The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices’ decision to move away from recommending the universal hepatitis B at birth is being framed as a scheduling change, but it exposes a deeper problem: for more than 30 years, the United States relied on vaccinating millions of low-risk infants instead of building system that identified and cared for the small number of women who along with their babies were truly were at risk. This was performative compassion—a universal policy that looked equitable
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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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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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From Fragmentation to Clarity: How Ambient AI Powers Value-Based Care
As healthcare organizations deepen their investments in value-based care, one obstacle continues to stymie progress: incomplete visibility into the patient’s health status. The problem isn’t limited to a single source, such as claims data, though claims are often blamed. Rather, it’s the fragmented nature of healthcare data itself. Patient information is dispersed across a patchwork of systems—EHRs, HIEs, scanned documents, specialist consults, diagnostic reports, lab results, payer files, and
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When the Zebra Hides: How AI Ends the Rare Disease Diagnostic Odyssey
Doctors are taught a simple rule early in their training: When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. In other words, the most common explanation is usually the right one. But for the roughly 300 million people worldwide living with a rare disease, that rule can turn into a trap. Their symptoms often look like something ordinary – until years later, when someone finally realizes it was a zebra all along.
The problem isn’t the doctors; it’s the data. Every symptom, lab result, scan, or
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The $32B Leak: Why Digitizing the OR is the Only Path to Financial and Workforce Resilience
In recent months, headlines on both sides of the Atlantic have told the same story. U.S. hospitals are cutting back surgical schedules because they simply don’t have enough staff, while NHS figures show more than seven million people still waiting for treatment in England. A regrettably high number of procedures are cancelled on the day because the workforce is stretched too thin.
For patients, the consequences are deeply personal - longer waits, worsening conditions, and avoidable
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What’s Replacing Traditional NLP in Risk Adjustment and Why It Matters
The RADV expansion isn’t the real story. Neither is V28.
The real story is what happened when both arrived simultaneously—and exposed a truth the industry had been quietly ignoring: the AI that powered risk adjustment for the past decade was never built for the precision, explainability, or adaptability the new environment demands.
Traditional NLP succeeded because the tolerance for error was high enough to absorb its limitations. That tolerance just evaporated.
The 70% Accuracy Nobody
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The Proprietary Trap: Why ‘Open Data’ is the Key to Scaling Your Dental Practice in 2026
Care coordination in the dental industry barely exists.
While the medical industry has made progress toward interoperability with several recent initiatives, dentistry continues to lag behind its healthcare counterparts in supporting the principles of “open data,” which allow information to be freely accessed, used, and shared across platforms without restrictive barriers.
Improved data-sharing offers significant benefits for both patients and providers.
Dental
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The Quiet Cybersecurity Crisis in Outpatient and Post-Acute Care
News headlines tend to focus on big events. Notable examples are the attacks on Change Health and Ascension in 2024. Effects from these events continue to pop up in new cycles. However, the cybersecurity incident at the 30-bed skilled nursing facility or the ransomware attack at the 15-provider urology practice down the street that brought care to a complete halt will not be on the 5 o’clock news anywhere.
Security events like these have the same significant, long-term
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Redesigning Mental Health for a Digital Era
As healthcare systems confront rising demand for mental health services, digital therapy has emerged as one of the most scalable — and contentious — solutions. Virtual platforms promise to reduce barriers, streamline operations, and expand access. But leaders across health systems and behavioral health networks are beginning to ask more complex questions: What are the clinical limits of online care? Where are the gaps in regulation, infrastructure, and oversight? And how can digital therapy be
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