UNC Health Rebrands Rex Health Ventures to Launch UNC Health Ventures Strategic Investment Platform
What You Should Know UNC Health officially announced the rebranding and expansion of Rex Health Ventures into UNC Health Ventures, establishing a unified, systemwide corporate venture capital (CVC) and strategic investment platform. The venture platform builds on more than a decade of strategic healthcare investing, having supported nearly 30 early-stage healthcare companies since its founding ... Read More
<img width="1179" height="940" src="https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/unch_ventures_v_pos_clr_rgb_260622.jpg" alt="UNC Health Rebrands Rex Health Ventures to Launch UNC Health Ventures Strategic Investment Platform" class="wp-image-97546" srcset="https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/unch_ventures_v_pos_clr_rgb_260622.jpg 1179w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/unch_ventures_v_pos_clr_rgb_260622-300x239.jpg 300w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/unch_ventures_v_pos_clr_rgb_260622-290x231.jpg 290w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/unch_ventures_v_pos_clr_rgb_260622-768x612.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1179px) 100vw, 1179px" /> What You Should Know UNC Health officially announced the rebranding and expansion of Rex Health Ventures into UNC Health Ventures, establishing a unified, systemwide corporate venture capital (CVC) and strategic investment platform. The venture platform builds on more than a decade of strategic healthcare investing, having supported nearly 30 early-stage healthcare companies since its founding in 2012. UNC Health Ventures is directly funded through UNC Health’s broader investment portfolio, with 100% of financial returns reinvested into the health system to support patient care, operational resilience, clinical research, and local innovation across North Carolina. Each prospective portfolio company undergoes clinical and operational due diligence, requiring formal evaluation by frontline physicians and operational leaders alongside approval by a systemwide investment committee. Key portfolio investments include Reprieve Cardiovascular, which is advancing intelligent, personalized fluid management technology for acute decompensated heart failure to reduce hospital length of stay (LOS) and free up acute bed capacity. Bridging Corporate Venture Capital with Frontline Clinical Workflows Historically, health system corporate venture capital programs operated at an arm’s length from day-to-day inpatient and ambulatory workflows, focusing primarily on balance-sheet returns while struggling to achieve clinical adoption across hospital departments. UNC Health Ventures establishes a dual-mandate model that holds early-stage investments accountable to both disciplined financial performance and measurable operational yield. To ensure clinical utility, prospective investment candidates undergo structured operational diligence and clinical workflow evaluations led by practicing physicians, nursing leadership, and administrative teams before reaching the systemwide investment committee. This embedded evaluation model serves as a proving ground for emerging technologies, validating whether solutions can successfully navigate electronic health record integrations, regulatory hurdles, and active inpatient environments. A defining architectural element of UNC Health Ventures is its closed-loop capital structure. Funded directly through UNC Health’s central investment portfolio, 100% of realized financial returns are channeled back into the health system to support clinical operations, medical research initiatives, and community health programs across North Carolina. The platform expands upon a track record of nearly 30 healthcare investments. Among its notable portfolio companies is Reprieve Cardiovascular, which develops automated fluid-management technology for patients suffering from acute decompensated heart failure. By automating decongestion therapy in real time, the technology optimizes fluid removal, mitigates kidney injury risks, and shortens acute hospital length of stay, directly demonstrating how venture co-development addresses inpatient capacity constraints. “Novel technologies are essential to advancing the care we provide to our patients and communities. UNC Health Ventures gives us the opportunity to engage with promising healthcare advancements earlier, helping our clinicians evaluate new approaches to care while shaping solutions that address real-world challenges across our health system.” — Dr. Cristy Page, MD, MPH, CEO of UNC Health and Dean of the UNC School of Medicine
Rise of Cloud Conversational Voice AI in Healthcare
Julian Jacquez, Jr. President COO of BCN
Healthcare providers are turning to cloud-based conversational AI to fix an access crisis that traditional staffing models can no longer solve, with intelligent voice networks now handling everything from appointment scheduling to insurance verification without a human on the line. What began as a customer-service experiment is fast becoming core clinical infrastructure. Hospitals and clinics ... Read More
<img loading="lazy" src="https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/JulianHeadshot_2025-1-1500x1967.jpg" alt="Rise of Cloud Conversational Voice AI in Healthcare" class="wp-image-97542" width="691" height="906" srcset="https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/JulianHeadshot_2025-1-1500x1967.jpg 1500w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/JulianHeadshot_2025-1-229x300.jpg 229w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/JulianHeadshot_2025-1-221x290.jpg 221w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/JulianHeadshot_2025-1-768x1007.jpg 768w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/JulianHeadshot_2025-1-1171x1536.jpg 1171w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/JulianHeadshot_2025-1-1562x2048.jpg 1562w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/JulianHeadshot_2025-1-scaled.jpg 1952w" sizes="(max-width: 691px) 100vw, 691px" /> Julian Jacquez, Jr. President & COO of BCN Healthcare providers are turning to cloud-based conversational AI to fix an access crisis that traditional staffing models can no longer solve, with intelligent voice networks now handling everything from appointment scheduling to insurance verification without a human on the line. What began as a customer-service experiment is fast becoming core clinical infrastructure. Hospitals and clinics are routing scheduling, triage, billing and payer communication through AI systems that understand medical terminology, integrate directly with electronic health records, and operate 24 hours a day. Analysts say the shift has moved from pilot project to operational necessity in the space of a year. The scale of the problem The pressure driving adoption is stark. Administrative and front-desk staff turnover in healthcare runs at 30 to 40 percent annually, while average call hold times sit at 4.4 minutes system-wide, climbing much higher during peak periods. Roughly 40 percent of appointments are booked outside standard office hours, meaning a caller reaching only voicemail after 5pm may not call back at all. Clinician burnout compounds the problem. Surveys show doctors logging more than 13 hours a week on documentation alone, a workload widely blamed for early departures from the profession. Health systems, providers argue, simply cannot hire their way out of a gap this wide. Beyond the phone tree Traditional interactive voice response (IVR) systems were built for call routing, not conversation: press 1 for billing, 2 for scheduling, 3 to wait. Cloud voice AI replaces that rigid structure with natural spoken dialogue. A patient can now say “I need to move my Thursday visit with Dr Sharma” or raise an insurance query mid-call, and the system will understand and act on the intent rather than forcing a menu-driven sequence. The underlying architecture combines several layers of technology: automatic speech recognition tuned to clinical vocabulary and regional accents, natural language understanding that reads intent rather than just words, dialogue management that tracks context across multi-part requests, and text-to-speech that completes the conversational loop. Because these systems are trained on real clinical terminology, including drug names, procedure codes and insurance jargon, accuracy is notably higher than with generic assistants. That matters, given the output often goes straight into a patient record. Crucially, providers say the technology now completes full transactions autonomously. Voice agents can book or reschedule appointments, verify insurance eligibility, process prescription refills or update patient records, integrating directly with major EHR platforms including Epic, Cerner and MEDITECH via FHIR-based interoperability standards now adopted across most hospitals. Where deployment is happening now Scheduling and intake. Still the highest-volume use case. AI agents now handle a significant share of inbound scheduling calls at some hospitals, checking live provider availability and writing updates directly into the EHR. Out-of-hours access. With so much demand falling outside office hours, round-the-clock voice availability turns a missed call into a resolved request. Billing and payer communication. Revenue cycle teams have long lost hours navigating insurer hold queues. Voice agents can now wait on hold, converse with payer representatives, and document claim status or benefit details automatically. Post-discharge follow-up. Automated but conversational outreach, including medication check-ins and no-show follow-up, keeps patients engaged between visits without added headcount. Triage and escalation. Systems are built with strict boundaries. If a caller describes anything resembling an emergency, or raises something outside the agent’s scope, the call is escalated immediately to a human clinician, with full context handed over so the patient isn’t asked to repeat themselves. Compliance is the entry price None of this works without trust in how patient data is handled. HIPAA compliance is treated as a baseline requirement rather than a selling point, and organisations evaluating vendors are advised to confirm a signed Business Associate Agreement before anything else. It is a federal requirement, not an optional extra. Many platforms now also carry SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certification, offer audit trails that separate AI-generated documentation from clinician-edited content, and give organisations the choice of cloud, on-premises or private-network deployment where data residency rules demand it. Equity is a growing concern too. English-only voice systems leave gaps for non-English-speaking patients, so multilingual capability, including the ability to switch languages mid-conversation without losing context, is increasingly treated as a baseline access requirement rather than a nice-to-have. The limits of the technology Despite the momentum, the sector is not short of scepticism. Independent analysis of “deflection rates,” the share of calls a voice agent resolves without human involvement, points to realistic production figures of 30 to 50 percent. That’s well below the 60 to 80 percent some vendors claim. That gap matters for anyone building a business case around the technology. It’s also a reminder that these systems are, for now, augmenting front-desk and call-centre staff rather than replacing them outright. Providers with the strongest results tend to share an approach: they target a specific, high-volume pain point, such as scheduling or insurance verification, rather than attempting to automate everything at once. They also treat rollout as a structured implementation project, complete with a roadmap and clear success metrics, rather than a plug-and-play switch. What comes next The bigger change is where the “front door” of a health system now sits. Voice, once seen as legacy infrastructure destined for replacement by apps and portals, is instead being rebuilt as an intelligent, cloud-native channel. It can carry context from a web chat into a phone call, recall a mentioned medication allergy without being told twice, and hand off cleanly to a human when the moment demands it. Industry forecasts suggest a large majority of healthcare providers will have invested in conversational AI technology by the end of 2026, a timeline that has moved up sharply from earlier projections. For a sector defined by rising patient demand and a shrinking workforce, the pitch is simple: answer more calls, not by adding people, but by finally making the phone call itself work the way patients need it to. About Julian Jacquez, Jr. Julian Jacquez, Jr. President & COO of BCN, Julian Jacquez, Jr. drives the company’s operations, sales, IT, and partner strategy with over two decades of leadership in the tech industry. A former CPA with PwC, he brings a sharp financial edge to his executive role, backed by a B.S. in Accounting & Finance from West Virginia University. A powerful voice in enterprise networking and digital transformation, Julian’s insights have been featured in The Fast Mode and The AI Journal, and he’s a frequent speaker at top-tier events like International Telecoms Week and Network X Americas.
The Premium Programmatic Imperative: Why Pharma’s HCP Engagement Strategy Needs a Serious Upgrade
Kamya Elawadhi, Co-founder and President, Doceree
When did “we believe we reached physicians” become an acceptable standard for a billion-dollar industry? Somewhere along the way, pharma marketing made peace with probabilistic targeting, inferred identities, and impression counts that looked impressive but proved little. The industry didn’t lower its clinical standards. It just never applied them to its media buying. That disconnect ... Read More
<img loading="lazy" width="800" height="800" src="https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Kamya-Elawadhi-Co-founder-and-President-Doceree.jpeg" alt="" class="wp-image-97539" srcset="https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Kamya-Elawadhi-Co-founder-and-President-Doceree.jpeg 800w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Kamya-Elawadhi-Co-founder-and-President-Doceree-300x300.jpeg 300w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Kamya-Elawadhi-Co-founder-and-President-Doceree-290x290.jpeg 290w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Kamya-Elawadhi-Co-founder-and-President-Doceree-768x768.jpeg 768w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Kamya-Elawadhi-Co-founder-and-President-Doceree-100x100.jpeg 100w" sizes="(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px" /> Kamya Elawadhi, Co-founder and President, Doceree When did “we believe we reached physicians” become an acceptable standard for a billion-dollar industry? Somewhere along the way, pharma marketing made peace with probabilistic targeting, inferred identities, and impression counts that looked impressive but proved little. The industry didn’t lower its clinical standards. It just never applied them to its media buying. That disconnect is no longer sustainable. And it’s not a media buying problem. It’s a structural one. The Illusion of Efficiency Programmatic advertising promised healthcare marketers the world: automation, scale, precision. For general consumer marketing, it largely delivered. But healthcare is not general consumer marketing. Healthcare professionals are not casual browsers waiting to be retargeted with a reminder about something they once Googled. They are credentialed, time-pressed clinicians operating within highly specific professional workflows, and they have extraordinarily little patience for irrelevant noise. Yet for years, the dominant approach to reaching HCPs programmatically borrowed the same logic used to sell sneakers: buy impressions cheaply, cast wide, optimize for clicks. I’ve watched brands pour significant budget into campaigns that technically “reached” physicians and generated almost no behavioral signal in return. The result has been a quiet epidemic of wasted spend ads served to unverified audiences, in generic digital environments, stripped of any clinical context, and measured by metrics that have little to do with actual behavior change. The industry has spent years perfecting the wrong model. The Problem Isn’t Programmatic. It’s Programmatic Without Standards. To be clear: programmatic as a delivery mechanism is not the issue. The ability to reach the right person, at the right moment, with a precisely tailored message at scale — is still one of the most powerful capabilities available to healthcare marketers. The failure has been in how that capability has been deployed. Standard programmatic infrastructure was built for open web audiences, cookie-based targeting, and high-volume impression trading. Layering healthcare audiences on top of that architecture is like performing microsurgery with a blunt instrument. It was never designed for this level of precision, and the results reflect it. The data make the opportunity cost impossible to ignore. On average, HCPs spend 84% of their weekly time consuming medical information through digital resources, with dedicated professional platforms, clinical journal websites, and physician networks accounting for the bulk of that time. That is an enormous concentration of professional attention, and most programmatic buying strategies are nowhere near it. We have known this for years. The infrastructure to act on it has simply lagged behind. What pharma brands are increasingly recognizing, and what we’ve seen proven repeatedly, is that reaching HCPs demands infrastructure built from the ground up for the healthcare context. Verified professional identity at the point of targeting, not probabilistic lookalike modeling. Placement within the clinical environments where HCPs actually spend their professional digital time, in medical journals, specialty platforms, research databases, not open web adjacencies that happen to share a demographic profile. And contextual intelligence that understands the clinical moment: what condition is being researched, what therapeutic area is in focus, what decision might be forming. When a nephrologist is reading a clinical review on SGLT2 inhibitors in CKD, the ad environment is doing something a general publisher simply cannot replicate. The message lands differently. It becomes part of a professional thought process rather than an interruption of a personal one. The Ownership Question the Industry Can No Longer Defer Here is what should be unsettling for anyone responsible for HCP marketing budgets: most organizations still don’t actually know whether their programmatic impressions are reaching licensed, on-target physicians. They have modeled audiences, inferred identities, and probabilistic targeting segments, but not verified reach. In a category where a single prescriber’s behavior can drive millions in revenue, that ambiguity is not a performance issue. It is a strategic failure. The relevance gap compounds it. A 2024 industry survey found that 68% of HCPs say they ignore communications unless the content feels personally relevant — a figure that should alarm any marketer still relying on broad-based targeting and generic creative. Relevance is not a nice-to-have. It is the minimum entry requirement for HCP attention. And it cannot be engineered from a general audience segment. It requires clinical context, endemic placement, and identity precision working in concert. The shift toward premium programmatic frameworks addresses this directly. Deterministic identity resolution — matching against verified NPI-level data — changes the accountability structure of the entire campaign. Marketers move from “we believe these impressions reached cardiologists” to “these specific, verified cardiologists were reached, and here is how their prescribing behavior shifted.” That is not a marginal improvement. It is a categorical one. Script lift analysis, NPI-level reporting, and behavioral signal tracking after exposure allow brands to draw a direct line between media investment and clinical outcome, the kind of accountability that brand leaders, market access teams, and finance partners are no longer willing to do without. The Window for Competitive Advantage Is Narrowing The broader digital advertising ecosystem is in flux. Third-party cookies are eroding. Privacy regulations are tightening. HCPs are more discerning than ever about where their attention goes. The brands building durable HCP relationships today are doing so inside clinical ecosystems, not by chasing the cheapest CPM available on the open web. Premium programmatic is not a luxury tier of the same old approach. It is a fundamental rethinking of what programmatic must mean in a healthcare context: verified reach, endemic environments, clinical context, adaptable formats, and rigorous measurement working as an integrated system, not a collection of disconnected tools. The marketers who recognize this now will have a meaningful head start. The ones who wait are already behind. About Kamya Elawadhi Kamya Elawadhi is Co-Founder & President of Doceree, the world’s first AI-powered programmatic platform built specifically for physician-level audience targeting.
Cityblock Acquires Homeward and Secures $116M to Unify Urban-Rural Care
What You Should Know Cityblock Health entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Homeward Health in an all-stock transaction, paired with a $116M Series E financing round led by General Catalyst. The combined entity now serves nearly 200,000 members nationwide across Medicaid, Medicare Advantage, and dual-eligible programs, generating $2.2B in annualized revenue (up 77% year-over-year ... Read More
<img loading="lazy" width="1500" height="431" src="https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Cityblock-Health-acquires-Homeward-1500x431.jpg" alt="Cityblock Acquires Homeward and Secures $116M to Unify Urban-Rural Care" class="wp-image-97507" srcset="https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Cityblock-Health-acquires-Homeward-1500x431.jpg 1500w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Cityblock-Health-acquires-Homeward-300x86.jpg 300w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Cityblock-Health-acquires-Homeward-290x83.jpg 290w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Cityblock-Health-acquires-Homeward-768x221.jpg 768w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Cityblock-Health-acquires-Homeward-1536x442.jpg 1536w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Cityblock-Health-acquires-Homeward-2048x589.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 1500px) 100vw, 1500px" /> What You Should Know Cityblock Health entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Homeward Health in an all-stock transaction, paired with a $116M Series E financing round led by General Catalyst. The combined entity now serves nearly 200,000 members nationwide across Medicaid, Medicare Advantage, and dual-eligible programs, generating $2.2B in annualized revenue (up 77% year-over-year and more than 4x its 2021 fundraise level). Homeward Health brings a dedicated rural-first Medicare Advantage delivery model, deep regional health plan partnerships (including Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan), and nearly 50,000 attributed members across underserved rural geographies. The transaction positions Cityblock as the leading outcomes-based provider platform serving the nation’s 120 million individuals enrolled in government-sponsored healthcare. Scaling Care Delivery Across Fragmented Government Programs As Medicare Advantage rate adjustments tighten and federal Medicaid funding faces long-term pressures, several early-generation value-based care platforms have retrenched from high-acuity, lower-income populations. Operating under full clinical and financial risk in these sectors traditionally carries high administrative friction, where static risk-stratification models fail to coordinate care before preventable acute escalations occur. The transaction pairs Homeward’s clinical and regional infrastructure with Cityblock’s data assets and AI orchestration engine: Expanding Rural Primary Care Reach: Integrates Homeward’s rural-first clinical model—co-founded by Dr. Jenny Schneider and Amar Kendale—incorporating regional health plan partnerships (including Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan) and nearly 50,000 rural members into Cityblock’s national footprint. CORE (Care Orchestration and Resourcing Engine): Expands Cityblock’s proprietary operating platform across the combined population. Rather than relying on generic risk tiers, CORE leverages nearly a decade of longitudinal member data to predict the specific clinical or social intervention required to resolve an individual care gap, achieving validated prediction accuracy rates between 62% and 87%. Autonomous Task Offloading: Deploys conversational AI agents and workflow automation tools that have autonomously resolved 42,148 routine member calls and returned 44,599 hours of capacity to clinicians and care managers in 2026. Financial Performance Since 2021, Cityblock has expanded enterprise revenue by 323%, improved corporate operating expenses as a percentage of revenue by 64%, grown its customer base from 5 to 18 health plans, and improved EBITDA margins by 81%.
Bristol Myers Squibb Partners with Chai Discovery for AI Antibody Design
What You Should Know Chai Discovery announced a strategic biopharmaceutical collaboration with Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS) to advance the discovery and engineering of therapeutic antibodies using artificial intelligence. Bristol Myers Squibb will integrate Chai’s proprietary molecular folding and de novo design models across its drug discovery portfolio to power an AI-driven, continuously learning discovery system. ... Read More
<img loading="lazy" width="1057" height="290" src="https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/ChaiDiscovery.jpeg" alt="Chai Discovery Raises $400M to Accelerate AI-Driven Molecular Design Platform" class="wp-image-96806" srcset="https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/ChaiDiscovery.jpeg 1057w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/ChaiDiscovery-300x82.jpeg 300w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/ChaiDiscovery-290x80.jpeg 290w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/ChaiDiscovery-768x211.jpeg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1057px) 100vw, 1057px" /> What You Should Know Chai Discovery announced a strategic biopharmaceutical collaboration with Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS) to advance the discovery and engineering of therapeutic antibodies using artificial intelligence. Bristol Myers Squibb will integrate Chai’s proprietary molecular folding and de novo design models across its drug discovery portfolio to power an AI-driven, continuously learning discovery system. Chai Discovery’s platform acts as a computer-aided design (CAD) suite for biology, predicting and reprogramming molecular interactions to generate targeted biomolecules from scratch rather than relying on iterative experimental screening. The collaboration expands Chai Discovery’s biopharma footprint, joining commercial and research partnerships with global pharmaceutical leaders including Eli Lilly, Pfizer, and Novartis. Transitioning from Trial-and-Error Screening to Computer-Aided Molecular Design Traditional antibody discovery often requires iterative wet-lab screening cycles spanning 12 to 24 months to identify viable candidates against complex antigens. Biopharma teams frequently face bottlenecks when targeting conformationally flexible, multi-pass membrane proteins, or historically “undruggable” epitopes. Chai Discovery’s platform approaches molecular discovery through a computer-aided engineering framework: Biomolecular Folding & Multimodal Prediction: Deploys generative models that reason directly over biological structure and biochemical function, predicting and reprogramming atomic interactions between complex proteins, antigens, and target epitopes. De Novo Molecular Design: Generates targeted antibody sequences and structures from scratch based on defined biophysical constraints, aiming to compress early-stage discovery timelines from months into weeks. Pursuit of Intractable Targets: Expands discovery capabilities toward high-value, hard-to-target disease mechanisms that evade standard hybridoma or display library methodologies. Expanding Global Biopharma Footprint: Follows previous collaborations with pharmaceutical leaders—including Eli Lilly, Pfizer, and Novartis—as biopharma increasingly adopts modular, foundation-model-driven discovery stacks. Chai Discovery was founded in 2024 by Joshua Meier (CEO), Jack Dent (President), Matthew McPartlon (CTO), and Jacques Boitreaud, bringing together alumni from OpenAI, Meta FAIR, Stripe, and Absci.
DCAI and Corti Launch Sovereign AI Control Layer on Gefion Supercomputer
What You Should Know The Danish Center for AI Innovation (DCAI) and clinical AI lab Corti have launched Corti Models, a governed, model-agnostic infrastructure layer providing European enterprises with sovereign control over AI deployments, data security, and compliance. The platform provides an OpenAI-compatible API supporting sovereign cloud and on-premises environments, allowing organizations to route workloads ... Read More
<img loading="lazy" width="1500" height="486" src="https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Corti-Logo-1500x486.jpg" alt="DCAI and Corti Launch Sovereign AI Control Layer on Gefion Supercomputer" class="wp-image-97508" srcset="https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Corti-Logo-1500x486.jpg 1500w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Corti-Logo-300x97.jpg 300w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Corti-Logo-290x94.jpg 290w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Corti-Logo-768x249.jpg 768w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Corti-Logo-1536x498.jpg 1536w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Corti-Logo.jpg 1669w" sizes="(max-width: 1500px) 100vw, 1500px" /> What You Should Know The Danish Center for AI Innovation (DCAI) and clinical AI lab Corti have launched Corti Models, a governed, model-agnostic infrastructure layer providing European enterprises with sovereign control over AI deployments, data security, and compliance. The platform provides an OpenAI-compatible API supporting sovereign cloud and on-premises environments, allowing organizations to route workloads to leading foundation models without rewriting existing SDK integrations or prompts. Corti Models is powered by DCAI’s ISO-certified Gefion AI supercomputer (an NVIDIA-powered cluster), with DCAI investing in a scalable NVIDIA Blackwell B300-based cluster to serve as a national inference platform across Denmark and the Nordic region. Mitigating Provider Dependency and Data Residency Risks As enterprise workflows increasingly rely on frontier generative models, dependence on single-vendor foreign AI providers exposes organizations to unexpected service outages, unforecasted API price shifts, and data transfer risks under European regulations like GDPR, NIS2, DORA, and the EU AI Act. Corti Models mitigates these vulnerabilities by pairing Corti’s clinical-grade governance frameworks with localized European supercomputing compute. The platform is anchored by DCAI’s ISO-certified Gefion AI supercomputer, which is expanding via a scalable NVIDIA Blackwell B300 cluster to serve as a sovereign national and regional inference backbone. “European enterprises need access to the world’s best AI models without becoming dependent on a single provider. Corti Models gives organizations the flexibility to innovate while staying in control of their data, compliance obligations, and long-term AI strategy.” — Andreas Cleve, CEO and Co-Founder, Corti To eliminate engineering friction, the architecture features a single, drop-in OpenAI-compatible API that supports sovereign cloud and on-premises environments, allowing engineering teams to change inference endpoints without rewriting backend application logic, prompts, or evaluation datasets. The initial deployment focuses heavily on enterprise software development and agentic coding, keeping proprietary codebase data strictly within European jurisdictions while cutting developer AI spend by up to 5–10x through centralized, consumption-based budget governance.
Radial Acquires Mindful Health Solutions MSO to Scale 27-Clinic Brain Medicine Network
What You Should Know Radial has acquired the Management Services Organization (MSO) supporting Mindful Health Solutions, creating the nation’s largest clinical management network dedicated to advanced brain medicine and interventional psychiatry. The combined management platform supports 27 outpatient clinics across California, Texas, Washington, and New York, encompassing over 100 clinicians and serving hundreds of thousands ... Read More
<img loading="lazy" width="1500" height="441" src="https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Radial-Health-Logo-1500x441.jpg" alt="Radial Acquires Mindful Health Solutions MSO to Scale 27-Clinic Brain Medicine Network" class="wp-image-97509" srcset="https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Radial-Health-Logo-1500x441.jpg 1500w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Radial-Health-Logo-300x88.jpg 300w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Radial-Health-Logo-290x85.jpg 290w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Radial-Health-Logo-768x226.jpg 768w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Radial-Health-Logo-1536x452.jpg 1536w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Radial-Health-Logo-2048x602.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 1500px) 100vw, 1500px" /> What You Should Know Radial has acquired the Management Services Organization (MSO) supporting Mindful Health Solutions, creating the nation’s largest clinical management network dedicated to advanced brain medicine and interventional psychiatry. The combined management platform supports 27 outpatient clinics across California, Texas, Washington, and New York, encompassing over 100 clinicians and serving hundreds of thousands of patients with major depressive disorder (MDD), PTSD, OCD, tardive dyskinesia, and suicidality. The clinical care model centers on next-generation, evidence-backed brain medicine modalities—including accelerated Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (aTMS, SWIFT, SAINT), Spravato (esketamine), IV ketamine, fMRI-EEG-guided PRISM, transcranial focused ultrasound (tFUS), and upcoming psychedelic therapeutics (e.g., Comp360 psilocybin)—delivering remission rates up to 79% (compared to 5–30% for traditional SSRI/talk therapy regimens). Moving Beyond Pill-Based Psychiatry While conventional outpatient psychiatry has relied heavily on trial-and-error oral SSRIs and psychotherapy since the 1980s, treatment-resistant depression (TRD) and high-acuity psychiatric disorders often see standard remission rates between 5% and 30%. Historically, advanced neuromodulation and rapid-acting therapies have remained siloed in academic medical centers or constrained by out-of-network cash-pay models. The combined Radial and Mindful Health Solutions network scales access to evidence-backed interventional brain medicine: High-Efficacy Interventional Modalities: Deploys rapid-acting therapeutics and neuro-technologies—including accelerated TMS (aTMS), Stanford Accelerated Intelligent Neuromodulation Therapy (SAINT), SWIFT protocols, Spravato (esketamine), IV ketamine, fMRI-EEG-guided PRISM, and transcranial focused ultrasound (tFUS)—achieving clinical remission rates as high as 79%. RadialOS Decision Intelligence: Implements an AI-guided clinical operating system that pairs longitudinal patient biomarkers, clinical histories, and diagnostic algorithms to match patients with optimal interventional protocols while automating authorization and care coordination workflows. National Scaled Infrastructure: Supports over 100 specialized clinicians across 27 outpatient centers, backed by a clinical research foundation comprising more than 368 peer-reviewed published studies and clinical trials. In-Network Insurance Integration: Delivers treatments through an insurance-first model across major commercial and government payers, including Medicare, TRICARE, the VA Community Care Network (VA-CCN), Aetna, Cigna, UnitedHealthcare, and Blue Cross Blue Shield plans. Neurodegenerative Research & Expansion: Establishes clinical trial pathways to expand neuromodulation protocols beyond behavioral health into neurodegenerative conditions such as Parkinson’s disease. Leadership Transitions Clinical and scientific leadership transitions include Dr. Owen Muir, MD serving as Chief Scientific Officer of Radial, Dr. Tobias Marton, MD, PhD serving as Chief Medical Officer for the unified clinical network, Dr. Carlene MacMillan, MD as Chief Product Officer, and John Capecelatro as CEO of Radial; Mindful Health Solutions CEO Mark Kehoe transitions to an advisory role. “Brain medicine is all we talk about amongst researchers, but lacks mainstream awareness. We’re here to change that. I’ve dedicated my career to studying the broad spectrum of brain medicine treatments. We shouldn’t rely on just ‘pill-based psychiatry’ anymore. Treating the whole patient has a life-changing impact, and we have worked with leading-edge clinicians and a robust clinical network to implement a unique process that is helping thousands of patients transform their lives.” — Dr. Owen Muir, MD, Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer, Radial
Why Healthcare AI Demands an Owned Intelligence Layer
Shanea Leven, Founder and CEO, Empromptu AI
Healthcare is one of the few industries where AI errors do not just cost money. They can compromise patient trust, expose sensitive data, create compliance risk, and undermine the clinicians and operators responsible for care. Yet much of the AI tooling entering healthcare was built for speed, not accountability. The tools that can generate a ... Read More
<img loading="lazy" width="550" height="550" src="https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Shanea-Leven.jpg" alt="Why Healthcare AI Demands an Owned Intelligence Layer" class="wp-image-97500" srcset="https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Shanea-Leven.jpg 550w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Shanea-Leven-300x300.jpg 300w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Shanea-Leven-290x290.jpg 290w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Shanea-Leven-100x100.jpg 100w" sizes="(max-width: 550px) 100vw, 550px" /> Shanea Leven, Founder and CEO, Empromptu AI Healthcare is one of the few industries where AI errors do not just cost money. They can compromise patient trust, expose sensitive data, create compliance risk, and undermine the clinicians and operators responsible for care. Yet much of the AI tooling entering healthcare was built for speed, not accountability. The tools that can generate a demo in a day were not designed for clinical workflows, fragmented patient data, audit trails, compliance policies, or the accuracy requirements healthcare environments demand. That gap is becoming one of the biggest barriers to healthcare AI adoption. Organizations want to use AI, but they cannot safely deploy systems they cannot verify, govern, audit, or improve. In healthcare, “almost right” is not good enough. A model that performs well in a demo can still fail when it meets messy records, payer rules, clinical nuance, edge cases, handoffs, and real patient context. Healthcare AI needs a different foundation. It needs data pipelines that normalize and validate clinical and operational inputs before inference. It needs governance policies built into the application layer, not added after deployment. It needs audit logs that show what the AI saw, what it recommended, who approved it, and how the decision was made. It needs human feedback loops so expert corrections become part of the system. And it needs a path to custom models trained on domain-specific workflows so healthcare organizations are not permanently renting generic intelligence from third-party models. The real opportunity is not just faster AI development. It is healthcare AI that gets safer, more accurate, and more valuable as experts use it. The AI application platforms getting this right are building AI that captures clinician knowledge, workflow data, and expert corrections to train models they own, not rent. The knowledge of revenue cycle teams, care operators, and clinical administrators becomes a durable intelligence layer rather than disappearing into one-off prompts or generic model calls. When healthcare AI is built this way, the economics change, too. Purpose-built models trained on domain-specific workflows can outperform general models on narrow healthcare tasks, reduce recurring inference costs, and become proprietary assets. More importantly, they give healthcare organizations the governance and traceability they need to move from AI experimentation to deployment. The next wave of healthcare AI will not be won by the fastest demo. It will be won by the systems that can prove they are accurate, compliant, auditable, and continuously improving. Many healthcare companies are not trying to build generic chatbots. They are trying to automate complex workflows that depend on clinical context, operational nuance, fragmented data, and compliance rules. For Ascent Health, for example, the challenge was not whether AI could generate a useful answer. The challenge was whether the system could be accurate enough, auditable enough, and controlled enough to be trusted in a healthcare environment. The blockers were usually a combination of cost, accuracy, compliance, engineering bandwidth, and workflow complexity. Generic AI tools could help create a prototype, but healthcare teams still needed data normalization, human review, audit trails, compliance controls, and a way to improve the system over time. In our healthcare work, the pattern is consistent: companies are not blocked because AI cannot generate outputs. They are blocked because healthcare workflows require accuracy, governance, auditability, and domain context that generic tools do not provide on their own. Another example we came across was a healthcare company trying to build AI around complex operational workflows, but the barrier was not just engineering. It was whether the system could safely handle sensitive data, understand the workflow, improve accuracy, and provide enough control for a healthcare environment. In an early run, adding customer-specific workflow data and expert feedback improved accuracy by approximately 30%. The larger point is that the model improved when it learned from the people and processes closest to the work. That is the future of healthcare AI. The winning systems will not be the ones that simply call a frontier model and return an answer. They will be the systems that normalize healthcare data before inference, enforce governance at the build level, log decisions, capture human corrections, and turn those corrections into custom models the healthcare company can own. For healthcare companies, that changes the economics and the risk profile. AI stops being only a recurring inference expense and starts becoming an asset. Every clinician correction, administrative decision, care workflow, routing rule, and edge case can become part of a proprietary intelligence layer. The healthcare organizations that build this way will not just be ahead on AI, they will own something their competitors cannot buy that they can actually deploy and trust. About Shanea Leven Shanea Leven is the co-founder and CEO of Empromptu.ai, where anyone can build enterprise-ready, fine-tuned, complete AI applications using AI. Under her leadership, Empromptu has developed proprietary prompt manifolds technology that achieves 90%+ accuracy versus the 60-70% industry standard, specifically targeting SaaS companies and founders who have been burned by popular AI builders that fail in production. Shanea brings 15 years of AI and product leadership experience to solving the reliability crisis in AI application development. She previously co-founded and served as CEO of CodeSee.io, a visual codebase understanding platform that was successfully acquired in 2024. Her extensive background in scaling technical products includes leadership roles at top-tier companies: Head of Product at Lob, Senior Director of Product at Docker, and Director of Product at Cloudflare, where she led transformative initiatives in APIs, cloud infrastructure, and engineering efficiency. Earlier in her career, she contributed to developing Google Assistant developer tools at Google and led machine learning and personalization initiatives at eBay.
XiFin Names Chris Martin Chief Product Officer Amid Rapid AI-Enabled Empower Platform Growth
What You Should Know XiFin, Inc. appointed Chris Martin as Chief Product Officer (CPO) to lead product strategy, drive solution modularity, and expand adoption of the company’s AI-enabled XiFin Empower revenue cycle management (RCM) platform. Martin’s appointment follows the February 2026 hiring of Chief Technology Officer Sanjay Kumar, forming a technical leadership pairing focused on ... Read More
<img loading="lazy" src="https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Christopher-C.-Martin-.jpeg" alt="XiFin Names Chris Martin Chief Product Officer Amid Rapid AI-Enabled Empower Platform Growth" class="wp-image-97520" width="603" height="603" srcset="https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Christopher-C.-Martin-.jpeg 800w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Christopher-C.-Martin--300x300.jpeg 300w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Christopher-C.-Martin--290x290.jpeg 290w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Christopher-C.-Martin--768x768.jpeg 768w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Christopher-C.-Martin--100x100.jpeg 100w" sizes="(max-width: 603px) 100vw, 603px" /> Chris Martin, Chief Product Officer at XiFin What You Should Know XiFin, Inc. appointed Chris Martin as Chief Product Officer (CPO) to lead product strategy, drive solution modularity, and expand adoption of the company’s AI-enabled XiFin Empower revenue cycle management (RCM) platform. Martin’s appointment follows the February 2026 hiring of Chief Technology Officer Sanjay Kumar, forming a technical leadership pairing focused on translating AI innovation into measurable customer value across new healthcare segments. XiFin reported a 21.1% increase in Empower RCM processing volume alongside double-digit growth across its molecular diagnostics, hospital outreach, and ancillary services divisions. Martin previously served as Senior Vice President and Head of Consumer Products at Axos Financial, leading AI-driven product strategy, with earlier enterprise transformation and consulting roles at Deloitte Consulting and IBM. The leadership addition coincides with major 2026 industry honors across XiFin’s executive bench, recognizing CFO Erik Sallee, CTO Sanjay Kumar, VP Heather Agostinelli, Marketing Director Debi Lerkins, and Senior Director Clarisa Blattner.
WellSky Unveils AI Summarization and Post-Acute Tracking Across 120,000 Providers
What You Should Know WellSky announced two new capabilities within its WellSky CarePort® care transition suite: CareBrief (AI-driven clinical summarization) and Patient Visibility Pro (longitudinal post-discharge tracking). Integrated into WellSky CarePort Transition and Care Management workflows, the tools address clinical data fragmentation and lack of visibility after hospital discharge. CareBrief synthesizes external clinical, social, and ... Read More
<img loading="lazy" width="1440" height="900" src="https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/WellSky.jpg" alt="WellSky Launches AI Ambient Listening in Specialty Care EHR to Cut Documentation Time by 41%" class="wp-image-92371" srcset="https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/WellSky.jpg 1440w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/WellSky-300x188.jpg 300w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/WellSky-290x181.jpg 290w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/WellSky-768x480.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1440px) 100vw, 1440px" /> What You Should Know WellSky announced two new capabilities within its WellSky CarePort® care transition suite: CareBrief (AI-driven clinical summarization) and Patient Visibility Pro (longitudinal post-discharge tracking). Integrated into WellSky CarePort Transition and Care Management workflows, the tools address clinical data fragmentation and lack of visibility after hospital discharge. CareBrief synthesizes external clinical, social, and post-acute data from outside the hospital EHR into structured summaries to inform discharge planning and post-acute level-of-care placement. Patient Visibility Pro delivers a longitudinal patient timeline, curated worklists, and automated task prioritization to track high-risk patients across their post-acute recovery journey. Overcoming Post-Discharge Visibility Gaps Health systems historically experience a visibility drop-off once a patient departs an acute facility. Because discharge planners often lack access to encounter histories, social determinants, and community records outside their primary EHR, care placement decisions can stall—contributing to extended length of stay (LOS), misaligned post-acute placements, and unmonitored recovery complications that drive 30-day readmissions. WellSky addresses these transition bottlenecks by connecting acute workflows with cross-continuum operational data: AI-Assisted Cross-EHR Summarization (CareBrief): Synthesizes clinical data, prior health encounters, and social determinants from across the broader provider network into structured, clinician-validated summaries to support faster, more precise placement determinations. Longitudinal Post-Acute Oversight (Patient Visibility Pro): Extends case management visibility beyond physical hospital discharge using interactive patient timelines, risk-stratified worklists, and automated task tracking to monitor recovery adherence. Proactive Readmission Mitigation: Flags emerging recovery deviations and transition risks early, enabling hospital case managers and post-acute navigators to intervene before patients require emergency re-hospitalization. Scaled Provider Footprint: Leverages real-time data exchange across more than 2,000 acute hospitals and 120,000 post-acute and community-based organizations nationwide. “Healthcare organizations don’t need more data. They need data translated into meaningful context and visibility that help teams act with confidence. Technology should help care teams spend less time searching for information and more time supporting patients. By reducing complexity and improving decision-making, we can help providers create more connected, efficient care experiences.” — Bill Miller, Chairman and CEO, WellSky
￼Impact Primary Care Network Deploys Innovaccer for Autonomous Population Health
What You Should Know Impact Primary Care Network (IPCN), a physician-led, clinically integrated network in Western North Carolina, has partnered with Innovaccer to establish an operational foundation for its care management and population health initiatives. Over nearly two years of deployment, IPCN utilized Innovaccer’s care management solution and population health dashboards to automate patient prioritization, ... Read More
<img loading="lazy" width="1024" height="512" src="https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/image-136.png" alt="Innovaccer Acquires Humbi AI to Enhance Healthcare Intelligence Cloud" class="wp-image-85423" srcset="https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/image-136.png 1024w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/image-136-300x150.png 300w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/image-136-290x145.png 290w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/image-136-768x384.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /> What You Should Know Impact Primary Care Network (IPCN), a physician-led, clinically integrated network in Western North Carolina, has partnered with Innovaccer to establish an operational foundation for its care management and population health initiatives. Over nearly two years of deployment, IPCN utilized Innovaccer’s care management solution and population health dashboards to automate patient prioritization, care gap identification, and protocol tracking. The deployment has strengthened care management engagement, improved clinical protocol adherence, and increased attributed population penetration rates across 19 counties in Western North Carolina and the Qualla Boundary. IPCN was founded in 2024 by parent nonprofit Impact Health, which serves as the network lead for North Carolina’s Healthy Opportunities Pilot (HOP) and the NC ROOTS Hub Lead for the state’s Rural Health Transformation Program. Automating Whole-Person Care Across Rural Communities Primary care practices across rural and underserved regions often coordinate medical treatments alongside non-medical social drivers of health. However, care managers frequently spend hours cross-referencing patient rosters, chasing missing lab results, and manually tracking preventive screening deadlines, leaving limited capacity for direct patient engagement. “What makes that work sustainable at scale is not more people managing more spreadsheets. It is an operational platform that handles the coordination, the prioritization, and the follow-through autonomously so every care manager on Impact Primary Care Network’s team is spending their time on the patients who need them most, not the administrative work that surrounds them.” — Abhinav Shashank, Co-Founder and CEO, Innovaccer IPCN’s deployment of Innovaccer establishes an automated operational layer to support whole-person care across 19 Western North Carolina counties and the Qualla Boundary: Autonomous Patient Prioritization: Runs continuous background evaluations across unified patient records to detect preventive care gaps, track chronic disease indicators, and automatically route high-need individuals to care managers. Revising Care Management Workflows: Replaces static spreadsheets with centralized population health dashboards, standardizing multidisciplinary clinical protocols and social care referrals. Demonstrated Penetration Gains: Over nearly two years of deployment, IPCN has expanded care management engagement, improved clinical protocol adherence, and elevated program penetration rates across attributed panels. Regional Alignment with HOP & NC ROOTS: Supports parent entity Impact Health—the network lead for North Carolina’s Healthy Opportunities Pilot (HOP) and the NC ROOTS Hub Lead for the Rural Health Transformation Program—in synchronizing medical interventions with social support services.
The Real Reason Investors Are Backing Maternal Health
Mark Taylor, Vice President of Market Strategy at Ready Computing
There’s a reason investors are pouring money into maternal health right now, and it’s not just because it’s the “right thing to do.” It’s because maternal health sits at the intersection of some of the biggest challenges in healthcare today: cost, access, workforce shortages, chronic disease, behavioral health, health equity, and long-term outcomes. And the ... Read More
<img loading="lazy" src="https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Image_20260603_155842_984.jpeg" alt="The Real Reason Investors Are Backing Maternal Health" class="wp-image-97504" width="660" height="660" srcset="https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Image_20260603_155842_984.jpeg 900w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Image_20260603_155842_984-300x300.jpeg 300w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Image_20260603_155842_984-290x290.jpeg 290w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Image_20260603_155842_984-768x768.jpeg 768w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Image_20260603_155842_984-100x100.jpeg 100w" sizes="(max-width: 660px) 100vw, 660px" /> Mark Taylor, Vice President of Market Strategy at Ready Computing There’s a reason investors are pouring money into maternal health right now, and it’s not just because it’s the “right thing to do.” It’s because maternal health sits at the intersection of some of the biggest challenges in healthcare today: cost, access, workforce shortages, chronic disease, behavioral health, health equity, and long-term outcomes. And the numbers are becoming impossible to ignore. Despite spending more on healthcare than any other developed nation, the United States continues to report some of the worst maternal and infant health outcomes among high-income countries. Infant mortality rates remain stubbornly high in many parts of the country, particularly in underserved and rural communities. Maternal mortality rates are equally troubling, especially for Black mothers, where disparities continue to persist regardless of income or education level. At some point, the industry had to stop pretending this was purely a clinical problem. For years, maternal health was often treated as a narrow specialty focused primarily on prenatal visits, delivery, and postpartum follow-up. But that model misses the bigger picture entirely. Maternal health is one of the clearest indicators of how well — or how poorly — our healthcare and social support systems actually work together. When an expectant mother struggles to access transportation, stable housing, nutritious food, behavioral health support, childcare, or even reliable communication with providers, the impact doesn’t stop with one pregnancy. It affects emergency department utilization, NICU admissions, long-term chronic conditions, infant development, family stability, and ultimately healthcare costs for years to come. That’s what investors are paying attention to. They are not simply investing in pregnancy tracking apps or digital engagement tools. They are investing in infrastructure around maternal health because maternal care exposes the operational gaps across the entire continuum of care. Think about what successful maternal care actually requires: coordination across OB/GYNs, primary care, behavioral health, pediatrics, specialists, payers, community organizations, and social services, along with real-time communication and referral management, longitudinal engagement before, during, and after pregnancy, better visibility into social needs and risk factors, and support models that extend far beyond the four walls of a hospital. In other words, maternal health is becoming a proving ground for connected care. And frankly, the organizations that learn how to orchestrate care effectively around maternal health are likely building capabilities that can scale into broader population health, Medicaid transformation, and whole-person care initiatives. That’s why you’re seeing investment flow into areas like remote monitoring, care navigation, doula and community support networks, behavioral health integration, Medicaid-focused care coordination, community-based referral platforms, home-based care models, predictive analytics and risk identification, and interoperability and data sharing infrastructure. Improving maternal outcomes is no longer viewed solely as a clinical initiative. It is increasingly viewed as a systems problem. And systems problems require orchestration. What’s especially interesting is that maternal health may become one of the first large-scale examples where clinical care and social care truly converge in an operationally meaningful way. Not as a pilot. Not as a grant-funded side project. But as a core component of care delivery and reimbursement strategy. Payers understand this. States understand this. Investors definitely understand this. If a health system, health plan, or state can successfully reduce complications, improve engagement, lower avoidable utilization, and support healthier families through connected maternal health strategies, the downstream financial and societal impact is enormous. That’s the real story. Maternal health is not suddenly attracting attention because the market discovered compassion. It’s attracting investment because the industry is finally recognizing that healthier outcomes depend on more than clinical encounters alone. And maternal health may ultimately prove to be one of the strongest business cases yet for whole-person care. About Mark Taylor Mark Taylor is a healthcare technology leader with experience advancing interoperability and connected care across complex health and social care networks. At Ready Computing, he focuses on how technology can help organizations coordinate services, address social needs, and support more connected models of care.
VA Expands Oracle Health EHR Modernization Contract Ceiling to Nearly $27B
What You Should Know The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) proposed a major contract modification to its Electronic Health Record Modernization (EHRM) agreement with Oracle Health, raising the contract ceiling by nearly $17B from almost $10B to approximately $27B, according to FedScoop. The contract modification documents cite “unanticipated complexities” and extensive site-specific customizations that depleted ... Read More
<img loading="lazy" width="1500" height="900" src="https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/VA-Department_of_Veterans_Affairs-1500x900.png" alt="Verizon Inks $448.3M Veterans Affairs Contract for Mobile Devices" class="wp-image-71752" srcset="https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/VA-Department_of_Veterans_Affairs-1500x900.png 1500w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/VA-Department_of_Veterans_Affairs-300x180.png 300w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/VA-Department_of_Veterans_Affairs-290x174.png 290w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/VA-Department_of_Veterans_Affairs-768x461.png 768w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/VA-Department_of_Veterans_Affairs-1536x922.png 1536w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/VA-Department_of_Veterans_Affairs.png 2000w" sizes="(max-width: 1500px) 100vw, 1500px" /> What You Should Know The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) proposed a major contract modification to its Electronic Health Record Modernization (EHRM) agreement with Oracle Health, raising the contract ceiling by nearly $17B from almost $10B to approximately $27B, according to FedScoop. The contract modification documents cite “unanticipated complexities” and extensive site-specific customizations that depleted the initial contract ceiling ahead of schedule, with remaining funds projected to be exhausted by Q1 FY2027. The modification adds three one-year firm-fixed-price optional ordering periods, extending the potential period of performance from May 2028 through May 16, 2031, aligning with the VA’s target for enterprise-wide completion across all 164 VA Medical Centers. The contract scope remains focused on enterprise EHR software, deployment waves, data conversion, interface testing, clinical and role-based training, and ongoing post-go-live sustainment. On the legislative front, the House-passed FY2027 Military Construction and Veterans Affairs appropriations bill allocates $3.4 billion toward EHRM, following an agreed renewal of collaboration between the VA and Oracle Health.
M&A: Francisco Partners to Acquire Weave in $650M Take-Private Deal
What You Should Know Weave Communications, Inc. entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by global technology investment firm Francisco Partners in an all-cash take-private transaction valued at an aggregate equity valuation of approximately $650M. Weave stockholders will receive $7.40 per share in cash, representing an approximate 34% premium over the company’s unaffected closing ... Read More
<img loading="lazy" width="1024" height="512" src="https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/image-16.png" alt="Francisco Partners to Acquire Weave in $650M Take-Private Deal" class="wp-image-97511" srcset="https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/image-16.png 1024w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/image-16-300x150.png 300w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/image-16-290x145.png 290w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/image-16-768x384.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /> What You Should Know Weave Communications, Inc. entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by global technology investment firm Francisco Partners in an all-cash take-private transaction valued at an aggregate equity valuation of approximately $650M. Weave stockholders will receive $7.40 per share in cash, representing an approximate 34% premium over the company’s unaffected closing stock price on August 17, 2026. Upon completion of the transaction, expected in the fourth quarter of 2026 subject to stockholder and regulatory approvals, Weave will delist from the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and transition to a private entity. Weave will continue operating under the Weave brand name and maintain its corporate headquarters in Lehi, Utah. Serving more than 40,000 customer locations across independent and small-to-medium-sized healthcare practices, Weave combines agentic AI workflows with practice management system integrations to automate scheduling, communication, insurance verification, and payments. Accelerating AI and Practice Workflow Expansion Independent medical, dental, optometry, and veterinary practices frequently struggle with fragmented front-office operations—balancing disconnected phone systems, manual scheduling reminders, and standalone payment terminals. Transitioning from the public market to private ownership provides Weave with the capital flexibility to accelerate long-term AI investments without quarterly public earnings pressure: Scaled Outpatient Footprint: Deployed across more than 40,000 customer locations, integrating directly with existing Practice Management Software (PMS) systems to synchronize patient messaging, scheduling, digital intake forms, and payment processing. Agentic Front-Desk Automation: Deepens investments in voice and conversational AI agents to automate patient intake, verify insurance eligibility, and streamline patient billing collections without requiring additional practice administrative staff. Payments & Revenue Cycle Integration: Expands embedded merchant processing and point-of-service billing tools to accelerate collection velocity for outpatient practices. Operational Continuity: Following the anticipated close in the fourth quarter of 2026, Weave will maintain its headquarters in Lehi, Utah, continue operating under the leadership of CEO Brett White, and delist its common stock from the New York Stock Exchange. “Since our founding in 2008, we have built Weave for a customer most software companies overlook — the independent practices that care for patients in communities across the country. More than 40,000 locations rely on us today. Together with Francisco Partners, we will be able to enhance our ability to invest in our AI platform, deepen our payments and revenue cycle management capabilities, and further our vision of a better healthcare experience at every practice.” — Brett White, Chief Executive Officer, Weave
Mass General Brigham Launches First Home Hospital Trials for Dementia and Behavioral Health
What You Should Know Mass General Brigham announced the launch of two clinical trials to evaluate acute, hospital-level care delivered in the home for patients living with dementia and those experiencing primary psychiatric conditions. The dementia trial, funded by the National Institute on Aging (NIA), is a randomized controlled study enrolling 200 patients followed for ... Read More
<img loading="lazy" width="1500" height="657" src="https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Mass-General-Brigham-Healthcare-at-Home-1500x657.jpg" alt="Mass General Brigham Launches First Home Hospital Trials for Dementia and Behavioral Health" class="wp-image-97488" srcset="https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Mass-General-Brigham-Healthcare-at-Home-1500x657.jpg 1500w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Mass-General-Brigham-Healthcare-at-Home-300x131.jpg 300w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Mass-General-Brigham-Healthcare-at-Home-290x127.jpg 290w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Mass-General-Brigham-Healthcare-at-Home-768x337.jpg 768w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Mass-General-Brigham-Healthcare-at-Home-1536x673.jpg 1536w, https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Mass-General-Brigham-Healthcare-at-Home-2048x897.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 1500px) 100vw, 1500px" /> What You Should Know Mass General Brigham announced the launch of two clinical trials to evaluate acute, hospital-level care delivered in the home for patients living with dementia and those experiencing primary psychiatric conditions. The dementia trial, funded by the National Institute on Aging (NIA), is a randomized controlled study enrolling 200 patients followed for one year; it evaluates whether proactive care planning, virtual urgent care, and mobile integrated health paramedics can safely prevent traumatic emergency department visits and inpatient admissions. The behavioral health trial, funded by the Thompson Family Foundation, represents the nation’s first clinical study testing an emergency-department-to-home hospital care pathway for primary psychiatric conditions (psychosis, severe depression, anxiety, and behavioral symptoms of dementia) using specialized multidisciplinary teams of psychiatrists, psychiatric nurses, and psychologists. Mitigating Delirium, Boarding, and Sensory Deconditioning The trials assess whether mobile integrated health teams and decentralized acute care infrastructure can safely substitute for traditional inpatient hospital admissions in patient populations historically excluded from acute home-care protocols. While acute Hospital-at-Home programs have become standard across health systems for acute exacerbations of heart failure, COPD, and pneumonia, individuals with cognitive impairment or acute psychiatric episodes have traditionally been admitted to brick-and-mortar facilities. However, the sensory disruption, rigid clinical routines, and ambient noise of standard hospital units frequently exacerbate behavioral symptoms and trigger hospital-acquired delirium in dementia patients. Concurrently, emergency departments face persistent boarding crises due to shortages of inpatient psychiatric beds. Mass General Brigham is expanding the clinical scope of decentralized acute care through two structured trial methodologies: NIA-Funded Dementia Trial (200 Patients): Supported by the National Institute on Aging (NIA), this randomized controlled trial tracks 200 participants longitudinally over 12 months. Patients with moderate-to-severe dementia are randomized to either standard inpatient hospital care or a proactive Home Hospital model combining scheduled in-home care planning, on-demand virtual urgent care, mobile integrated health paramedics, and direct home admission during acute decompensation episodes. Thompson Family Foundation Psychiatric Pilot (20 Patients): Evaluates the feasibility, safety, and clinical efficacy of admitting patients presenting to the emergency department with primary psychiatric conditions—including acute psychosis, major depressive episodes, severe anxiety, and dementia-related neuropsychiatric symptoms—directly into acute psychiatric home hospital care. Multidisciplinary Mobile Clinical Pods: Deploys specialized care teams consisting of psychiatrists, psychiatric nurses, clinical psychologists, and licensed mental health specialists to manage medical and behavioral stabilization directly in the patient’s residence. Inpatient Bed Decompression: Expands MGB’s home-based clinical portfolio (which already encompasses acute medical admissions and home oncology infusions) to alleviate emergency department boarding bottlenecks and free up physical acute-care beds across regional academic medical centers. Trial Blueprint & Methodology Snapshot Trial 1 (Dementia Pathway): 200 Patients | 12-Month Longitudinal Follow-Up | NIA-Funded RCT Trial 2 (Behavioral Health Pathway): 20-Patient ED-to-Home Feasibility Pilot | Thompson Family Foundation Care Delivery Mechanism: Mobile Integrated Health (MIH) Paramedics + Virtual Urgent Care + Specialized Multidisciplinary Teams Target Diagnostic Cohorts: Moderate/Severe Dementia, Acute Psychosis, Major Depression, Severe Behavioral Disturbances Primary Operational Endpoints: Delirium Reduction, Avoided Emergency Department Boarding, Hospital Bed Decompression, Caregiver Strain Mitigation