Readers Write: A Global Perspective on Advancing Precision Medicine with Genomic EHR Integration
By Jennifer Ford
Jennifer Ford, MBA is manager of clinical product management and genomics at Meditech.
The promise of precision medicine is simple, using genetic data to identify the best treatment for each patient as quickly as possible.
During my travels to South Africa and Namibia, healthcare leaders in both urban and remote areas shared enthusiasm for the role of EHRs in incorporating genomic data to guide treatment decisions. However, it also made wonder that if the passion for advanced technologies like genomics is so universally embraced, then what barriers are holding us back from widespread adoption?
The Challenges of Adopting a Precision Medicine Program
Despite its promise, adoption of genomics and precision medicine has been slow. Several challenges, both real and perceived, are hindering its adoption:
These challenges and misconceptions often stem from experiences that predate the integration of genetic data into the EHR, but the paradigm can change.
Overcoming the Challenges of Adopting a Precision Medicine Program
I’ve worked with healthcare leaders who are integrating genomics into the EHR. The result has been that when genetic data is ingested discretely into the EHR, clinical alerts become available for each patient based on their genetic information, enabling personalized patient care.
Genetics is not just for academic centers. I’ve seen the value that community hospitals gain when patients receive genetically-led services locally rather than traveling to larger academic medical centers. By equipping community clinics with a user-friendly, plug-and-play solution, they can focus on translational research that will lower costs, improve accessibility, and achieve better patient outcomes.
The Benefits of Adopting a Precision Medicine Program
The benefits of genomics in healthcare are becoming increasingly clear. The use of genomic data extends beyond cancer treatment, as health systems are using it to improve behavioral health treatment, newborn and pediatric care, and health and weight management. Having effective technology that can analyze genomic data to provide clinical support empowers clinicians to deliver more targeted patient treatment and support population health objectives. Adopting a genomics program can also support service line growth.
Global Precision Medicine Initiatives
Various initiatives worldwide are bringing genetic testing to the forefront of healthcare. Each area of the world faces distinct challenges related to geography, patient demographics, and scaling testing opportunities.
In South Africa and Namibia, healthcare leaders shared their desire to improve access to genetic testing in African nations. To reduce costs and maximize the benefits of genomic data, they are experimenting with leveraging social determinants of health to identify and prioritize patient cohorts to whom they will deploy testing. Where technological infrastructure may be limited, national labs are looking for ways to more equitably transport and perform testing from remote villages using drones, satellite internet services, and other technologies.
In England, the National Health Service (NHS) announced a £650m investment to provide every baby in England with DNA screening to identify potentially fatal diseases and to offer personalized healthcare as part of the government’s 10-year plan. The NHS recognizes that when patients receive personalized healthcare to prevent ill health before symptoms begin, it will reduce the pressure on NHS services and help people live longer, healthier lives. In the US, a similar approach has been announced in Florida’s Sunshine Genetics Act, which funds newborn genome sequencing pilots. These efforts are helping shift the paradigm toward proactive, personalized healthcare.
In Maryland, Frederick Health operates a dedicated precision medicine and genetics clinic that uses genomic data for precision medicine in behavioral health and beyond. In a Scottsdale Institute presentation, they shared how they addressed cost concerns by negotiating testing costs with laboratories and started a rapidly growing clinical trials program. They use genomic data to identify patients for clinical trials, increasing enrollment and improving care. They have found that moving clinical trials into the community hospital space increased revenue.
Ontario Shores Center for Mental Health Services in Canada announced that it would offer free pharmacogenetic testing of eligible patients to improve outcomes. The testing is initially focused on improving the treatment of patients who are admitted with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder, with plans for future expansion to use pharmacogenomics in behavioral health management.
Final Thoughts: Adopting Precision Medicine in Clinical Care is Essential
The more that genetic data is integrated into the EHR, the faster widespread deployment will occur. As clinicians find meaningful utility in genetic data, the importance of a strong precision medicine program shifts from a nice-to-have to a must- have. The key factor is how the EHR can leverage genetic data to improve patient outcomes.
As applications for genetic data evolve, an established genetic program becomes essential to improving physician satisfaction by empowering them with the advanced tools that they need to provide the best possible patient care.
When the Cloud Becomes the Attack Surface
By Brian McManamon
Brian McManamon, MBA is general manager of managed security and managed services at Clearwater.
Healthcare organizations often talk about cloud as though it is a destination. In reality, for most hospitals, it has become an operating layer that keeps expanding.
That expansion did not usually happen through one formal strategy. It happened incrementally through SaaS adoption, remote access, vendor integrations, analytics tools, backup environments, and acquisitions. What many organizations now manage is not a clean cloud migration, but a hybrid environment made up of on-premises systems, cloud platforms, and third-party services that are tied together through identity and connectivity.
That matters because the cloud is no longer just part of the technology stack. In many environments, it has become part of the attack surface.
For many hospitals, “moving to the cloud” does not mean shutting down the data center and rebuilding everything as cloud-native. It usually means adding cloud services around existing operations. Clinical and business systems may still sit on-premises while identity, disaster recovery, remote access, analytics, and collaboration tools increasingly depend on cloud services. SaaS expands the footprint even further, often without being treated internally as part of the organization’s cloud environment.
That is where risk begins to grow quietly.
One of the most common misconceptions is that cloud is secure by default because the provider is secure. Major providers such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud invest heavily in securing their platforms. What they do not secure is each customer’s implementation.
Hospitals still own the responsibility for identity, configuration, access controls, logging, monitoring, and governance. If those areas are weak, cloud adoption can expand exposure faster than teams realize.
The opposite misconception is also common. Some organizations assume that keeping critical systems on-premises limits cloud risk. In practice, many of those same organizations have already adopted cloud identity, SaaS, remote vendor access, and external integrations. They have become hybrid whether they planned to or not. The difference is that they may not be managing that reality with a clear operating model.
Hybrid itself is not the failure. It is normal. In many cases, it is the natural result of smart teams making practical decisions over time.
A department adopts a new SaaS platform. IT centralizes identity. A cloud backup initiative begins. A new analytics platform is introduced. An acquisition brings another tenant, another domain, or another set of inherited tools. None of those decisions is inherently problematic. The problem is that governance and visibility often do not scale at the same pace.
That is when the cloud starts to become the attack surface.
The risk shows up first in identity. In hybrid healthcare environments, identities increasingly function as the control plane. Privileged roles accumulate. Service accounts remain active without clear ownership. Exceptions to MFA or conditional access persist longer than intended. Shared administrative access and standing privileges expand the potential blast radius of a single compromise.
An attacker no longer needs to move through the environment in the old ways if they can come through a valid account, exploit a policy exception, or take advantage of weakly governed permissions in a cloud-connected system.
The problem is compounded by visibility gaps. Many healthcare organizations do a strong job monitoring endpoints and network activity, yet cloud signals often remain fragmented. Logs may live across multiple consoles, subscriptions, tenants, and SaaS environments. Security teams may be watching the perimeter closely while missing critical changes in role assignments, application permissions, data shares, or service account behavior.
When those signals are not centralized and correlated, detection slows down. In some cases, it never happens at all.
Data sprawl adds another layer of risk. Healthcare environments generate copies of sensitive data for backups, archives, exports, analytics, and testing. Over time, protected health information can end up in more places than intended, sometimes with broader access and weaker protections than production systems. The issue is not only where the data started, but where it moved, who can reach it, and whether that movement is being governed consistently.
This is why cloud security in healthcare cannot be treated as a narrow infrastructure question. It is a governance question, an identity question, and ultimately a resilience question.
Cloud can improve resilience, but only when it is designed deliberately. Redundancy, scale, and operational flexibility can be real advantages. But those advantages weaken quickly if identity becomes a single point of failure, if disaster recovery exists only on paper, or if dependencies across cloud, SaaS, and legacy systems are not fully understood. In a hospital, resilience is not just uptime. It is the ability to support patient care when systems are under stress.
Good governance in that environment does not mean a large policy binder sitting on a shelf. It means a small number of clear, enforceable standards.
Hospitals need defined ownership for subscriptions, accounts, and services. They need baseline guardrails that prevent unsafe defaults. They need identity governance that prioritizes least privilege, manages non-human identities, and reviews exceptions regularly. They need enough centralized logging and alerting to see meaningful changes in the environment and act on them.
Most importantly, governance has to work in a 24/7 clinical setting. That means building models that support urgent care delivery without abandoning accountability. Exceptions may be necessary, but they should be time-bound, documented, owned, and reviewed.
The cloud is not the problem by itself. Unmanaged cloud is.
For healthcare leaders, one of the most useful next steps is a practical reality check. Inventory the tenants, subscriptions, service accounts, and privileged identities that are already in use. Confirm ownership. Review standing administrative access. Identify where visibility into cloud activity is missing. In most organizations, the attack surface has expanded gradually enough that no single decision created the problem. That is exactly why it deserves attention now.
In healthcare, the fundamentals still apply. Know your environment. Govern identity and access. Maintain visibility into critical systems and data flows.
The cloud becomes dangerous when organizations stop treating it as infrastructure and start assuming it will govern itself.
Mount Sinai Health System will use Midstream Health’s financial AI platform to identify supply chain cost-saving opportunities.
A Trilliant Health analysis finds that hospitals that adopt AI-enabled medical scribing tools subsequently code more outpatient visits at higher complexity. The authors say that the change could reflect more complete documentation rather than upcoding, but the data cannot determine whether the shift represents improved accuracy or a change in billing behavior. They note, however, that all parties have access to data that could identify the reasons for the coding changes.
A Doximity report finds that 95% of physicians are interested in using AI, and one-third are already using it daily or more often in practice. The most common use is for literature search, while voice-based documentation increased significantly. Three-fourths of physicians say that AI reduces administrative workload and improves job satisfaction, while two-thirds believe that it has improved patient care and outcomes.
VSee launches an autonomous telehealth AI robot for hospitals that uses LiDAR navigation to allow remote clinicians to send it to a patient’s bedside. The system can be autonomously dispatched for telestroke and rapid response and can perform patient check-in, supply delivery, and patient identification.
Heartio, which offers an AI-powered tool for detecting coronary artery disease from standard ECGs, raises $4.25 million in funding.
West Virginia University Health System deploys Brainomix’s AI imaging stroke diagnosis solution across all of its 25 sites.
Mount Sinai researchers find that clinical AI systems perform more accurately and efficiently when tasks are distributed among multiple specialized AI agents that are coordinated by an orchestrator, rather than being handled by a single general-purpose agent.
OpenAI’s mental health experts express unanimous concern about the company’s plan to allow erotic conversations in ChatGPT, warning that it could foster unhealthy emotional dependence in users and give minors access to sex chats. The company delayed its planned Q1 release of the capability but says that it will eventually make it available. OpenAI has reportedly struggled to implement guardrails that can filter conversations about nonconsensual behavior and sexual abuse. It will also restrict ChatGPT’s ability to generate erotic images, voice, or video.
Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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Healthcare pricing and payment platform vendor Turquoise Health raises a $40 million Series C funding round.
Knowtion Health Acquires Revly
RCM company Knowtion Health acquires revenue cycle services and consulting firm Revly.
OpenAI preps for IPO by end of year, tells employees ChatGPT must be ‘productivity tool’
ChatGPT parent company OpenAI renews its focus on enterprise business as it prepares to go public by the end of this year.
Healthcare pricing and payment platform vendor Turquoise Health raises a $40 million Series C funding round.
From ExecPhysicianCalifornia: “Re: wrongful death complaint filed against Epic. The case is Fischman v. Epic Systems Corporation, Case No. 3:26‑cv‑00770‑D, was filed on March 10, 2026.” Thanks for those details, which allowed me to download the filing. Summary:
From Dr. Nick: “Re: ‘Scrubs.’ The relaunch covers the pit stop analogy, where we are forced into RVUs and timed interactions that demand speed over safety or compassion, amongst other things.” Trivia: the original was filmed in North Hollywood Medical Center, which was closed in 1998, torn down in 2011, and replaced with apartments. Patients kept showing up in the lobby because they saw prop ambulances parked outside.
None scheduled soon. Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.
Sutter Health will acquire Allina Health, with the California-only system pledging to invest $2 billion in Allina and allowing it to continue using the Allina Health name. The combined organization will have $26 billion in revenue, 39 hospitals, 88,000 employees, and 400 care sites. I believe they both use Epic.
Google removes the “What People Suggest” feature from its search, which provided AI-generated summaries of crowdsourced medical advice.
Google says that it will invest $10 million to fund organizations that incorporate AI in clinician education. The company also will add an “Ask” button to health videos on YouTube so that users can request AI explanations, add a connection to continuous glucose monitors in Health Connect, and link to medical records in the Fitbit app.
Philips announces a cloud-enabled version of its IntelliSite Pathology Solution on HealthSuite.
Southeast Georgia Health System will implement digital billing software from RevSpring later this month.
West Virginia University Medicine expands its pilot of Abridge’s AI-based clinical documentation software to 1,200 clinicians.
In Colorado, Heart of the Rockies Regional Medical Center will implement Epic through a Community Connect arrangement with Aspen Valley Health.
Censinet announces GA of GRC AI, an automated governance, risk, and compliance platform; and additional enhancements to its healthcare cybersecurity risk-management solutions.
Azara Healthcare will integrate its population health and value-based care solutions with Meditech Expanse.
Vanderbilt University Medical Center (TN) attributes its brief EHR downtime early Monday morning to an Epic-related outage. Epic noted that it was “aware of one healthcare organization experiencing technical issues.”
Perelman School of Medicine researchers determine that telemedicine visits at Penn Medicine are less expensive than in-person visits after analyzing EHR and billing data from 160,000 visits conducted over four months. They found that initial virtual visits were charged $96 versus $509 for the in-person visit. Telemedicine patients had one fewer follow-up visits within 30 days of their first appointment than did in-person patients.
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Nadia Care Raises $12 Million to Expand Community-Centered Maternal Care Model Across the US
Payer-focused, hybrid maternal healthcare company Nadia Care announces $12 million in funding.
Understood Care Raises $8.4M to Scale AI-Native Infrastructure Layer for Patient Advocacy
Understood Care, which offers Medicare patients virtual patient advocacy and care navigation services, announces $8.4 million in funding.
Access to patient records restored after brief outage at Vanderbilt University Medical Center
Vanderbilt University Medical Center (TN) attributes its brief EHR downtime early Monday morning to an Epic-related outage.
Mr. H recently mentioned the ECRI “Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns” list. It highlights this year’s 10 “most critical patient safety challenges anticipated to impact the healthcare industry.”
I appreciated one of the particular call to action paragraphs in the report:
For decades, safety advocates have made the case for patient safety on moral grounds. That foundation remains unshakable, but there’s an equally compelling financial argument that’s impossible to ignore. Unsafe care isn’t just dangerous; it’s expensive.
The report goes on to highlight the $17 billion annual cost of preventable adverse events in US hospitals. More than 12% of health-related spending in high-income countries involves managing the downstream effects of safety issues.
I’ve tried to make that point to organizational leaders countless times over the last two decades. Sometimes it’s difficult to convince them that the math works. Despite growing financial penalties for quality mishaps, organizations still put themselves at risk because they can’t find the budget to do more than pay lip service to risk mitigation.
Not all remedies are expensive. Some are as straightforward as revisiting roles and responsibilities documents to make sure that processes are clearly assigned and managed. It could also involve taking advantage of new technology features that the organization is paying for but hasn’t yet implemented, resulting in waste. It’s foolish as well as dangerous to fail to embrace revenue-neutral process changes.
The report notes that patient safety concerns are systemic, and that addressing them requires work in four categories: culture, leadership and governance; patient and family caregiver engagement; workforce safety and wellbeing; and learning systems.
Topics nominated for the list were reviewed by experts in medicine, nursing, pharmacy, human factors engineering, quality, risk management, patient safety, and technology. They were ranked by severity, frequency, breadth of patient impact, insidiousness, and visibility. The report notes that organizations can’t address every concern, but should use available tools to identify their risk scores and perform a gap analysis against the recommendations.
Concerns with AI-powered diagnostic tools made the top of the list. One that caught my eye was that some models are more accurate when prompts are created using textbook-style descriptions instead of being formulated based on conversations with standardized patients.
The authors noted challenges with AI detection of certain types of cancers or rare diseases, even in areas where AI has a long track record of helpfulness, such as supporting diagnostic radiology.
Those of us working on AI projects deal every day with bias, lack of transparency, challenges with users being able to identify hallucinations, and erosion of clinicians’ critical thinking skills.
Solid action recommendations include AI usage policies, governance, appropriate training, documentation of when and where AI is being used, disclosure of such to patients, usage of human factors assessments and engineering tools, processes to document concerns, and ensuring that critical thinking skills are emphasized in staff training.
These are processes that organizations typically have in their toolkit for other technologies or interventions. Leaders shouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel to begin to take action just because it’s a new technology.
Number two on the list is increasing health risks and disparities caused by reduced access to rural healthcare. Rural hospitals have been at risk of closure for years, and more and more patients are finding themselves living in healthcare deserts. Private equity firms swooped in to buy hospitals and then saddled them with debt, sometimes destroying the community’s healthcare ecosystem.
Rural hospitals can’t achieve the economies of scale that larger organizations might, which increases the cost of care. Rural areas also may have higher percentages of Medicare and Medicaid patients, which tips the equation even more to the negative.
The report calls for expanding telehealth and telepharmacy services, creating mobile health clinics for primary care and preventive services, and partnering with community organizations to educate patients. It also recommends looking at transportation programs to improve patient access and partnering with educational and government organizations to improve recruitment and retention of rural health workers. There are certainly costs for programs like those, which will make this issue challenging to solve.
I wasn’t surprised by the third item on the list, the increasing rates of diseases that are preventable, especially those for which effective vaccines exist. I never thought that I would see myself practicing in the middle of a measles epidemic, especially since until last year I was one of few clinicians in my area who had actually seen the disease. I wish that club was still exclusive, but now many of my colleagues have seen the disease in the community. The report also calls out pertussis (whooping cough) as well as dysentery as re-emerging diseases in the US.
Item number four is the impact on healthcare operations and patient safety of federal funding cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, and grants to educational and care delivery organizations.
Item five is the lack of recognition and reporting of harm events. That surprises me given the push for reporting in organizations that I’ve worked in. It saddens me to think of institutions that don’t have a strong safety culture, but based on some of the lawsuits that I see filed, they are out there.
Sixth on the list is inequitable pain management that is received by women due to implicit bias and inconsistent guidelines. The report notes the frequency with which women’s pain is thought to be psychological or hormonal rather than being driven physical causes. Evidence also exists that women of color are more likely to have their reports of pain underestimated or dismissed compared to white patients. I’ve certainly seen this in practice more than I would like, so I’m glad it made the list.
Number seven should be no surprise to anyone: workforce shortages with resulting staff burden and decreased access to care.
Eighth on the list is the negative impact of a “culture of blame” on learning and system improvement, which is also not shocking.
The contribution of emergency department boarding to worse patient outcomes made the list at number nine. I’ve worked in a busy emergency department and had to manage patients well outside my scope of practice. Let me tell you that can be terrifying, especially if you are in a community or rural facility with no backup. I did that kind of work in the days before telemedicine, which supposedly that helps to some degree, but it’s still ultimately on the shoulders of the physician in the room. I hope that the boarding problem continues to receive attention.
Rounding out the list at number 10: medication safety issues due to gaps in manufacturer packaging and labeling design. I’m familiar with medication-related confusion with patients, but those of us outside the inpatient realm might not think about clinician confusion involving injectable medications and infusions. The report notes that confusion is most common when manufacturer package branding makes medications look similar when they are in fact quite different.
The report notes that barcode scanning could be helpful, and I agree, although I had my own medication safety issue during a hospital stay when the nurse scanned the package after she had already administered it. Needless to say, a sternly worded letter was crafted, and I hope the situation was addressed.
I encourage readers, even those who aren’t in a patient safety-related role, to download the report and take a look. Most of us are patients to some degree, and all of us will be patients at some time in the future. It’s important to understand these risks so you can have a plan if you or a loved one has to seek care, particularly in a hospital or emergency department.
What patient safety risks didn’t make the list? Would you have ranked them differently? Leave a comment or email me.
Email Dr. Jayne.
Defendant GuardDog Telehealth Admits to Providing Patient Records to Law Firms
GuardDog Telehealth agrees to a judgment and injunction in Epic’s lawsuit against it, noting that its plans to build a chronic care management and remote patient monitoring business fizzled, so it pivoted to selling patient medical records to law firms.
CareCloud, Inc. (CCLD) Q4 Earnings Match Estimates
CareCloud reports Q4 results: revenue up 22%, adjusted EPS $0.11 versus $0.23, beating expectations for revenue and matching those for earnings.
UPMC Notified of National Medical Exchange Concern
Epic notifies UPMC that Health Gorilla and participants in its health network allegedly accessed medical records for non-treatment purposes, leading UPMC to notify affected patients.
GuardDog Telehealth agrees to a judgment and injunction in Epic’s lawsuit against it. GuardDog says that its plans to build a chronic care management and remote patient monitoring business fizzled, so it pivoted to selling patient medical records to law firms.
GuardDog acknowledges that it told Carequality that it was requesting records through Health Gorilla for treatment purposes and says that Health Gorilla was aware of its business model.
If approved by the court, the agreement would bar GuardDog from accessing records through TEFCA and Carequality. The company’s website, social media accounts, and LinkedIn profile have been removed.
The judgment does not directly affect Epic’s lawsuit against Health Gorilla, but it strengthens Epic’s claim that some Health Gorilla customers requested patient records for law firms while representing the requests as treatment-related.
From Secure Itty: “Re: Stryker. They should either have moved from their private Microsoft cloud to Azure or committed hundreds of millions of shareowner profits to match what Microsoft spends to thwart this kind of attack. IMO, it was inevitable and irresponsible.” The attack is interesting because the hackers apparently didn’t bother to install malware, they hacked into Stryker’s Microsoft Intune mobile device management software and security policy enforcement tool, then used system administrator privileges to reset 200,000 devices, including any personal or BYOD devices that were connected. According to analysis by Shieldworkz:
This is the detail that should be keeping every CISO awake right now: the attackers no longer need any custom tool or deploy a wiper. They just need to reach the administrative layer of a platform the potential victim is already paying for and trusting implicitly. Once they had that access, traditional endpoint detection was blind to it. A remote wipe command issued through Intune looks identical to a legitimate IT administration move. No malware signature, no anomalous process and no alert … Enterprises deploy MDM to secure their devices, then fail to secure the MDM itself. The tool designed to protect turns into the very a mechanism of destruction. In security, we call this a single point of catastrophic failure — and enterprises have been building them into their Microsoft environments for years without recognizing it.
Patients on both sides of the pond say that they are uneasy about giving Palantir and similar analytics companies access to their medical data. The debate is particularly heated in England, where the NHS hired Palantir to build a national health data sharing network. Poll respondent comments are worth a read.
New poll to your right or here: How will Amazon’s healthcare ambitions play out?
Pondering: if medical practices really care about patient health and access, why are their offices closed 75% of the time? Pharmacies, veterinarian clinics, therapy clinics, and dentists don’t just operate 8 until 5 on weekdays only. Is it adequate that patients can seek after-hours help from urgent care centers, hospital EDs, and telehealth providers?
Your Monday morning cheer-up comes from Ms. M in Missouri, who wanted to tell HIStalk readers about the impact of the STEM kits that her elementary school students are using, which were provided by reader donations and matching funds (thanks, Anonymous Vendor Executive) that funded her Donors Choose teacher grant request. She reports:
The new resources have transformed our classroom from a space of simple instruction into a space of hands-on exploration and discovery. We are currently using the materials during our STEM block for a unit on measurement and plant growth. Instead of just reading about how plants grow, students are actively measuring their plants using nonstandard and standard units, recording data, and creating graphs to track growth over time. One special moment that truly stood out was when a student noticed that her plant had grown two whole centimeters in just a few days. She excitedly called her classmates over and said, “It’s really working!” That spark of ownership and pride is exactly what authentic learning looks like.
Several students said it felt like we had turned our classroom into a “science lab.” The excitement was genuine and contagious. Even students who are typically hesitant to participate were eager to measure, observe, and share their findings. Because of your support, students are not just completing assignments, they are thinking like scientists and mathematicians. They are collaborating, problem-solving, and explaining their reasoning with confidence. Thank you for giving my students opportunities they will remember. Your generosity is not just providing materials, it is building confidence, curiosity, and a love of learning that will last far beyond our classroom walls.
None scheduled soon. Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.
Stryker says in an SEC filing that an Iran-linked cyberattack that the company disclosed last week continues to disrupt its systems, affecting order processing, manufacturing, and shipping. The company says that patient-related services and connected products such as Vocera and Care.ai were not affected.
CareCloud reports Q4 results: revenue up 22%, adjusted EPS $0.11 versus $0.23, beating expectations for revenue and matching those for earnings.
A small study of ambulatory practice patients finds that conversational AI (Google AMIE) can successfully conduct pre-visit medical histories and generate accurate diagnoses and treatment plans, but is best used as a clinical assistant rather than as a standalone diagnostic tool.
Epic notifies UPMC that Health Gorilla and participants in its health network allegedly accessed medical records for non-treatment purposes, leading UPMC to notify affected patients.
I didn’t spot an EHR screen in SNL’s MAHAspital sketch, but maybe you can.
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Iran-linked group says it hacked US company in retaliation for Minab school bombing
An Iran-linked hacker group claims in a statement that it disrupted the systems of medical device maker Stryker, saying that the attack was retaliation for the bombing of an Iranian school that killed 168 children and 14 teachers.
Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns 2026
ECRI publishes its list of “Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns for 2026,” with potential AI-generated diagnostic errors taking the top spot.
Grant Avenue preps Ovation Healthcare for sale
Axios reports that Grant Avenue Capital is looking to put Ovation Healthcare, which offers RCM, technology, contracting, and supply chain services, up for sale.
Malama Health Raises $9.2M to Scale Doula-Led Maternal Care for Women insured by Medicaid Nationwide
Tech-enabled maternal care company Malama Health announces $9.2 million in seed funding.
An Iran-linked hacker group claims in a statement that it disrupted the systems of medical device maker Stryker, saying that the attack was retaliation for the bombing of an Iranian school that killed 168 children and 14 teachers.
The group claims that it wiped 200,000 of the company’s servers and other devices. It also says that it exfiltrated 50 terabytes of Stryker data, including product details, hospital purchasing contracts, clinical trials data, and internal communications, and is threatening to post the information publicly.
Security experts warn that the attack could serve as a test case for further attacks against large US corporations.
From ExecPhysicianCalifornia: “Re: Epic. A new wrongful death lawsuit alleges architectural defects in the company’s EHR design, including the inability to reconstruct medication timelines or distinguish between active versus discontinued medications. Do other see this as an isolated case or part of a larger pattern emerging around Epic’s market position and legal exposure?” I haven’t seen this lawsuit, which I would assume involves a provider given the wrongful death aspect. Details?
From Associate Meets Door: “Re: NextGen. Laid off about 100 people on Thursday, including some who have been with the company for 20+ years.” Unverified. The company is owned by two private equity firms, so I wouldn’t be shocked.
None scheduled soon. Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.
Medical practice AI agent vendor Nitra raises $50 million in Series B funding.
Amigo AI, which builds patient-facing AI agents for clinical use cases, raises an $11 million Series A round.
Healthcare finance AI platform vendor Translucent AI raises $27 million in Series A funding.
Oracle CTO and chairman Larry Ellison said this in Tuesday’s earnings call:
In healthcare, Epic automates … primarily acute care hospitals. We automate acute care hospitals. We automate clinics. We automate laboratories. We automate the payers, the people who actually pay the bills. We automate the insurance companies. We automate the HCM system that trains their nurses, that schedules their radiologists to get the right radiologist when an MRI is given, that automates the hospital’s financials, that also automates the FDA and the regulators that approve the latest drugs, that deals with the pharmaceutical companies. That is the healthcare ecosystem. It is enormous. And thank God we have these coding tools now that allow us to build a comprehensive set of software, agent-based software, to automate an ecosystem like healthcare or financial services. That is what we are doing at Oracle Corporation. That is why we think we are a disruptor. That is why we think the SaaS apocalypse applies to others, but not to us.
Amazon expands access to its Health AI assistant to US users of its website and app, allowing them to receive health guidance, schedule One Medical virtual visits, and manage prescriptions.
Epic says that 85% of its customers are using its AI tools.
Zen Healthcare IT announces that its Stargate API supports identity tokens from CLEAR and ID.me to verify patients for TEFCA Individual Access Services.
ECRI publishes its list of “Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns for 2026,” with potential AI-generated diagnostic errors taking the top spot.
Stryker launches SmartHospital Platform, which includes connected infrastructure, clinical communication, a workflow engine, virtual care, and ambient sensor.
Microsoft introduces Copilot Health, a Copilot application that collects and summarizes user medical records. The product appears to be a revamp of Copilot for Health, which was announced in October 2025 as a non-personalized information chatbot. The new data capabilities are provided in partnership with records retrieval platform vendor HealthEx, which says that its free service retrieves information using direct connections, TEFCA, CareQuality, and CommonWell.
An AMA survey finds that 80% of physicians are using AI for work, double the share that was reported in 2023. Documentation and summarization are the most common uses, but use is growing fast for summaries of research and standards of care. More than 75% of respondents say that AI gives them an advantage in patient care, with the greatest benefits in diagnosis and work efficiency. Ninety percent worry about skill loss, especially among early-career physicians.
A study finds that US healthcare affordability continues to deteriorate, even before this year’s expiration of ACA subsidies and Medicaid enrollment cuts. Americans report cutting back on driving and meals to pay for healthcare or medications, while also deferring treatments and stretching prescriptions.
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I’ve always taken a taxi when visiting Las Vegas. It has been years since I had to stand in a crazy long line, and today I figured out why. It’s because everyone is packed into the Uber/Lyft pickup area.
The kitschy neon artwork was the only good thing about the experience, which is in desperate need of a process improvement project. I was only there because I had an Uber voucher that was about to expire. I’ll be back in the taxi line next time for a cheaper and less stressful experience.
I spent some time Monday catching up with old friends at the HIMSS Native American & Indigenous Health Symposium. The clinicians in this space care deeply about their patients and the populations they serve, and are often working with minimal resources.
One session featured representatives from GDIT and Oracle Health. An attendee pointedly asked how the company will ensure that facilities that serve this population won’t experience the issues that some of the Veterans Administration hospitals have had. The answer was not reassuring.
From there, I headed to the exhibit hall for a sneak peek at the setup process. I didn’t have an exhibitor badge, but no one challenged my entry. That was a big change from the recent ViVE conference where the door teams checked every badge at some entrances.
CoverMyMeds has a swag machine in the lobby, and I received a pouch with some nail clippers that I’ll be donating when I get home. I was actually hoping for the hand sanitizer since I had forgotten to replenish my supply, but I was confident that I could find some in the exhibit hall when it opened.
I put my feet up for a bit and then was off to the opening reception. It was held once again at Caesar’s Forum, which is across the street from Caesar’s Palace. That created confusion among attendees and taxi drivers alike.
It was a target-rich environment from a footwear perspective. I found myself also eyeing these embroidery and pearl-embellished jeans. I’m not sure who the team was with the matching Nikes, but they looked sharp.
I had a chance to catch up with the incomparable Ross Martin, MD, who shared a great story about performing as Elvis for HIStalkapalooza 2013. He was even able to produce the highlight reel from the event on his phone, which was a nice treat.
On the way back, I did a detour to the Bellagio Fountains. I was lucky enough to catch my favorite song, which made for a perfect cap to the evening.
The next couple of days were a whirlwind, with plenty of sessions and laps around the exhibit hall. It felt a lot like the old days of HIMSS. I saw fewer influencers and more people ready to do business than I did at ViVE.
Some complained that HIMSS doesn’t include meals with registration, but those who ventured down to the Hall G lower level were rewarded with cookies, fruit, brownies, blondies, and the elusive Kouign Amann pastry. The lower level was dubbed “The Park” and also included the odd tree here and there, as well as a food court and a place to pet kittens.
At the Epic booth. I was pleased to see that their new AI solution offers sensible patient-facing information for a scenario where a patient asks if they can celebrate with bacon while in Las Vegas even though they have high cholesterol. As usual, the Epic booth had the most plush carpet in the exhibit hall. I didn’t know that I needed a coffee table that was embellished like the painting “The Starry Night” before I went there, but apparently, I need that in my life.
It’s great to see the next generation of healthcare tech professionals coming to see the big show. I enjoyed an impromptu demo from graduate student who was working on the TheraCare.ai platform.
It seemed like everyone was talking about AI or SaaS solutions, but I always enjoy visiting vendors that offer physical technology, such as waterproof keyboards, innovative crash carts and workstations, and communications devices.
During my booth crawl with Dr. Craig Joseph from Nordic Global, we scoped out Athena Security’s hospital visitor management system technology, which includes AI-powered concealed weapons detection. Having worked at hospitals that have had serious security incidents and even injury to staff, such solutions are unfortunately necessary, and it’s nice to see innovation.
The show floor had a couple of themed seating areas, one of them complete with a digital fireplace. For the zone that had the bean bag chairs, they were less occupied than the more traditional chairs, which might say something about the agility of the average HIMSS attendee and our willingness to risk being unable to arise from a soft surface. The main floor also included a puppy park, although I didn’t see any dogs during the times I passed by.
First Databank had a cool giveaway with its adult coloring book.
The best booth slogan goes to connectivity vendor Digi International, which promised “The Ultimate Hookup.” CognomIQ was close behind with their offer of a chance to “win a prize that doesn’t suck,” which was funny since it was a Dyson vacuum.
The footwear game was strong this year. IMO Health brought their shoe and sock A-game as usual. I’m sure they are looking forward to next year, when HIMSS returns to their hometown of Chicago.
American Messaging had light up shoes for the whole team.
The ever-dapper Jonathan Shivers of Relatient married form and function with oxfords and argyle.
My spotters were calling in outstanding outfits from across the show, but I wasn’t fast enough to catch the woman in the hot-pink suit with matching shoes or the pair of gents who were wearing matching brocade dinner jackets.
Wednesday afternoon featured a number of in-booth happy hour events. Drinks were flowing as long as you were willing to have your badge scanned. I always wonder about the return on investment for those events, since a good number of the attendees aren’t decision makers or budget owners. I’m sure it falls into the category of all publicity being good publicity, but I can only imagine what the event services vendors charge for a happy hour service.
I had to head for the airport due to some obligations at home, so I’ll be missing Thursday morning’s session covering the future roadmap for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services featuring Dr. Mehmet Oz. I’ll be interested to hear from those who attended and whether you found the content inspiring. There is much work to be done in the US healthcare space.
If you attended HIMSS, what was the highlight of the event? If you didn’t attend, why not, and where are you spending your budget instead? Leave a comment or email me.
Email Dr. Jayne.
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Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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