February 3, 2025

What You Missed in Healthcare IT: January Edition

Patrick Wingo's headshot
Patrick Wingo
Head of Research, Elion

In January 2025 we tracked 80 healthcare IT news stories, making it the most prolific news month out of the last six. AI clinician assistant news showed up most frequently this month, and just over half of all announcements we covered pertained to an AI product or feature. Here, we’re summarizing the month’s news—finding the signal in the noise—so you can stay abreast of the most important trends you may have missed.

1. Mergers, Acquisitions, and Funding Were the Headlines

It was a slow start to the year, with fewer products and features released this month compared to the rash of investment and M&A announcements. We covered 31 such stories; a few trends we noticed:

  • Funding announcements tended to be later-stage, on average, than those announced during the latter half of 2024. Eleos, Rad AI, and SafelyYou made Series C announcements; Qventus announced a $105M Series D; and Innovaccer announced a $275M Series F.

  • Providers’ focus on data infrastructure was reflected in investment activity. Leaders have been telling us for months that getting data infrastructure in place to support AI implementations is a major priority. We saw that reflected in investments within the data and analytics categories. For example:

  • Neuroflow has been particularly busy. Following the July announcement of their partnership with Intermountain Health, this month they acquired Intermountain’s proprietary behavioral health analytics model. A mere few weeks later, Neuroflow acquired the VBC behavioral health care enablement company, Quartet Health (building on its acquisition of Owl Health back in June).

2. AI Ambient Scribe Implementations Continue to Go Big

Back in August we covered large health systems shifting beyond pilots toward enterprise-wide rollouts of AI scribes. We saw that continue, with Abridge continuing to land major contracts with large health systems.

Of course, the numbers of physicians referenced in these announcements are not necessarily reflective of the number of providers actually using the tools. We look forward to seeing hard numbers from these implementations published in peer-reviewed journals.

3. Interoperability Progress Continues Amidst Uncertainty

The jury is still out on just what the Trump administration might mean for TEFCA (though Elion advisor Brendan Keeler did give us his best guesses). In the meantime, though, we’re continuing to see large health tech vendors move forward with meeting interoperability standards regardless:

4. Population Health Gets Personal

We’re continuing to monitor the ever-increasing capacity of AI to process and analyze patient records for the purposes of population health interventions. Many of the larger VBC population health platforms are already working to surface patients in need of care before the patient presents with an issue. This month we saw a few newer, smaller startups enter specific segments of this market:

  • C the Signs, raised $8M to fund its expansion from the UK to the US. The company leverages AI to analyze data already available in patient electronic health records to “examine a wide number of personal and environmental data points” beyond regular cancer screening filters like age and sex.

  • AI-powered radiology risk stratification platform for lung cancer screening Oatmeal Health markets particularly to FQHCs, offering a solution that utilizes, “one of only 16 AI-specific CPT codes” for Medicare reimbursement, claiming to be a more affordable and equitable option than other outpatient diagnostic support platforms. (more)

  • Population health management platform Percipio Health announced its launch, touting RPM functionality without wearables or medical devices. Per the release, “The platform works by using a single mobile app to collect multiple health signals daily … It uses vision-based AI biomarkers for vitals and medication monitoring, and vocal AI biomarkers for brain health assessments, among others.”

Other Resources You May Have Missed

In case you missed it, here’s a quick roundup of other resources we shared this month: