What You Missed in Healthcare IT: April Edition
In April 2025, we tracked 87 healthcare IT announcements across product launches, partnerships, funding rounds, and system implementations. AI clinician assistant tools once again led in volume, but this month also saw critical developments around big tech partnerships, RCM consolidation, and AI copilots at the point of care. Below, we break down the most important themes so you can find the signal in the noise.
1. The Next Steps for AI Clinician Copilots are High-Acuity, Specialization, and Democratization
Adoption of AI copilot tools—unsurprisingly—remains strong. What is new this month, however, is a shift toward greater support of high-acuity environments, specialization, and increased availability of these solutions at FQHCs, critical access, and community hospitals.
High-Acuity Care Contexts: Houston Methodist is testing Ambience’s AI ambient scribe and CDI platform in emergency and inpatient care settings, two environments that have been slower to adopt ambient AI solutions. Mednition’s KATE AI announced three Adventist HealthCare sites would use the nursing decision support tool to improve triage in the emergency department. UMass Memorial is also scaling its KATE AI implementation system-wide.
AI Scribes Support More Specialties: Meanwhile, DeepScribe is doubling-down in oncology, announcing partnerships with independent cancer care provider, CARTI, and New York Cancer & Blood Specialists (here and here, respectively). Vanderbilt University Medical Center also announced it would be rolling out specialty-specific documentation with DAX Copilot to its physicians.
Greater Adoption Across FQHCs and Critical Access Community Hospitals: Altera announced that Nabla is now integrated with Paragon Denali, its EHR for rural, critical access, and community hospitals. San Diego-area FQHC Neighborhood Healthcare expanded its implementation of Nabla across all 220 clinicians following a four-month pilot. Public safety-net hospital system MetroHealth selected Pieces for AI clinical summaries.
2. Health Systems Lean into Big Tech Partnerships for Hybrid Build/Buy and Research Support.
A growing number of health systems are partnering with major tech businesses to co-develop internal tooling, rather than fully buying off-the-shelf solutions (or fully building in-house). Recently, this hybrid “build-with” model included City of Hope partnering with Microsoft Azure to develop an internal tool to create clinical summaries for incoming referred patients and Seattle Children’s working with Google Cloud to build Pathway Assistant, an AI clinical decision support agent that gives providers access to clinical pathways information at the point of care.
Not to be left out, big-name wearables manufacturers are also partnering with health systems to support clinical research projects. For example, Stanford Medicine and Samsung announced a research project to develop a health solution based on Samsung’s obstructive sleep apnea feature. Children’s Hospital Los Angeles is leveraging the Apple Watch to collect children’s sleep data, allowing researchers to develop machine learning algorithms to detect sleep disorders in children and inform care.
3. RCM Consolidation Grows as Investors and Buyers Eye Scalable AI Infrastructure
April brought signs of renewed momentum in revenue cycle M&A, with New Mountain Capital—which has already made a strategic investment of an undisclosed amount in Access Healthcare—also investing in SmarterDx and Thoughtful.ai this month. That activity along with other recent RCM investment and acquisition activity by New Mountain could signal a strategic push to integrate front-, mid-, and back-office capabilities into a unified RCM platform.
Against this backdrop, Plenful raised a $50M Series B, Ascertain a $10M Series A (which included participation from Northwell Health), and Brellium a $16.7M Series A. Additionally, Cleveland Clinic added AKASA to its stack, which already includes Ambience’s CDI functionality. Not to be left out of the action, AI scribe Abridge has started touting the RCM impacts of its implementations following pilot results, such as at Riverside Health and Sharp.
Clearly there’s investor and health system interest in an “RCM stack” model that reflects the same platform dynamics we’ve seen in EHRs and CRM. We’d guess standalone RCM point solutions may soon be absorbed into broader, interoperable ecosystems.
4. Implementations Emphasize Point-of-Care Utility
Efforts are increasingly focused on getting actionable data more deeply embedded into clinical workflows. This month saw new integrations and initiatives aimed at surfacing relevant information at the bedside or in primary care. For example:
Stanford is leveraging Atropos Health to surface personalized evidence at point of care.
MetroHealth selected AI clinical summaries tool Pieces for both inpatient and outpatient contexts, offering clinicians a longitudinal patient summary across encounters and settings at the point of care.
Lumeris is integrating CDS content into value-based primary care workflows with Wolters Kluwer UpToDate.
Microsoft Copilot will now integrate Merck Manuals’ medical content at the point of care.
Other Resources You May Have Missed
In case you missed it, here’s a quick roundup of other resources we shared this month:
This month’s Market Maps: AI Clinical Documentation Integrity, AI Denials Management, Digital Patient Education, Medication Adherence, and Post-Acute Transitional Care.
This month’s conversations with healthcare leaders: