What You Should Know
The Core News: ECRI has named the misuse of AI chatbots (LLMs) as the #1 health technology hazard for 2026, citing their tendency to provide confident but factually incorrect medical advice.The Broader Risk: Beyond AI, the report highlights systemic fragility, including "digital darkness" events (outages) and the proliferation of falsified medical products entering the supply chain.The Takeaway: While AI offers promise, ECRI warns that without rigorous oversight and
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Health IT | News, Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
Analysis: Amazon One Medical’s Health AI Assistant—Agentic Care or Algorithmic Gatekeeping?
What You Should Know
- Amazon One Medical has launched Health AI, an agentic assistant integrated into the One Medical app that provides 24/7 personalized health guidance grounded in a member's unique medical history.
- The tool goes beyond generic search by explaining lab results, managing medications, and booking appointments, while utilizing clinical guardrails to seamlessly connect members to human providers when medical expertise is required.
The Technical Stack: Agentic AI
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Why Social Capital is the Missing Lever for 2026 Healthcare Efficiency
My grim (and not-so-bold) prediction for the year ahead: Cost challenges will dominate leadership meetings throughout the year. My recommendation: Don’t let cost reduction be the only response. Instead, consider how building social capital can help organizations improve efficiency while also improving quality.
The financial pressures on organizations throughout healthcare are already intense, and only likely to worsen. Many providers and payers are running financial
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Zarminali Pediatrics Secures $110M to Solve America’s Child Health Crisis
What You Should Know:
- Zarminali Pediatrics, the first outpatient pediatric destination purpose-built to provide integrated primary and specialty care nationwide, today announced a $110M Series A funding round.
- Healthier Capital led the round, along with participation from existing investor General Catalyst, and new investor K2 HealthVentures.
Zarminali Pediatrics Accelerates Nationwide Expansion to Redefine Family-Centered Pediatric Care
Zarminali Pediatrics is building the
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Beyond the Hype: New KLAS Data Validates the Financial and Clinical ROI of Ambient AI
What You Should Know
The News: A new report by KLAS Research validates the performance of Suki, an AI clinical intelligence platform, across three major health systems: FMOL Health, McLeod Health, and Rush University System for Health.The Numbers: The systems reported significant ROI, including a 26.8% reduction in documentation time and monthly revenue gains exceeding $1,000 per provider due to improved coding and volume.The Takeaway: Ambient AI has graduated from "experimental pilot" to
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Consolidating Clinical Intelligence: Rapid Care Acquires DeepDoc to Scale AI Summarization
What You Should Know
The Deal: Rapid Care has acquired DeepDoc, a generative AI platform specializing in summarizing complex medical records with over 99% accuracy. Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed. The Problem Solved: The technology addresses the "unstructured data" crisis in healthcare by automating the review of massive patient files for insurance claims, legal cases, and utilization reviews.Acquisition Impact: This is Rapid Care’s third major acquisition in three
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Harmony Healthcare IT Acquires Blue Elm to Build MEDITECH Data Engine
What You Should Know
The News: Harmony Healthcare IT has acquired Blue Elm, a specialist provider of data solutions for the MEDITECH EHR platform.The Impact: The deal creates a single, end-to-end partner for MEDITECH hospitals, covering everything from data extraction and optimization to long-term archiving and system decommissioning.The Value: By combining Harmony’s archiving scale with Blue Elm’s technical nuance (covering all MEDITECH versions from Magic to Expanse), the combined entity
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Why Patient Understanding is the Most Important Metric You Aren’t Tracking
Health systems are drowning in metrics. We can tell you how many portal messages were answered within 24 hours, how many patients closed a care gap, and how many clinicians are using ambient AI in their notes. But there is one question our dashboards rarely answer:
Did the patient actually understand what we told them well enough to act on it?
We have turned “patient education” into a checkbox: an after-visit summary printed, a link to an online library, a line in the note that says,
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Analysis: The Dual Crisis of 2026—Supply Chain Disruptions and the Clinical Alignment Gap
What You Should Know
- The 2026 State of Healthcare Supply Chain Survey from symplr reveals a "dual crisis" as supply chain leaders struggle to balance persistent global disruptions with escalating multi-million dollar savings targets.
- Optimism has plummeted, with 53% of leaders expecting challenges to worsen this year, while a deepening disconnect with clinicians—only 3% of whom are seen as "strongly supportive"—threatens essential cost-containment and standardization efforts.
The
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The “Digital Front Door” or a Revolving Door? Why Nurse-Led Access is 2026’s Critical Efficiency Lever
What You Should Know
- A new national report from Conduit Health Partners reveals that 74% of patient triage cases are resolved without an ER visit when clinical expertise is placed at the first point of contact.
- The report, “The Connected System: Insights on Patient Access and Throughput,” finds that aligning nurse-led triage with centralized transfer centers can drive a 3:1 return on investment by protecting hospital capacity and reducing the "firefighting" of downstream
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