If you’ve managed an ambulatory practice, you know immediately where the money leaks: it isn’t just in clinical inefficiency; it’s in the administrative seams that surround every visit. Phone tag, duplicate registration work, eligibility surprises, referral fallout - these are the operational shortcomings that show up as denied claims, missed appointments, and staff turnover. The clinical encounter is just the tip of the iceberg; the real pressure on a practice’s margins emanates from the
Read More
Health IT & Digital Health-Opinion | Op-Eds | Guest Columns | Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
How Ambient AI and Autonomous Coding Can Deliver Hospital Financial & Operational Returns
When ambient listening/generative AI first entered the clinical mainstream, the value proposition was simple: reduce documentation burden and give clinicians their evenings back. That promise resonated. Burnout was rising. After-hours charting had become normalized. Health systems needed relief.
And ambient documentation delivered.
But as deployments scaled from pilot projects to enterprise rollouts, the conversation matured. CFOs and revenue cycle leaders began asking a harder question:
Read More
The Role of Ethical Oversight and Algorithmic Bias in Automated Pharmacovigilance
Pharmacovigilance is changing quietly but fundamentally. You can feel it in the way adverse event reports move faster through systems, in how signals surface earlier, and in how dashboards now carry insights that once took weeks of manual review. Machine learning, natural language processing, and automation have become trusted partners in drug safety operations, handling volumes of data no human team could reasonably manage alone. Yet as these systems take on more responsibility, the role of
Read More
How Small Medical Practices Can Build HIPAA-Aligned DevSecOps Without Enterprise Budgets
When people discuss healthcare security, they often think about large hospital systems with dedicated security teams and expensive compliance programs. But a big part of U.S. healthcare looks very different. It is made of small practices, local clinics, and independent providers with limited staff, limited IT support, and very little room for operational mistakes.
At the same time, these organizations still handle sensitive patient data every day. They use patient portals, scheduling systems,
Read More
Building an ‘AI-Ready’ Healthcare Enterprise Using NIST and ISO Frameworks
Technology leaders across diagnostic organizations, radiology practices, pharmacies, and specialty pharmacies are hearing a consistent message from technology providers: “Adopt AI or fall behind.”
The problem is that “adopt AI” is not a strategy. It’s an activity, and too often, it turns into a series of pilots that never become fully integrated enterprise capabilities.
That failure is well-documented. According to a 2025 “State of AI in Business” report on enterprise AI implementation by
Read More
How Workflow-Embedded Learning Solves the Healthcare Compliance and Staffing Crisis
On a busy hospital floor, a reminder pops up on a nurse’s screen. She needs to complete a mandatory compliance training by the end of the week, but a glance at the census board tells her that’s not feasible. Fourteen patients need support, they’re down three nurses this week and there’s a long list of people waiting in the ER for a bed on her floor. She closes the tab. Compliance is important to her, but she doesn’t have the capacity to step away from patient care to watch a 90-minute training
Read More
What’s Next for Emergency Response Data in 2026?
In emergency response, the name of the game has always been speed and adaptability: getting the right people in the right place at the right time to save lives. But in 2026, data is completely reshaping how agencies respond to emergencies.
For years, agencies have been playing catch-up: responding to emergencies as they come, reacting to problems as they hit us. Now, it’s possible for your data to work in real time and help you see what’s coming next, from surging demand to resource
Read More
Beyond the AI Arms Race: Why Collaborative Intelligence Is the Only Path Forward for Utilization Management
Healthcare's utilization management crisis didn't start with artificial intelligence — but AI threatens to make it exponentially worse if we don't change course now.
A recent peer-reviewed study from Stanford University, published in the January 2026 issue of Health Affairs, evaluated 21 predictive and/or generative AI tools currently deployed across the utilization review landscape. The findings should serve as a wake-up call: we're
Read More
AI Didn’t Fix HCC Coding—It Made It Harder. This is How to Fix It
Hierarchical Condition Category (HCC) coding is one of the areas in healthcare where AI is the obvious solution. On paper, it makes perfect sense. Use it to scan charts, identify diagnoses, group them into risk categories, and more efficiently predict future healthcare costs. In Medicare Advantage and value-based care, where risk adjustment directly impacts reimbursement, it sounds like a natural fit. But reality tells a very different story.
If you want to understand what is actually
Read More
How CMS Policy Just Shifted 30% of Shoulder Surgeries Out of the Hospital
A Shoulder Replacement Case Study
The Bottom Line: When CMS makes a procedure ASC-payable, the shift is fast, measurable, and concentrated in certain territories. Here's what total shoulder arthroplasty can tell us about where the site-of-service mix for hundreds of procedures is headed.
In July, I broke down the 2026 OPPS Proposed Rule and called it a gold rush. The first tranche just hit: 285 procedures came off the inpatient-only list on January 1. The remaining 1,400+ will phase out by
Read More
