< + > Making AI and Value-Based Care Work in Rural Health Facilities

Everyone knows that rural health care systems are stressed: costly populations, low reimbursements, staffing shortages, transportation problems—and the 900 billion to one trillion dollar cuts upcoming in Medicaid will severely add to those stresses. But rural providers also have advantages when it comes to the chances for transformation. In a recent video interview, we explore the opportunities in rural health, particularly the use of technology for value-based care with Pranam Ben, Founder & CEO at The Garage and Brittany Sachdeva, COO at Cibolo Health.

Ben says that 60% of health care payments already have some form of value-based modifier built into it, and credits this with reducing costs in the U.S. from an expected 6 trillion dollars to 5 trillion.

Rural organizations are often exceptionally strong at primary care delivery, but Sachdeva points out a towering challenge to value-based care for rural health: some 50% to 65% of costs are incurred in other facilities outside the ones used by patients for primary care. Technology solutions such as cleaner, well-integrated data and better coordination are required to make value-based care work.

What Sachdeva found is that the most impactful value based care strategy is when it’s an extension of the care team while still keeping the provider relationship central. Using Garage-generated prioritization lists in the background allows care teams to focus on the right patients without disrupting the provider-patient relationship.

The reality is that what works in urban markets often does not work in rural communities due to unique challenges around access, affordability, transportation, awareness, and social determinants.  On the positive side, Ben says, rural providers are very committed and have a “strong fabric” in their communities and are very resilient. They are not focused on maximizing the number of encounters. Furthermore, according to Sachdeva, it may be easier to implement new workflows at a small facility where there’s easier coordination and the staff trusts their leadership.

Both interviewees say that the $50 billion recently earmarked for improving rural health care in the Rural Health Transformation Program (RHTP) comes at a critical moment as communities prepare for the impact of the upcoming Medicaid reductions. Ben and Sachdeva suggested that this funding creates a great opportunity to use these funds to modernize infrastructure, virtualize care delivery, automate workflows with AI, train the workforce, and better position rural communities for long-term sustainability.

Ben says that the principle is to “focus on the right patients at the right time.” Value-based care means more screening and early disease management.  Sachdeva also emphasized that these investments impact the entire continuum of care and that payer partners must actively be part of these efforts.  Great payer partners are the key to being successful in value-based care.

This requires integrated data that is turned into “actionable insights.” Payer and provider data must be better integrated, perhaps requiring support at the state level.  Providers are operating with lean teams and need “one version of the truth” to focus on the patients that matter most within VBC contracts.

On top of a strong data infrastructure, AI can look through millions of patient records to identify revenue opportunities. Sachdeva points out that wearable devices can produce more accurate interventions by learning each patient’s personal baseline, instead of depending on “just what the textbook says is normal.”

Getting “rural-relevant” contracts is also important. AI can help reduce the manual labor of dealing with many contracts at many payers.  One of the largest barriers to successful VBC participation in rural markets is having enough scale and having payer relationships structured appropriately for rural organizations.  Cibolo and The Garage partnered together to help rural health organizations really address these obstacles.  Through this collaboration, the BlazeLink Contract Compliance Agent was born.

In our interview, Pranam noted that contracts can now be consumed by the agent in approximately 0.25 seconds on average and analyzed against millions of records to identify revenue opportunities. Given rural facilities often operate on extremely narrow margins, even recovering a fraction of the typical 3–6% of compromised revenue can materially impact sustainability.

Sachdeva shared that AI is becoming a necessity, not a replacement for providers. The “people” aspect of care cannot be removed. These technology and AI tools though can reduce the operational burden rural facilities face around contract compliance and understanding reimbursement methodologies.

Learn more about what’s happening in rural health to address the challenges, making rural health’s value based care efforts successful, and how technology can help in these efforts in this interview with The Garage and Cibolo Health.

Learn more about The Garage: https://www.thegaragein.com/

Learn more about Cibolo Health: https://cibolohealth.com/

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

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The Garage is a proud sponsor of Healthcare Scene.

< + > This Week’s Health IT Jobs – May 27, 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:

• Director of Information Technology – Trace Medical
• Data Specialist I – Nursing Administration – CHRISTUS Health
• Senior Director Systems Engineering – WellSpan Health
• Director of Network & Technology Resilience – TransMedics, Inc.
• Medical Biller – Epic
• Health Information Tech II – Health Information Services – Health First
• Vice President of IT – Avance Care
• Credentialing Coordinator – Revenue Cycle – UPMC
• US Oncology Practice Technology Director – McKesson
• Senior Director, IT PMO – Labcorp
• Patient Financial Representative – Patient Financial Services – CHRISTUS Health
• Technology Director, Billing and Enrollment – Medica
• Program Administrator GME – HCA Healthcare
• Patient Care Specialist – Community Events – Sentara Health
• Director, Data Systems and Clinical Programming – Alumis
• Health Information Specialist – Evara Health
• Senior Director of IT Operations – Vivie
• Patient Experience Representative II – MultiCare Health System
• Director, Configuration – Versant Health
• Associate Director, IT End User Services – BioSpace

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.

< + > Sunoh.ai’s Ambient AI Scribe Helps Clinicians Spend Less Time Charting at Night

Family Health Centers in Louisville, Kentucky adopted the ambient note-taking tool from Sunoh.ai to cut down on doctors’ filling out notes during family times in the evenings and even way into the night. In this information-rich interview, Chief Clinical Informatics Officer Cynthia Cox discusses how Family Health Centers adopted Sunoh.ai and the main ways it’s helped them on this key goal and others.

The initiative came about after a few doctors heard of ambient scribes and wanted to try it. The health center started by offering the tool to these doctors, but then realized it had a great opportunity to reach out and introduce it to other doctors experiencing burn-out. A demo video of the tool in action was enough to persuade many to use it. Family Health Center EHR trainers came into the practice to work side-by-side with doctors, training them on Sunoh.ai. And the doctors are happy with the change with many of them using the scribe for more than 90% of their notes.

The departments currently using the scribe are primary care and behavioral health. The latter department has unique needs for recording interviews which are longer and more in depth.  This required a special effort from the team at Sunoh.ai to make it work effectively. Cox hopes to have their women’s health and pediatrics clinicians using the scribe soon.

According to Cox, one of the most important traits of Sunoh.ai is it’s ability to handle Spanish.  Spanish is spoken by most of the 41% of patients who are non-native English speakers and is also used by some doctors during the visit.  This allows a patient to speak in the language their most comfortable while still capturing the information for the clinical note in English.

Cox also noted that Sunoh.ai can focus on what’s important in the visit. Casual chat about non-essential subjects is left out of the note, but important points are documented and sometimes in more detail than the doctors were doing before Sunoh.ai.

She hopes that Sunoh.ai in the future will help with more of the discrete data that is needed, as Family Health Centers is a federally qualified health center. She also says it could offer more support with pulling in templates for structured data.

Watch our interview with Family Health Centers to learn more about their experience with the AI medical scribe, Sunoh.ai.

Learn more about Family Health Centers: https://www.fhclouisville.org/

Learn more about eCW: https://www.eclinicalworks.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.

 eCW is a proud sponsor of Healthcare Scene.

< + > Knit Health Launches with $11.6M Seed to Build Clinical Intelligence AI for Healthcare

UC Berkeley Spin-Out Builds AI that Learns from Real Clinical Decision-Making

Knit Health, a health tech company spun out of the University of California, Berkeley, developing collective clinical intelligence, today launched out of stealth with $11.6 million in seed funding. The round was co-led by Uncork Capital and Frist Cressey Ventures, and the pre-seed round was led by Moxxie Ventures, with participation from Coalition Operators. The funding will accelerate deeper development and deployment of Knit Health’s Large Clinical Behavior Model (LCBM) across health systems, helping optimize clinical operations and elevate patient care.

Much of AI in healthcare today relies on large language models primarily trained on text or published literature to support clinical operations and decision-making. This approach overlooks collective clinical intelligence: the patterns of real-world decision-making and coordination embedded in referral habits, scheduling practices, and the informal ways clinicians navigate complex institutions. This knowledge is what ultimately drives better outcomes, ensuring patients are routed to the right care, at the right time, with the right information.

Knit Health is addressing this gap as it builds its LCBM trained on Truveta EMR Data from over 130 million patients across 30 U.S. health systems. Using deep reinforcement learning, causal inference, and behavioral cloning, the model learns directly from clinician decision-making patterns and applies that insight across operational and care delivery workflows – enabling providers to deliver faster, more informed, patient-specific care pathways.

“Much of what matters most in medicine isn’t written in textbooks, it’s learned through experience with time and navigating the healthcare system,” said Jonathan Kolstad, Co-Founder and CEO at Knit Health. “Across millions of patient journeys, clinicians develop patterns for what to do next and when. Knit learns from those real-world decisions, transforming collective clinical experience into intelligence that improves how the system works.”

Knit Health’s approach differs from traditional systems in several key ways:

• Building to a Behavioral World Model: Knit’s LCBM learns from observed sequences of clinical decisions, enabling it to reflect how care actually unfolds in practice rather than producing probabilistic text
• Health System-Specific: Knit fine-tunes to each health system’s practice patterns, capacity constraints, and referral dynamics, allowing it to integrate seamlessly into existing operations and deliver measurable impact from the outset
• Infrastructure Layer to Drive Health Systems: Knit sits beneath every routing decision, every discharge prediction, every care team allocation, every referral, and eventually every clinical workflow that touches a patient; this drives intelligence across the systems

“Knit Health is creating a new approach to AI. Unlike traditional models, it learns and evolves from real human behavior and can be applied across complex systems,” said Tripp Jones, General Partner at Uncork Capital. “This approach redefines how intelligence is captured and scaled, opening entirely new possibilities for AI-driven innovation in healthcare.”

“The hardest challenge in healthcare isn’t knowing what good care looks like; it’s delivering it consistently for every patient,” said Navid Farzad, Managing Partner at Frist Cressey Ventures. “Knit Health’s model embeds the best clinical intelligence directly into the workflow, helping clinicians make better decisions faster and more consistently. At scale, this will improve patient outcomes and transform clinical operations across health systems.”

Knit Health is built with full HIPAA compliance – rigorous governance, bias testing, and continuous monitoring to ensure guidance that patients and providers can trust. The company is partnering with health systems to deploy its initial models for triage, patient flow, and quality improvement. Through these collaborations, Knit aims to become the irreplaceable infrastructure layer that every clinical decision runs on.

Learn more about Knit Health here.

About Knit Health

Founded in 2025, Knit Health is building AI that captures collective clinical intelligence to become the infrastructure for better healthcare. Knit Health’s founders are a team of University of California, Berkeley researchers and academics and together, they bring deep expertise across behavioral economics, causal inference, generative AI, and healthcare. Knit Health was born from their shared vision to harness the capabilities of generative AI in a way that reflects the human behavior and collective intelligence that defines medicine.

Originally announced May 12th, 2026

< + > Trends in Healthcare Marketing and Patient Experience – Healthcare IT Today Podcast Episode 193

For the 193rd episode of the Healthcare IT Today Podcast, we are talking about trends in healthcare marketing and patient experience! We kick this episode off by discussing how we think the healthcare website is changing this year. Then, we debate where we think AI is affecting how patients seek and receive care. Next, we share the marketing message that surprised us at the Swaay.Health LIVE conference. Lastly, we conclude this episode by talking about our key takeaways from Swaay.Health LIVE that we think health IT leaders need to know.

Here’s a preview of the topics and questions we discuss in this episode:

• How is the healthcare website changing in 2026?
• Where is AI changing how patients seek and get care?
• What marketing message surprised you at the Swaay.Health LIVE conference?
• What are the key takeaways from Swaay.Health LIVE that Health IT leaders need to know?

Now, without further ado, we’re excited to share with you the next episode of the Healthcare IT Today podcast.

We publish a new Healthcare IT Today podcast every ~2 weeks. Thanks to our friends at Healthcare Now Radio, you’ll be able to listen to the latest episodes of Healthcare IT Today on their radio station for the first two weeks. Then, we’ll be publishing each episode as a podcast and YouTube video here after it finishes on the radio.

You can also subscribe to the Healthcare IT Today podcast on any of the following platforms:

• Apple Podcasts
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Thanks for listening to Healthcare IT Today and if you enjoy the content we’re sharing, please rate the 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 HealthcareITToday.com.

If you work in Healthcare IT, we’d love to hear where you agree and/or disagree with the perspectives we shared. Feel free to share your thoughts and perspectives in the comments of this post, in the YouTube comments, with @Colin_Hung or @techguy on Twitter, 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!

Listen to Our Latest Episodes:

< + > Why HIPAA-Compliant Telehealth Requires a Flexible, Device-Agnostic Workforce

The following is a guest article by David Matalon, Chief Executive Officer at Venn

Telehealth has expanded access to care and fundamentally changed how healthcare organizations deliver services, with projections suggesting telehealth may account for up to 30% of U.S medical visits in 2026. Behind every telehealth appointment is a broad workforce that includes coders, billing specialists, insurance professionals, and contractors – most of whom work remotely, hybrid, or even offshore. This increasingly blended workforce reflects real changes in how care and support services are delivered. As more people rely on telehealth services, there’s a growing demand for professionals enabling virtual care – as well as solutions that ensure data remains secure across these distributed workforces.

However, traditional security model approaches – such as shipping corporate-managed laptops to onboard this distributed workforce, or virtual desktops which rely on remote hosting, are too slow and complex to support the speed and scale needed. This current mismatch is fueling the need for a more flexible, device-agnostic security model that will enforce compliance without restricting how and where work gets done.

Ensuring HIPAA Compliance Across a Distributed Workforce 

With 73% of healthcare leaders expecting half of their workforce to be hybrid in 2026, maintaining HIPAA compliance across diverse devices and environments will be critical for protecting patient data. It’s well known that HIPAA requires organizations to implement safeguards that include strong policies and controls that prevent the unauthorized access, use, or disclosure of electronic protected health information (ePHI). As a default, these responsibilities extend to anyone who accesses this data, including contractors, vendors, offshore workers, and other business associates.

For healthcare organizations, enforcing consistent security policies can be challenging with remote contractors using personal or third-party devices that companies don’t fully control or manage. For an industry severely understaffed, maintaining a high level of control and consistent protection for ePHI is difficult. Without strong access controls and monitoring, the risk of unauthorized access or disclosure increases. 

Legacy security for these scenarios was built around the endpoint. IT leaders would lock down the device, control the hardware, and manage everything installed on it, with the assumption being that protecting the machine protected the data on it. But that model doesn’t hold up when your workforce is spread across geographies, on personal laptops, contractor machines, and home offices.

Ensuring HIPAA compliance in a distributed environment requires a reframe: protecting the work itself. Encrypting and isolating work applications and ePHI directly on the endpoint, regardless of what device is being used to access them.

Enabling Secure, Device-Agnostic Access for Telehealth Workforces

To fully embrace this next phase of telehealth, healthcare organizations need workforce models that are more flexible by design, and the security infrastructure to match. 

Allowing employees and contractors to use their own devices can remove much of that friction. It makes the onboarding process a lot faster and gives organizations more flexibility in how they want to build and scale their workforce. 

But device flexibility only works if compliance travels with it. HIPAA doesn’t change based on who owns the laptop, so the obligation to control access to ePHI applies regardless of whether someone is using a corporate-issued machine or their own. That’s the challenge that a device-agnostic model solves: giving people the freedom to work on any device, while ensuring the organization never loses control of the data.

Building a Secure, Flexible Future for Telehealth Workforces

The practical shift starts at the endpoint. Rather than restricting access by locking down entire devices, IT teams can isolate ePHI and healthcare applications inside a protected workspace directly on the user’s machine, fully separated from personal activity. 

This allows healthcare organizations to onboard remote workers and contractors in minutes instead of days, without shipping laptops or spinning up complex virtual desktops. Offboarding is just as fast, since access can be revoked instantly, with no equipment to retrieve. For an industry dealing with persistent staffing pressure and high contractor turnover, that agility matters.

As telehealth continues to reshape care delivery, the organizations best positioned to scale are those that stop treating device ownership as their security strategy. HIPAA compliance doesn’t require that IT teams control the hardware; it just requires that they keep sensitive data secure, regardless of what device it’s on. A model that isolates and protects ePHI at the endpoint, regardless of what device it sits on, gives healthcare organizations the flexibility to grow their distributed workforce without compromising the trust patients place in them.

About David Matalon

David Matalon is the Founder and CEO at Venn, the leader in flexible workforce enablement. As a 5-time founder, David has experience running companies focused on securing and delivering applications for distributed workforces. He led businesses that worked on virtual desktop (VDI) technologies and security/compliance for remote teams. Venn is the innovator behind Blue Border, a purpose-built technology that creates a secure, IT-controlled work environment on a user’s own PC or Mac—separating work and personal activity without locking down the device or relying on virtual desktops. He earned his undergraduate degree from NYU’s Stern School of Business and holds a master’s degree from Columbia University. You can follow him on LinkedIn here.

< + > Roche Enters Into a Definitive Merger Agreement to Acquire PathAI to Transform AI-Driven Diagnostics

• PathAI’s Best-In-Class Image Management System (IMS) with Advanced AI Analysis and Workflow Capabilities will Complement Roche’s Digital Pathology Portfolio to Drive Laboratory Efficiency
• Combining Roche’s Strong Position in Companion Diagnostics and PathAI’s Advanced AI Platform Helps Accelerate Clinical Therapy Development, Foster the Discovery of New Biomarkers, and Create Novel Diagnostic Tools
• These Integrated Capabilities will Accelerate the Shift from Broad Intervention Toward Personalised Healthcare for Patients

Roche announced today that it has entered into a definitive merger agreement to acquire PathAI, a US-based company in digital pathology and AI-powered technology for pathology laboratories and the biopharma industry. This acquisition builds on the successful partnership between Roche and PathAI, established in 2021 and scaled up in 2024 to include the development of AI-enabled companion diagnostic algorithms. Subject to the closing of the transaction, which is expected in the second half of the year, the acquired entity will become part of the Diagnostics division.

This acquisition strengthens Roche’s position in Digital Pathology, which is transforming extensive manual workflows into fully automated, AI-driven processes and insights. Digital pathology enables the creation of high-resolution digital images from physical tissue on slides, allowing pathologists to use AI tools to facilitate diagnostic workflows and provide patients with faster results.

“Digital pathology has the potential to improve precision diagnosis of cancer and enable physicians to offer better-tailored treatment regimens,” said Matt Sause, CEO at Roche Diagnostics. “Bringing PathAI into Roche Diagnostics will allow us to combine their best-in-class digital pathology tools with our leading oncology diagnosis platforms to deliver better insights for physicians and potentially better outcomes for patients worldwide.”

Andy Beck, Co-Founder and CEO at PathAI, adds, “Joining forces with Roche marks a new era for PathAI, enabling us to realise our mission of improving patient outcomes through AI-powered pathology at unprecedented scale and speed. Roche’s global infrastructure and expertise will bring our digital diagnostics technology to patients worldwide.”

PathAI’s AISight IMS software interface is efficient and user-friendly, seamlessly integrating advanced analysis and workflow capabilities within the digital pathology laboratory. In the rapidly growing pathology market, Roche intends to scale this solution globally.

In addition, the expanded capabilities strengthen Roche’s competitiveness in precision medicine by enhancing its biopharma services. PathAI’s strength in AI-driven solutions, including clinical trial support and translational research, will complement Roche’s deep expertise in companion diagnostics. Combining these capabilities will foster the discovery of new biomarkers, potential drug targets, and novel diagnostic tools, increasing the value Roche can bring to biopharma companies.

About Roche

Roche is a healthcare company uniquely placed to prevent, stop, and cure diseases by uniting leading science and technology across diagnostics, medicines, and digital solutions.

Roche was founded in Basel, Switzerland, in 1896 and today is a leading provider of transformative medicines and diagnostics for millions of people in over 150 countries around the world. It is dedicated to tackling healthcare challenges that place the greatest strain on patients, families, communities, and healthcare systems. Across its Diagnostics and Pharmaceutical divisions, Roche focuses on areas including oncology, neurology, cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, ophthalmology, infectious diseases, and immunology with the aim of providing real and positive change for patients, the people they love, and the professionals who care for them.

Genentech in the United States is a fully owned subsidiary in the Roche Group. Roche is the majority shareholder in Chugai Pharmaceutical, a major innovator in the Japanese therapeutic antibody market.

For more information, please visit roche.com.

Originally announced May 6th, 2026