What You Missed in Healthcare IT: October Edition

1. Las Vegas Was the Place to Be for HLTH 2024

Based on our ongoing coverage of this space, it appears many vendors saved up their big funding and M&A announcements in hopes of making a bigger splash at HLTH. We saw at least double the usual number of announcements during the week of HLTH, making it even more remarkable if a vendor did make it into reporters’ post-event coverage.

Fierce Healthcare did a nice recap of the trends on the showroom floor, including the current temperature on AI in healthcare, “unsexy” data and interop solutions, pharmacy innovation, women’s health, and psychedelic medicine.

Our favorite demo of the week? Anthropic’s computer use capability. You can see our Head of Research, Patrick Wingo’s take on what it could mean for the future of AI in healthcare here.

While HLTH may be over, if you’re ruminating on AI solutions you encountered there, you can still download our Guide to Everything AI at HLTH 2024.

2. Oracle Rolls Out Major Product Updates

Shortly after HLTH, Oracle hosted its Oracle Health Summit in Nashville October 28-30. As of press time, Oracle has:

• Previewed its “next-generation EHR,” which promises to embed AI natively across clinical workflows and improve information exchange between payers and providers.

• Release of Oracle Health Patient Portal, which allows patients to securely review and share their health information.

• Release of Oracle Health Patient Administration, a front-office patient intake, scheduling, and registration solution.

• Updates to Clinical AI Agent, formerly known as Clinical Digital Assistant, a genAI agent for ambient scribing and clinical summaries.

• Announced plans to become a Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA) Qualified Health Information Network (QHIN).

• Introduced new supply chain capabilities around inventory management and procurement.

• Added new talent acquisition tools to its staffing tools.

Prior to the summit, Oracle also announced:

• Two new RCM products—a new patient payments solution that includes gateway routing, processing, and acquiring under a single agreement, and Oracle Health Clinical Data Exchange, a new medical claims processing solution.

• Integration with FinThrive, an end-to-end RCM solution, via API, enabling improved functionality, performance, and a unified login experience.

It’s clear that much like Epic, Oracle is planning to compete by both broadening and deepening its native solutions across clinical workflows, RCM, provider administration, and more.

3. Dynamic Market Maps Just Dropped

Keeping track of the ever-shifting healthcare IT landscape is already tricky—add in all the new AI-driven features being added on and it can be difficult to tell at any given moment who all the players in a particular category are. That’s why we rolled out dynamic market maps.

Navigate to our category taxonomy and choose any category or super-category to generate a market map showing all of the vendors within that space.

4. Players Are Grappling With Governance

The Coalition for Health AI (CHAI) announced draft frameworks this month for how it will:

1. Certify independent Health AI Assurance Labs, and

2. Help standardize the output of these labs in the form of CHAI Model Cards, a “nutrition label” for health AI solutions. CHAI then previewed the first such card at HLTH.

With AI being rapidly integrated into nearly every aspect of healthcare, we’re excited to see this progress. There is a pressing need for greater transparency into the performance, safety, and fairness of AI-driven solutions, and we’re encouraged by the collaborative approach CHAI has taken to develop an industry-wide evaluation infrastructure.

However, they’re far from the only game in town. Andrew Hines, CTO at Canvas, shared a breakdown (plus some hot takes) on all of the many entities currently vying for market share in the AI governance space. These include seemingly “neutral” players like CHAI, The Joint Commission, HIMSS, and Digital Medicine Society, as well as solutions either developed or co-developed by AI vendors themselves, such as Avanade SAIGE (which includes Microsoft and Accenture), Aidoc BRIDGE with NVIDIA, and Epic Seismometer.

This will undoubtedly be a space to watch over the coming months.

5. Everyone Is (Still) Innovating Around AI Ambient Scribes

If you thought the AI ambient scribe space was fully saturated, you were mistaken. Despite being one of the largest categories in our taxonomy with 56 vendors as of press time, the market is far from set. Existing EHR and patient engagement vendors are still launching new integrations and native solutions in this space. For example:

• Kipu Health partnered with AWS to build a suite of AI-enabled solutions for behavioral health, starting with an AI clinician assistant that includes transcription and chart summarization.

• Myriad Health released MyScribe AI for AI ambient scribing and coding suggestions.

• Health Note released an AI ambient scribe.

• Zoom partnered with Suki to generate clinical notes as well as other integrated AI features.

• Net Health announced it would integrate Tali.

• athenahealth released a fully integrated AI ambient scribe for ambulatory practices.

Ultimately, we believe there will be a variety of scribes that focus on the myriad of different specialties and provider workflows, and perhaps ambient scribing will become just a standard feature of all clinical products, but it remains to be seen whether new vendors entering the market will be able to offer enough in the way of product features and usability or cost savings to make major headway as a standalone product.

One of the major ways that ambient scribe tools can differentiate currently is through their language models. With OpenAI’s Whisper transcription tool in hot water, how and how much vendors train these foundation models is an essential component of differentiation for now.

6. Speed Is the Name of the Game in AI for RCM

While accuracy seemed to be the catchphrase in previous months, lately we’re seeing speed in handling prior auths and denials as a top-selling point for AI RCM vendors. This month:

• Infinx launched a new solution that offers human-in-the-loop automation of RCM tasks, emphasizing its impact on claims processing speed and quicker reimbursements.

• Claimable announced the launch of its AI denials appeal solution, citing pilot results such as “most cases resolved in under 10 days (3x faster than average),” and “appeals submitted in minutes–not days.”

• Cohere Health is partnering with MCG to drive, “clinically appropriate auto-approvals [on prior auths], while reducing provider submission time and friction.”

• Apprio released Intelligent Denial Prevention, which aims to predict denials before claims are submitted.

• Blue Shield of California and Salesforce are partnering on a solution that promises to give patients prior auth responses within the course of their appointment and handle peer-to-peer clinical consultations within hours in the event of a rejection.

• SmarterDx released an AI denials solution that creates AI-generated appeals letters, promising to help providers, “get paid more accurately and get paid faster.”

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: Virtual nursing, AI hospital at home, AI inpatient risk monitoring

• This month’s conversations with healthcare leaders: Mark Townsend of Bon Secours Mercy Health, Jessica Beegle formerly of Lifepoint Health, Alvin Liu of John Hopkins Medicine, Karen Hunter of Adventist Health, and Graham Walker of Kaiser Permanente TPMG.