What You Missed in Healthcare IT: March Edition
In March 2025 we tracked 77 healthcare IT news stories, including a cluster of announcements surrounding HIMSS. As is often the case around industry conferences, product news skewed heavily toward AI, with 64% of all stories involving an AI product or feature. Similarly, for the seventh consecutive month, AI clinician assistant tools dominated headlines. Below, we break down the most important trends so you can find the signal in the noise.
1. AI Scribes See Continued Rollouts—and Growing Feature Sets
No surprise here: Health systems are continuing to rollout ambient scribes. Abridge announced an expanded rollout at Memorial Sloan Kettering, Suki secured an enterprise-wide rollout at Rush University System for Health, MSU Health Care adopted Avo for outpatient locations, and Tia rolled out Nabla’s AI scribe to all clinicians following a pilot.
Health system interest remains concentrated on ambient scribing over clinical summaries, but AI scribe vendors are rapidly expanding functionality as a key means of differentiation. To whit:
Avo—adopted at MSU Health Care—provides scribing, summaries, and clinical decision support.
Suki partnered with Wolters Kluwer’s UpToDate to integrate its clinical decision support content.
DeepScribe added E/M medical coding support.
Freed and Heidi Health both raised Series A rounds (announced here and here, respectively) to continue scaling in this space.
To dive deeper on the trends we’re seeing across AI scribe implementations, check out the recent Peterson Health Technology Institute report, which our team contributed to alongside leaders from top health systems and health AI developers.
2. The Push-Pull of EHR Native Solutions vs. Vendor Integrations Continues
We’re continuing to see EHRs grapple with where they fit in the AI market—whether they’ll build AI functionality internally, white-label solutions, or integrate with vendors with deeper workflow-specific expertise.
Internally built AI: As a general trend, more specialized (e.g. specialty-specific, critical access/community health hospital-centered, and ambulatory) EHRs are building-in clinician copilot technology in an effort to maintain or grow market share as AI scribes take off as the next must-have solution in the provider tech stack. Altera, Canvas Medical, and ModMed all introduced ambient scribe solutions for their EHRs, and NextGen updated its mobile app to offer AI clinical summaries and medication suggestions. (See announcements here, here, here, and here, respectively)
White-labeled solutions: In the vendor space Suki is clearly making a play as a white-labeled solution for partners, with Azalea Health and Zoom’s telehealth platform both implementing native scribes powered by Suki (read more here and here).
Vendor integration: Despite the shift toward increased native AI implementations, EHRs are still a dominant enabler for vendor distribution. Epic remained central, with new integrations announced for Elsevier’s ClinicalKey AI and Webex’s contact center tools (here and here). Commure’s fully automated and human in the loop AI scribe services will now be available for integration with MEDITECH, and Juno is integrating Avo’s ambient AI solutions.
Our bet is that smaller players will be more inclined to white label and partner (with the exception of modern EHRs which will be more inclined to build), while larger EHRs will do some of all three. We're particularly interested in watching where Epic partners vs. builds internally.
3. AI Clinical Decision Support Tools Gain Footing
AI clinical decision support tools are continuing to advance their capabilities, and—while adoption is far from the point AI scribes have reached—we’re seeing early signs that some institutions are moving beyond administrative AI use-cases to begin rolling out more clinical applications.
In radiology, Bunkerhill Health and Cleerly partnered to combine triage and detailed imaging assessment tools for their customers, and GE HealthCare announced a partnership with NVIDIA to build autonomous imaging tools, pointing to major manufacturer investment in AI-based diagnostics. On the implementation front, Sentara selected Inflo Health’s CDS platform, which identifies patients for followup based on imaging results.
Beyond imaging, CDS vendors like Wolters Kluwer, Elsevier, Phrase Health, and Layer Health expanded their AI tools with new integrations, workflow features, and funding. However, MSU Health Care's implementation of Avo was the only CDS implementation we tracked this month.
Adding an additional layer to this picture, John Snow Labs released Medical LLM Reasoner, a healthcare-specific reasoning LLM. The model is designed to “systematically [apply] clinical guidelines, protocols, and established medical knowledge to specific patient scenarios.” This advancement reflects a broader technological shift in the reasoning and explainability capabilities of solutions, which could continue to fuel clinician confidence.
4. AI Revenue Cycle Solutions Draw Funding and Partnerships
We continue to view AI rev cycle solutions as the next big focus area for AI adoption after ambient scribes, and the recently announced Palantir and R1 partnership is particularly interesting. We've been curious to see how some of the large outsourced RCM shops will respond to the increasing capabilities of AI, and this is an interesting playbook—essentially bringing AI talent in-house, rather than simply buying AI-driven RCM solutions off the shelf.
Additional March AI RCM headlines include:
Taxo ($5M), Sohar Health ($3.8M), and Navina ($55M) raised funding for RCM or VBC-aligned analytics and automation (read more here, here, and here).
Cedar joined forces with Twilio for automated billing communications.
Latitude Health launched out of stealth.
Infinx released two new agent platforms, one for RCM intelligence and automation and the other for document capture.
VisiQuate is acquiring Rotera to extend its revenue cycle automation capabilities with agentic AI.
5. Court Decisions Continue to Shape Interoperability Landscape
March brought a wave of announcements centered around interoperability—a ruling on the Real Time Medical Systems vs. Point Click Care case being the most notable. With this latest decision, the courts are essentially saying that business associates should be able to read or write anything that an EHR can read or write, whether that’s via APIs, screen scraping/bots, or direct database access. This has massive implications, as Brendan Keeler has previously pointed out:
It’s great news for app developers—in theory they should be able to do anything an EHR could do if they have support from the provider organization they’re working with. But stakes are now higher for app developers, as well; there’s no ability to complain about a lack of access anymore.
Compliance will be a headache for EHRs though, particularly smaller EHRs with less resources to devote to this.
In a world where agentic capabilities are quickly advancing, EHRs will need to contend with third party agents using them or risk getting sued for info blocking.
In other interoperability vendors’ updates we saw an emphasis on enhancing longitudinal patient records and integrating data directly into clinical workflows.
CommonWell launched its CommonWell Marketplace, a platform for connecting with interoperability solutions.
Google updated its Health Connect platform with medical records APIs to support deeper integrations with consumer and clinical data.
Atropos Health launched new capabilities for generating deidentified longitudinal patient records while preserving data security.
MEDITECH’s Traverse Exchange added functionality allowing clinicians to access comprehensive, longitudinal health histories from multiple sources within their native EHR workflows.
Together, these updates reflect a broader trend: Vendors are working to reduce the friction of data access—bringing richer, longitudinal, and increasingly intelligent datasets to 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: Care Team Coordination, Bedside Patient Engagement, Care Plan Management, and Remote and AI-Enabled Language Interpretation
This month’s conversations with healthcare leaders: