The price shock from soaring 2026 ACA (Affordable Care Act) premiums is reshaping how Americans think about and shop for their health coverage. This environment creates an opportunity for provider-sponsored health plans (PSHPs) to step in and deliver more patient-focused care and coverage to their communities.
The average unsubsidized premiums for the 2026 exchange-based Open Enrollment Period increased nearly 20% from last year, and the expiration of enhanced tax credits increased
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Health IT & Digital Health-Opinion | Op-Eds | Guest Columns | Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
Health Payers Have Invested in Modern Data Infrastructure. Access Control Hasn’t Kept Up.
Ask any data security leader at a health plan what keeps them up at night and the answer usually isn't a single threat. It's the environment: member data that's among the most sensitive anywhere, regulatory obligations that expand every legislative session, and a data ecosystem that grows more complex every time a new contributing plan comes online or a new analytics use case gets approved.
Many health plans have made the right infrastructure investments. Snowflake and Databricks are
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Grounding Clinical AI in Evidence: The Critical Role of Human Oversight and Continuous Validation
"Above all else, do no harm." The Hippocratic Oath remains the ultimate guiding principle in medicine. As artificial intelligence (AI) rapidly spreads through clinical care teams, the medical community faces a pivotal test. Using AI to guide patient care decisions requires a clear, discerning eye. Understanding foundational source content and governance is now essential for every clinician and healthcare organization.
When reviewing clinical information to make patient care decisions,
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Beyond the Screen: How Telepsychiatry Must Evolve in the
Era of Interventional Psychiatry
Key Takeaways:
Telepsychiatry and interventional psychiatry are both expanding rapidly, but existing virtual care workflows are not yet designed to integrate advanced treatment pathways.Current telepsychiatry platforms create a care gap by failing to identify, coordinate, and retain patients who could benefit from interventional treatments like TMS or esketamine.Redesigning workflows with structured data, EHR integration, and pre-procedure education can enable telepsychiatry to serve as a
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Scaling Enterprise Imaging: IT Lessons from Digital Pathology
Health IT leaders looking to scale enterprise imaging programs should take note of digital pathology.Whole slide images, often two to ten times the size of a radiology study, have forced pathology to confront the challenges that most imaging modalities eventually face, but at an order of magnitude that’s particularly instructive. Here are the lessons learned about what works at scale and where implementations fall short.
At Scale, Infrastructure and Workflow Are the Same ProblemIt’s
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Why Health Tech Leaders Need to Stop Setting Goals and Start Drawing Ladders
Every health tech marketing leader I've talked to in the last two years has said some version of the same thing: "We know where we want to be. We just can't seem to get there."
They have a goal. They have a budget. They have a team. What they don't have is a map.
"Grow ARR 30% this year." "Increase brand awareness in the mid-market." "Become the go-to platform for patient engagement." These are not strategies. They are wishes with a deadline attached. And in health tech, where sales cycles
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IT Teams are the New Drivers of Healthcare Efficiency and Value
For years, every hospital department leader was the master of their own domain. The CNO drove staffing ratios and documentation time. The COO oversaw operating room throughput and bed turns. The CFO guarded denials and days in accounts receivable. Revenue cycle, scheduling, imaging, and labs each measured success against individual goals and metrics. But soon, those silos will break down, and healthcare IT is holding the sledgehammer.
Healthcare IT has long been a critical supporting pillar
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What Produce Longevity Can Teach Us About Personalized Health Care
The lifespan of an avocado may seem worlds apart from the science of individual health, but both are shaped by the same principle: small environmental stresses compound into dramatically shorter lives. In grocery supply chains, a single hour at the wrong temperature can erase a full day of freshness. In human health, sustained exposure to poor sleep, inconsistent nutrition, and chronic stress quietly accelerates biological aging. As retailers adopt real-time monitoring to
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Beyond Chatbots: Agentic AI as the Operating System Transforming Patient Services
Patient Services Are Digitized—but Not Delivered
Over the past decade, healthcare organizations and pharmaceutical companies have invested heavily in digital transformation. Chatbots, patient portals, CRM systems, and omnichannel engagement platforms promised a more responsive, always on patient experience. And to some extent, they delivered.
Yet reality on the ground tells a different story.
Studies indicate that nearly 30–40% of patients in specialty therapies experience
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Healthcare’s Next Software Crisis Will Be a Governance Failure, Not a Technology Failure
Healthcare has spent the past several years digitizing nearly every part of care delivery. Electronic health records, telehealth platforms, remote monitoring, AI copilots, patient portals, clinical decision support tools, and revenue cycle automation are no longer side projects; they are core infrastructure.
That shift has created a dangerous blind spot. Many healthcare organizations still treat software risk management as something that happens after the build, during testing, validation,
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