Friday, July 17, 2026

< + > Using AI to Reduce Biostatistical Analysis Readouts – Life Sciences Today Podcast Episode 70

We’re excited to be back for another episode of the Life Sciences Today Podcast by Healthcare IT Today. My guest today is Kyle McBride, VP, AI Innovation at Veristat. We talked about InStat, the clinical research industry’s first zero-code, fully automated biostatistics solution, reducing manual effort to speed time to approval with every output backed by validated statistical engines and expert biostatistician review. It delivers submission-ready tables, listings, and figures (TLF) in five days or less*, rather than the four to six weeks that sponsors typically wait after database lock, while maintaining the highest-quality data.

McBride has taken a first-principles approach to designing the software components to fully automate biostatistics in clinical trials using AI. We spoke about the gap between AI demos and AI that actually ships in regulated environments, the economics of CRO delivery in an AI-native world, and the operational realities of running an AI transformation inside a 20-year-old CRO.

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

  • Tell me about your journey. How did you end up doing what you do now?
  • What’s the value creation in AI-augmented biostatistics?
  • How do you capture value?
  • What is your moat?
  • Are you still using SDTM?
  • What are three things you want to do for your customers in 2026?
  • What’s the biggest anti-pattern in the industry?

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!



< + > How Cloud-Based Imaging Reduces Workflow Delays and Storage Costs

The following is a guest article by Diana Lam, Marketing Specialist at MIMIC

A patient walks into a physician’s office with persistent neurological symptoms—headaches and dizziness. The provider orders an MRI to rule out serious underlying conditions. What happens next depends heavily on the imaging workflow behind the scenes.

As the volume of patients requiring diagnostic imaging continues to rise across healthcare, medical practices are undergoing pressure to move studies faster, improve accessibility, and reduce operational bottlenecks. At the same time, imaging archives grow, and storage becomes one of the fastest-rising operational costs in imaging workflow. In many cases, organizations are required to over-purchase storage, driving costs even further.

Healthcare organizations today manage far more imaging data than they did a decade ago. Multi-site practices, remote radiology workflows, telehealth growth, and increased patient mobility have all contributed to a more connected, but also a more demanding, imaging environment. For many practices, traditional imaging workflows still rely on fragmented or outdated systems, on-site infrastructure, or manual processes that slow down access to studies. Delays often occur when retrieving archived imaging from older storage environments or coordinating specialist reviews. While these inefficiencies may seem small individually, they quickly compound across an organization.

Cloud-based imaging platforms help healthcare organizations modernize how imaging studies are stored, accessed, and shared. The global picture archiving and communication system (PACS) market is estimated to reach a valuation of $5.21 billion by 2031 (GII Global Information). Instead of relying solely on physical infrastructure at a single location, cloud environments allow approved users to securely access studies virtually from anywhere. This flexibility has become especially valuable for growing imaging networks and remote radiology workflows. With cloud-based PACS systems on the rise, radiologists can review images more efficiently, specialists can collaborate faster, and healthcare teams can reduce delays caused by disconnected systems or manual transfers.

Cloud-based PACS platforms also offer different economic models. Instead of requiring large upfront capital investments in local infrastructure, storage will be usage-based. This shift allows imaging centers and healthcare networks to align costs more closely with actual data usage, rather than maintaining access capacity that may sit unused. Over time, this model can significantly reduce the total cost of storing and managing imaging data, as study volumes grow year over year.

From our experience at MIMIC, organizations are not only trying to improve access to imaging studies but are also actively seeking ways to reduce the long-term financial strain associated with storing growing datasets.

While hospitals and imaging centers remain major adopters of cloud-based PACS systems, the need for secure and accessible imaging workflows is expanding across a much broader range of industries. Private healthcare practices are looking for flexible imaging solutions that reduce infrastructure costs while improving accessibility for both providers and patients. Independent radiologists also rely on cloud-based workflows to access and interpret studies from anywhere securely. Beyond traditional healthcare environments, organizations such as law firms, universities, clinical research groups, and government entities are also recognizing the value of centralized imaging access.

While cloud-based systems alone will not solve every workflow challenge in healthcare, they are becoming an important foundation for organizations looking to reduce delays, improve collaboration, reduce the financial burden of long-term data storage, and create a more seamless imaging experience for providers and patients alike

About Diana Lam

Diana Lam is a marketing specialist at MIMIC, a cloud-based PACS platform that helps organizations securely store, access, and share medical imaging data. She specializes in digital strategy, design, and industry education. Through her work with healthcare providers and organizations alike, she helps communicate emerging trends in cloud technology and workflow optimization.



< + > Prosper AI Raises $30M from Andreessen Horowitz | Ladder Health Raises $7M

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.


Prosper AI Raises $30M from Andreessen Horowitz to Scale the First AI Platform to Run the Entire Patient Journey

Working Across 150,000 Healthcare Providers, Prosper AI is the First Platform Built to Combine Patient Scheduling, Insurance Verification, and Patient Billing while Coordinating Voice Interactions with Both Patients and Insurers

Prosper AI, the leading AI platform to run the entire patient journey, today announced a $30 million Series A financing led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with participation from Base10 and continued support from Emergence Capital, Y Combinator, and Company Ventures.

The financing follows a period of rapid adoption and market acceleration. Since its last funding announcement six months ago, Prosper AI has grown revenue 5x, added more than 40 healthcare organizations as customers, expanded across more than 150,000 healthcare providers, and become the platform powering more than $1.3 billion in patient care. Today, Prosper AI wins 80% of competitive evaluations.

Providers increasingly recognize that scheduling is only the first step in the patient journey. As healthcare organizations look to automate insurance verification and patient billing alongside scheduling, Prosper AI is emerging as the platform of choice to power financially cleared appointments. Today, Prosper AI’s customers span some of healthcare’s most influential organizations, including PE-backed outpatient groups such as Preferred Dermatology, health systems such as Jackson Memorial Hospital—the second-largest hospital in Florida—and healthcare technology leaders such as Athenahealth, one of the largest ambulatory EHR platforms in the United States.

Healthcare’s Next AI Platform Won’t Stop at Scheduling

Every patient appointment depends on workflows that occur before and after care is delivered, from scheduling and insurance verification to patient billing and collections. Historically, these processes have been fragmented across disconnected teams and point solutions, creating +$450B in administrative waste while making healthcare more expensive and less transparent for patients…

Full release here, originally announced June 22nd, 2026.


Ladder Health Raises $7M to Fix Pediatric Therapy’s Waitlist Crisis

The Virtual-First, AI-Enabled Model Helps Health Systems Expand Pediatric Developmental Care Capacity and Empower Families with Faster, More Accessible Care

Ladder Health, a virtual-first pediatric developmental care company, today announced the close of an oversubscribed $7 million Seed financing round led by Nina Capital, with participation from Mairs & Power Venture Capital, South Dakota First Capital, and incubating partner 25madison Health. Other investors in this round include Hatteras Venture Partners, Create Health Ventures, Jumpstart Capital, White Oak Enterprises, Groove Capital, and 7Rock Ventures. The funding will support expansion across North Carolina, Massachusetts, and Maryland, accelerate entry into additional states, and continue investment in Ladder Health’s AI-enabled care platform and health system partnerships.

For the more than 27 million children in the U.S., the first 1,000 days of life and the critical “next 1,000 days” through age five together represent the most consequential window for brain development. However, for the roughly one in four children under age six who are at risk for a developmental delay or disability, families routinely encounter a system defined by months-long waitlists, workforce shortages, and limited access to specialty care. Average wait times for in-network pediatric developmental therapy now exceed six months. For families on Medicaid and those in rural communities, the barriers run deeper still.

Ladder Health was built to close the gap and reduce wait times from months to days. The company delivers speech, occupational, physical, and feeding therapy through a virtual-first, AI-enabled platform available evenings and weekends. Unlike conventional therapy models built around episodic weekly visits, Ladder Health works directly with caregivers, activating parents as therapeutic partners and extending care into the home between sessions, helping kids get better, faster. A dedicated team of Ladder liaisons builds relationships with pediatric practices and health systems, serving as a referral and care-extension partner that helps providers reach more families without increasing headcount.

“Early developmental therapy changes life trajectories, but only if families can actually access it at the right time,” said Mitch Mudra, Co-Founder and CEO at Ladder Health…

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



Thursday, July 16, 2026

< + > Leveraging Data Analytics to Improve Charge Capture Accuracy and Financial Performance

It is well understood at this point that data plays a huge role in every single decision we make in healthcare. What is still in talks, though, is the best way to utilize and leverage that data. We reached out to our beautiful Healthcare IT Today Community to ask — how are organizations leveraging data analytics to improve charge capture accuracy and financial performance? Below is what they had to share.

Sunil Konda, Chief Product Officer at SYNERGEN Health
For some, charge capture is a top-five challenge and one of the highest-leakage areas in RCM. With analytics, we’re beginning to see a way to close those gaps. The combination of CDI analytics with retrospective charge auditing creates a feedback loop that can capture and flag missed charges before they result in lost revenue. That data is then used to prevent the same error from occurring further upstream in the workflow. This switches RCM from an offensive, reactive charge recovery to a defensive, proactive charge integrity, driving a direct, quantifiable impact on net revenue.

Yousuf J. Ahmad, President and CEO at AssureCare
Organizations are increasingly using analytics not just for retrospective reporting but as a driver of real-time performance improvement across the revenue cycle.

With detailed visibility into denial codes, reasons, and payer-specific trends, teams can identify systemic issues and take corrective action upstream. This might include improving clinical documentation, refining coding practices, or adjusting workflows to prevent recurring issues before they impact claims.

Analytics also enhances collections performance by enabling more targeted prioritization of follow-up and recovery efforts. The result is stronger charge capture accuracy, reduced revenue leakage, and more consistent financial outcomes. Instead of reacting to missed revenue after the fact, organizations can proactively tighten processes and improve overall performance.

Monte Sandler, Chief Operating Officer at WebPT
Data tells you where the system is breaking. When denials, rejections, and unpaid accounts receivable are analyzed, patterns become visible. From there, the root cause can be addressed and resolved in bulk instead of working on claims reactively one at a time. That is how accuracy improves, and the cost to collect is reduced. The organizations that win are the ones that listen to the data and act on it.

Elevsis Delgadillo, SVP, Customer Success at KeenStack
Organizations are using analytics to improve financial performance by tracking core revenue cycle metrics like collections and denials and identifying where breakdowns occur. By tying analytics to specific workflows, they can measure what changes after new processes or technologies are introduced and better understand what is driving performance.

Firoze Lafeer, SVP of Data Engineering at Revecore
Data analytics is helping organizations move from periodic audits to continuous monitoring by identifying where charges are systematically missed at the service line, provider, or facility level before they become lost revenue. By analyzing patterns across large claim populations, revenue cycle teams can pinpoint the root causes of charge capture failures and fix them upstream rather than chasing discrepancies after the fact. For example, if analytics consistently surfaces a payer systematically underpaying a specific DRG or denial pattern tied to incomplete documentation, that intelligence can drive upstream coding and charge entry corrections before the issue scales across thousands of claims.

Deb Jones, Senior Director, Insights Strategy at Tendo
Organizations are increasingly moving beyond retrospective reporting toward real-time and predictive analytics. On the charge capture side, this means identifying gaps as care is being delivered—not weeks later. By connecting clinical documentation, orders, and billing data, analytics can highlight missing or inconsistent charges, ensure alignment with coding requirements, and surface opportunities for more complete capture.

More broadly, advanced analytics are helping organizations understand the root causes of revenue leakage—whether it’s documentation gaps, workflow breakdowns, or payer-specific trends. Instead of looking at isolated metrics, leading organizations are analyzing performance across the entire revenue lifecycle. The shift is from “What happened?” to “What’s about to happen—and how do we intervene?” That’s where analytics starts to drive meaningful financial improvement.

Jake McCarley, CEO at Alluvium Health
Charge capture begins the moment a patient tries to access care — if referrals leak out of network or scheduling breaks down, there’s no charge to capture.

Advanced analytics platforms consolidate fragmented access data across EMRs, call centers, and digital channels to reveal exactly where revenue is being lost: which referral sources consistently leak, which specialties have untapped capacity, and where in the patient journey demographic collection, insurance verification, and prior authorization break down. Surfacing these gaps earlier — and optimizing how they’re resolved — directly improves charge capture accuracy.

AI-powered insights allow operators to identify these issues quickly and take targeted action, transforming access from reactive troubleshooting into strategic, data-driven performance management. And because the underlying model is purpose-built for this use case, the system compounds in value over time — getting smarter with every interaction.

Kevin Coloton, CEO at HURC
What looks like a payer–provider imbalance is increasingly a breakdown in revenue cycle communication. Hospitals can excel at registration and collections, but when the middle cycle fails, the full value is not achieved. This operational layer not only balances utilization review and denials management but also clinical documentation improvement (CDI) and medical coding.

If there are any gaps in documentation, they lead to denials, extended length-of-stay, and unclear payer communication, which create delays, write-offs, and appeals that never should have occurred. Hospitals are spending nearly $18 billion annually reworking claims and a staggering $43 billion trying to collect payments insurers owe for care already delivered, according to the AHA’s 2026 Cost of Care Report. That is why the middle revenue cycle is where CFOs feel pain so acutely.

Partial fixes such as adding more software, hiring more staff, or outsourcing have not solved the problem. What’s emerging instead is a more effective model: integrated, tech-enabled services that combine technology to handle all the operational components of the middle revenue cycle with experienced operators and embed directly into hospital workflows. This approach enables real-time alignment between clinical intent and payer requirements, driving fewer denials, shorter stays, faster post-acute transitions, and meaningful net revenue improvement, without reducing staff.

Ryan Hungate, DDS, MS, Chief Clinical & Strategy Officer at Henry Schein One
Health IT and AI are finally connecting what has historically been a fragmented process, from patient intake all the way through reimbursement. The biggest impact isn’t just faster claims processing; it’s eliminating the manual handoffs and rework that slow everything down.

When you automate eligibility checks, documentation, coding support, and claim submission in a coordinated way, you reduce errors upstream and improve financial performance downstream. But just as important, it allows staff to step away from the screen and focus on the patient.

The organizations seeing the most success aren’t just adding AI; they’re redesigning workflows so that technology handles the administrative burden and people can focus on care, communication, and decision-making where it matters most.

Thomas Shea, Chief Revenue Officer, AI and Patient Affordability Solutions at Doceree
Making sure every service gets billed correctly sounds straightforward, but a surprising amount slips through — a procedure performed but never coded, a visit billed at a lower level than the work supported, a supply used but not logged. Teams would catch these gaps weeks later in an audit, if at all. That’s changing.

The best organizations now run analytics inside the clinical workflow itself, flagging those gaps in real time — while the provider is still in the note, not after the claim has gone out. In my work embedding analytics into HCP workflows, I’ve seen denial rates drop and clean-claim rates climb noticeably when these checks run at the point of documentation, not in a back-office queue. The biggest wins come from the quiet checks running inside the EHR before the note is even signed.

Scott Schrader, President, Provider Healthcare Solutions at Firstsource
Hospitals lose an estimated 1–3% of net revenue to charge capture problems alone, amounting to millions of dollars annually in legitimately earned revenue that was never billed. Leading organizations are closing this gap by deploying NLP-driven mining of unstructured clinical notes to surface missed billable concepts, computer-assisted coding that can reach 90-95%+ accuracy, and concurrent CDI programs that query physicians on documentation gaps before discharge — identifying significant DRG corrections that compound in impact across a facility each month.

The most sophisticated are building unified analytics across the full revenue cycle that trace a denial back to its origin in registration or documentation rather than treating it as an isolated back-end event, because catching a charge capture problem upstream is exponentially cheaper than appealing a denial downstream.

So many great points to consider here! Huge thank you to everyone who took the time out of their day to submit a quote to us! And thank you to all of you for taking the time out of your day to read this article! We could not do this without all of your support.

How do you think organizations are leveraging data analytics to improve charge capture accuracy and financial performance? Let us know over on social media, we’d love to hear from all of you!



< + > The Semantic Gap in Healthcare: Why Interoperability Alone Won’t Fix What’s Broken

The following is a guest article by Dr. Kaushal Kulkarni, M.D., Physician and Chief Medical Officer at Predoc

In the computer science world, there is a commonly discussed problem known as the semantic gap. It’s the idea that the way computers process information is radically different from the way a human understands information. 

Take an image, for example. To a computer, a photo of a dog is a series of pixels and patterns. A person, on the other hand, not only sees the image, they project memories, emotions, senses, cultural questions and more onto an instantly recognizable image. See the difference?

In healthcare, the semantic gap isn’t just a philosophical mismatch between data and meaning. It’s operational. It shows up every single day in the gap between having data and being able to use it.

On paper, the industry has made enormous progress in creating and moving patient data, particularly in recent years with the 21st Century Cures Act and the more recent CMS Health Tech Ecosystem initiatives. And yet, when a patient is sitting in front of a clinician today, the data is just not there in a usable form. So humans step in. Then they read, interpret, and manually reconstruct the patient’s story so care can move forward. When the full story is not there, they make phone calls, request faxes, chase records, and open PDFs.

That’s the semantic gap in healthcare.

It’s the difference between accessible data and usable information. And today, it is being filled not by technology, but by people.

The Semantic Gap

APIs, the rise of FHIR as a standard for exchange, national networks, and regulatory pressure have all pushed the industry toward greater interoperability. And if data can move, the problem is solved, right?

Except for the fact that healthcare data is still not in any one standardized format. Behind the scenes is an unfathomable amount of information (now measured not in terabytes or even exabytes, but zettabytes) living in faxed documents, scanned PDFs, unstructured notes, and disconnected systems and portals. Even in an increasingly digital ecosystem, critical pieces of the patient story aren’t in a format that is easily searchable and sometimes not really accessible with the plug and play tools available.

If, for example, a patient’s record is in the form of hundreds of physical pages, clinicians are left to track it down, have it faxed over, and sort through page after page to piece together what the data actually matters. A single data point buried deep in the stack could change everything. But getting to that point can take hours, while other patients wait and care is delayed.

What Gets Stuck

When this semantic gap stays open, the effects ripple across the entire healthcare system. 

Clinician burnout, operational inefficiency, delays in care, repeat testing, and poor patient experience all trace back to the same root cause. We’re spending hours tracking down records, reviewing fragmented information, and piecing together an incomplete picture, all before a doctor can even get started on delivering care. Entire teams are built around retrieval and intake just to make the system function. What should take seconds can take days, and when information is missing, the system compensates with duplication and guesswork – in the end, it is the patients who suffer.

The semantic gap explains why so many AI initiatives struggle to move beyond pilots. These systems depend on complete, structured, and trustworthy data. Without that foundation, even the most advanced models fail in real workflows.

There are clear examples of what happens when this is addressed. Organizations that have improved how data is retrieved and prepared have reduced intake times from days to hours and increased patient capacity without adding clinical staff.

Closing the Gap

The healthcare industry is not short on data. It’s not even short on ways to move data.

What it needs is a consistent way to ensure that when data arrives, it is complete, structured, and ready to be acted upon. Until that changes, every gain in interoperability will continue to fall short of its promise.

There will always be administrative work in healthcare. But the current model, where people are required to retrieve, interpret, and reconstruct the patient story before care can begin, is not sustainable. It does not scale with growing data volumes, rising patient demand, or the expectations being placed on the system.

Right now, progress depends on human effort filling in the gaps left by technology. That slows care, limits access, and places a ceiling on what the system can achieve.

The trajectory is clear. More data, more complexity, and more pressure to do more with less. Without a fundamental shift, the gap only widens. 

We can’t build the future of healthcare on data that isn’t usable.

Closing the semantic gap is the prerequisite for everything that comes next.

About Dr. Kaushal Kulkarni

Dr. Kaushal Kulkarni is Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer at Predoc, where he focuses on making healthcare data more complete, usable, and accessible for clinicians. A board-certified ophthalmologist with subspecialty training in neuro-ophthalmology, he has practiced across academic and community settings and brings firsthand clinical perspective to interoperability and health data workflow challenges. He earned his M.D. from Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, completed residency at Georgetown University, and finished fellowship training at the University of Miami’s Bascom Palmer Eye Institute. He is a vocal advocate for usable patient data and clinician-centered innovation.



< + > Verkada Accelerates Physical AI with NVIDIA | XRHealth Acquires Swing Therapeutics

Check out today’s featured companies who have recently completed an M&A deal, and be sure to check out the full list of past healthcare IT M&A.


Verkada Accelerates Physical AI with NVIDIA

Verkada is Scaling Its Physical AI Platform Across More than 2.4 Million Devices Globally with a New Technical Collaboration and Investment from NVIDIA

Verkada, a leader in AI-powered physical security and operations, today announced a collaboration with NVIDIA to accelerate the development and deployment of physical AI across the built environment. NVIDIA also joins as a new investor in Verkada, following a strategic investment from Alphabet’s CapitalG at the end of last year.

Verkada is applying AI to transform how schools, hospitals, retailers, manufacturers, and other organizations turn real-world operational data into actionable intelligence — helping keep people and places safe.

“Verkada has been building and deploying Physical AI before the term existed. With our footprint of more than 2.4 million devices across 170 countries and 30,000 organizations, we’ve proven that the built environment is one of the largest beneficiaries of AI,” said Filip Kaliszan, Co-Founder and CEO at Verkada. “Working with NVIDIA supercharges what we’ve spent nearly a decade building: AI that keeps students safe in schools, protects workers on factory floors, helps retailers prevent theft, and enables organizations to operate more efficiently.”

Verkada is strengthening the models and data flywheel underpinning its intelligent video analytics through its collaboration with NVIDIA, advancing AI-powered video search, multimodal embeddings and vector retrieval for next-generation semantic search, and synthetic data generation to augment training datasets and improve accuracy.

By leveraging NVIDIA Cosmos world foundation models and NVIDIA Physical AI Data Factory, Verkada has accelerated model training and inference across its rapidly expanding global footprint on NVIDIA accelerated computing. Since the collaboration began, Verkada has improved the mean average precision (mAP) of its AI-powered search by 68% for spatial-temporal understanding, delivering faster, more accurate, and more robust search capabilities…

Full release here, originally announced July 1st, 2026.


XRHealth Acquires Swing Therapeutics, Expanding Its Platform to Mobile Digital Therapeutics

Acquisition Extends Digital Health Care from Augmented and Virtual Reality Glasses to Smartphone Apps, Smartwatches, and IoT Devices, Combining AI and Licensed Clinicians to Deliver Continuous, Reimbursable Care for Chronic Conditions

XRHealth, the leading platform for therapeutic technologies, today announced the acquisition of Swing Therapeutics, a leading developer of digital therapies and the virtual care platform Swing Care for chronic pain conditions. The acquisition propels XRHealth as the largest extended reality digital health platform for chronic conditions, bringing digital healthcare seamlessly across multiple digital devices, including augmented and virtual reality glasses, smartphone apps, smartwatches, and IoT wearables, combining AI and licensed physicians to treat patients across multiple technologies.

The acquisition adds Swing Therapeutics’ FDA De Novo–authorized Stanza program to XRHealth’s existing behavioral health and chronic pain capabilities, deepening the platform’s reach into two of the most undertreated conditions in the country: fibromyalgia and chronic pain. 

“When we founded Swing, we believed that the future of chronic pain care had to look fundamentally different: more accessible, more personalized, and grounded in evidence,” says Mike Rosenbluth, Founder and CEO at Swing Therapeutics. “Joining XRHealth means we can deliver on that vision at an expanded scale, with clinicians and technology working together through a single platform where patients can access every dimension of their care.”

Swing Therapeutics’ Stanza is the first digital behavioral therapy indicated for treatment of the symptoms of fibromyalgia, a widespread chronic pain condition impacting 10 million people in the United States. In a Phase 3 randomized controlled trial published in The Lancet, Stanza demonstrated significant improvements across symptoms, including fibromyalgia severity, pain intensity, fatigue, sleep, and depression.

The acquisition also brings Swing Care, Swing Therapeutics’ virtual specialty care platform for fibromyalgia and chronic pain, into the XRHealth ecosystem. Developed in collaboration with leading fibromyalgia clinicians, including Medical Director Dr. Andrea Chadwick, a globally recognized expert in the field, Swing Care delivers comprehensive, multidisciplinary care that combines the Stanza digital therapeutic with medication management, mental health support, and personalized coaching.

“The future of therapeutic care is technology. Not as a supplement to medicine, but as the medicine itself—delivered through AI, monitored by licensed clinicians, reimbursed by insurance, and continuously improved by outcomes data,” says Eran Orr, CEO at XRHealth…

Full release here, originally announced July 15th, 2026.



Wednesday, July 15, 2026

< + > Leading Virtual Nursing Programs

Amid workforce shortages and increasing inpatient volumes, many hospitals are turning to virtual nursing programs that augment in-person care with remote support. Research has shown most virtual nurses are given a dedicated role in the care journey, typically admission/discharge, patient education, or medication reconciliation.

Programs have been shown to succeed when bedside nurses play a role in program development prior to implementation and build relationships with virtual nursing teams. It’s also helpful to avoid duplicative workflows and maintain safe patient-to-nurse staffing ratios even when virtual nursing support is available.

These health systems are using virtual nursing to augment in-person care without creating additional administrative burdens or interrupting clinical workflows.

AdventHealth began with a pilot program in three Florida hospitals, with offsite registered nurses communicating to patients in the ED and inpatient units. One hospital reported a year-over-year drop in RN turnover from 46% to 16%. The health system is also piloting the use of virtual nurses to assist with inpatient admissions at one Colorado hospital.

Akron Children’s uses audio and video equipment to help employed RNs communicate with patients and families, as well as in-room sensors to monitor movement and alert nurses and necessary. Now live across inpatient units, the program builds on a pilot that reduced the time it took for ED orders to arrive in the unit.

Atrium Health assigns virtual nurses to about 10 patients at a time. Nurses monitor safety, assist with charting, and help with admission and discharge. Additional benefits include virtual nursing’s potential to provide emotional support to patients otherwise alone in the hospital room and allow older staff to mentor new hires without needing to be at the bedside.

BayCare began using virtual nurses to monitor ICU patients more than a decade ago. The program recently added virtual nursing at discharge, as the health system found most nurses spent 3 hours per shift on admission, discharge, and patient education tasks. Many nurses divide their time between virtual and bedside shifts – and say it helps them better focus on their work.

Boston Children’s found “virtual nurses provided a critical experience lens,” looking at charts, analyzing data, and otherwise offering procedural support while bedside nurses engage with patients and their families. The program ramped up in 2022 as the hospital hired nurses to meet demand for a new 150-bed facility.

Central Maine Healthcare has similarly focused on using virtual nursing to support staff with less bedside experience. By gathering medical history and other key information as patients transition from the ED to the floor, virtual nurses give bedside nurses the space to build relationships with admitted patients.

Covenant Medical Center served as the virtual nursing pilot for Providence. The model delivered quick results, reducing RN’s first-year turnover rates by 73%. Two keys to success: Virtual nurses take part in daily meetings alongside charge nurses, case managers, and physicians, and support teams remain in place to provide bedside support so floor nurses can focus on assessment.

Emory Healthcare complements employed virtual RNs to handle “hands-off care activities” with LIDAR technology to monitor patients for unexpected movements, proactive alerts of potential fall risks for bedside care teams, and automated voice messages to tell patients to remain in their beds until staff arrive. Eight inpatient units are part of the LIDAR pilot.

Houston Methodist is also building “self-aware” hospital rooms to monitor patient movement (and staff hand hygiene compliance). The hospital’s main focus, though, is virtual nursing for stroke care and psychiatric care, with the former leveraging neurologists from designated stroke centers and the latter using contracted providers.

Lee Health started with virtual observation supported by telehealth carts in acute care and ED settings. The hospital also invested in its staff – virtual observers transitioned from part-time to full-time status – which made it possible to apply virtual nursing support to all patients. Following implementation, the hospital saw a 20% improvement in HCAHPS scores.

Sentara Health virtual nurses provide support to more than 1,700 beds across 73 units. The emphasis is primarily on completing administrative tasks, though patient education – both at discharge and throughout the inpatient stay – has been a bright spot, as virtual nurses tend to have more time to answer patients’ questions.

Upstate University Hospital takes a unique approach, as patients use personal devices to connect to virtual nursing services over a secure network. The model may be different, but results to date have been the same: Nearly 2 hours saved per virtual admission and 44 minutes saved per virtual discharge, along with triage support and remote monitoring of vitals.

Vanderbilt Health started in cardiac care before deploying virtual nursing to inpatient units. Since the pilot, the health system made virtual nursing part of its new virtual care department, which leadership hopes “will enable virtual nursing to develop as a unit and work to meet the growing needs of the patients it cares for.”

Yale New Haven Health is another system that started with telestroke and TeleICU more than a decade ago and saw virtual nursing as a way to provide “vital support” for medical and surgical nursing teams. For example, bedside nurses have more time to address social drivers of health and connect patients to community resources they may need.



< + > Using AI to Reduce Biostatistical Analysis Readouts – Life Sciences Today Podcast Episode 70

We’re excited to be back for another episode of the Life Sciences Today Podcast by Healthcare IT Today. My guest today is Kyle McBride, VP,...