What You Missed in Healthcare IT: January Edition
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:
Intermountain Ventures invested in Qualified Health’s $30M in seed funding.
Banner Health and Kaiser Permanente participated in Innovaccer’s $275M Series F funding round.
Virtual care provider WellSpan Health participated in Hippocratic AI’s $141M series B funding round.
Percipio Health announced a $20M Series A, including participation from UPMC and Labcorp.
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.
Mayo Clinic, John Hopkins Medicine, Deaconess Health System, and Duke Health, all expanded their Abridge implementations either enterprise-wide or to a significantly larger number of physicians.
CO safety net health system Denver Health selected Nabla following an 8-week pilot.
ACO enabler Pearl Health selected DeepScribe to roll out to its 3,500-plus primary care providers.
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:
MEDITECH announced full support of USCDI v4 interoperability standards.
VBC platform Wellsky announced its participation in TEFCA and selected Kno2 as its QHIN.
eClinicalWorks announced its designation as a QHIN.
On a related note, Greenway Health announced general availability of UDS+ reporting capability within Greenway Insights for FQHCs.
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:
AI Clinician Copilots: Technology, Market Trends, and Key Differentiators
This month’s Market Maps: AI imaging clinical decision support, AI imaging enhancement, patient intake, and AI symptom checkers
This month’s conversations with healthcare leaders: