For years, America has talked about the aging population as a problem we will need to solve somewhere down the road. That framing is outdated. The crisis is already here.
The population of older adults grew 13% between 2020 and 2024, far faster than the working-age population. There are over 61 million older adults in the United States. By 2030, every Baby Boomer will be at least 65 years old.
After decades in healthcare, I have seen how quickly demographic trends become realities
Read More
Health IT | News, Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
Vonage Brings Branded Calling to Epic Hello World to Drive 45% Patient Answer Rates
What You Should Know
Cloud communications provider Vonage, a subsidiary of Ericsson, announced the deployment of its Branded Calling technology natively within Epic Systems’ Hello World communication platform.Built using the programmable Vonage Voice API, the integration enables hospitals and ambulatory clinics to display their verified organization name, corporate logo, and specific reason for calling directly on a patient’s mobile handset before the call is answered.The feature addresses
Read More
CertifyOS Launches National Shared Credentialing with UnitedHealthcare, Cigna, and Centene
What You Should Know
Provider data infrastructure company CertifyOS launches its National Shared Credentialing Program, establishing a unified, multi-payer verification network designed to eliminate duplicative credentialing and recredentialing workflows.Flagship commercial participants at launch include three of the nation’s largest health insurance payers: UnitedHealthcare, Cigna Healthcare, and Centene Corporation.The program addresses an administrative crisis where the United States
Read More
Oracle Health Unveils Upstream AI Revenue Cycle Portfolio at Health and Life Sciences Summit
What You Should Know
At the Oracle Health and Life Sciences Summit, Oracle Health announced a major portfolio-wide expansion of embedded artificial intelligence capabilities across its Revenue Cycle Management (RCM) suite, scheduled for rollout in the coming months across U.S. healthcare organizations.The strategic deployment brings machine learning and generative workflows upstream into the earliest operational stages—spanning patient scheduling, financial clearance, clinical documentation,
Read More
Healthcare AI Governance: Moving from Data-Sensitivity Tiers to Reversibility Controls in Agentic Systems
Ashok Benial is right. His argument in these pages last week — that most hospitals are buying AI faster than they can govern it, that "the tools go live while the guardrails are still on a slide deck" — is the most useful thing anyone has said about healthcare AI governance this quarter. His three controls are the correct ones: validate locally against your own population, monitor for drift after go-live, and fund the human review layer as a control system rather than overhead. Every health
Read More
Heidi Secures $340M to Transition from Clinical Documentation to Supervised Agentic Execution
What You Should Know
Global clinical AI platform Heidi raises $340M in total new capital, comprising a $100M Series C equity round at a $900M valuation and a $240M growth investment from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund (CVF).The Series C equity financing was led by long-term investor Blackbird, with continued participation from Phoenix Court (LocalGlobe, Latitude, and Solar funds), Point72 Private Investments, and Headline, bringing Heidi’s cumulative funding to $436.6M.The $240M CVF
Read More
Beyond Hospital Pre-Merger Notice: PESP Report Reveals States Are Targeting Private Equity Control via MSOs, Debt, and Sale-Leasebacks
What You Should Know
The Private Equity Stakeholder Project (PESP) released its comprehensive report, the 2026 State Healthcare Policy Review: Tracking Private Equity Oversight and Reform, examining nationwide legislative efforts to regulate private equity control across provider networks.As of August 2026, six states had enacted nine distinct healthcare oversight laws—one each in Washington, Vermont, and Delaware, and two each in Illinois, Maine, and Connecticut—while California and Oregon
Read More
Healthcare Doesn’t Need Forward Deployed Engineers. It Needs Forward Deployed Operators.
The forward deployed engineer model, embraced across enterprise technology, is built on a seductive assumption: that the gap between a technology's potential and its adoption is primarily a technical gap. A missing integration. A misconfigured workflow. A feature not yet built. Fix the code, and the organization will follow.
In most industries, that assumption is partially right. In healthcare, it is almost entirely wrong.
In part, healthcare organizations contribute to the problem
Read More
Abridge Wins Seat on $775.7M VA Enterprise Contract to Power Ambient Clinical AI
What You Should Know
Abridge, the AI-native clinician intelligence platform deployed across more than 300 U.S. health systems, announced it was selected through a distribution partner to provide ambient clinical AI under a landmark U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) enterprise contract.The multiple-award Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract carries a total ceiling of $775.72 million over five years across all eligible competing vendors, allowing individual VA medical
Read More
Zocdoc Launches Care Access Network to Make Providers Bookable Across Gemini, Amazon Health AI, and Search Engines
What You Should Know
Healthcare access infrastructure leader Zocdoc launches an enterprise platform expansion that syndicates provider availability beyond its native marketplace (Zocdoc.com and mobile app) into a distributed Care Access Network.The platform allows healthcare providers to maintain a single integration that makes their real-time calendar availability instantly discoverable and bookable across external partner channels, including Google Gemini, Amazon Health AI, Yelp,
Read More
