< + > Bonus Features – August 9, 2026 – 57% of home- and community-based providers evaluating AI tools, 28% of patients have put off canceling an appointment because it required a phone call, plus 25 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.

News and Stats

• The Senate introduced the Patient Matching and Transparency in Certified Health IT (MATCH IT) Act of 2026, which would create an industry standard definition for how patient match rates are measured. AHIMA voiced support for MATCH IT, as did CHIME, HIMSS, and numerous health systems.
• An HHAeXchange survey found that more than 57% of home- and community-based service providers are actively using, testing, or evaluating AI tools.
• A Tebra survey found 28% of patients had put off canceling or rescheduling an appointment because the office required a phone call instead of a text, link, app, or portal.

Partnerships

• Clinical decision support from Atropos Health is now accessible in Health Universe‘s agentic AI platform.
• AI agents from Hyro are now integrated with ServiceNow, a workflow automation platform. In addition, Hyro customer Hackensack Meridian Health earned The Joint Commission’s Responsible Use of AI in Healthcare (RUAIH) Certification.
• Digital mental health care company Mentavi Health is now integrated with Quest Diagnostics through the DrChrono EHR platform.
• CMS-approved Qualified Clinical Data Registry Patient360 is partnering with Medbridge to deliver MIPS reporting directly from patient-reported outcomes captured in the Medbridge platform.
• PwC and Zyter are collaborating to help healthcare payers and providers transform total cost of care programs.
• Workforce management technology from QGenda is now integrated with ShiftMed‘s network of credentialed clinicians.
• Medication affordability search technology from TailorMed is now embedded in participating RxSense-powered marketplace tools for pharmacy benefits management.

Products

• Cotiviti launched an enhanced version of its prepay dental payment integrity solution.
• GE HealthCare launched Invenia ABUS (Automated Breast Ultrasound) Prime and ABUS StreamVue, the latter of which recently received FDA clearance and CE Marking.
• Health and wellness brand Hims & Hers launched a new Hers app for personalized weight loss support.
• ModMed announced the ModMed RCM AI Platform.
• Mental health EHR Upheal released insurance billing with AI-drafted denial appeals, alongside an agentic AI Assistant.

Implementations

• Employer- and school-based primary care provider HealthBar selected Elation Health as its EHR.
• NewYork-Presbyterian adopted Signal 1‘s AI Management System for monitoring AI technology use across the organization.
• Curative Insurance Company selected Wondr Health to bring behavior-based weight management support to its group health insurance plans

Company News

• Research from Apella found use of ambient AI can be linked to increased surgical case volume and fewer late-ending OR days.
• Data and analytics company Definitive Healthcare announced an early adopter program for its new AI-powered platform.
• Proscia received FDA clearance for Concentriq AP-Dx, a digital pathology platform for primary diagnosis.
• Royal Philips announced six collaborations to expand its open monitoring ecosystem.
• Texas-based University of Houston is launching the Institute for Digital Healthcare Transformation.
• Research from XRHealth found cognitive behavioral immersion for depression is more effective when delivered through VR than a conventional flat screen.

People

• Employer and payer care navigation company Transcarent appointed Mike Morgan as Chief Commercial Officer.
• Specialty pharmacy services organization Longitude Rx appointed Cora Beth Enzor as Chief Operating Officer.
• Behavioral health technology company RethinkFirst appointed Shane Wilson as Chief Customer Officer.

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.

< + > Weekly Roundup – August 8, 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.

Keeping the Patient at the Center of Large-Scale Technology Deployment. John Lynn connected with Lindsey Bengfort at NTT Data to discuss trying to manage the pace of change with AI, especially from the start of a pilot to the time to ramp up adoption. Read more…

Turning Data Into Actionable Insights. Renee Wiczorek at Truven by Merative gave John a demo of the company’s dashboards and insights, which help organizations evaluate program benchmarks and determine where investments will have the biggest impact. Read more…

Integrating Back-Office Systems With Clinical and Front-End Applications. The Healthcare IT Today community is solving this challenging problem with flexible infrastructure, platforms, device-level security, ambient documentation, and AI agents embedded in clinical workflows. Read more…

Life Sciences Today Podcast: Scaling Physical Therapy Without New Clinics. Danny Lieberman connected with Dr. Ashok Gupta at TheraNow, which uses virtual physical therapy to help health systems expand capacity without adding buildings or staff. Read more…

Healthcare IT Today Podcast: Leadership Succession. In light of Sumit Rana leaving Epic, John and Colin Hung discussed whether a company’s leadership and succession plan matters to customers, along with how to ensure a smooth path forward. Read more…

The Growing Gap Between Healthcare Risk and Healthcare Governance. AI can help organizations improve threat detection, prioritize alerts, and streamline security operations, but AI cannot compensate for fragmented governance or inconsistent risk management practices, noted Sam Peters at IO. Read more…

How to Maintain Patient Care During Communications Outages. Lori Stone at First Responder Network Authority, the overseer of national broadband network FirstNet, explained how FirstNet supports direct communications and acts as backhaul for Wi-Fi and other systems. Read more…

The Denial Economy Is Asymmetric. Knowing That Can Start to Fix the Issue. John Beene at Soupy Audit explained why providers don’t audit Recovery Audit Contractor extrapolations – and why they should respond by flagging risks, tracking payer activity, and monitoring changes in demand. Read more…

Taking a New Approach to Physical Security in Healthcare. It’s difficult for humans to continuously monitor live video for potential signs of security threats. Shikhar Shrestha at Ambient.ai described agentic physical security that can reason about what’s happening, decide if it matters, and initiate the right response. Read more…

How Trust-Centric Design Reduces Patient Stress and Retains Users. Yuliia Apanasenko at Phenomenon Studio provided four user experience principles that help reduce uncertainty and guide patients toward the next step in their care journey without leaving them to figure it out themselves. Read more…

This Week’s Health IT Jobs for August 5, 2026: Houston-based Texas Children’s Hospital seeks a CISO. Read more…

Bonus Features for August 2, 2026: Vizient projects 8% increase in healthcare IT spending for 2027; 70% of clinicians chart outside of working hours. Read more…

Funding and M&A Activity:

• Full-body MRI scanning company Neko Health completed a $700 million Series C funding round ahead of its U.S. launch.
• Autonomous RCM platform Candid Health raised $120 million in Series D funding.
• Agentic AI platform Bunkerhill Health closed a $55 million Series B funding round.
• Provider operations platform Assured announced $19 million in Series A funding.
• Cardiovascular technology company Karoo Health closed $16.2 million in Series A financing.
• Precision diagnostics company Vivid Dx announced $15 million in seed financing.
•  Breathing and sleep disorder device maker SoundHealth announced $12.25 million in funding to date this year.
• Autoimmune disease care platform Mirae launched with $5.4 million in funding.

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

< + > How TheraNow Scales Physical Therapy Without New Clinics – Life Sciences Today Podcast Episode 73

We’re excited to be back for another episode of the Life Sciences Today Podcast by Healthcare IT Today. My guest today is Dr. Ashok Gupta, Founder and CEO at TheraNow. In this episode, I speak with Dr. Gupta about why the real bottleneck in physical therapy isn’t quality — it’s access. Dr. Gupta explains how TheraNow built a virtual physical therapy model that helps health systems expand capacity without adding buildings or staff, and why 99% of the company’s revenue now comes from hospitals and their outpatient networks. Our conversation covers the shift from pre-COVID resistance to post-COVID reimbursement, the operational moat created by combining software with a 39-state clinician network, and why fragmented tools fail when they don’t fit clinical workflows. 

We also dig into a core industry anti-pattern: putting care in the wrong physical location, where even parking and travel time become barriers to treatment.

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

• Tell me about your personal journey – how did you end up in this?
• You have different kinds of customers—individual clinics, healthcare plans, healthcare providers— so how do you create value?
• Is compliance better or worse when you operate online?
• I saw on your website you have four different kinds of customers. Out of the four, where do you make the most money?
• Considering that you’re not the only person with this idea, what is your moat?
• Are the physical therapists who work for you on your payroll, or are they contractors?
• What are three things you want to do for your customers, which are healthcare/hospital systems, in the next twelve months?
• What are three things you want to do for your customers in the next twelve months?
• What is the biggest anti-pattern in the industry?

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

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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!

< + > The Growing Gap Between Healthcare Risk and Healthcare Governance

The following is a guest article by Sam Peters, Chief Product Officer at IO

Healthcare organizations are moving quickly to adopt artificial intelligence. From clinical documentation assistants and patient communication tools to operational automation and decision support systems, AI is becoming embedded throughout healthcare workflows. The promise is significant: greater efficiency, reduced administrative burden, and improved experiences for both patients and providers.

What many organizations are discovering, however, is that the challenge is not simply adopting AI. It is governing risk in an environment where technologies, vendors, and regulatory expectations are evolving faster than many oversight processes were designed to accommodate. Healthcare organizations were already managing increasingly complex technology environments, growing third-party dependencies, persistent cybersecurity threats, workforce shortages, and expanding compliance obligations. AI is arriving on top of those existing realities, adding another layer of complexity and forcing leaders to examine whether their governance practices are capable of keeping pace with a rapidly changing risk landscape.

Governance Was Already Under Pressure

Much of the conversation around AI assumes healthcare is confronting an entirely new category of risk. In practice, many organizations are encountering familiar governance challenges that have simply become more visible as AI adoption accelerates. Fragmented oversight, limited resources, growing supplier dependencies, and difficulty maintaining visibility across complex technology environments have all been longstanding concerns for healthcare leaders.

Recent research from IO’s State of Information Security report reflects this reality. While 47% of healthcare organizations identified AI-driven phishing as a significant threat and 51% cited AI-generated misinformation and disinformation as a growing concern, the underlying pressures were already present. More than half (51%) reported budget constraints affecting security initiatives, 47% identified information security skills shortages, and 55% experienced a third-party or supply chain incident during the past year.

AI is changing the speed and scale at which these risks can materialize. Threat actors can automate activities that previously required significant time and expertise, while healthcare organizations are simultaneously under pressure to evaluate and deploy AI-enabled technologies faster than many governance processes were designed to support. The result is an environment where risks evolve more quickly than traditional oversight models can track.

The challenge extends to the defensive side as well. While AI has the potential to help healthcare organizations improve threat detection, prioritize alerts, and streamline security operations, it cannot compensate for fragmented governance or inconsistent risk management practices.

Annual Assessments Cannot Keep Pace

For years, healthcare organizations have relied on annual risk assessments, periodic compliance reviews, and point-in-time audits to evaluate security, privacy, and operational risks. Those practices remain important, but they were developed for environments where major technology changes occurred over months or years. Today’s healthcare technology ecosystem operates very differently.

AI-enabled platforms receive frequent updates, vendors continuously introduce new capabilities, and data flows evolve as systems become more interconnected. A healthcare organization’s risk profile can look very different at the end of the year than it did when the annual assessment was conducted. Yet many governance programs still rely heavily on periodic reviews that provide only a snapshot of risk at a particular moment in time.

This becomes even more challenging because AI-related risks rarely fit neatly within a single department. A clinical documentation assistant, patient engagement platform, or operational AI tool may simultaneously create cybersecurity, privacy, compliance, third-party risk, and patient safety considerations. Governance structures built around isolated functions often struggle to maintain visibility into risks that span multiple teams and evolve continuously.

Many healthcare leaders are finding that annual assessments remain valuable, but snapshots alone are no longer sufficient. Organizations increasingly need mechanisms for ongoing assessment, communication, and accountability that provide visibility into how risks change over time.

Governance Must Become an Operational Function

The challenge becomes even more complex in healthcare’s highly interconnected vendor ecosystem. Most organizations are not building AI systems themselves. They are acquiring capabilities from software providers, cloud platforms, medical device manufacturers, and specialized healthcare technology vendors. As those suppliers introduce new functionality and update existing products, healthcare organizations must understand how those changes affect their own risk posture.

This is why governance is increasingly becoming an operational function rather than a compliance exercise. Across cybersecurity, privacy, operational resilience, and emerging AI governance requirements, regulators and executive leadership teams are looking for evidence that organizations understand and manage risk continuously, not just during audit cycles. The expectation is shifting from demonstrating compliance at a specific point in time to demonstrating ongoing awareness, accountability, and resilience.

For healthcare leaders, the priority should be strengthening the fundamentals: governance, resilience, supplier assurance, workforce capability, and risk management. Frameworks such as ISO 27001, ISO 27701, and ISO 42001 can provide useful structure, but what matters most is establishing repeatable processes that help organizations assess, communicate, and adapt to risk as conditions change.

The organizations that realize the greatest value from AI are unlikely to be the ones deploying the most tools. They will be the organizations that can confidently understand and manage risk as their environments evolve. As AI adoption continues to accelerate, governance must evolve from a periodic compliance activity into an ongoing operational discipline—one that enables organizations to innovate while maintaining trust, accountability, and resilience.

About Sam Peters

Sam Peters is Chief Product Officer at IO and has more than 20 years of experience in cybersecurity, privacy, risk management, and governance. He previously served as Chief Information Security Officer and Data Protection Officer, leading programs focused on ISO 27001, privacy governance, and emerging AI governance frameworks.

< + > SoundHealth Raises $12.25M | Assured Raises $19M Series A

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.

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SoundHealth Raises $12.25M to Accelerate Growth of Its AI-Enabled Non-Invasive Devices for Breathing and Sleep Disorders

Oversubscribed Series A Led by Shangbay Capital Brings Total Funding to Date to $12.25M, Fueling Expansion of the Company’s FDA-Cleared, Personalized Therapeutics

SoundHealth, a leader in personalized, AI-enabled non-invasive medical and wellness devices, announced the closing of an oversubscribed Series A financing led by Shangbay Capital, bringing the company’s total funding to date to $12.25 million. The new capital will accelerate growth of SoundHealth’s portfolio of personalized, FDA-cleared therapeutics designed to treat population-scale breathing and wellness devices targeted towards sleep disorders.

SoundHealth’s devices combine clinically validated science with proprietary AI to deliver personalized, drug-free treatment at scale. The company’s flagship product, the FDA-cleared Sonu band, has now delivered more than 500,000 acoustic resonance treatment sessions for users ages 12 and up. Additionally, the flagship product has become the leading steroid alternative for the treatment of congestion due to allergic and non-allergic rhinitis.

The company’s industry-leading craniofacial anatomical dataset was developed to deliver personalized treatment for congestion. This unique craniofacial anatomical dataset has been used to provide the foundation for the company’s Spatial Sleep product, the world’s first clinically proven personalized sleep wellness device. Spatial Sleep has been shown to help people fall asleep faster and sleep longer.

Recommended by more than 1,000 medical and dental professionals nationwide, SoundHealth is leading the industry in revolutionizing non-drug treatments for breathing and sleep disorders…

Full release here, originally announced July 30th, 2026.

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Assured Raises $19M Series A Led by Insight Partners to Automate Healthcare Provider Operations with AI Agents

This Funding Accelerates Assured’s Mission to Replace Manual Healthcare Provider Operations with AI Agents, so Providers Get Onboarded Faster and Patients Receive Care Sooner

Assured, the AI-native platform for healthcare provider operations, today announced $19 million in Series A funding led by global tech investor Insight Partners, with continued participation from First Round Capital and Kindred Ventures. The company now serves more than 100 healthcare organizations, including health systems, digital health companies, and medical groups.

Provider onboarding has always been complex, but the infrastructure behind it has never caught up. Credentialing and operations teams still stitch together primary source verifications, state-specific licensing requirements, and payer-by-payer enrollment submissions across disconnected systems using outdated legacy tools. It can take months for a provider to get in-network, delaying revenue while patients wait for care.

Assured replaces that fragmented work with AI agents that directly operate inside the credentialing and payer enrollment processes. Assured’s AI agents verify provider data against more than 2,000 primary sources, prepare applications tailored to each state’s and payer’s requirements, and flag gaps before they become delays. The result: providers credentialed within days, in-network 30 percent faster, and operations teams freed up by dozens of hours each week.

“Across healthcare, provider credentialing and enrollment remain some of the most painful and expensive parts of scaling,” said Teddie Wardi, Managing Director at Insight Partners…

Full release here, originally announced July 30th, 2026.

< + > A Demo of Truven Health Insights Turning Data Into Actionable Insights

Renee Wiczorek, Lead Product Manager at Truven by Merative, wants healthcare institutions to ask the deep questions about the trends they’re seeing: What caused a recent cost increase? What programs are working? Which of their populations need more attention?  When you ask the right questions and have the right data, healthcare organizations can glean a lot of value.

Truven’s dashboards, which Wiczorek demos during this video, let managers find “clarity” in their data, and learn “not just what happened, but why.” The demo is well worth viewing in full screen.

The dashboards reveal right away whether benchmarks are rising or falling, and let you compare your organization against averages across the industry. You can then click on particular conditions or other elements of a chart to dig deeper. Wiczorek features the recent “Risk of rising cost” feature, which can identify the individuals who are most at risk, and the conditions driving that risk. Program evaluation becomes easier with Truven.

Another recent addition called Insight Edge applies AI to help employ data to answer business questions.

In short, Wiczorek says, their platform can “turn health care data into actionable decisions” and determine “where your investment is most likely to have impact.”

Watch the video below to learn more about the value Truven Health Insights can provide your organization and see a demo of the product.

Learn more about Truven Health Insights: https://www.merative.com/truven

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< + > This Week’s Health IT Jobs – August 5, 2026

It can be very overwhelming scrolling through job board after job board in search of a position that fits your wants and needs. Let us take that stress away by finding a mix of great health IT jobs for you! We hope you enjoy this look at some of the health IT jobs we saw healthcare organizations trying to fill this week.

Here’s a quick look at some of the health IT jobs we found:

• Head of Information Technology – Kyverna Therapeutics
• Cybersecurity Engineer – Iterative Health
• Vice President of Information Technology – MBX Biosciences, Inc.
• Chief Information Security Officer – Texas Children’s Hospital
• Executive Director – San Diego Health Connect
• Cybersecurity Engineer Sr. Incident Response – Aurora Health Care
• Privacy Analyst – Bon Secours Mercy Health
• Vice President, Chief Medical Information Officer – Montefiore Health System
• Revenue Management Analyst-Process Improvement – NYU Langone Health
• Compliance & Privacy Coordinator – AltaMed Health Services
• VP IS Business Operations – Children’s Health
• Cybersecurity Analyst – Johns Hopkins Health Plans
• Revenue Cycle Analyst (Remote) – Cedars-Sinai
• Chief Technology Officer – eMed
• Cyber Engineer – HealthEquity
• Analyst, Revenue Integrity – Northwestern Medicine
• HIPAA Specialist – UCHealth
• Clinical Bill Review Analyst – Vālenz Health
• Cybersecurity Analyst- IOT Security – Henry Ford Health
• Manager Healthcare Compliance – PeaceHealth

If none of these jobs fit your needs, be sure to check out our previous health IT job listings.

Do you have an open health IT position that you are looking to fill? Contact us here with a link to the open position and we’ll be happy to feature it in next week’s article at no charge!

*Note: These jobs are listed by Healthcare IT Today as a free service to the community. Healthcare IT Today does not endorse or vouch for the company or the job posting. We encourage anyone applying to these jobs to do their own due diligence.