Patrick Cheng

Here’s your recap of last week’s health IT news 🗞️ 👇 🤖 AI Clinician Assistant • athenahealth released Ambient Notes, a fully integrated AI ambient scribe for ambulatory practices, which also supports switching between AI models based on context and individual preference. • Abridge is partnering with OpenNotes to evaluate AI-generated visit summaries. 📞 AI Contact Center • healow health released Genie, a phone-, text-, and chat-based AI conversational chat solution for appointment scheduling, prescription refills, and more. 🏥 AI Facility Management • Kontakt.io released a security app that allows staff to page security personnel with location information, and a Kio Nurse app for locating items with a live map view. 📈 Data & Analytics • Alameda County selected Innovaccer to unify and analyze the data in its Social Health Information Exchange.    • Cornerstone AI announced an additional $5M investment, bringing its total funding to $10M. • emtelligent released their Clinical Workflows solution, which offers both clinical and business users across healthcare organizations an interface experience to interact with their existing LLM and NLP engine. 💼 Provider & Practice Administration • Axuall announced two new health system partnerships—VA-based Inova Health System and IN-based Community Health Network—and a partnership with PayrHealth, which helps providers negotiate contracts and reimbursements. 🔁 RCM • SmarterDx released an AI denials solution that creates AI-generated appeals letters.    • Inovalon hosted its Empower 2024 summit and announced a host of new solutions and updates, including an eligibility verification solution for provider organizations and several other tools for health plans and research organizations. • XiFin, Inc. added two new payers to its Payor Rate Transparency Monitor—Humana and Blue Shield of California—and launched Payor Intelligence Hub to help providers better understand payer policies and behaviors. ⚙️ Clinical Operations • Oracle hosted its Oracle Health Summit and announced a number of new features and product updates, including an AI-native EHR, patient admin tools, and plans to become a QHIN. • eClinicalWorks hosted its National Conference and released AI RCM tools, VBC scorecards, and patient engagement updates. • Altera Digital Health released a new EHR, Paragon Denali—natively deployed in Microsoft Azure —intended for rural, critical access, and community hospitals. 🤝 Staffing, Consults, and Referrals: • Tennr raised a $37M Series B. • Cottage Hospital partnered with ShiftMed to add more flexible per diem options for acute care staff. 🧑‍💻 Virtual & At-Home Care • Brook Health is partnering with Linus Health to provide treatment plans and ongoing remote clinical care for cognitive care patients. --- Want the latest healthcare tech news delivered to your inbox each week? Sign up here 📬 👉 https://lnkd.in/e2UJ3ckP

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Here’s your recap of last week’s health IT news 🗞️ 👇 🤖 AI Products • Emergency Services, Inc. + Augmedix Go ED: The emergency medicine group adopted the new ED-specific AI ambient scribe solution.    • Color + OpenAI: The cancer care tech company partnered with the GenAI giant to build a AI clinical decision support copilot.    • AKASA Medical Coding: The AI RCM vendor known for its AI prior auth tool AKASA Authorization Advisor released a new GenAI medical coding solution.    • Humata Health: The AI prior auth for providers vendor closed a $25M funding round led by healthcare org-backed funds The Blue Venture Fund and LRVHealth.    • Wellsheet + Concord Hospital Health System: The AI-enabled Smart EHR UI solution announced a client-reported 16.3% reduction in length of stay and 40% decrease in time spent in the EHR via its partnership with Concord Health, as well as the release of its new LLM-generated handoff summary feature. 🍎 VBC • BSIM Healthcare Services + Innovaccer: The healthcare provider—embarking on its first VBC contract—adopted the pop health data platform for analytics. 🩼 Durable Medical Equipment • Parachute Health: The DME e-prescribing and ordering solution released an update that integrates prior authorization. ⚕️Clinical Staffing • Matchwell + Indiana Hospital Association: The clinical staffing service partnered with the hospital member org to create the first state-wide resource pool for temp staffing. 🧑‍💻 Virtual and At-Home Care • Deaconess Health System + KeyCare: The Indiana-based health system adopted the Epic-based virtual care provider for around-the-clock virtual urgent care.    • UC Davis Health + Current Health: The health system launched a new RPM program for high blood pressure in partnership with Best Buy Health’s care-at-home platform. 🧠 Food for Thought: We came across a couple of good resources this past week on the current state of healthcare data information exchange: • This article in Health Affairs from Deven McGraw and Tina Grande provides a comprehensive overview of some of the patient health data abuses we've seen come to light in recent months, as well as a number of policy recommendations to improve the health information exchange landscape for all participants. https://lnkd.in/e_GEQ-JJ  (h/t Alya Sulaiman)    • This episode of Health Gorilla's InteropTalk gives a helpful update on the current state of affairs, with a particular focus on the state of trust across the health data exchange community and how the definition of "Treatment" may evolve. https://lnkd.in/e96AJG-5 (h/t Brendan Keeler) --- Reminder: you can sign up for the Elion Briefing to get the latest healthcare tech news delivered to your inbox each week 📬 👉 https://lnkd.in/e2UJ3ckP

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Here’s your recap of last week’s health IT news 🗞️ 👇 Notable partnerships 🤝 • WakeMed will roll out AI clinician assistant Regard across three hospitals by the end of the year.    • Saint Luke's Mid America Heart Institute adopted Story Health to support patients with AFib.    • Cone Health, Sentara Health, and A Plus Family HealthCare, along with 2 others are partnering with TytoCare to deliver primary care in local school districts.    • Ballad Health is integrating with teleneurology provider Sevaro to provide stroke care in the ED.    • Sturdy Health is utilizing Notable for appointment scheduling, demographic and insurance verification, and pre-registration form completion.    • Group Health Cooperative of South Central Wisconsin has implemented the Epic-based virtual care platform KeyCare to provide virtual visits nationwide. Product updates 👩🏼‍💻 • Transcarent launched an AI-powered platform for patients to navigate benefits, clinical guidance, and care delivery.    • Epic announced it will launch a new patient data insight tool relying on its Cosmos database.    • LG Electronics released its hospital-at-home platform, PrimeFocus.    • athenahealth released two new specialty care solutions for women’s health and urgent care.    • SmarterDx announced a $50M Series B funding round.    • Kyruus Health has expanded its network to include virtual behavioral health providers.    • Laguna Health released a new performance dashboard that detects metrics such as burnout risk and empathy in patient interactions.    • Crosby Health, which aims to automate claim denial appeals, announced the launch of its large language model and $2.2M in pre-seed funding.    • Radiometer and Etiometry Inc. are partnering to enhance clinical decision making in acute care settings.    • TurningPoint Healthcare Solutions acquired the AI prior authorization vendor Fairway Health.    • Komodo Health announced updates to its MapEnhance product, adding SDoH insights, and two new specialty data partners, GeneDx and COTA. Posts we enjoyed 👏 • We’ve been watching much of the recent news on nurse strikes as well as the political back and forth on AI regulation, and really appreciated Sarah Gebauer, MD’s take on AI governance: https://lnkd.in/e7Jkb3NC    • We enjoyed Nikhil Krishnan of Out-Of-Pocket's take on AI in healthcare, including his thoughts on defensibility and AI's impact on costs: https://lnkd.in/eVtH4ShC --- Want to stay in the loop? Sign up for the Elion Briefing to get all of the latest healthcare tech news delivered to your inbox 📬 👉 https://bit.ly/49z6AUW

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I’m thrilled to share that FeelBetter is starting a new prospective research study with Brigham and Women's Hospital, building on the success of our retrospective research study. "Many polypharmacy problems aren’t detected until patients end up in the ER and, in seniors with several chronic diseases and conditions, the simultaneous use of multiple medications ultimately contributes to 10-30% of hospitalizations,” said Lisa Rotenstein, MD MBA MSc, the principal investigator of the study. “Our previous study showed that its platform can be used to identify which patients are at the highest risk of polypharmacy-related adverse events. Based on retrospective data, we’re excited to prospectively examine how the platform can potentially be used to improve patient outcomes, healthcare utilization, and cost efficiencies.” #Polypharmacy #medicationmanagement #AI #ACO #VBC #PrecisionHealth #PopulationHealth

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The agony and ecstasy of scaling generative AI solutions. We have had some success with deploying secure and reliable systems that incorporate LLMs. One of the shocks we had was that what is cheap in the pilot phase became hugely expensive at scale: those tokens can really add up. Like, add up to a whole lot of compute expense. We had to come up with multiple ways to make our complex system faster and cheaper while simultaneously improving the user experience and ensuring accurate output. Honestly, it kind of hurt. Happy to share our experience so that others can learn from our pain to accelerate our journey to a better healthcare system. Read the full blog at: https://lnkd.in/gYhk-fY7 #innovation #Startups #healthcare #Healthcare #management #technology #future #healthcareinnovation, #implementation, #aiinhealthcare, #healthinnovation, #healthcaretech, #healthtech, #healthcaretransformation, #AI, #healthcaretech, #healthtech, #Vituity, #InflectHealth, #hcimplementation, venturestudio

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Modern Healthcare's Digital Health Summit in Chicago explored key components of healthcare's transformation, from AI in healthcare to patient trust and the path ahead for telehealth. ⚕ #AIinHealthcare is accelerating to alleviate administrative burden on clinicians. Health systems are tapping AI to bring patient-doctor conversations into the electronic medical record. "AI-enabled voice transcription products went from five in the market to 30." ⚕ Adoption of AI #medicalscribe technology is growing. This tech is designed to improve the quality of office visits by supporting more personalized interaction with patients. "Physicians can focus on the patient in front of them while the conversation is captured by a smartphone device with generative AI." ⚕ Data and proactive communication are at the center of #patienttrust with digital health solutions. The “why” data is collected should be discussed more often along with the "what" is done with data. "Tell patients how data can help them. Would our thoughts on healthcare data privacy change if we knew sharing data could improve outcomes?" ⚕ Despite the current headwinds on #telehealth, there continues to be a bullish view on how the tech can improve chronic condition management, engage patients, and build a stronger connection between patients and their doctors. “Telehealth has improved the patient experience when it is in the mix with in-person visits and personalized treatment plans." #DHSummit #healthcareinnovations #physiciansupport

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As the discourse shifts from models to compound AI systems / agents, we need better AI benchmarks to evaluate multi-modal and multi-step task performance, especially in healthcare and life sciences. When we wrote the first paper demonstrating ChatGPT's performance on the USMLE, we chose the US Medical Licensing Exam as a benchmark for accessibility, speed, and ease. This benchmark was never intended to represent AI model performance on real-world clinical tasks. Today, I still see so many research teams and startups using benchmarks (like the USMLE) that are ill-fitted for assessing the true clinical or scientific performance and utility of the models they are developing for real-world contexts. Benchmark development may be seen as a "less sexy" area of research, but it is of paramount importance. Years after the rise of the transformer, we still lack adequate benchmarks for so many single-step tasks in biomedicine. With compound AI systems (i.e., architectures that integrate multiple AI models to perform complex tasks) emerging, we need new benchmarks for agentic behaviors. I'd argue that developing an agent with novel capabilities without at least proposing a companion benchmark (if an industry standard does not yet exist) may hinder the adoption of said agent, especially for high-stakes workflows. Designing more benchmarks that capture/simulate real-world clinical and scientific workflows will help us mitigate the major discrepancies observed between in silico and in vivo performance and better support safe + effective deployment of AI in biomedicine. There are already brilliant people focused here, and we need more. DMs are open if you're researching or working in this area of multi-step/multi-modal benchmarking in healthcare and life sciences! #healthcare #ai #artificialintelligence #generativeai

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🚀 Innovate for Impact, Not Hype Too many healthtech startups are dazzled by the latest technology trends. But real success comes from driving value-based outcomes. Here’s your roadmap: 🔍 Enhance Patient Outcomes 💰 Cut Down Healthcare Costs ⚙️ Boost Operational Efficiency Funding and contracts don’t come from flashy features—they come from proven results. Focus on what truly matters to your end users and stakeholders. 💡 Make value the core of your innovation strategy. #Healthtech #ValueBasedOutcomes #HealthcareInnovation #Efficiency #Innovation #Health

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What’s next for health optimization? Come find out in Las Vegas, on December 11-12, 2024, at the Health Optimization Medicine and Practice Symposium. This isn’t just another conference—it’s a deep dive into the future of health, #AI, and building a better practice. Speakers like Dr. Ted Achacoso, Dr. Scott Sherr, Lucia Aronica will cover everything from leveraging AI to hands-on health optimization strategies with #epigenetics. These are the leaders shaping where this field is going. You’ll get a chance to experiment with the latest in health tech, but more importantly, you’ll have time to connect with other practitioners who are serious about growing their businesses and communities. Oh, and we’ve got a networking event at Meow Wolf, because the future of health deserves an unconventional setting. Come for the knowledge, stay for the connections, and leave with a clearer vision of where health optimization is headed. Details here 👉 https://lnkd.in/d3wwcVJW #healthoptimization

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Been reading a fair bit this week about the entrances of exits of large organizations in the healthcare technology sectors. To me, it keeps coming back to how healthcare is truly different from the typical private investment model of business and why those of us that have been in healthcare for decades keep saying that healthcare math "is different." Millions . . . no BILLIONS of dollars are being invested and lost in healthcare. Buildings built and empty. People hired and laid off. Companies stood up and folded. Service lines expanded, then shelved. All in search of the next big ROI. In the end - we care for people. Yes, we need to be capitalists and there is no mission without margin. But we need to keep patients and caregivers in the forefront of our decisions. Not profit and loss. Pick a service. Do it exceptionally well. Double and triple down on consumer, physician, and employee experience, be strategic and relentless in contracting for reimbursement for that service, and own that space. You will make money. You will make a difference.

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Ambient AI is gaining traction in healthcare by seamlessly integrating into clinical settings to enhance patient care and streamline workflows. Learn more about this advancement - https://buff.ly/3AFbPqs #Forbes #AmbientAI

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After a brief writing hiatus… Part III of “Who Pays for Healthcare AI” is live. The third installment defines five performance-based pricing models for healthcare AI and explores: • Four types of Return on Investment (ROI) in healthcare and life sciences • The importance of shielding at-risk pricing models from operational externalities • How better pricing model design can mitigate negative working capital risk under performance-based models • Taming the beast: attribution Check out Part III below, and subscribe to receive the final post of the series! https://lnkd.in/dPZSHMiy

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Big healthcare AI news yesterday as Tempus AI received the first-ever CPT code for an algorithm-only analysis of previously-sequenced, laboratory developed test transcriptomic data. TLDR: AI molecular phenotyping has a new business model. The PurISTSM test uses RNA profiling to identify molecular subtypes in patients with advanced pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, which may inform first-line therapy selection and management. While I'm skeptical that payer balance sheets are going to solve the "who pays for healthcare AI" problem, the reimbursement pipes for clinical AI are maturing. I am surprised to see more progress for usage-based vs. performance-based models given the many challenges with FFS economics. It will be interesting to see how payers assess the "medical necessity" and therefore reimbursability of clinical AI as these models come to market. https://t.co/eLe18SmihV

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A survey from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center's Center for Connected Medicine reveals that 85% of health system leaders regard AI as the most exciting emerging technology in healthcare. Indeed, its potential is vast; whether it spans across administration, operations, or clinical care. However, we must be aware of the ethical and security responsibilities that come with it. Despite the enthusiasm for AI, concerns about data security and governance remain paramount. Effective AI deployment hinges on robust data aggregation and analytics capabilities. Healthcare organizations face challenges related to siloed data that can hinder the effective use of AI tools. Leaders must prioritize patient privacy and data security to foster trust in AI applications. Implementing transparent policies and governance structures will ensure compliance with regulations and maintain the integrity of patient information while driving data management. Adopting AI is no simple feat and is something that must be carefully rolled out. What do you think the most exciting use of AI in healthcare so far is? #Healthcare #AI

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🌟 Generative AI and Healthcare Transformation: A New Era of Innovation 🌟 I am constantly asked about #AI applications for healthcare transformation. I continue to take people back to the pain points or problems being solved. The healthcare industry is undergoing a significant transformation, driven by the integration of generative AI. This revolutionary technology is currently reshaping the way we approach care management, early disease detection, and administrative tasks. Early Benefits of Generative AI: Enhanced Care Management: AI serves as a "co-pilot" for healthcare professionals, assisting in managing patient care more efficiently and accurately. This leads to improved patient outcomes and more personalized care plans. Early Disease Detection: AI's ability to analyze vast amounts of unstructured data enables early identification of diseases, potentially saving lives and reducing healthcare costs. It's a game-changer in preventive healthcare. Reducing Clinician Burnout: By automating repetitive administrative tasks, AI allows clinicians to focus more on patient care. This not only improves job satisfaction but also enhances the quality of care provided. Affordability and Efficiency: AI-driven processes streamline operations, making healthcare more affordable and accessible. From optimizing workflows to reducing operational costs, AI is paving the way for a more sustainable healthcare system. Challenges and Considerations: Ethical and Legal Frameworks: Ensuring AI is used responsibly requires robust ethical, legal, and policy frameworks. Trustworthy AI adoption is crucial for patient safety and health equity. Technology Infrastructure: Organizations need to update their technology infrastructure, including cloud capabilities, to fully support AI implementation. As we embrace these advancements, it's essential to stay informed and engaged in the conversation about how AI can continue to transform healthcare for the better. #HealthcareTransformation #GenerativeAI #HealthTech #Innovation #AIinHealthcare Thanks to sources McKinsey & Company (https://lnkd.in/g7HZHEST) and MedCity News (https://lnkd.in/gi95t4qJ)

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Stop scrolling for one second! . As the CEO and Founder of a telemedicine menopause practice serving patients in nearly all 50 states, having my company powered by AI has been nothing short of eye-opening. realDocAI [founded by myself and Nihar Ganju, MD] has massively reduced my healthcare overhead, increased revenue, and therefore sustainability. AI helps us power every aspect of our business, from customer acquisition and satisfaction to inside the clinic, where the "Heather" AI chats with patients, supports the medical assistants and provides me with real-time and daily insights on how the business is thriving. . Want to know what we are integrating? Read the article below or reach out and ask us! Think that is all we are up to? Revolutionizing healthcare is kind of our thing, and more is coming soon so watch closely.

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