Put yourselves in the shoes of a health plan’s behavioral health hotline responder. This is a person, typically a clinician, whose job it is to provide immediate support as soon as members are flagged as a risk – a routine call that is made every day.
Suicide remains one of the leading causes of death in the United States, with the CDC reporting over 48,000 suicide deaths in 2024. For a health plan’s response services team, the interaction likely begins before the member ever picks up the
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Health IT & Digital Health-Opinion | Op-Eds | Guest Columns | Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
How Peristaltic Pumps Are Enabling the Next Generation of Robotic Surgery
Surgical robotics gets talked about the way AI gets talked about in every other industry right now. It's the thing everyone in medtech eventually brings up when the conversation turns to the future of surgery. As robotic-assisted procedures spread across specialties, from urology to orthopedics, the robot itself understandably gets most of the attention. Intuitive's da Vinci system remains the best-known example, but the category now includes an entire generation of platforms purpose-built for
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Healthcare CIOs Need a Plan for November’s State Ballot Measures
State ballot initiatives can become practical questions for healthcare technology teams: who remains eligible for coverage, which expenses must be reported, who can access a record and when systems should change. Those questions deserve attention as voters decide state measures in the November 3, 2026 election.
Chief information officers should put ballot implementation on a shared planning calendar with finance, clinical and compliance leaders. Preparing for both approval and rejection can
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AI Agents Are Stress-Testing Healthcare Interoperability and Governance
Healthcare has become one of the most active testbeds for AI agents. In a single week of January 2026, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Health and Anthropic launched Claude for Healthcare. Ambient scribes such as Microsoft’s Dragon Copilot are generating clinical notes in production. The 2025 CAQH Index found that more than half of health plans and a quarter of provider organizations now use AI somewhere in their workflows.
But these agents are descending on infrastructure that wasn’t made for
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Hospitals Can No Longer Afford to Manage Revenue Cycle After the Fact
For years, hospital finance teams have run revenue cycle on a familiar loop: a claim goes out, a claim comes back denied or underpaid, and staff spend the next several weeks working it back. That loop was manageable when denial rates held fairly steady and reimbursement was reasonably predictable. Neither of those things is true anymore, and the gap between how revenue cycle is typically run and what today's payer environment actually demands is widening fast.
Denials are climbing, and they
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Pharma’s Billion-Dollar AI Bets May Be Chasing the Wrong Advantage
2026 will be remembered as the year pharma went all in on AI.
Since January, nearly every major pharmaceutical company has announced some version of the same thing. GSK signed a five-year foundation-model deal with Noetik. Eli Lilly built a co-innovation lab with NVIDIA. Merck committed a billion dollars to Google Cloud. This month, Novo Nordisk named Amazon Web Services its preferred AI partner. The dollar figures are staggering. And the messaging has been almost identical across all of
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Why Calling ICD-10 a Diagnosis Is Healthcare’s Costliest Design Flaw
Healthcare software colleagues of mine often describe a recurring discussion they have with their outsourced development teams. They recount that when they try to explain the difference between a billing diagnosis and a clinical diagnosis, the engineers on the other end deliver a common platitude: “a diagnosis is a diagnosis.”
That answer is defensible in ordinary English. In healthcare data, however, it is wrong in a way every team that accepts it inherits. The formal name of the
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When Cybercriminals Impersonate Care: Why Trust Is Part of the Treatment
For years, healthcare organizations have encouraged patients to become more digitally connected to their care.
Use the patient portal. Check your test results online. Respond to appointment reminders. Communicate electronically with your care team. Use digital tools to take a more active role in managing your health.
Patients listened.
That progress has made digital engagement an important part of the healthcare experience. Unfortunately, cybercriminals understand that relationship,
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Telehealth Was Built for Two. Interpreted Care Requires Three
Telehealth was supposed to widen access. For patients who do not speak English, it narrowed access.
An analysis of California Health Interview Survey data published in Health Affairs found that patients with limited English proficiency used telehealth at a rate of 4.8 percent, against 12.3 percent among proficient English speakers, roughly half the odds even after adjusting for other sociodemographic factors.
A systematic review by researchers at the University of North Carolina's
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Health Systems Can’t Optimize What They Can’t See: TeleTracking on Ambulatory Capacity, Leakage, and Operational AI
For decades, health systems have invested in creating operational visibility inside the hospital. Leaders are accustomed to tracking bed capacity, anticipating demand, identifying bottlenecks and coordinating the movement of patients and resources within the four walls of the hospital.
But healthcare no longer begins and ends at the hospital doors.
Care continues to move into physician practices, specialty clinics, imaging centers, ambulatory surgery centers, and at home with virtual care.
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