Journal of Medical Systems describes a randomized controlled trial around Reducing Work-Related Screen-Time in Healthcare Workers During Leisure Time (REDUCE SCREEN). Researchers used a straightforward intervention to examine whether a link exists between clinician wellbeing and the use of work-related apps on personal devices. A cohort of 800 physicians, residents, and nurses was divided into a control group and one whose members were instructed to take specific steps to reduce after-hours work, such as using out-of-office notifications and removing work apps from personal devices.

They found that after a scheduled weekend off, those in the intervention group had double the reported reduction in stress compared to those who weren’t instructed to make changes in device use. The intervention group also had an overall reduction in screen time compared to the control group. The study was limited by the fact that one-third of participants failed to complete the post-weekend assessment.

The authors plan additional research to look at interventions that force disengagement from work during non-scheduled hours to see if they are linked not only to less stress, but to improved productivity during working hours.

From Home Care: “Re: AI solutions. My daughter’s college is working on AI solutions that could help individuals with cognitive decline live independently longer. This seems like a much better use of AI than some of the options currently out there.”

The article covers a project that brought computer scientists together with occupational therapists to create an AI assistant to help solve this problem. The team captured videos of patients with and without cognitive decline performing a specific task, then created models to identify cognitive sequencing errors during task completion. The system is cheekily named CHEF (Cognitive Human Error Detection Framework) as it looked at the executive functions needed to prepare oatmeal on a stove.

While a camera captured the subject’s movements, occupational therapy students also provided cues about safety concerns or other errors. The system’s vision-language model integrates videos along with text and images to identify both obvious errors and those that are difficult to detect. The team states, “This is an excellent example of applying the cutting-edge AI to a vital health problem with tremendous public health impact.”

As a family physician who has had many difficult conversations about aging patients who are struggling to remain independent, this is some of the most exciting AI-related work that I’ve seen in recent memory. I hope these types of solutions are a reality by the time I might need them.

HIMSS has announced that the keynote speaker for the upcoming meeting will be actor Jeremy Renner. The announcement promises “a thoughtful look at the intersection of determination, care, and innovation and the impact they can have when people come together in moments that matter most.” Those who register before Friday, January 30 have a chance to win an opportunity to meet him personally.

I did something that I haven’t done in a very long time today. I wrote a paper check to pay for a medical bill. The entire process was frustrating. I received a patient portal message that told me that I had a bill, but I wasn’t able to log in. I thought it was an expired password, but I could access the portal from a different link.

It turns out that the practice operates as two separate entities. They use the same EHR, but each practice has its own patient portal. Going back to the portal that I could access, I saw the billing statement with the header for the other entity.

Clicking the payment link took me to a “page not found” error, so I typed the link manually, with the same outcome. I repeated this process the next day, thinking that maybe it was a site outage, and had the same result. 

I called the number on the bill. They told me that they can’t take payments over the phone, so I was off to find the checkbook. If providers want to be paid in a timely manner, they need to make sure that their systems are working to make it easy for patients to pay.

I received two separate mailings from that practice today. The first was a check, which I assume was mailed by their billing service, that refunded me for an overage for the patient co-insurance portion of a procedure that I had last month. The second was a letter from the practice of the physician who performed the procedure featuring red “Second Notice” stickers to remind me that I was overdue to have the procedure and that they would make no further attempts to schedule it. This right here is US healthcare at its finest.

The American Academy of Pediatrics released its own childhood vaccination schedule this week, breaking with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccine guidance. States are also issuing their own guidance or joining coalitions to discuss common recommendations.

The EHR where I practice most often continues to display legacy recommendations, and I haven’t heard of any plans to update them. I’m not sure if that’s because the work to do so wasn’t slotted into the IT build budget or if facility leadership is making a statement. Some days it’s refreshing to be outside the circle of decision- making, after having done it for so long.

How is your organization approaching the task of updating vaccine recommendations in your EHR? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Morning Headlines 1/29/26

Cleveland Clinic to expand, modernize main campus, CEO says

Cleveland Clinic plans to expand and modernize its main campus in Ohio while it continues to enhance system-wide adoption of AI tools, sepsis-prediction software, workflow automation, virtual nursing, and EHR-integrated digital whiteboards.

VA to invest all-time high of nearly $5B to improve health care infrastructure

The VA plans to spend $1 billion in 2026 on the maintenance and modernization of its Oracle Health-based EHR, which will go live at 13 facilities this year.

Sword Health acquires Kaia Health expanding reach to 100M people

Digital musculoskeletal care provider Sword Health acquires German competitor Kaia Health in a $285 million deal.

Wisp Acquires TBD Health, Launching Enterprise and Hybrid Care Offerings

Women’s telehealth company Wisp acquires sexual health-focused provider TBD Health.

This Week in Health Tech 1/28/26

Healthcare AI News 1/28/26

News

OpenAI introduces Prism, a free ChatGPT-based workplace for scientists to write and collaborate on research.

A Louisiana news site reports that LCMC Health has removed its patient consent disclosure stating that it uses Nabla for ambient documentation. The organization’s compliance department determined that patient consent is not required for other types of note-taking and therefore is not needed for an AI scribe. Louisiana law requires only one-party consent for audio recording, which in this case would be the provider.

Testing finds that the latest version of ChatGPT cites sources that were themselves generated by other AI tools, including Elon Musk’s AI-created encyclopedia Grokipedia, which has been accused of promoting right-wing narratives on controversial topics. Experts question whether AI tools can be trained to ignore AI-generated content that may be incorrect, leading to recursively less accurate information. When asked by a news outlet about a fabricated quote that was attributed to the site, an XAI spokesperson responded, “Legacy media lies.”

Business

The Guardian warns that Google’s AI Overviews could pose a public health risk because they summarize search results that may be inaccurate or low quality. A study of health-related queries found that AI Overviews rely heavily on content from Google’s YouTube that anyone can upload. Experts caution that users may accept the summaries at face value, and that even when summarizing medical literature, the tool can’t assess the quality of research.

Research

A Wolters Kluwer survey finds that 58% of nurses use generative AI in their personal lives and 46% at work. Nearly half believe that AI could reduce nurse burnout by automating documentation, triaging patient questions, and streamlining workflows, while 62% say that using AI for onboarding and training can get new nurses onto the floor faster. Most report that their organizations lack formal AI policies or training.

A small UCSD Health study finds that clinicians generally view Epic’s EHR-integrated LLM chart review tool as useful for summarizing patient records, even though it frequently misses relevant details and occasionally hallucinates, requiring careful human verification. The authors conclude that such tools can augment workflows, but are not reliable enough to be used without clinician oversight.

Researchers believe that agentic AI systems could help hospitals prepare for extreme climate events that fall outside of emergency planning assumptions.

A study finds that of the 42% of US hospitals that use Epic, 62% have implemented ambient documentation. Adoption was significantly higher in metropolitan and government-operated hospitals and much higher in non-profit versus for-profit hospitals.

Other

ChatGPT Health gives the Washington Post’s technology columnist an F for cardiac health after analyzing a decade of his Apple Watch data, a conclusion that his physician and Eric Topol, MD, say is wrong. When he repeated the test with Anthropic’s Claude for Healthcare, it assigned a C, although both tools changed their grades when he repeated the same question. He also notes that his resting heart rate reports a significantly different number each time he upgrades his Apple Watch. Topol concludes that, “You’d think that they would come up with something much more sophisticated, aligned with the practice of medicine and the knowledge base in medicine. Not something like this. This is very disappointing.”

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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Send news or rumors.
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Readers Write: Killing the Clipboard: Cloud Fax is the Bridge to Patient-Centric Data Access

Killing the Clipboard: Cloud Fax is the Bridge to Patient-Centric Data Access
By Bevey Miner

Bevey Miner is a healthcare strategist at eFax, a Consensus Cloud Solutions brand.

The Trump Administration’s renewed focus on interoperability has reignited the long-standing calls for healthcare to “Kill the Clipboard.” This movement aims to eliminate the administrative burden and data silos that are caused by paper-based processes, allowing for near-instant access to searchable, actionable patient information.

The industry broadly supports modernization efforts, with patient access at the forefront. But we need to ensure that this digital transformation doesn’t leave small, rural, and under-resourced communities behind.

The paper problem: why change takes time

We cannot wait for every provider to achieve a perfect, fully digital state before we start delivering on the promise of interoperability. Patients must have access to their data now, even if parts of the industry are still using clipboards and paper fax.

With the federal initiative to bolster near-instant patient access to their health records, along with real-time patient data accessible for providers to dramatically speed care coordination, paper records that are transmitted over outdated fax machines don’t support and often impede the ability to reach this goal. The administration is leaning heavily on data networks and vendors to streamline the transmission of information between healthcare providers while modernizing standards with FHIR APIs.

Conceptually, the future we are all working towards is faster data access, searchable and actionable information to improve care, and seamless communication between care teams. This idealized future state fails to account for the practical limitations that are facing many foundational healthcare organizations. 

Twenty-nine percent of providers report that they lack the financial resources that are needed to deploy the advanced digital infrastructures that are required by today’s interoperability vision.

Many organizations, like rural and smaller post-acute care settings, are still playing catch-up since they were excluded from incentives that accompanied the HITECH act of 2009. While some of these organizations may have an EHR, it may be outdated and not certified. Additionally, it’s not uncommon to find others working with scrappier, home-grown solutions, or even resorting to paper-based and manual processes.

But while these smaller organizations might not have million-dollar EHR platforms, they do have paper fax. In order for healthcare organizations of all sizes to participate in the move to “Kill the Clipboard,” they are turning to digital cloud fax.

Cloud fax: healthcare’s guilty pleasure

A recent survey found that 46% of healthcare facilities still use paper fax to send and receive patient data. If the healthcare industry is so dedicated to moving past paper, why do these archaic systems persist?

The simple answer is that, while we are attempting to replace the paper fax machine with a structured data format like FHIR, we still need the next level of communication maturity: cloud fax. Once a fax becomes digital, additional data-sharing capabilities become possible. 

Cloud fax offers all the benefits of paper fax and is much more efficient. It is particularly easy to use and can be fully integrated into other applications via APIs. For decades, it has served as the standard method for document and digital data transmission in healthcare because it checks many boxes. It meets HIPAA and HITRUST standards and is universally compatible with other systems that operate in silos.

Simply put, cloud fax is the most common and accessible form of send and receive communication in our industry. Calls to prevent its ubiquitous use demonstrate a fundamental unawareness of current operational realities and the power of digital transformation to modernize and integrate cloud fax, rather than simply eliminate it.

Send, receive, find: AI-powered digital cloud fax goes the extra mile

Digital cloud fax provides robust send and receive capabilities, but to meet the CMS definition of interoperability, “find” is another key component. To find information, the data must be discoverable. New AI capabilities are helping fax go the extra mile, transforming traditionally unstructured, static documents into structured, actionable insights using intelligent data extraction. This is critical to advancing interoperability since as much as 80% of healthcare data remains unstructured.

Innovations in machine learning and LLMs enable unstructured data from digital faxes, scanned images, TIFFs, and other PDFs to be extracted from nearly any type of health document, including intake content, claims, handwritten forms, and more, and place it directly into a structured system like an EHR or a payer workflow. When these AI tools are built on digital cloud fax platforms to start, they are already leveraging a technology that most healthcare organizations have in place. Implementation is significantly easier and less time-consuming than adding an entirely new system to an organization’s already overloaded and fragmented tech stack.

Delivering superior reliability and security, intelligent digital cloud fax acts as a connector between various types of data files and formats, sharing both structured and unstructured data between healthcare organizations that span various levels of digital sophistication.

Time to face the fax

For many healthcare organizations, digital cloud fax isn’t a roadblock, but an accelerator, enabling them to keep up with more tech-savvy counterparts without the heavy investment in rip and replace technology. It also supports the ongoing FHIR mandates and regulatory changes impacting providers at every level.

By recognizing digital cloud fax as a necessary part of day-to-day operations, as it is at most healthcare organizations, we can better understand how this tool can help us reach interoperability faster, while facilitating the digital transformation of as many organizations as possible.

Healthcare’s reliance on digital cloud fax should not be treated as a guilty secret. Instead, it’s an equalizer and an opportunity. Once we realize its full potential, interoperability initiatives will be more achievable and successful than ever.

Morning Headlines 1/28/26

Health Gorilla Releases Statement in Response to Epic Lawsuit

Health Gorilla says that the lawsuit that Epic Systems and several health systems filed against it contains unfounded allegations about the company’s role in data exchange.

Anthropic closes latest funding round above $10 billion and could go higher, sources say

Claude for Healthcare parent company Anthropic raises additional funding, with sources putting this latest round at between $10 billion and $15 billion.

Kodiak Solutions Acquires Besler to Enhance Kodiak’s Revenue Integrity and Reimbursement Services for Hospitals, Health Systems, and Medical Practices

Healthcare revenue optimization company Kodiak Solutions acquires Besler, which specializes in hospital revenue cycle consulting and technology.

NOCD Buys Rebound Health, Creates Parent Company Noto to Expand Specialty Behavioral Health Services

Virtual OCD treatment provider NOCD acquires virtual trauma therapy company Rebound Health.

News 1/28/26

Top News

Bloomberg reports that the valuation of prior authorization technology vendor Tandem Technology has reached $1 billion, with an anticipated $100 million in new funding.

Tandem founder and CEO Sahir Jaggi was previously a director at insurance company Oscar Health.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

It’s that time of year when LinkedIn is flooded with graphics posted by proud show-uppers. The HIMSS ones are also piling up. I’m only slightly annoyed at pitches by scheduled presenters who are trying to drum up attendance, but just being in the convention center is not newsworthy. It won’t be long before the “influencers” start posting their mandatory ViVE-fawning posts (three before, three during, three after) to pay for their free badge and accompanying sense of self-importance.

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.

People

HURC names Kevin Coloton, MPT, MBA (Reveleer) CEO.

Elissa Baker, RN (American Telemedicine Association) joins Nesa as president and chief clinical officer.

MedeAnalytics names David Figueredo (Experian) chief innovation officer.

Nicholas Testa, MD (CommonSpirit Health) joins Sentact as chief clinical officer.

Sevaro Health names Carl Dugart (Medically Home) CTO and Vineet Agrawal, MBA (DocSpera) head of growth.

Artera promotes Tom McIntyre, MS, MBA to president, Michael Jensen to CFO, Zach Wood, MBA to chief product and strategy officer, and Emily Coy to VP of communications and integrated marketing.

Dartmouth Health hires Randa Perkins, MD, MBA (Moffitt Cancer Center) as CHIO.

Announcements and Implementations

Qure.ai secures a multi-million dollar Gates Foundation grant to develop AI-powered point-of-care ultrasound tools that are aimed at detecting tuberculosis and pneumonia in low-resource settings. The project also includes building an open, multimodal data platform to support global lung health research and deployment at scale. The company’s products are being used by 4,800 sites in 105 countries.

Health Gorilla says that the lawsuit that Epic Systems and several health systems filed against it contains unfounded allegations about the company’s role in data exchange. Health Gorilla says that it suspended the disputed connections of some of its clients and accuses Epic of using litigation to stifle competition in interoperability. Health Gorilla says that it operates in conformance with all laws and requirements and accuses Epic of using litigation as a weapon so it can “monetize clinical data exchanges for their own benefit.” An Epic spokesperson provided this statement:

Health Gorilla enabled their customers to sell identifiable patient medical records to class-action law firms without patients’ consent or health systems’ knowledge. They had an obligation to protect patients’ intimate health information. Instead, they violated the privacy of hundreds of thousands of people. Epic and health systems together filed this lawsuit to hold Health Gorilla and other bad actors accountable and to stop further abuse and misuse of patients’ sensitive information.

Midwives at some NHS hospitals that use Epic are given the option to record the gender identity, sexual orientation, and pronouns of newborns, but according to a midwife quoted in The Times, lack a dedicated field to record biological sex in the same workflow. An executive of a sex rights charity criticized the configuration, saying, “The concept of babies having a gender identity is farcical, whereas a baby’s sex is essential medical information,” and argued that some trusts have prioritized ideological preferences over clinical clarity. A spokesperson for the One Devon Electronic Patient Record project says that any claims that Epic requires information about the gender identity or sexual orientation of newborns are incorrect, and the only mandatory entries are date of birth and legal sex. Epic has not publicly commented on the article.

Government and Politics

The VA Office of Inspector General’s annual report lists information systems and innovation among the top five management and performance challenges facing the department, particularly highlighting its beleaguered EHR modernization efforts. The Oracle Health-based program will restart this April at four sites in Michigan.

Other

The Connecticut College of Emergency Physicians develops a public dashboard that displays ER boarding trends across hospitals throughout the state to gain insight into ED overcrowding. State lawmakers passed a law in 2023 that requires hospitals to annually report their boarding data through 2029.

Nassau University Medical Center sues seven former executives, including its CIO, alleging that they received $1 million in improper payouts when they resigned in May and later refused to give the money back. Many of the hospital’s executives quit after the state took over the financially struggling hospital’s board. The hospital filed a $10 million lawsuit against the former hospital CEO who authorized the payouts. Her name is Meg Ryan, should you have a surplus of “When Harry Met Sally” Katz’s Delicatessen scene bon mots.

Sponsor Updates

• Black Book Research publishes its Trust Framework, a formal standard that defines how the firm designs research programs, benchmarks performance, and recognizes high-performing healthcare technology and services providers.
• Optimum Healthcare IT posts a new white paper titled “From Vendor to Vital Partner.”
• Cardamom is recognized as the “#1 Best Place to Work” in the Madison area by Madison Magazine.

Blog Posts

• A Guide to the Use of AI in Healthcare: Deploying a Realistic Approach (Med Tech Solutions)
• Health system size impacts AI privacy and security concerns (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• The reality of cyberthreats: Why preparing for a breach is your best defense (Altera Digital Health)
• Advancing Rural Health Transformation: Reflections from a JPM Health Week Roundtable (Arcadia)
• AI Voice Agents in Healthcare: Inbound vs. Outbound (Artera)
• Looking back, leaping forward: Healthcare AI predictions for 2026 (Cardamom)
• JPM 2026 Takeaways: Cybersecurity in Healthcare PE Diligence (Clearwater)
• What 14 Ironmans, 50+ Marathons, and 30 Years in Healthcare IT Have Taught Me About Leadership (Divurgent)

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 1/27/26

AI-for-Prescriptions Startup Tandem Lands $1 Billion Valuation

Bloomberg reports that automated medication access startup Tandem Technology has achieved a $1 billion valuation with an anticipated $100 million in new funding.

Pair Team Announces Acquisition of Town Square to Expand Community-Connected Care for Medicare and Medicaid Beneficiaries

Care coordination company Pair Team acquires competitor Town Square.

CT launches country’s first public dashboard to track and fix emergency room overcrowding

The Connecticut College of Emergency Physicians develops a public dashboard that displays emergency department boarding trends across hospitals throughout the state.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 1/26/26

Significant portions of the US are experiencing arctic temperatures and significant snowfall this weekend. As the storm approached my area, I touched base with nursing staff at several hospitals to see how they were ensuring adequate staffing despite deteriorating road conditions.

They generally offered options for staff to sleep on campus, but approached the situation in drastically different ways. One hospital enticed nurses to sleep on campus to guarantee attendance, paid a retention bonus for the time between shifts, and provided meals Another sent a text message that was less than welcoming, treating those who planned to stay at the hospital as a burden by telling them to bring their own bed linens and towels. I’m betting that employee satisfaction differs between those facilities.

Speaking of things that didn’t resonate well during the storm, the marketing folks at Starbucks should reconsider their tactics during winter storms. While the National Weather Service was issuing advisories and our city and state public safety officials were urging people to stay off the roads, Starbucks was blowing up my phone with discount drink offers.

It seems like it would be easy to suppress those promotions in area codes where people shouldn’t be on the roads, whether they’re customers or employees. People who have storm-belt area codes might live elsewhere in the US, but I would guess that they are in the minority. Better yet, come up with a promo code that people can enable that becomes active in three or four days, when they start to tunnel out and are looking for a treat. My city is still focusing on clearing interstates and critical roads, so I will be staying put for a while.

We became skilled at pivoting to virtual meetings during the COVID pandemic, so I was surprised to see some meetings cancel off of my schedule even though they could have been held as web meetings or even as old-school conference calls. I could understand this for small organizations that might have let their virtual meeting subscriptions lapse, but these cancellations involve larger organizations that routinely have at least one or two people on video due to travel constraints.

Childcare issues could be at play due to school closures, but one of the only bright spots of the pandemic was getting to virtually meet the families and pets of my co-workers.

In last week’s Healthcare AI News, Mr. H mentioned the growing concerns that we are on the cusp of seeing AI-related malpractice lawsuits. Frankly, I’m surprised that we’re not already there, given how I see some of my colleagues using AI tools.

Quite a few knowledgeable clinicians, including clinical informaticists and AI researchers, understand the limits of AI. But large numbers of people are overly trusting of the content they see coming out of LLMs.

I’ve seen people cut and paste content containing obvious errors directly from a non-clinical AI tool into the EHR. I’ve also seen people operate wildly outside their scope of practice based on the ability to quickly access information that may or may not be accurate. Unfortunately, these are the situations where people don’t know what they don’t know, and LLMs can be extremely convincing even when they are wrong.

As an example, I recently saw a patient who was accompanied by a physician family member. The family member had a predetermined outcome that they wanted to achieve during the visit. They apparently thought that paying an $80 co-pay entitled them to see a physician who would suspend their professional knowledge and judgment and do the electronic equivalent of whipping out a prescription pad and ordering what they wanted.

I explained the clinical situation, the evidence-based recommendations, what I saw on the patient’s exam, what I had gathered from their history, and why I believed that the requested medication wasn’t appropriate in that scenario. The family member began arguing with me and was showing me his phone with his previous searches on the topic as a way to prove his point. Especially given that his specialty training wasn’t even close to the body system in question, he wasn’t aware that the articles being cited were only tangentially related to the diagnosis.

Fortunately, I’ve spent the last couple of decades working with patients who bring their internet research to the visit. I’m pretty good at educating while arriving at a plan of care that is mutually acceptable. However, I don’t have a lot of experience arguing with a peer who is putting blind trust in the output of a generative AI tool, so it was new territory.

I used my emergency department-mandated de-escalation training, so we managed to make it through the visit once one of the other family members in the room made the physician family member leave. With situations like this on the daily, it’s no wonder that clinicians have lost the joy in medicine. Having to argue with AI-generated errors when a patient’s health is at stake is something that none of us signed up for.

Mr. H also mentioned ECRI’s annual list of technology hazards, and I was gratified to see one of my soapbox issues in the number two position. “Unpreparedness for a ‘Digital Darkness’ Event” is a fancy way to say that an organization isn’t ready for an unplanned downtime. Maybe making it sound more exciting will convince people that they need to do something to get ready.

We should all know that cyberattacks are a “when” situation rather than an “if” these days, and that network or vendor outages are entirely possible. For clinicians who have always been dependent on the tools and safeguards that are built into the EHR, having to work without those can be frightening. It’s one thing to not have calculators or references at your disposal, but not being able to see the overall picture of what’s going on in the intensive care unit at full capacity is something else entirely.

Those of us who practiced in the olden days remember the large paper ICU progress notes that were the size of a poster board, but could fold up to fit in a standard medical chart. With just a glance, we could quickly figure out what was going on with a patient and formulate the best questions to ask during shift change.

The availability of electronic dashboards and monitoring suites has rewired those parts of my brain, but I bet that mental model is still in there somewhere and I could access it in a pinch. We need to remember that soon there will be more clinicians who have never seen that kind of paper documentation than those who have, and adjust our downtime preparations accordingly.

Are you prepared for a digital darkness event? Have you experienced any outages due to snowmageddon? Is your hospital treating staff who have to stay overnight in the facility like a blessing or a burden? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.