Sunday, June 14, 2026

< + > Bonus Features – June 14, 2026 – Number of patients using telehealth down 48% since 2020, 71% of patients want phone or in-person assistance when they need help, plus 22 more stories

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

Studies

Partnerships and Implementations

Products

Company News

People

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



at No comments:
Labels:

Saturday, June 13, 2026

< + > Weekly Roundup – June 13, 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.

Replacing Post-It Notes in the OR With Real-Time Dashboards. At MUSEInspire, Colin Hung took in a session with Jeffrey Oliver and David Owen at LiveData, which is using live displays to support surgical teams and keep families in the waiting room informed. Read more…

From Fragmented Data to Actionable Intelligence. Paul Brockington at the ONCare Alliance and Sergio Wagner at Salient Health joined John Lynn to talk about why healthcare needs to apply AI and analytics to specific business problems – especially those that require clinicians or administrators to run sophisticated data interrogations. Read more…

Your Hosting Provider Says They’re Compliant. Can They Prove It? Looking at logs (not just audits), incident management plans, and encryption strategies can help organizations ensure vendors can follow through on their compliance claims, Kelly Goolsby at Nexcess told John. Read more…

Why Health Payers Need a Unified Content Strategy. John sat down with Ashish Desai and Jami Hernandez at Simplify Healthcare to learn about harmonizing data on the back end so representatives engaging with members aren’t pulling data from multiple sources just to answer simple questions. Read more…

Workflow Integration Drives Ambient Scribe Success. Liz Massey at Central Oklahoma Family Medical Center talked to John about doing role-plays with doctors and offering suggestions on how to do things differently with a patient in the room to increase comfort with and adoption of Sunoh.ai. Read more…

Technology’s Role in Addressing Health Equity, Accessibility, and Digital Literacy. According to the experts in the Healthcare IT Today community, the key success factors here include usability, transparency, personalization, context, and am omnichannel experience. Read more…

Bridging the Divide on Electronic Prior Authorization. The latest in the in the Healthcare Regulatory Talk series came from DrFirst’s Tyler Wince, who outlined the CMS proposed rule that would align FHIR-based mandates for prior auth for providers and payers and what it would mean for EHR vendors. Read more…

Life Sciences Today Podcast: Building AI Innovation Backward from Adoption. Danny Lieberman caught up with Ayelet Geva at Sheba Medical Center’s Jusidman Cancer Center, where innovation starts with intended use and value proposition before considering evidence, data, partnerships, and adoption models. Read more…

Healthcare IT Today Podcast: Buy or Sell: Spring Conference Edition. John and Colin debated the trends they heard from the trenches at this spring’s events – namely, are IT budgets shrinking, and are IT leaders prioritizing vendor consolidation? Read more…

Transforming Care Delivery Through Clinical Device Management. Enterprise asset management lacks clinical context and doesn’t understand how devices and their data impact patient care, said Jeremy Tipton at iTech AG. Organizations benefit from an approach that prioritizes patient safety, improves performance data access, and ensures auditability. Read more…

Prepay Prevention Is Becoming the New Standard in Payment Integrity. Shifting left in payment integrity means being moving detection, validation, and decision-making closer to claim intake and adjudication. This helps catch issues before funds go out the door, said Steve Sutherland at CERIS. Read more…

Why Patient Engagement Technology Must Function Outside of Visits. Families experiencing cancer holding too much unstructured information in their heads, noted Teddy Aaron and Brynn Forlizzi at Soothe Note. That’s why they create a free app to help patients and caregivers manage clinical care and everyday life by quickly capturing and sharing information. Read more…

The Emerging Role of AI Platforms in Care Delivery. AI is no longer limited to back-office automation or isolated pilots, said Ashutosh Kavathekar at Apexon. As a result, AI must be treated as a shared enterprise layer integrated across clinical, financial, and operational workflows. Read more…

How Small Practices are Putting AI to Work. AI is delivering value through clinical documentation and administrative automation, noted Chris Knotts at PEAKE Technology Partners. Practices often need help understanding strategic context when it comes to selecting and implementing AI tools. Read more…

This Week’s Health IT Jobs for June 10, 2026: Multiple roles in IT security as well as behavioral health. Read more…

Bonus Features for June 7, 2026: While 34% of patients would let an AI assistant read their entire medical record, 74% of clinicians worry relying on AI too much will erode their skills. Read more…

Funding and M&A Activity:

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



at No comments:
Labels:

Friday, June 12, 2026

< + > Healthcare AI Humor – Fun Friday

Happy Friday everyone!  It’s Friday and so that means it’s time for another edition of Fun Friday where we try to make you smile and possibly learn something as you head into the weekend.  This week we have some humor on the overreliance on AI.  Check out these cartoons:

We would never do this with AI in healthcare…would we?

This is about books, but it certainly could apply to LLMs in healthcare too.  Do you want to trust the crowd?

What’s old is new.  Trusting technology always takes time for the technology to mature.

Have a great weekend!  See you back here next week for more great healthcare IT content.



at No comments:
Labels:

< + > Transforming Care Delivery Through Clinical Device Management

The following is a guest article by Adam Byer, Chief Delivery Officer at iTech AG

The implementation of technology in healthcare has driven incredible scientific discoveries and improved outcomes. However, the rise of connected devices and integrated systems has also created increasingly complex environments to manage.

Historically, healthcare technology management has treated clinical devices as static assets, focusing on inventory and routine servicing. This approach offers limited visibility into real-time device performance and how risks evolve over device lifecycles, resulting in inefficiencies and security vulnerabilities.

Meanwhile, healthcare organizations are under pressure to do more with existing resources while delivering consistent, high-quality care. As healthcare technology evolves rapidly, traditional approaches can no longer keep pace with today’s scale and complexity.

Many hospitals and care providers are turning to more integrated approaches to better manage the tools that power patient care. As healthcare systems evolve to meet current needs and combat increasing demands for more results with fewer resources, healthcare should consider implementing a modern clinical device management (CDM) solution to prioritize patient safety, improve access to consolidated device performance data, and ensure a strong auditability posture.

Enterprise Asset Management Versus Clinical Device Management

With more connected technology in hospitals than ever before, teams are responsible for monitoring operations across their ecosystem. To do so, organizations traditionally looked to enterprise asset management (EAM). EAM focuses on tracking assets and scheduling maintenance, but it lacks the clinical context needed to understand how devices impact patient care in real time and the regulatory environment attached to those devices. Clinical device management (CDM) offers a comprehensive lifecycle view of healthcare equipment by merging medical engineering with information technology to ensure more effective patient safety and treatment management.

Managing modern healthcare devices requires a system that fully understands healthcare, not just assets. CDM enables healthcare organizations to fully harness the growing volume of data generated across their device ecosystems and hosts a comprehensive understanding of the healthcare space to support patient care.

Consolidated Device Performance Data

In addition to tracking assets and scheduling maintenance, CDM integrates device data, services device histories, and provides operational insights in a unified view that reflects actual usage and risk. By connecting devices and centralizing insights, healthcare professionals can move beyond static scheduled inventories and better understand device performance, identify patterns, and anticipate failures. The result is a more informed, predictive approach that improves reliability and ensures critical equipment is consistently available.

Healthcare workers rely on a wide range of critical equipment, including infusion pumps, ventilators, anesthesia machines, and imaging systems that directly support patient care and clinical decision-making. Any failure, misconfiguration, or delay in servicing can affect patient outcomes. Reliable device performance is not just an operational concern; it is essential to ensure clinicians can act quickly with the tools they need to save lives.

Prioritization of Patient Safety

CDM plays a critical role in increasing efficiency and speed across healthcare operations by introducing more nuanced classification systems rooted in patient safety. Instead of applying uniform processes to all devices, CDM prioritizes patient safety by classifying devices based on clinical risk, patient impact, and potential harm. This system ensures that the most critical equipment receives the highest level of visibility, prioritization, and response, fundamentally changing how maintenance and escalation are handled.

Combined with real-time monitoring and more automated workflows, this risk-based approach allows IT teams to focus on the most critical patient issues first, reduce unnecessary maintenance on low-risk equipment, and streamline service delivery overall. This minimizes downtime, shortens repair cycles, and helps healthcare organizations make better use of limited staff and resources.

Compliance and Audit Readiness

CDM also strengthens risk management and supports strategic, long-term planning by embedding compliance and audit readiness into everyday operations.

Devices like infusion pumps, ventilators, and CT machines are subject to strict regulatory, accreditation, and manufacturer maintenance requirements. CDM natively captures maintenance records, tracks updates, and ensures that devices can be aligned with required standards. This creates a consistent, transparent system of records that simplifies audits and reduces the burden of manual documentation.

In addition to compliance, it enables healthcare leaders to make more confident, data-driven decisions about capital planning and their hospital’s overall technology strategy; all while maintaining a focus on patient safety.

With CDM, healthcare organizations can break down silos between operations, access real-time visibility, and gain critical, predictive insights to ensure that the machines and systems that keep people alive and healthy are always available.

Healthcare organizations should look to adopt CDM to not only strengthen patient care today but to better achieve their principal outcomes of patient care, minimizing risk, and leveraging technology to positively impact the patient experience.



at No comments:
Labels:

< + > Ilant Health Raises $15M to Replace Fragmented Obesity Care With AI-Supported, Precision Care

  • Ilant is Redefining Obesity Care from a Set of Disconnected Interventions into a Continuous Service that Delivers Outcomes at Scale
  • The Company Operates as an AI-Enabled Healthcare Services Company, Bringing a Precision Medicine Approach to Obesity Care by Continuously Adapting Treatment Pathways to Each Individual Over Time
  • Ilant Delivers both Clinical and Financial Impact by Addressing the Primary Drivers of Obesity-Related Healthcare Costs, Introducing Personalized Care Models that Deliver Value and Reduce Unnecessary Spend

Ilant Health, the value-based obesity treatment company working with employers and health plans to deliver clinical outcomes and reduce the total cost of care, announced it has raised $15 million in Series A funding, bringing its total funding to over $22M to date. The round was led by Cornucopian Capital, with participation from naturalX, Peakbridge, Semcap AI, Evidenced, Operator Partners, as well as existing investors Celtic, LifeX, and AlphaLab.

Founded by Elina Onitskansky (formerly McKinsey and Molina Healthcare), Ilant works directly with employers and health plans to deliver comprehensive, clinician-led care for obesity and related conditions. Ilant delivers measurable clinical and financial outcomes, versus solutions focused on access or cost control, or fragmented solutions that look at obesity and weight loss in isolation from broader health.

Early results show that members achieve 15% weight loss on average — well above 5.8% reported in real-world settings – alongside measurable gains in broader biometrics and overall wellbeing, including an average of two additional mentally healthy days per month. These results highlight Ilant’s success improving outcomes in clinically meaningful ways. The company does this while managing both treatment costs and total cost of care for employers and payers, creating a uniquely compelling value proposition.

The Rise of AI-Enabled Healthcare Services and Precision Care

The company delivers these results through clinician-led care with treatment that is precision-matched to individual member needs based on clinical, behavioral, and personal data, and continuously optimized based on how each individual responds in practice. Treatment includes behavioral therapy, medication (including both GLP-1 and non-GLP-1 therapies), and surgical options as delivered in a comprehensive model that address nutrition, physical activity, and stress alongside medical care.

The approach focuses on initiating with the best treatment and consistently enhancing outcomes over time, delivering life-changing clinical results while avoiding unnecessary or ineffective care.

Early Traction and Demand Signal Rapid Growth

Ilant is already working with leading employers and healthcare partners to deliver measurable improvements in both outcomes and cost, reflecting strong demand for models that move beyond point solutions toward integrated, outcomes-based care.

“What stood out with Ilant was their precision-based, data-driven approach to obesity care, not a one-size-fits-all model centered on medication only,” said Kenneth L. Gardner, Director of Growth, Benefit Operations at SEIU 775 BENEFITS GROUP. “Ilant conducted a detailed analysis of our population and identified the members most likely to benefit clinically and financially, giving us confidence in both improved outcomes and meaningful ROI. Just as importantly, the members consistently share positive feedback about the care, support, and personalized attention they receive from the Ilant team.”

As part of this approach, in November 2025, Ilant announced direct contracting and transparent pricing solutions for obesity management medicines available through Lilly’s Employer Connect program; the company is also working with Novo Nordisk. These manufacturer contracts enable Ilant to provide transparent prices for medications with flexibility in design, giving employers greater visibility and control over one of the fastest-growing areas of healthcare spend.

Recent results from Eli Lilly and Company, reported by the Financial Times, highlight the scale and speed of demand for GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, with revenues surging as adoption accelerates. As more employers face pressure to offer coverage while managing rising pharmacy spend, the need for models and infrastructure that can bring predictability and control – while delivering outcomes and experience – has never been higher.

“Employers and health plans are facing a real dilemma right now — they are faced with either expanding access and watching pharmaceutical costs rise dramatically, or restricting access and risking rising chronic disease and cost,” said Elina Onitskansky, Founder and CEO at Ilant. “That’s not a sustainable model. If we don’t change how care is delivered, we’re just paying more for the same broken system, and we risk a crisis where both chronic disease and costs are spiraling out of control. Ilant’s model focuses on delivering real value with manageable treatment costs and clinically meaningful care that actually bends the cost curve.”

Investors see this shift as defining the next phase of obesity and cardiometabolic care.

“We believe the next generation of category-defining companies will be those that deliver outcomes as a service, not just tools or access,” said Aryeh Ganz, Founder and Managing Partner at Cornucopian Capital. “Ilant is applying that model to one of the most important and costly areas in healthcare. The company understands that the future of obesity and cardiometabolic care will not be defined by access to a single class of drugs, but by the ability to deliver the right care to the right patient at the right time. Their model aligns clinical rigor with economic value in a way that we believe will define this category over the next decade.”

About Ilant Health

Ilant Health is an obesity and cardiometabolic health company focused on increasing access to treatment while reducing the total cost of care for employers and payers through value-based care. Ilant Health provides the single front door for individuals with obesity, delivering end-to-end evidence-based solutions (bariatric surgery, medication, intense behavioral therapy) through a technology-enabled and analytics-driven obesity medicine practice. To learn more about Ilant Health, please visit their website at ilanthealth.com.

Originally announced June 2nd, 2026



at No comments:
Labels:

Thursday, June 11, 2026

< + > From Fragmented Data to Actionable Intelligence

Modern tools, including AI, offer healthcare institutions new windows onto their data with the potential for real business changes. In our recent interview, we sat down with Paul Brockington, Vice President of Integrations at the ONCare Alliance, a consortium of independent oncology providers sharing their data for research and to improve their operations, and Sergio Wagner, Salient Health’s Chief Strategy Officer, to learn more about their efforts to leverage data to improve the care provided. ONCare Alliance has partnered with Salient Health to curate and interrogate their data in order to make it more actionable.

Both Brockington and Wagner stress the importance of applying AI and analytics to specific business problems, what Brockington calls “MBA 101.” Wagner says that he wouldn’t be interested in AI unless it can “make money, save money, or reduce risk.”

Wagner thinks that the technology is available today to extract the value that health care providers need, and that the old problems of interoperability and data movement are solved. The key issue is the financial incentive to share data.

Salient Health’s key asset, Wagner says, is their proprietary in-memory database, which they have integrated with an analytic engine to analyze billions of data points in real time. Salient’s platform is also trained on the specific nomenclature and nuances of its partners.

One partner Wagner mentioned is the Department of Health of the state of New York, which has stored every claim in the state since 2005. Now 35 agencies can query data in its totality.

Brockington’s alliance accepts EHR, billing, and next-generation sequencing (NGS) data from alliance members, building up billions of rows of structured data along with unstructured data in the form of physician notes, patient observations, lab values, and NGS testing. Their members are concerned with quickly extracting key aspects of the patient journey, such as age range, stage of the cancer, and treatments, from both structured and unstructured data. They identify cohorts that they can track through their patient journeys.

Brockington says that it’s time to move beyond pre-canned data and dashboards and allow clinicians or administrators to run sophisticated interrogations of their data. Salient Health helps them run such queries instantaneously, not relying on IT staff to spend days coding queries.

Watch our interview to learn more about how ONCare Alliance and Salient Health have partnered together to turn data into action.

Learn more about Salient: https://salienthealth.com/

Learn more about ONCare Alliance: https://www.oncarealliance.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.

Salient is a proud sponsor of Healthcare Scene.



at No comments:
Labels:

< + > Shifting Upstream in Payment Integrity: Why Prepay Prevention is Becoming the New Standard

The following is a guest article by Steve Sutherland, SVP Information Systems at CERIS

Payment integrity often lives at the end of the claims line, with teams measuring success by how much they can win back after payment. While recoveries matter, most payer and program leaders know the hidden cost of that model.

That is why more organizations are now “shifting upstream” in payment integrity. This trend of shifting upstream or left means being proactive and moving detection, validation, and decisioning upstream, closer to claim intake and adjudication. The goal here is to catch issues earlier in the claim lifecycle, before funds go out the door, and when problems can be clarified, corrected, or resolved with less disruption.

This change touches the full healthcare ecosystem. Large health systems and hospitals feel the strain when recoupments disrupt revenue cycle planning. Group practices and solo practitioners experience the drag of repeated record requests and appeal cycles. Government agencies face heightened scrutiny and pressure to demonstrate program integrity. Health IT companies, consultants, and associations are under the impression that integrity initiatives must balance accuracy, access, and administrative burden.

Shifting upstream is gaining ground because it supports a better process, not just tougher policing.

Why Prepay Strategies are Speeding Up Now

Claims keep rising in both volume and complexity. At the same time, many plans and programs run short on staff, and post-pay recovery work can be costly and hard to scale. Even when recoveries are successful, they can come with downstream costs that are harder to quantify but easy to recognize, including strained provider relationships, more appeals, and more time spent resolving disputes than preventing them.

Prepay prevention reduces that churn. The most successful programs focus on clear rules and tight scope, and target common failure points. They also route those claims through steps that teams can explain and providers can resolve.

Prepay work also helps payer information technology and claims teams measure results faster. Intervention is happening in a shorter window, making it easier to track outcomes, compare changes, and refine edits.

What Prepay Prevention Looks Like in Practice

Shifting upstream shows up in a few core moves across the industry, and the following steps are quickly becoming standard as programs mature.

One step is clinical validation, which helps confirm that a billed service aligns with clinical documentation and applicable policy. This often involves reviewing whether the medical record supports the level of care, medical necessity, or clinical appropriateness. Another intervention is coding checks, where payers identify inconsistencies such as incompatible code combinations, unbundling risk, upcoding indicators, and mismatches between codes and documented services. A third is documentation review, which catches missing or unclear details before payment. That timing matters as providers can often respond faster before a claim turns into a formal dispute.

The operational upside is clear: providers still have context, and claims staff can resolve questions without triggering a long recovery cycle. From a technology view, payers can embed edits and workflows where they work best, which leads to clearer routing, stronger audit trails, and more consistent decisions.

Where AI is Making a Real Impact

Artificial intelligence can help payment integrity teams move faster and stay consistent. Additionally, the technology works best when teams pair it with tight governance and human review. AI can help sort incoming claims by risk and provide better triage. It can use signals like pattern fit, dollar risk, and confidence scores to cut through the noise. AI also keeps human review focused on the claims that matter most.

AI also provides faster record review. Modern tools can pull key facts from records and highlight the right sections. Some tools can also draft short summaries for reviewers, which reduces the time spent hunting for details across long notes. Reviewers are moving faster when using AI without lowering the bar.

Lastly, AI can also help with pattern detection at scale, surfacing emerging anomalies across procedures, sites of service, or provider groups. This is particularly useful for identifying where an edit may need to be tuned, where education could prevent repeated errors, or where a new billing pattern is creating avoidable leakage.

The key point is trust. Artificial intelligence helps most when it supports decisions and leaves a clear trail. If teams cannot explain why a claim was flagged, they should not rely on the output.

Where Human Expertise Stays Essential

Even as automation improves, payment integrity still depends on expert judgment. Complex clinical scenarios, nuanced coding situations, policy exceptions, and context-specific documentation issues do not always fit neatly into rules or model predictions.

Humans also protect quality, calibrate rules, and handle escalations. Without those steps, teams risk uneven decisions and weak rationales. Provider trust drops fast when outcomes feel unsystematic.

Clinical reviewers and coding experts add the interpretive layer that keeps decisions fair. They can tell the difference between a true billing issue and a chart that needs one more detail. They also feed what they learn back into edits and models. With mature programs treating this as a loop and automation handling volume, experts are able to handle nuance and oversight.

Earlier Intervention Improves Transparency and Reduces Provider Friction

When a payer flags an issue before payment, the message can be more direct and the policy cite can be clear. The provider can respond while the facts are still easy to confirm. Early intervention also improves internal transparency, because prepay workflows can be instrumented to show exactly why a claim was flagged, what information was reviewed, what was requested, and how the final decision was reached.

For payer information technology teams, that trace supports audit needs and strong controls. For providers, it reduces the feeling that rules change after the fact.

What Shifting Upstream Means for Payer Information Technology and Claims Teams

Shifting upstream is ultimately a modernization effort. It requires payer IT and claims operations teams to treat payment integrity as a lifecycle capability, supported by workflow design, data quality, and disciplined governance.

Teams can make the change with a few practical moves:

  • Precision Before Scale – Pick a small set of high-impact use cases and make sure they are defensible and workable in prepay; measure results, then expand
  • Tie Every Decision to Evidence – Each intervention should produce a clear rationale and a policy link; it should also point to a consistent path to resolve the issue, and explainability turns automation into trust
  • Use Artificial Intelligence where it is Strong – Use AI for routing, record search, summarization, and trend detection; keep expert review for clinical judgment, coding nuance, and quality checks
  • Measure Success Beyond Recoveries – Track avoided improper payments, cycle times, touch rates, appeal outcomes, provider escalations, and cost-to-manage, because those indicators reveal whether shifting upstream is improving integrity through transparency

Across healthcare, the goal is to improve billing accuracy by strengthening transparency and integrity. By preventing errors early, organizations reduce waste, minimize rework, and lower friction for everyone involved. The result is a clearer, more consistent, and fairer billing and claims experience.



at No comments:
Labels:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)

< + > Bonus Features – June 14, 2026 – Number of patients using telehealth down 48% since 2020, 71% of patients want phone or in-person assistance when they need help, plus 22 more stories

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