< + > Weekly Roundup – August 15, 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.

AI + Larger Data Sets = Workflows in the Cloud and at the Edge. Dan Schneider at NVIDIA and Sandra Colner at Dell Technologies talked to John Lynn about getting more from AI by thinking at a higher level instead of just trying to get individual tasks done. Read more…

Inside Australia’s Wide-Open Acute Care EHR and Aged Care Markets. Colin Hung took one for the team and went to HIC2026 in Sydney (lovely this time of year, I’ve heard). He learned many Australian hospitals still operate without a centralized EHR but recognize now’s the time to invest in digital health. Read more…

Using Automation to Reduce Administrative Burdens and Operational Costs in Back-Office Systems. Making this happen means anticipating supply chain shortages, managing payer contracts, and streamlining provider credentialing, according to the Healthcare IT Today community. Read more…

Life Sciences Today Podcast: Can a Platform Company Become a Real Business? Danny Lieberman posed this question to Gabi Tarcic at Evogene, which is navigating the latest wave of technology to transform biology. Read more…

CIO Podcast: Improving Through Data and Research. Dr. Eric Lee at AltaMed Health Services joined John to discuss making the most of survey results from the KLAS Arch Collaborative. Read more…

Key Lessons Organizations Are Learning About AI Governance. These lessons include approaching governance well before deployment, establishing continuous monitoring, and understanding how AI risk spreads, according to Lesley Berkeyheiser at DirectTrust. Read more…

Turning Past Clinician Records Into More Staff Placement Opportunities. Bret Williams at Spokeo Business outlined how matching existing clinician profiles with updated contact information helps recruiters know where to start to fill staffing gaps. Read more…

What’s Next for Non-Emergency Medical Transportation. The true cost of missed and delayed care from transportation gaps is more than $150 billion. Elizabeth Jepsen at Kinetik recapped the company’s webinar on how NEMT is building stronger transportation networks, especially in rural areas. Read more…

Why Governance Is the New Differentiator in EHR-Adjacent AI. Built-in governance means a system knows what should happen after every output, said Angela Adams at Inflo Health. That involves output controls, audit trails, and escalation pathways. Read more…

What Makes a Community Information Exchange Work? According to Mark Taylor at Ready Computing, key factors include understanding patient journeys, connecting existing systems, building trust, and proving value. Read more…

This Week’s Health IT Jobs for August 12, 2026: Baptist Memorial Health Care (Memphis) seeks a CNIO, while VHC Health (Virginia) seeks an Associate VP and CISO. Read more…

Bonus Features for 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. Read more…

Funding and M&A Activity:

• Dassault Systèmes acquired ArisGlobal, an enterprise compliance platform for life sciences industry.
• Virtual care provider Included Health acquired Firefly Health, a clinically integrated health plan and advanced primary care company.
• Rehab and physical therapy EHR vendor Raintree acquired Spike Technologies, maker of agentic AI voice technology for healthcare.
• Doctronic acquired Summer Health, a platform for virtual, text-based pediatric care.
• Clinical trial simulation company QuantHealth announced a $45 million Series B funding round.
• Concierge primary care platform Prosper Medical announced $16 million in financing.
• Lung nodule characterization company RevealDx announced a strategic investment of $3.4 million.
• Certification and workforce development provider Advanced eClinical Training received an investment from Tortuga Growth Partners.

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

< + > Evogene – Can a Platform Company Become a Real Business? – Life Sciences Today Podcast Episode 74

We’re excited to be back for another episode of the Life Sciences Today Podcast by Healthcare IT Today. My guest today is Gabi Tarcic, Chief Development Officer at Evogene. In this episode, I sit down with Tarcic to ask a question the industry has been asking for twenty years: how does a platform company become a real business? Evogene has lived through every wave of “compute will transform biology” — genomics, systems biology, computational biology platforms, and now generative AI — and built a business across human health, medical cannabis, and agriculture on the bet that the answer is yes. 

A must-listen for TechBio founders.

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

• What does Evogene actually do, and what does BD look like in a company structured around a computational platform and multiple subsidiaries?
• The company has lived through several waves of “compute will transform biology” — genomics, systems biology, computational biology platforms, and now generative AI. What’s genuinely different about this wave, and what’s the same story in new packaging?
• Platform companies struggle to monetize because value accrues to the products, not the platform. Evogene has tried both — licensing the tech engines out and spinning up subsidiaries to develop products in-house. What have you learned about which model actually works?
• In a world where AlphaFold is free, foundation models are commoditized, and every biotech now claims to be AI-driven — what’s defensible about Evogene’s platform that a well-funded startup with the latest models can’t replicate?
• You’re in BD, which means you’re the one sitting across the table from potential partners who have to decide whether Evogene’s platform is a genuine accelerator or just another vendor. What do the good conversations have in common, and where do the deals that fall apart usually fall apart?
• What’s the biggest anti-pattern you see in TechBio — something founders and platform companies keep doing that doesn’t work, that everyone in the industry has watched play out multiple times now?

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:

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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!

< + > Tortuga Growth Partners Invests in Advanced eClinical Training | QuantHealth Raises $45 Million Series B

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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Tortuga Growth Partners Invests in Advanced eClinical Training to Accelerate Healthcare Workforce Development

Investment Extends TGP’s Healthcare Platform and Positions Advanced eClinical Training to Meet Growing Demand for Patient-Centric Clinical Professionals

Tortuga Growth Partners (TGP), a New York-based private investment firm focused on building market leaders through disciplined buy-and-build strategies, today announced a strategic investment, made through Tortuga Growth Partners Fund I, L.P., in Advanced eClinical Training (ACT), one of the nation’s leading providers of online healthcare certification and workforce development. The investment extends TGP’s build-out of its healthcare vertical and underscores the firm’s conviction that scalable, technology-enabled solutions can address the clinical workforce shortage facing the U.S. healthcare system.

According to the American Hospital Association, the healthcare worker shortage in the US is projected to grow to over 3.2 million this year. ACT addresses the shortage of skilled clinical professionals through high-quality training, certification, and workforce readiness programs designed for the next generation of healthcare professionals. Since its founding in 2020, ACT has trained and certified over 10,000 healthcare professionals, placing them in critical frontline healthcare roles.

Founded by Shay Safarzadeh and Shabnam Safarzadeh, ACT has developed a clinical ecosystem of more than 1,000 healthcare partners, including urgent care centers, physician practices, outpatient clinics, diagnostic laboratories, and health systems nationwide. The company is recognized by Forbes as the #1 Certified Clinical Medical Assistant (CCMA) online certification program in the United States, with a 98% NHA exam pass rate.

“We built ACT to help address the growing demand for high-quality clinical workforce training,” said Shay Safarzadeh, Co-Founder. “Partnering with TGP gives us the strategic resources and shared conviction needed to accelerate our next phase of growth and continue building the market leader in healthcare workforce development.”

“TGP shares our vision for building an enduring platform in this category,” added Shabnam Safarzadeh, Co-Founder…

Full release here, originally announced August 4th, 2026.

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QuantHealth Raises $45 Million Series B, led by Qumra Capital, to Accelerate Simulation-First Clinical Trial Development

Funding Will Advance QuantHealth’s R&D, Product Innovation, and Commercial Expansion Following 8x Sales Growth in 2025

QuantHealth, a global leader in AI-driven clinical trial simulation, today announced a $45 million Series B. The round was led by Qumra Capital, with support from additional investors, including Pitango HealthTech, Sanofi Ventures, Artofin Venture Capital Fund L.P., Bertelsmann Healthcare Investments (BHI), GC Ventures, NewHealth Ventures, Shoni Top Ventures, and Esplanade Ventures.

Building on strong momentum and growing adoption of its solutions, QuantHealth will use the new capital to scale its enterprise-wide impact and accelerate adoption of simulation-first clinical development. With this approach, life sciences organizations move away from designing clinical trials based on historical benchmarks and subjective assumptions, and toward launching trials that have been tested, optimized, and de-risked through AI-driven simulation before a patient is enrolled or capital is deployed.

Key investments include:

• Advancing its R&D capabilities with next-generation AI models, deeper scientific validation, expanded data sets, and increased therapeutic coverage
• Growing its workforce to support increasing industry demand and deliver expert-driven client engagements
• Expanding its product portfolio across the clinical and commercial lifecycle, from trial design through go-to-market positioning, with a focus on demonstrating measurable impact

Clinical trials remain one of the most costly and uncertain phases of drug development, with more than 90% of drugs that enter clinical development ultimately failing, approximately 75% due to efficacy and safety. As pressure mounts to bring therapies to market faster, while still ensuring safety and efficacy, pharmaceutical and biotech companies are increasingly turning to predictive technologies to guide decision-making…

Full release here, originally announced August 4th, 2026.

< + > AI Plus Larger Data Sets Drive Workflows to the Cloud and to the Edge

The sudden emergence of AI models for all sorts of healthcare procedures, along with advanced hardware such as NVIDIA’s GPU processors, creates questions for healthcare practices that want to improve outcomes and costs with these technologies. In a recent video interview, Dan Schneider, Enterprise Platforms Product Specialist at NVIDIA, and Sandra Colner, GM Global Healthcare & Life Sciences at Dell Technologies dove into these important topics and shared some key insights as healthcare leaders navigate AI in their organization.

When used properly, according to Colner, data management and AI-driven diagnostics can “streamline and improve operations.” The term “workflow” turns up a lot in the responses of both interviewees. Thus, Colner says that AI can make workflow decisions and prioritize workflows so they “just run more smoothly.” AI can also provide time-sensitive triage.

The workflow concept is a reminder that administrators and health IT staff have to think at a higher, more connected level instead of just getting individual tasks done. In fact, AI agents can coordinate multiple workflows, “making governance more efficient” in Schneider’s words. Colner calls AI an “end-to-end workflow enabler.”

Colner also says that AI agents become necessary with the growth in both the number and size of images, as well as data sets in general, and the increasing complexity of workflows. Schneider suggests a future use of agents to get the results of a relevant prior scan to the radiologist for comparison purposes.

The option of remote AI processing in the cloud leads to new questions. If a facility wants to subject an image to AI processing or run administrative processes using an AI agent, what should be done locally and what should be done in the cloud? Schneider and Colner point to several considerations, including whether you need instant results (latency) and regulations around protecting patient data (security).

The cloud is often appropriate for analytics. But Schneider points out that sites can’t rely on the cloud always being there, or on adequate bandwidth, especially outside the U.S. Desktop systems are powerful enough for many current AI applications.

How can institutions derive cost benefits by moving AI from pilots into production? Schneider says that it’s an organization issue rather than a technical challenge. The right KPIs must be defined. Ultimately, someone must be responsible for making the shift. He pointed to MONAI (Medical Open Network for AI), an open-source, community-driven framework and ecosystem co-founded by NVIDIA and leading academic medical centers that supports the development, validation, optimization, and deployment of medical AI applications, helping healthcare organizations bring AI from research into production.

Learn more about AI in healthcare from experts from NVIDIA and Dell Technologies in our interview below.

Learn more about NVIDIA: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/

Learn more about Dell Technologies: https://dell.com/Healthcare

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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< + > Dassault Systèmes to Acquire ArisGlobal | Included Health Signs Agreement to Acquire Firefly Health

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.

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Dassault Systèmes to Acquire ArisGlobal, Creating a Unified AI Intelligence Platform for the Life Sciences Industry Connecting Molecule, Patient, and Real-World Outcomes

• ArisGlobal Brings a Mission-Critical, AI-Native Platform Spanning Regulatory, Safety, Quality, and Medical Affairs that Serves as a Single Source of Truth for the Life Sciences Industry
• Combining ArisGlobal’s Real-World Patient Insights with Dassault Systèmes’ Leading Domain Expertise in Research and Development, Clinical Development, and Manufacturing Establishes the Industry’s First Unified Intelligence Platform
• As Part of the Company’s Industrial AI Roadmap, It Uniquely Positions Dassault Systèmes to Deliver Clinical-Grade AI at Scale, Allowing the Life Sciences Industry to Deliver Better Health Outcomes to Patients at an Accelerated Pace by Leveraging Dassault Systèmes’ 3D UNIV+RSES

Dassault Systèmes today announced that it signed a definitive agreement to acquire ArisGlobal, the leading AI-native enterprise compliance platform for the Life Sciences industry. Under the terms of the agreement, Dassault Systèmes will acquire ArisGlobal for approximately $1.8 billion in cash at closing and up to $200 million in additional consideration linked to multi-year AI-related revenue milestones. The transaction was unanimously approved by the Board of Directors of Dassault Systèmes.  

ArisGlobal’s leading AI-native enterprise compliance platform serves over 200 customers, including half of the Top 50 global biopharma companies as well as biotech, medtech, CROs and global health authorities. Its regulated core platform is deeply embedded within mission-critical operations and processes more than 12 million patient safety cases annually. ArisGlobal has over 1,300 employees globally and is expected to generate revenue of $175 million in 2026.  

ArisGlobal operates in a highly resilient compliance market, projected to grow double-digits to reach $7.5 billion by 2030, and where software and AI are expected to capture an expanding share of total spend. Enterprise biopharma and medtechs deploy ArisGlobal’s innovative technology solutions horizontally to track and manage global patient safety events, medical affairs, complex regulatory submissions, and quality processes. Its NavaX AI platform operationalizes clinical-grade AI at production scale within highly regulated environments. It delivers more than 30% productivity gains, helping customers automate complex processes, improve data quality, strengthen compliance, and generate decision-grade intelligence across the product lifecycle.  

Acquiring ArisGlobal advances Dassault Systèmes’ ambition to transform the Life Sciences industry by combining its unique domain expertise in discovery, clinical trials, manufacturing and quality with ArisGlobal’s leadership in regulated operations and real-world evidence management…

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

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Included Health Signs Agreement to Acquire Firefly Health; Companies to Combine to Deliver Clinically-Integrated Health Plan Alternative at Scale

Acquisition to Add a Proven 15%+ Total Cost of Care Savings Model, a Nationwide Near- and In-Home Care and Specialty Network, and an Incentive-Aligned Health Plan Architecture

Included Health, a new kind of healthcare company delivering personalized all-in-one healthcare to millions of people nationwide, today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Firefly Health, a clinically integrated health plan and advanced primary care company that has demonstrated 15%+ in total cost of care savings while delivering 90% member satisfaction and proven results across preventive care, chronic disease management, and complex care. The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of calendar year 2026, subject to customary regulatory review.

Building on Included Health’s recently announced alternative plan design, this pending acquisition will bring together Included Health’s AI-native, clinician-in-the-loop platform with Firefly’s clinically-integrated health plan — anchored in primary care, a nationwide near- and in-home care and specialty network, and dynamic benefit design — to create a scaled, health plan alternative that gives employers nationwide a clear path to long-term savings by connecting employees to better care through a modern experience with predictable costs.

“We’ve spent years shoulder to shoulder with employers and their members, and we’ve heard the same frustration again and again — the system isn’t built around what people actually need,” said Owen Tripp, Co-Founder and CEO at Included Health. “That’s why Included Health and Firefly share the core belief that investing in primary care and navigating people to quality is what actually lowers unnecessary costs — not narrowing networks or shifting costs to members. We’ve seen firsthand what works, and Firefly’s proven results in total cost of care and member experience align and complement our core offerings. Together, we’re giving employers a single, connected benefits experience that integrates plan design and administration, comprehensive care, and full system support to reduce friction, improve employee health, and lower costs.”

Firefly Health’s results are proven: in 2025, the company delivered a 15% reduction in total cost of care across its full Administrative Services Only (ASO) book of business compared to a risk-adjusted market benchmark, with every customer reporting savings and one exceeding 17%…

Full release here, originally announced July 28th, 2026.

< + > Inside Australia’s Wide-Open Acute Care EHR and Aged Care Markets

I was in Sydney, Australia for the HIC2026 (Health Innovation Community 2026) conference, and it was fantastic. The event felt familiar to conferences on my home turf in Canada – lots of discussion about government initiatives, funding obstacles, workforce issues, and geographic challenges.

Beyond the great venue and warm hospitality, the event highlighted a market going through rapid digital transformation. Three big trends stood out: a massive push in elder care, major workforce and interoperability initiatives, and an EHR market that remains wide open.

Key Takeaways from HIC 2026

• Australia’s aged care sector is undergoing rapid regulatory reform, motivating providers to modernize systems and improve data exchange across acute and primary care.
• Digital front door initiatives and clinical informatics credentials are taking center stage to reduce emergency department strain and build workforce capability.
• The Australian EHR market is a rare global greenfield, with many hospitals replacing paper or fragmented legacy setups, attracting major international software vendors.

Aged Care Reform Demands Practical Vendor Alignment

I caught up with Tom Symondson, CEO of Ageing Australia, to talk about the latest developments in the country’s efforts to address the silver tsunami. According to Symondson, a new Aged Care Act is pushing a thousand providers across the continent to raise their digital sophistication. Right now, data flow between aged care, hospitals, and primary care is almost non-existent.

Symondson offered strong advice for technology companies looking to enter this space. He warned vendors to stop tagging products with “AI” unless the functionality is real: “Stop doing that [tagging products with AI] unless it’s genuinely AI-enabled…the vendors that come to me and say ‘I’m not having success’ are the ones that have not been able to transform their marketing speak into a description of how that product will help the provider comply with their regulatory requirements.”

Driving Connected Care Through Workforces and Digital Front Doors

Interoperability and workforce readiness were main talking points in the hallways. Anja Nikolic, CEO of the Australasian Institute of Digital Health (AIDH), explained how they are launching a rigorous clinical informatics fellowship. The goal is to build up an educated, verified digital health workforce that has the mastery needed to connect clinicians, patients, and systems together.

The digital front door and access challenges were also a hot topic at HIC2026. I spoke with Dr. Amith Shetty from the New South Wales Ministry of Health. His team created a single digital front door app that lets patients self-triage using built-in nurse algorithms. By steering non-urgent cases to virtual care consults and local clinics, they are already seeing real diversion away from crowded emergency rooms.

A Greenfield EHR Opportunity Down Under

Walking the exhibit floor revealed a surprising reality about Australian acute care. Unlike North America or Europe, many Australian hospitals still operate without a centralized electronic health record system. Many sites still rely on paper or a loose collection of disparate software applications (aka point solutions).

This gap makes Australia one of the few global markets where EHR vendors do not have to fight off a dominant incumbent. Companies like Dedalus, MEDITECH, Oracle, and Epic were out in full force to capture this growing demand. Vendors that offer clear orchestration, secure communication tools like Celo Health and CloudWave, and cloud migration paths will find a hungry audience here.

The Bottom Line

Australia is entering a critical phase of growth in digital health. Providers are looking for fast, proven implementations, especially when it comes to AI, elder care, patient access, and interoperability. For health IT vendors, success down under means having a clear line from marketing promise to smooth implementation to meaningful results.

Questions Healthcare IT Leaders are Asking

Why is the Australian hospital market attractive to EHR vendors right now? Unlike saturated markets in North America, many Australian hospitals still lack a centralized electronic health record system. This gives software vendors a rare greenfield opportunity to implement enterprise solutions without needing to dislodge entrenched incumbent platforms.

How can health IT vendors successfully sell into the Australian aged care market? Vendors must align their sales messages directly with provider regulatory, data reporting, and financial constraints. Aged care providers need practical software that streamlines compliance under the new Aged Care Act and connects cleanly with acute and primary care systems.

Video Features (in order of appearance):

• Tom Symondson from Ageing Australia
• Anja Nikolic from AIDH
• Amith Shetty from New South Wales Ministry of Health
• George Margelis from Ageing Australia
• Didier Moutia from InterSystems
• Jacob Wheeler from CloudWave
• George Patapis from Dedalus
• David Swanson from Commure
• Matthew McBride from MEDITECH
• Steve Vlok from Celo
• Ramanan Moorthy from Celo
• Paul Pettit from Commure
• Michael Anderson from Solventum

< + > What’s Next? A View of the Future of NEMT (Non-Emergency Medical Transportation)

The following is a guest article by Elizabeth Jepsen, Chief of Staff at Kinetik

A Q&A recap of Kinetik’s industry panel on the future of non-emergency medical transportation

When transportation breaks down, so does care. That was the throughline of a recent Kinetik webinar panel discussion on The State of NEMT 2026: The Future of Healthcare Transportation. Moderated by Mohammad Hossain of Kinetik, the panel featured the CEO of United Healthcare New Mexico; Dr. Ainsley MacLean, a practicing neuroradiologist and former Chief AI officer at Kaiser Permanente who now leads carcompany.ai; and Tonya Copeland, Chief Growth Officer at Liberty Health and board chair of NEMTAC. Kinetik Co-Founder and CEO, Sufian Chowdhury, joined the conversation as well.

Their shared message: non-emergency medical transportation isn’t a logistics problem. It’s a care problem. The webinar’s panel discussion highlighted what needs to change in NEMT.

NEMT as Care Coordination, Not Logistics

When did you stop viewing NEMT as “just a ride”?

The shift happened early for the CEO of United Healthcare New Mexico. He saw firsthand that transportation was often the single biggest barrier standing between a rural Medicaid member and the care they needed. In New Mexico, it isn’t out of the ordinary for patients to drive 100 to 150 miles round trip to reach an appointment, a real challenge for anyone working an hourly job.

The takeaway: the appointment starts the moment a member walks out their front door, not when they arrive at the clinic. That means transportation needs the same coordination as the visit itself. And reliability is what determines whether members trust the benefit enough to use it at all.

What Clinical Experience Teaches About Technology’s Limits

What did practicing medicine teach you about where technology helps, and where it doesn’t?

Dr. Ainsley MacLean has spent her career on both sides of the equation, treating patients as a Harvard-trained radiologist and building AI strategy as Kaiser Permanente’s first chief AI officer. That dual view shapes how she thinks about value. True value, she said, means tying every service back to outcomes: longer, healthier lives. Transportation, she argued, is a spoke the industry has largely overlooked on that wheel.

That thinking led carcompany.ai to rename its drivers as “navigators,” treating their experience as being just as important as the patient’s, the payer’s, or the physician’s. As care shifts from hospitals to outpatient settings and homes, MacLean sees navigators as more than a ride. They’re a touchpoint that can catch a missed mammogram or an overdue cancer screening before it becomes something bigger.

What Providers See That Plans Don’t

Where have you seen a disconnect within NEMT?

Tonya Copeland’s perspective comes from having run an NEMT program herself. Early in her career, leading a multi-state agency serving people with intellectual and developmental disabilities and the elderly, she couldn’t find a single vendor willing to transport the population she served. Eventually, her agency became an NEMT vendor out of necessity.

More than a decade later, Copeland still sees the same gap. The label “non-emergency,” she said, undersells how urgent and important these trips are. Missing a ride to a dialysis appointment or a primary care visit isn’t a scheduling inconvenience. For the member, it can feel like an emergency. Transportation, she said, is foundational. Without it, care simply doesn’t happen.

The Systemic Fix

After a decade building Kinetik, what’s your view of what needs to change in NEMT?

Kinetik CEO Sufian Chowdhury pointed to a structural problem: NEMT was never designed as part of the healthcare continuum, which is why so much value leaks out of the system. He pointed to a wave of rural hospital closures on the horizon, more than 400 expected in the coming years, that will roughly double the distance many patients travel to reach care.

Chowdhury’s math is stark. He estimates the true cost of missed and delayed care from transportation gaps at more than $150 billion, dwarfing the roughly $8 billion NEMT market itself. For decades, he said, payers have treated NEMT as a transaction rather than weighing the far larger cost of getting it wrong.

Building a Network That Lasts

What does it take to keep transportation providers viable?

For the  CEO of United Healthcare New Mexico, the focus has been on fair pricing. Transportation providers need to be paid enough to stay viable rather than paying them the lowest per-mile rate, which hurts the network in the long run. Health plans and brokers need to treat transportation providers as partners.

Copeland sees reason for optimism in new rural health transformation grants tied to HR1, several of which name transportation explicitly. Tennessee’s grant, for example, focuses specifically on transportation technology, a sign that states are starting to treat the problem as solvable.

Trust, Funding, and the Fraud, Waste, and Abuse Spotlight

The conversation turned to funding, and here the panelists largely agreed: the system is working against itself. Chowdhury pointed out the irony of health plans paying liquidated damages when a ride falls through, dollars that could instead fund surge pricing to make sure the ride actually happens. Rising gas prices compound the problem on both ends, keeping drivers from taking trips and keeping patients from following through on appointments. Chowdhury described patients in Pikeville, Kentucky skipping medical visits because they couldn’t afford the drive.

The stakes go beyond inconvenience. Chowdhury said that members who miss a methadone or dialysis appointment are more likely to end up in the emergency department in the near future. Copeland’s answer is professionalization: treating NEMT drivers and the systems that support them as core healthcare infrastructure, not an administrative afterthought.

Closing: Rapid-Fire

To close, Hossain posed one question to each panelist: with 5.8 million Americans missing or delaying care due to transportation barriers, what’s one thing you can do to move that number in the next five years?

The CEO of United Healthcare New Mexico recommends to over-communicate as members need to hear, repeatedly, that the ride will be reliable and safe before they’ll trust it enough to use it. Copeland is staying focused on professionalizing the industry at the federal level through her work with NEMTAC and CMS. MacLean wants to redefine quality itself, measuring NEMT by verified health outcomes rather than verified miles driven. And Chowdhury’s answer was blunt: fix the funding structure now, before chronic underfunding turns into a genuine crisis.

Four different seats at the table. One shared conclusion: transportation is care.

Watch the webinar to get the full conversation.

About Elizabeth Jepsen

Elizabeth Jepsen is Chief of Staff at Kinetik, where she partners closely with the CEO and executive team to drive strategic alignment, operational rigor, and cross-functional execution. Working at the intersection of healthcare, technology, and public policy, she supports initiatives that strengthen Medicaid transportation infrastructure, improve accountability, and expand access to care for vulnerable populations. She leads executive planning, board and investor communications, and enterprise-wide initiatives—bringing clarity, ownership, and momentum to complex, high-growth environments. Prior to her current role, Elizabeth built her career in marketing and communications across nonprofit organizations, higher education, and hospital systems. She led brand strategy, executive communications, content development, and integrated marketing campaigns designed to elevate mission-driven institutions and deepen stakeholder engagement. Across every role, she is driven by a commitment to helping organizations communicate with clarity, operate with excellence, and create measurable impact.

Kinetik is a proud sponsor of Healthcare Scene.