Sunday, July 12, 2026

< + > Bonus Features – July 12, 2026 – Healthcare workers spend 161 hours per year on PDF tasks, 94% of companies want tools to educate employees on prescription costs, plus 30 more stories

Welcome to the weekly edition of Healthcare IT Today Bonus Features. This article will be a weekly roundup of interesting stories, product announcements, new hires, partnerships, research studies, awards, sales, and more. Because there’s so much happening out there in healthcare IT that we aren’t able to cover in our full articles, we still want to make sure you’re informed of all the latest news, announcements, and stories happening to help you better do your job.

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Products

Implementations

Company News

People

If you have news that you’d like us to consider for a future edition of Healthcare IT Today Bonus Features, please submit them on this page. Please include any relevant links and let us know if news is under embargo. Note that submissions received after the close of business on Thursday may not be included in Bonus Features until the following week.



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Saturday, July 11, 2026

< + > Weekly Roundup – July 11, 2026

Welcome to our Healthcare IT Today Weekly Roundup. Each week, we’ll be providing a look back at the articles we posted and why they’re important to the healthcare IT community. We hope this gives you a chance to catch up on anything you may have missed during the week.

The 2026 EHR Market is Cooling as Leaders Pivot to AI. Colin Hung connected with Paul Warburton at KLAS Research, which recently released its U.S. Acute Care EHR Market Share Report. The takeaways: Large systems are in a holding pattern, smaller systems are switching to Epic, and large-scale IT projects aren’t happening. Read more…

Practical AI and the Reality of Data Standards. At eHealth26, Canada’s leading health IT event, Aidan Lee and Matt Leducat OntarioMD joined Colin to discuss the role of actionable guidance for implementing healthcare data standards, particularly when it comes to AI use. Read more…

Building Trust and Interoperability Across Canadian Healthcare. Also at eHealth26, Colin talked to Karen Gauthier and Gurpreet (GP) Singh at ELLKAY about leading data migration projects in several provinces, with a focus on viewing archiving and interoperability as part of a larger data strategy. Read more…

Unlocking RCM Capabilities With Generative AI. Malinka Walaliyadde at AKASA sat down with John to talk about AI’s role in quickly and accurately coding patient records, which contain dozens of documents and 50,000 words for the average patient. Read more…

Where RCM Needs a Human Touch Instead of AI. This is an important question as automation takes hold in the revenue cycle. Advice from the Healthcare IT Today experts included complex denials and appeals, assessing performance, understanding regulations, and providing empathy to patients in need. Read more…

The Power of Voice AI Agents in Automating RCM. John connected with Sam Schwager at SuperDial, which rolled its own AI voice agent and marketed it to other RCM vendors. The company has since made more than 7 million automated calls. Read more…

Sumit Rana to Step Away from Epic. John had a chance to interview Epic’s President, who’s stepping away from Epic on August 14 to devote more time to his family – which is certainly understandable as he recently lost his father. Among Sumit’s proudest moments at Epic: Seeing MyChart grow to 195 million users worldwide. Read more…

Life Sciences Today Podcast: The Industry You’ve Never Heard of Is About to Change Hands. Rachel Timberlake at Bend Bioscience talked to Danny Lieberman about why disruption is coming to the world of contract development and manufacturing. Read more…

Healthcare IT Today Podcast: RCM Trends. John and Colin reflected on what they heard about RCM during the spring conference season. That made them wonder: Are we heading for a day when we have totally autonomous RCM? Read more…

‘The Pitt’ Cyberattack Scenario Wasn’t Fiction – Most Health Systems Still Aren’t Ready. Most downtime procedures were designed for temporary outages, not prolonged operational paralysis, noted Matt DeFrain at Arcova. The solution starts with reframing cybersecurity around patient impact. Read more…

The Strategic Value of a Patient Portal Service Desk. The success of a patient portal relies on the support structure that enables patients to effectively utilize them. Specialized support for account access, navigation, technical troubleshooting, and patient education helps accomplish this, said Chris Durham at HCTec. Read more…

Closing the Gap Between Personal and Population Health. Saikrishna Kavali at Sacred Heart University detailed outlined a FHIR-based family health record framework. This aims to bridge the gap between detailed medical records and scattered sources of household intelligence such as availability of food and levels of stress. Read more…

Innovation Fatigue in Healthcare Is Real. Here’s How to Avoid It. Melissa Powell at The Allure Group offered five tips for ensuring innovation leads to measurable improvements in care delivery and clinician experience. Starting with workflows and co-designing with clinicians are important first steps. Read more…

Why Connected Doesn’t Necessarily Mean Cared For. Despite growth in FHIR API adoption, healthcare’s walled garden problem is real and underacknowledged. Ryan Carlson at Soracom said successful deployments built care models around constraints such as unclear data flows and indirect integrations. Read more…

This Week’s Health IT Jobs for July 8, 2026: Roles in behavioral health, community health, and cybersecurity. Read more…

Bonus Features for July 5, 2026: 58% of dermatology practices see patients daily with AI-generated diagnoses; 94% of CIOs say AI delays would put their orgs at a competitive disadvantage. Read more…

Funding and M&A Activity:

Thanks for reading and be sure to check out our latest Healthcare IT Today Weekly Roundups.



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Friday, July 10, 2026

< + > Why the Industry You’ve Never Heard Of Is About to Change Hands – Life Sciences Today Podcast Episode 69

We’re excited to be back for another episode of the Life Sciences Today Podcast by Healthcare IT Today. My guest today is Rachel Timberlake, Director of Business Development, Bend Bioscience. Contract manufacturing is a ~$275B global industry most people outside pharma have never heard of. Every drug you’ve ever taken and most of the medical devices you’ve ever used were made, at least in part, by a CDMO — a Contract Development and Manufacturing Organization — that your doctor, your pharmacist, and usually the drug company’s own marketing team will never mention. For the last decade, these businesses have been quietly rolled up by private equity, and 2026 is shaping up to be the year the ZIRP-era platforms either exit well, exit badly, or get absorbed into something bigger.

Timberlake has spent two decades inside this industry. She started at a small owner-operated CDMO doing — in her words — “chief cook and bottle washer” work and moved through roles of increasing scale into national sales leadership. Timberlake is one of the few people who can explain this industry in plain language — she has lived every altitude of it, from small-shop BD to national sales leadership inside a large platform, and she is now choosing what comes next.

Check out the main topics of discussion for this episode of the Life Sciences Today podcast:

  • What is a CDMO? What does a sponsor actually buy, and why doesn’t every drug or device company just build its own factory?
  • Chief cook and bottle washer to national sales — what did a small CDMO look like when you started, and what did business development actually mean back then?
  • When a biotech CEO calls a CDMO for the first time, what does the first ninety days actually look like — and where does it most often go sideways?
  • Onshoring is the tailwind everyone is talking about — BIOSECURE, tariffs, GLP-1 capacity. What are you actually seeing in the RFPs?
  • What should a founder ask a CDMO in diligence that most of them don’t think to ask?
  • What is the biggest anti-pattern you see at the sponsor–CDMO interface?
  • What’s the kind of problem you’d most want to work on next?

Subscribe to Danny’s newsletter to get strategic patterns for life science leaders building a defensible business.

Be sure to subscribe to the Life Sciences Today Podcast on your favorite podcasting platform:

Along with the popular podcasting platforms above, you can Subscribe to Healthcare IT Today on YouTube.  Plus, all of the audio and video versions will be made available to stream on Healthcare IT Today. As a former pharma-tech founder who bootstrapped to exit, I now help TechBio and digital health CEOs grow revenue—by solving the tech, team, and go-to-market problems that stall your progress. If you want a warrior by your side, connect with me on LinkedIn.

If you work in Life Sciences IT, we’d love to hear where you agree and/or disagree with our takes on health IT innovation in life sciences. Feel free to share your thoughts and perspectives in the comments of this post, in the YouTube comments, or privately on our Contact Us page. Let us know what you think of the podcast and if you have any ideas for future episodes.

Thanks so much for listening!



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< + > ‘The Pitt’ Cyberattack Scenario Wasn’t Fiction, Most Health Systems Still Aren’t Ready

The following is a guest article by Matt DeFrain, Managing Director at Arcova

When this season of “The Pitt” depicted a hospital spiraling into chaos after a ransomware attack forced clinicians to abandon digital systems and go analog, many viewers saw it as gripping television. Healthcare cybersecurity leaders saw something else entirely: a realistic preview of what happens when a cyber event becomes an operational crisis.

On the show, clinicians lose access to digital health records, lab orders disappear, paper charts replace connected systems, and patient care begins to deteriorate in real time. The frightening part is how familiar the scenario feels.

For years, many organizations approached cybersecurity through the lens of compliance and baseline controls. Did we meet the HIPAA requirement? Did we complete the audit? Do we have the right tools in place, and are they secure? Those questions still matter, but they are no longer enough.

The better question is, if critical systems disappeared tomorrow, how long could your organization safely continue delivering care?

Most healthcare organizations are not prepared to answer.

Downtime Planning Was Built for Hours, Not Weeks

Nearly every health system has downtime procedures. The problem is that most of them were designed for temporary outages, not prolonged operational paralysis.

Across healthcare, cyberattacks have evolved beyond data theft and financial extortion. Today, the real risk is operational disruption at scale. We are now seeing attacks capable of delaying surgeries, disrupting care coordination, taking down entire hospital networks, and jeopardizing patient safety.

That shift requires healthcare leaders to fundamentally rethink what cybersecurity preparedness actually means.

Healthcare leaders often think about cyber resilience in terms of restoring technology. They should also be thinking about sustaining patient care during extended disruption. It’s worth noting that, as operational pressure increases, the likelihood of medical error rises with it.

It is now table stakes to test whether manual workflows can realistically scale beyond a few hours. Teams must also audit and understand where hidden dependencies exist between systems to identify which clinical and operational processes would fail first under prolonged downtime conditions.

The Biggest Threats Often Enter Through Third Parties

One of the most important lessons from recent healthcare cyber incidents is that organizations do not need to be directly breached to experience catastrophic disruption.

Healthcare operates through a deeply interconnected network of vendors, technology providers, partners, and external platforms. Every connection creates another potential attack vector.

The Change Healthcare incident illustrated this reality on a massive scale. A compromise originating through a third party affected claims processing, pharmacy operations, payment systems, and healthcare delivery organizations across the country. Many hospitals that considered themselves operationally secure still found themselves severely impacted.

The challenge becomes even more complicated as healthcare organizations rapidly adopt AI-enabled tools and external data platforms. Employees are also increasingly using generative AI tools on personal devices or outside formal governance structures. In many environments, shadow AI adoption is already happening at scale, creating significant exposure risks around sensitive data, metadata leakage, third-party integrations, and uncontrolled information sharing.

Healthcare organizations need a far more comprehensive understanding of how all of these pieces are woven into their environment, what data is accessed where, and how privilege escalation could occur. You can’t govern what you can’t see, or what you don’t know exists. Visibility across partners, vendors, AI tooling – visibility across the full ecosystem – is the first step.

Most of All, Cybersecurity Must Be Reframed Around Patient Impact

One of the reasons “The Pitt” resonated so strongly with viewers is that it showed how patient care suffers when systems fail. Now more than ever, maintaining quality patient care must become the central organizing principle for healthcare cybersecurity moving forward, regardless of the scenario.

Too often, cybersecurity conversations are narrowly focused on compliance metrics, technical controls, or financial loss. Those issues matter, but they miss the broader operational stakes. Boards, executives, IT leaders, clinical leadership teams, and security teams all need to operate from a shared understanding that cybersecurity resilience is directly tied to care continuity.

Organizations should be running realistic operational resilience exercises that include clinical leaders and staff, not just IT teams. They should be stress-testing how long they can operate under degraded conditions. They should understand how communications, supply chain systems, imaging workflows, and third-party dependencies intersect with all team members’ unique roles during a crisis.

Most importantly, they need to stop viewing cybersecurity preparedness as the goal. The goal is maintaining safe patient care under adverse conditions.

The Next Healthcare Cyber Crisis Will Be Operational

The healthcare industry is entering a new era of cyber risk where operational disruption will define the severity of an incident. “The Pitt” felt believable because healthcare leaders already know how fragile interconnected systems can become under pressure. Increasingly, that pressure is what healthcare leaders need to be preparing for now.

This shouldn’t become a battle for who has the longest compliance checklists or the largest security budgets. Instead, it’s the organizations that prepare for resilience at every level of the operation that will see the most enduring success.

About Matt DeFrain

Matt DeFrain is Managing Director at Arcova, where he advises healthcare organizations on cybersecurity, governance, operational resilience, and risk management strategies. He works closely with healthcare leaders to strengthen preparedness against evolving cyber threats that impact both technology infrastructure and patient care.



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< + > xCures Closes $46 Million Series B Financing | Cadence Raises $100M Series C Led by Spark Capital

Check out today’s featured companies who have recently raised a round of funding, and be sure to check out the full list of past healthcare IT fundings.

xCures Closes $46 Million Series B Financing to Transform Fragmented Medical Records into Decision-Ready Data Through Its Clinical Clarity Engine

New Capital Brings Total Funding to More Than $76 Million and Will Fuel Continued Expansion of the Company’s Platform for Turning Fragmented Medical Records into Decision-Ready Clinical Data

xCures, a pioneering healthcare data company focused on improving healthcare outcomes, today announced the close of a $46 million Series B financing round led by Innovius Capital, with participation from iGrow, GKCC, Spring Mountain Capital, and existing investors. The new capital brings xCures’ total funding to more than $76 million and will support the continued expansion of the clinical clarity layer to turn fragmented medical records into decision-ready clinical data.

Patient information is scattered across thousands of labs, hospitals, imaging centers, and EMRs, often arriving as unstructured documents that are difficult to use in clinical workflows. The xCures Clinical Clarity Engine brings together three integrated capabilities: decision-ready checklists built from automated patient histories and backed by evidence-grade data. It creates the clarity that providers, value-based care, diagnostics labs, and consumer health organizations have long needed.

To date, xCures has processed over 300 million medical records sourced from more than 550,000 healthcare locations nationwide, supporting clinical decisions for millions of patients across the U.S.

“Healthcare has spent decades generating enormous amounts of patient data without a reliable way to make that information usable. We’re changing that,” said Mika Newton, CEO at xCures. “This financing allows us to accelerate product development, expand our team, and help more organizations turn fragmented records into information they can actually act on.”

Stu Posluns, Partner at Innovius, added, “The promise of AI in healthcare depends on having accurate, complete, and trustworthy clinical data. xCures has built by far the most compelling platform we’ve seen for turning fragmented medical records into actionable clinical intelligence…

Full release here, originally announced June 24th, 2026.

Cadence Raises $100M Series C Led by Spark Capital to Automate Chronic Care

This New Investment Will Help Scale AI Agents to Meet the Needs of Over 56 Million Older Adults with Chronic Disease Amid a Deepening Clinician Shortage

Cadence, the clinical AI company managing chronic care for older adults, announced a $100 million Series C, amid adoption of its AI-powered care model across the nation’s leading health systems.

The Series C was led by Spark Capital. Thrive Capital, General Catalyst, Coatue, B Capital, Corewell Health Ventures, Memorial Hermann, and Duke Health participated in the round.

Today, Cadence also announced new affiliations with Duke Health, a world-class academic health care system serving patients across North Carolina, and Texas Health Resources, the nonprofit health system that cares for more patients in North Texas than any other. Now working alongside over 20 leading health systems, Cadence treats more than 100,000 active patients, has demonstrated significant clinical improvements in peer-reviewed literature, and saves Medicare roughly $2.7 million every week. The company tripled annual recurring revenue in 2025.

“We believe the most consequential AI companies of the next decade will be built in categories where the technology changes the underlying mechanics of the business. Cadence has done the hardest work first – demonstrating clinical outcomes, building trust with the country’s leading health systems, and proving out the safe and effective deployment of AI inside care delivery,” said Will Reed, Partner at Spark Capital and new Cadence Board Member. “There is no other AI care platform in the country with this combination of scale, peer-reviewed clinical outcomes, and economic proof.”

“At Duke Health, our mission is to advance the health of our patients and the communities we serve. The moments that matter most for a patient’s health often happen at home, not in the clinic,” said Jeffrey Ferranti, MD, MS, Senior Vice President and Chief Digital Officer at Duke Health…

Full release here, originally announced June 23rd, 2026.



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Thursday, July 9, 2026

< + > OntarioMD on Practical AI and the Reality of Data Standards

The healthcare industry is finally moving past the hype of artificial intelligence and the hope of data standards. Leaders are no longer questioning the benefits of either, but they are searching for how to deploy both in ways that do not disrupt clinical care or increase the burden on staff.

While attending eHealth26, I sat down with Aidan Lee and Matt Leduc, both Executive Directors at OntarioMD, to discuss their respective sessions on data standards and deploying AI midstream into established workflows.

Key Takeaways from OntarioMD at eHealth26

  • Standards need practical translation. Creating a healthcare data standard is only the first step. Vendors need active support to incorporate and activate those standards within their solutions
  • AI requires governance. Integrating AI into healthcare operations requires careful consideration of privacy, security, patient safety, and clinical workload. Cross-functional governance is needed.
  • Technology cannot ignore human factors. A successful AI rollout depends heavily on understanding the direct impact on a clinician’s daily workload rather than just the software capabilities.

Translating Data Healthcare Standards for Vendors

Establishing Pan-Canadian Health Standards (like CACDI) is a massive achievement, but those standards sit idle if electronic medical record vendors do not know how to implement them. Organizations like OntarioMD bridge that gap by partnering with agencies like CIHI to provide actionable guidance to the marketplace.

“Vendors always ask, ‘What do we do with these [standards]?’ and this is where Ontario MD’s approach and history will benefit the EMR community,” Lee explained.

Building AI with Governance

When OntarioMD introduced an artificial intelligence tool to extract information from hospital and radiology reports within their Health Report Manager (HRM) system, privacy was a priority. That was by design.

“You need to have the right controls in place. Introducing artificial intelligence is something that has to do that in a constrained way,” Leduc noted.

The OntarioMD hopes their approach will serve as an example to others – that AI is not to be feared but does need to be respected.

Prioritizing Human Factors in AI

The initial expectation for clinical AI was that it would instantly reduce physician workloads and replace human effort. In practice, inserting immature AI into an established workflow can easily backfire if the deployment fails to adapt to the reality of human behavior.

“It really is all about the human factors around the way you’ve introduced AI,” Leduc observed.

Ultimately, AI is simply a tool to handle heavy data processing so doctors can focus on the human elements of care they do best. Lee agreed, adding that AI is “giving physicians ‘superpowers’ in some cases.

Questions Healthcare IT Leaders are Asking

Why do vendors struggle to adopt new data standards?
Standards are often highly technical and disconnected from the daily realities of software development. Vendors require practical guidance and partnership to understand how to build these standards into their existing architectures in a way that benefits clinicians.

How should organizations evaluate the privacy risks of clinical AI?
Leaders must treat AI tools with the same strict governance applied to any clinical system. Organizations must ensure that any AI vendor operates within a constrained environment where patient data is isolated and protected from external model training.

Learn more about OntarioMD at https://www.ontariomd.ca/

Listen and subscribe to the Healthcare IT Today Interviews Podcast to hear all the latest insights from experts in healthcare IT.

And for an exclusive look at our top stories, subscribe to our newsletter and YouTube.

Tell us what you think. Contact us here or on Twitter at @hcitoday. And if you’re interested in advertising with us, check out our various advertising packages and request our Media Kit.



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< + > The 2026 EHR Market is Cooling as Leaders Pivot to AI

Hospitals are terrified of switching their electronic health record (EHR) systems. The massive capital costs, multi-year timelines, and disrupted clinical workflows mean most healthcare organizations are putting a pin in their migration plans. Instead, they are keeping their current systems and shifting their budgets toward AI solutions.

To get the inside scoop on these changing market dynamics, I sat down with Paul Warburton, Senior Market Research Analyst at KLAS Research, to unpack the findings from their latest US Acute Care EHR Market Share Report.

Key Takeaways on the EHR Market from KLAS’s Paul Warburton

  1. EHR buying decisions have cooled significantly as major health systems pause large migrations to focus on shorter-term AI pilots.
  2. Epic is capturing smaller hospitals through its Community Connect program, driven by local data exchange needs rather than software features.
  3. Short-term thinking is dominating IT budgets, with a massive rise in six-month pilots and month-to-month vendor contracts.

Highlights from the KLAS Research US Acute Care EHR Market Share 2026

  • 0 “Whale” EHR Decisions in 2025. KLAS tracked zero large health system migrations during the past year. “The whole market overall at a macro level is in a bit of a holding pattern,” Warburton noted. Leaders are betting that emerging AI can patch their current IT stack issues over the next 12 to 24 months, delaying the need for a full rip and replace of their EHR infrastructure.
  • 1 to 2 Hospital Systems are Driving Epic’s Growth. Epic still had a big year, but the wins came from small community hospitals extending existing local networks. “It was a big year for Epic’s Community Connect approach,” Warburton said. Local data coordination and heavy pushback from shared physicians drove these decisions, not necessarily software functionality.
  • $350 Billion in RCM Waste is a Focus. Financial pressure is forcing organizations to prioritize survival over large IT projects. Organizations are demanding immediate payback which has put a focus on revenue cycle management technology and relief – especially related to prior authorizations and denials management.

 Questions Healthcare IT Leaders are Asking

 Why are EHR satisfaction scores dropping for Oracle Health? The decline in ratings is a communication issue rather than a technology problem. Oracle is developing a promising AI-driven interaction layer that sits on top of existing architecture to prevent a full rip and replace. However, they have struggled to communicate this roadmap to their broader community base, leaving mid-market customers frustrated.

Is Meditech holding onto its current customer base? Yes. While Meditech is losing overall market share, it is successfully migrating its existing base to its cloud-based Expanse platform. This cloud migration simplifies infrastructure updates and allows hospitals to adopt a flexible, best-of-breed approach to AI integrations with third-party partners.

Learn more about KLAS Research at https://engage.klasresearch.com/

Listen and subscribe to the Healthcare IT Today Interviews Podcast to hear all the latest insights from experts in healthcare IT.

And for an exclusive look at our top stories, subscribe to our newsletter and YouTube.

Tell us what you think. Contact us here or on Twitter at @hcitoday. And if you’re interested in advertising with us, check out our various advertising packages and request our Media Kit.



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< + > Bonus Features – July 12, 2026 – Healthcare workers spend 161 hours per year on PDF tasks, 94% of companies want tools to educate employees on prescription costs, plus 30 more stories

Welcome to the weekly edition of Healthcare IT Today Bonus Features . This article will be a weekly roundup of interesting stories, product ...