What You Should Know
The Reality: The U.S. healthcare system is in a "structural pressure" cooker. While patient outcomes are improving (mortality down 33%), the financial model is fracturing under the weight of an aging population and rising supply costs.The Shift: 2026 marks the end of the "Megadeal" era. Hospital M&A has pivoted to distressed asset acquisitions, while successful systems are moving toward vertical partnerships rather than buying more hospitals.The Future: AI is the only
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Revenue Cycle Management | News, Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
Ventra Health Launches “vCision” – An Agentic AI Platform to Combat Revenue Leakage
What You Should Know
The News: Ventra Health has launched vCision, a new revenue intelligence platform powered by "Agentic AI" (autonomous digital agents) to optimize the revenue cycle for facility-based physicians.The Partnership: The platform was developed in partnership with healthcare engineering firm CitiusTech, combining Ventra’s RCM expertise with CitiusTech’s generative AI capabilities.The Goal: vCision aims to move beyond simple automation by using adaptive models to anticipate payer
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Consolidating Clinical Intelligence: Rapid Care Acquires DeepDoc to Scale AI Summarization
What You Should Know
The Deal: Rapid Care has acquired DeepDoc, a generative AI platform specializing in summarizing complex medical records with over 99% accuracy. Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed. The Problem Solved: The technology addresses the "unstructured data" crisis in healthcare by automating the review of massive patient files for insurance claims, legal cases, and utilization reviews.Acquisition Impact: This is Rapid Care’s third major acquisition in three
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Kaiser Permanente Affiliates to Pay $556M to Settle Medicare Advantage Upcoding Allegations
What You Should Know:
- Kaiser Permanente affiliates have agreed to a $556M settlement to resolve allegations of violating the False Claims Act by submitting invalid diagnosis codes to inflate Medicare Advantage (MA) payments.
- The settlement, involving multiple Kaiser Foundation and Permanente Medical Groups, addresses a decade-long "data mining" scheme designed to pad the bottom line by manipulating the risk-adjustment model.
The Core of the Conflict: Risk Adjustment vs. Care
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How Hospital M&A Momentum Shifted to Ambulatory and Behavioral Health in 2026
What You Should Know
- Kaufman Hall has released its year-end analysis for 2025, reporting a total of 46 hospital and health system transactions. While total transacted revenue hit a historical low of $18.5 billion due to a slow start in the first half of the year, momentum surged in Q4 with 17 transactions, including four "mega mergers" where the smaller party’s annual revenue exceeded $1 billion.
- Crucially, financial distress drove a record 43.5% of all transactions, a trend
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The Autonomous Revenue Cycle: Waystar Launches Agentic AI to Prevent Billions in Denials
What You Should Know
- Healthcare payment provider Waystar has announced the introduction of agentic intelligence to its cloud-native platform, marking a pivotal step toward the industry's first autonomous revenue cycle.
- Powered by the Waystar AltitudeAI™ engine and a dataset comprising 7.5 billion annual transactions, the new agentic network is designed to execute defined tasks and learn from outcomes with minimal intervention, significantly reducing administrative friction for
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HPS/PayMedix Secures $33M to Scale Guaranteed Healthcare Payments
What You Should Know
- HPS/PayMedix secures $33M in combined equity and debt financing to accelerate the growth of its healthcare financing and payments platform.
- Led by HLM Investment Partners, the funding will be used to expand the PayMedix solution, which unifies all healthcare stakeholders through guaranteed provider payments, interest-free patient financing, and a consolidated SuperEOB® experience.
The Affordability Mandate: Unifying the Payment Experience
As
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FinThrive Report Reveals 71% of RCM Leaders Prioritize Experience Over Revenue
What You Should Know
- FinThrive's 2026 Transformative Trends Report marks a historic turning point: for the first time, improving the patient experience has surpassed increasing revenue as the top strategic goal for healthcare financial leaders, with 71% identifying it as their primary focus.
- The shift indicates that leaders are moving away from short-term fixes toward AI-enabled platform consolidation and automation to drive long-term stability and workforce
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Zelis Acquires Rivet to Bring AI-Powered Analytics to 750+ Providers
What You Should Know
- Zelis, a global leader in healthcare financial modernization has acquired Rivet, a pioneer in revenue cycle analytics. Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.
- The deal integrates Rivet’s AI-enabled analytics and intuitive dashboards directly into the Zelis platform, providing 750+ payers and millions of providers with actionable data to reduce denials, minimize "rework," and navigate rising regulatory complexity.
The Intelligence Layer:
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Abridge and Availity Partner to Automate Prior Authorization at the Point of Conversation
What You Should Know
- Abridge, the leader in clinical conversational AI, and Availity, the nation’s largest health information network, have launched a first-of-its-kind collaboration to automate prior authorization in real-time.
- By embedding Availity’s FHIR-native Intelligent Utilization Management solution into Abridge’s Contextual Reasoning Engine, the partnership aims to provide clinicians with visibility into coverage requirements and enable payer determinations during the
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