You had to know that we couldn’t skip a Fun Friday this week after seeing the MAHAspital featured on Saturday Night Light (SNL). Positioned as a trailer for a new high-stakes medical drama (no doubt inspired by The Pitt). I don’t really know how to describe it, but it does illustrate the absurdities that have happened in healthcare over the past few years.
We hope you enjoyed a few laughs. Have a great weekend and see you back here next week for more great health IT content.
The following is a guest article by Matt Scavetta, CTIO at Future Tech
Healthcare organizations are under immense pressure to deliver high-quality, patient-centered care while also managing increasingly complex technology. One critical example many healthcare IT leaders face is the hardware requirements for modern EHRs.
Epic holds approximately 48% market share among large healthcare systems and has rigid requirements for endpoint devices to run its ecosystem. This places significant responsibility on end-user computing teams to ensure devices in circulation meet those standards and are continuously monitored for abnormal degradation or performance issues.
Hardware refresh strategies were once an afterthought for healthcare executives. With vendors now enforcing more stringent hardware standards, they have become top of mind for CIOs, CFOs, and CEOs alike. The question now becomes: How do IT executives provide that strategy? This is where Digital Employee Experience (DEX) comes in.
How Digital Employee Experience Addresses Silent Friction in Healthcare IT
DEX is a rising category of platforms and practices that monitor and improve how employees interact with devices, applications, and AI tools. It gives IT teams real-time insight into performance so they can prevent problems before they reach staff.
In healthcare, physical environments can be just as diverse as the software being deployed. Emergency Departments, Labs, Radiology, Inpatient units, Patient Access, and Revenue Cycle teams all have unique technical requirements. Tablets are being deployed as part of digital front desks to streamline check-in. AI-assisted claim submission and medical coding tools are transforming revenue cycle operations. Workstations on Wheels (WOWs) in Emergency Departments are evolving to support new hardware configurations. Finance teams are using AI tools such as Translucent to manage increasingly complex departmental P&Ls. At the same time, virtual care and remote patient monitoring continue to expand as healthcare systems extend care beyond traditional facilities.
All of these shifts create a growing need for greater visibility into what is happening at the device level across the entire ecosystem. As a result, DEX adoption has moved from a “nice to have” capability to an essential component of IT operations.
Many hospitals still rely on traditional IT metrics such as tickets opened, mean time to repair, and help desk volume. But these measures only tell part of the story. They do not capture the hours clinicians spend working around slow applications, waiting for tools to load, or abandoning technology in frustration. These hidden inefficiencies create silent friction that affects efficiency, decision-making, patient throughput, and staff satisfaction.
What DEX Offers
DEX platforms collect data directly from devices and applications, providing real-time insight into how staff interact with technology. This enables IT leaders to answer questions that were previously difficult to measure, including:
This is more than a monitoring layer. Proactive alerts, self-healing capabilities, and usage analytics allow IT teams to resolve problems before they disrupt care, reducing downtime and hidden inefficiencies.
Through DEX campaigns, organizations can segment devices by department, location, or application to curate targeted surveys. These campaign insights provide meaningful data on how AI tools are being used and can collect sentiment analysis that IT leaders can leverage to inform broader strategy and investment decisions.
Why DEX Matters in Healthcare
Adopting DEX can change how hospitals manage technology day to day. With real-time visibility into device and application performance, IT teams can address issues before they affect the patient journey. Anecdotal feedback from users can be translated into measurable data, helping leaders determine whether technology investments are delivering real value.
Several key impacts include:
DEX Belongs at the Center of Healthcare IT Strategy
Adopting DEX changes how IT teams operate and how staff experience technology. It shifts IT from a reactive support function to a proactive operational partner. While the tools themselves matter, the real value comes from using the data to improve processes, assign accountability, and track outcomes.
As hospitals continue investing in AI and digital innovation, consistent endpoint performance is no longer just an IT concern. It is essential to delivering reliable, high-quality patient care. DEX is what makes that consistency possible.
Matt Scavetta is the Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at Future Tech, a global IT solutions provider that offers a diverse array of technology services to both corporate and government sectors.
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.
Health Recovery Solutions Acquires Rimidi to Expand Remote Care Programs
Strategic Acquisition Strengthens HRS’s Virtual Care Platform with Advanced EHR and Workflow Integrations, Continuous Glucose Monitoring, and Ambulatory Expertise
Health Recovery Solutions (HRS), the nation’s leading remote patient monitoring and enterprise remote patient care platform, announced its acquisition of Rimidi, a pioneering chronic disease management and remote monitoring company with deep roots in diabetes and cardiometabolic management.
HRS has been the leader in Remote Patient Monitoring and Enterprise Remote Patient Care for over a decade, consistently recognized by leading industry analysts, including KLAS, Frost & Sullivan, Newsweek, and Avia since 2020. The company has delivered proven clinical outcomes for more than one million patients and financial outcomes for hundreds of healthcare organizations across North America.
Building on this foundation, HRS introduced PatientFirst Pathways in 2025 to expand into comprehensive longitudinal care, enabling healthcare organizations to deliver connected, continuous care at home across the entire patient journey. This innovation earned HRS the Frost & Sullivan Customer Value Leadership Award for Technology-Enabled Longitudinal Care in 2025. In 2026, HRS further evolved to become a full Chronic Care Management solution provider, addressing the growing need for integrated chronic disease management.
The Rimidi acquisition perfectly complements this strategic evolution, with Rimidi’s expertise in enabling better chronic disease management through virtual care programs in ambulatory care settings across the country. Rimidi has been a leader in interoperability to support their commitment to streamlined and scalable clinical workflows. Bringing together two of the longest-standing and widely adopted remote care companies directly responds to three key challenges facing healthcare organizations today:
Enabling RPM at Scale and Across Conditions
Health systems need platforms that manage multiple chronic conditions under one system and can meet their evolving needs. Integrating Rimidi’s cardiometabolic and diabetes expertise and advanced clinical decision support capabilities with HRS’s post-acute expertise…
Full release here, originally announced March 4th, 2026.
Messagepoint Acquires Sefas
Acquisition Advances Comprehensive AI-Powered Platform for Omnichannel Management, Orchestration, and Digital Delivery of Regulated Customer Communications
Messagepoint, a leading customer communications management (CCM) solutions provider, today announced the acquisition of Sefas, a CCM and enterprise communications processing (ECP) software vendor.
Enterprises—especially in regulated industries—are under growing pressure to communicate faster and more accurately across channels, while reducing the cost and effort required to manage those communications. This acquisition strengthens Messagepoint’s ability to move organizations from fragmented document production to an orchestrated, trackable communications journey across channels.
The acquisition builds on Messagepoint’s established OEM partnership with Sefas, first announced in 2021, and will accelerate product innovation through deeper platform integration. Messagepoint currently OEMs key Sefas solutions, including Messagepoint Composer (Sefas Designer) and Messagepoint ECP (Sefas Producer), to help organizations modernize regulated communications management across print and digital channels.
In addition to deepening existing integrations, Messagepoint plans to bring additional solutions to customers—most notably Conductor, an omnichannel orchestration layer that coordinates and tracks high-volume print and digital communications, and Electronic Delivery Gateway (EDG), which helps integrate and manage digital delivery services.
This acquisition positions Messagepoint to deliver an AI-powered platform that supports a more complete communications lifecycle by…
Full release here, originally announced March 5th, 2026.
“We’re the government and we’re here to help.” That’s a common punchline, but based on recent IT announcements from CMS, this line may turn out to be no joke. From interoperability to provider directory to patient identification, CMS is working on several initiatives to tackle systemic IT challenges in healthcare.
Healthcare IT Today sat down with Amy Gleason, Strategic Advisor to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). She is tackling the massive challenge of slow progress on interoperability, provider identification, fraud, and clipboard-based care. Her mission is to drive immediate action across the healthcare ecosystem.
What This Conversation Revealed
Mandates move at a glacial pace. For example, a rule written in 2020 on interoperability will not take effect until 2027. To bypass this sluggish timeline, CMS launched a pledge to unite the industry right now.
“At CMS, we tried to take a step last spring. We asked, how can we really get interoperability to work and how can we do it in a way that doesn’t take seven years to go into effect,” explained Gleason.
After a series of listening sessions, “CMS launched an ecosystem, and the idea is to get industry to come together voluntarily”. This idea became the CMS Health Technology Ecosystem where participating organizations (vendors, providers, payers) pledge to make their systems and data interoperable.
The goal? “To work together to actually see this stuff [interoperability] happen in six months or a year,” stated Gleason.
According to Gleason, the healthcare industry burns billions of dollars trying to keep provider information accurate.
“There are over 5,000 provider directors in the US. Providers answer between 20 and 60 requests every month to validate their information. Yet none of the directories are accurate and not very helpful,” detailed Gleason.
To stop this financial drain, CMS is building a National Provider Directory. “If we can just have people update one place, then we can all get the benefit and stop wasting so much time and money,” she stated.
Data sharing does not fail just because of bad technology.
“One of the main reasons we heard from people about why interoperability doesn’t work today is that it’s not a technology problem, it’s a trust problem. And so we’re putting identity on front of the provider directory,” observed Gleason. If a provider cannot verify who is asking for records, the data stays locked down.
CMS is baking strict identity checks directly into its infrastructure. “So a provider can use things like CLEAR or ID.me or login.gov to validate their identity and then do that one time, and then others can query to see if that provider has validated their identity,” she explained.
Patients are tired of filling out the same forms at every visit. CMS wants to eliminate this frustrating bottleneck entirely with their kill-the-clipboard initiative. The vision is for patients to control their data securely and easily.
They should be able to do this “without having to log into all these portals into whatever app I choose, then I can share that with my doctor with a QR code,” shared Gleason. “So it will move into more stages after that. But a simple scan, just like you do at a concert or the airport, here’s my QR code. Take my data,” she noted.
Fraud and waste cost the system dearly. Bad actors slip through the cracks because the government simply cannot spot every anomaly on its own. To combat this, CMS is crowdsourcing the fight.
“The idea of releasing data is to let people have access to this data and help us find patterns and issues with the data,” Gleason explained. Opening the vault allows sharp minds in the private sector to track down waste. “And there are bounties. If you find things that we’re able to enforce, then you can get a cut of that money as well.”
CMS recently release another large batch of data to assist with machine learning.
By focusing on voluntary pledges, centralized directories, and secure identity verification, CMS is pushing the industry to execute right now. Organizations that cling to siloed operations will be left behind. Although policy and compliance do motivate the healthcare industry to move in a particular direction, these voluntary and problem-solving IT initiatives from CMS will hopefully boost adoption quicker.
What is the CMS Health Tech Ecosystem pledge?
The CMS Health Tech Ecosystem pledge is a voluntary initiative bringing together electronic health record vendors, payers, providers, and tech companies. Instead of waiting years for federal rulemaking to take effect, participants agree to actively collaborate and execute data sharing milestones within six to twelve months.
How will the National Provider Directory reduce costs?
The healthcare industry spends roughly $6 billion annually maintaining thousands of fragmented and inaccurate provider directories. A single CMS-backed National Provider Directory will allow clinicians to update their credentials in one centralized location, eliminating redundant administrative tasks and dramatically reducing operational waste across the entire sector.
Why is identity verification critical for healthcare interoperability?
Many organizations block data sharing because they cannot reliably verify the identity of the requesting provider or patient. By integrating established identity verification tools directly into federal directories and patient portals, organizations can confidently exchange clinical data without fearing security breaches or fraud.
Learn more about CMS at https://www.cms.gov/
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With all the amazing AI innovation that’s happening, sometimes we underestimate the value of simple solutions that make a big impact. One of the simplest solutions out there is an SMS text message to a patient. However, when utilized properly, it can create a big impact.
That’s the story that we heard from Ben Long, MD, Director of Hospital Medicine at Magnolia Regional Health Center, in his session at the recent HIMSS conference. In this session Dr. Long provides a short case study of their implementation of SMS text reminders (SMS nudges) using DrFirst’s prescription engagement solution embedded within MEDITECH to text patients on behalf of their physician minutes after a prescription is sent to the pharmacy. The text includes medication education, price transparency and savings, and reminders to fill their prescription.
Below you’ll find some of the details from the presentation along with our additional commentary.
In a world where we can easily over-architect anything, it’s great to see the value of something as simple as a text message. It points out a key principle about technology and patients. They want something that’s simple and fits in their workflow. An SMS fits that description.
I love that Magnolia Regional Health Center tied this to hospital readmissions. If they would have just tied their effort to prescription fills, that could easily be pushed aside since prescription fills isn’t a strategic priority for most healthcare organizations. Hospital readmissions on the other hand is a priority since it’s tied to real dollars and cents. It’s great that they saw how prescription fills and hospital readmissions are connected though.
For many of us that are relatively affluent and trust our doctors, it’s probably shocking to see these medication fill rates. Did you know that 20% of medications aren’t filled and 50% of refills are abandoned? I’d heard of this problem, but it’s pretty stark to see the real numbers.
We know that heart failure patients are one of the most expensive parts of our healthcare system. It makes sense why Magnolia Regional would make this the focus of their study. Impacting this group of patients is a win for the patients and the healthcare organization. It did shock me that 40-60% of heart failure patients don’t take their medications as prescribed. You’d think a heart issue would wake you up to the need to take care of yourself, but as Dr. Long pointed out, there are a lot of other factors and barriers to patients taking their medications as prescribed.
How many of you have integrated a text message solution into your EHR and prescribing workflow? If you haven’t, DrFirst offers some great resources on prescription engagement that you’ll likely find helpful.
One of the important topics the past few years has been provider burden. It’s great to see that Magnolia Regtional Health Center considered this in their solution and designed a workflow that required no extra work for their clinicians. The SMS nudge just happens automatically.
The focus on the patient workflow matters a lot as well. While it’s easy to send an SMS message, the real key to making the patient workflow simple is the patient authentication. The nice thing with this solution is that it doesn’t redirect the patient to a portal that overwhelms them once they get in. The text is sent. The patient is authenticated. The information is given. That’s the kind of experience a patient wants.
Always great to see the results of these efforts. A 10% increase in prescription fill rate is a big deal. Some may look at the 40% that still aren’t filling their prescription and they’d be right that there’s more work to do. As was mentioned above, remembering to fill your prescription or knowing how to properly take your medication is the challenge for some. There are plenty of other behavioral, financial, educational, and accessible challenges with prescriptions. However, it’s great to see that the SMS nudge was able to improve prescription fills by 10%.
While increased prescription fills is great, it’s worth remembering that the real goal wasn’t more prescription fills. The real goal was reducing hospital readmissions. With that in mind, it’s great to see that Magnolia Regional Health Center saw a 6% decrease in 30-day readmission odds. That’s a meaningful impact on a relatively simple to implement solution.
As discussed above, the SMS message can’t solve everything. It will be interesting to see where they take this program next. The amazing thing with SMS is that you now have a communication channel open with the patient to do all sorts of creative efforts to improve fill rates even more.
What’s interesting about this shift in patient engagement is that patients are almost demanding it. They’re experiencing this kind of convenient “where they are” experience in the rest of their lives that they want it in healthcare as well. The good news is that the tools and technology are there for this to be their experience in healthcare too.
This is so beautifully said, “When the right action becomes the easiest action, adherence naturally improves.” This really is the key to having patients follow the care that’s prescribed.
Kudos to Magnolia Regional Health Center and Dr. Long for this kind of leadership in their organization. Communicating the shared goal of better patient outcomes is sometimes hard to do. The nice thing is that Dr. Long and his team paired that with a solution that didn’t add more burden to the providers. That’s an amazing recipe for success.
If you want to learn more about this solution, you can also check out this article “Improving Medication Adherence for CHF Patients in Rural Communities: Lessons From Magnolia Regional” which outlines more details and even includes access to a webinar on demand.
The following is a guest article by Nick Muir, General Manager for EMEA at Spectralink
Platforms Such as Microsoft Teams May Aid Organization-Wide Collaboration, Yet Many Frontline Healthcare Workers are at the Mercy of a Communication Infrastructure That Isn’t Suitable for Their Needs
Too often, when healthcare organizations calculate the payback of unified communications (UC) deployments, they aren’t thinking of the high volumes of critical frontline workers who are continuously moving between patients, departments, and critical care areas. This can prove to be a risky mistake.
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many healthcare organizations migrated administrative staff to modern UC platforms, such as Microsoft Teams, to keep staff connected wherever they are. But those provisions weren’t typically deployed with frontline clinical staff in mind.
Standard desktop or mobile clients aren’t generally suitable for clinical environments with their strict hygiene protocols, complex building structures, integration requirements, and patient safety regulations. Most frontline healthcare workers communicate largely by voice, meanwhile. If network connectivity drops, infrastructure is breached, or core functionality isn’t fit for purpose, their ability to provide continuous quality care is compromised.
The Risk of Disruption to Clinical Processes
In healthcare, communication devices serve as an aggregator for the entire clinical process, linking prescriptions, treatment protocols, surgeon schedules, patient monitoring, and nursing procedures on a patient-by-patient basis.
Devices that aren’t purpose-built for healthcare environments may fail under the demands of clinical work, be stolen, or become damaged during cleaning with hospital-grade disinfectants.
Communications coverage must remain reliable throughout complex building structures, including basements, reinforced areas, and locations with historically poor wireless connectivity. Integration with nurse call systems, patient monitoring platforms, and electronic health records is essential for clinical workflows. Location services are particularly acute in a healthcare context.
Resilience Matters
Recent roundtable discussions our organization has held with healthcare providers confirmed just how worried their frontline workers are about communication resilience, for example, in the event that primary networks fail or are breached. When organizations invest heavily in cloud-based UC platforms, it is often with an assumption that communication capabilities will remain available when needed. But when broadband outages occur, standard UC infrastructure can be compromised. This can pose a real patient safety risk if it affects clinical staff on the frontline.
DECT (Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications) technologies are a viable option here because they create dedicated communication channels that persist irrespective of Wi-Fi or LAN status, while also enabling peer-to-peer calling and full UC platform integration during normal operations. DECT systems are also inherently more difficult to compromise than Wi-Fi or cellular networks. This is because they operate on dedicated frequencies and use their own authentication protocols. In an era of increasing cyber threats to critical infrastructure, this architectural separation provides an additional layer of security.
Regulatory Expectations
The risks for healthcare organizations are amplified by evolving worker safety regulations and public and patient safety requirements, including those that specify how emergency alerts should be handled.
In the U.S., Kari’s Law mandates that notifications are routed simultaneously to internal security and emergency services, while RAY BAUM’s Act requires dispatchable location information, including specific room and floor data, not just building addresses. Organizations that fail to comply could be penalized.
Robust safety measures, on the other hand, can help to drive down workplace violence incidents (a growing concern in healthcare) and accelerate crisis response, while making tangible the organization’s duty of care to staff and patients.
Technical Barriers to Frontline Continuity
Today, almost two-thirds (65%) of frontline workers use Microsoft Teams, according to research by Cavell on workforce mobility. Healthcare organizations are increasingly standardizing Teams as their primary collaboration platform. This creates both an opportunity to finally include clinical staff in UC and a challenge. That’s because extending Teams capabilities to mobile workers in specialist environments can present a range of practical issues.
The integration challenge isn’t trivial. Connecting DECT systems with platforms such as Teams requires sophisticated technical implementation and platform certification. Where executed properly, the extended rollout enables clinical staff to participate fully in the Teams environment, receiving messages, joining group chats, and accessing shared resources while using devices optimized for clinical working conditions. Where this is not the case, hygiene control could become problematic, battery life could falter during a long shift, and noise levels in busy departments might render standard audio unusable.
Recommended Remedies
Ideally, clinical UC deployment will include native integration and maintain a single identity and presence across all staff personas. This helps to ensure seamless communication irrespective of device or location, as well as consistent administration. Certainly, in 2026, the priority should be to ensure that clinical and frontline staff (the core of healthcare delivery) are no longer an afterthought in digital transformation.
Practical recommendations to overcome current gaps in frontline continuity include:
Nick Muir is Spectralink’s General Manager for EMEA. He is a leader and innovator with more than 25 years of customer experience, consumer electronics, and telecoms, specializing in strategy, sales/business development, and scale-ups. Nick has held board, executive, C-level, VP, management team, and director roles across a diverse range of tech-enabled businesses. Nick currently also serves as a non-executive director at RIPtec and at Blackfinch Ventures, providing strategic guidance and oversight on its invested portfolio. Spectralink gives frontline workers the same tools and connectivity as desk-based workers – so they can move faster, work smarter, and serve customers better.
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.
Amigo AI Raises $11M Series A to Train Clinical AI Agents Like Doctors
Platform Pioneering “Digital Residency” for Clinical AI Reaches 3M+ Autonomous Patient Encounters with 100% Safety Pass Rate
Amigo AI, the platform for building and training patient-facing clinical agents, today announced an $11M Series A led by Madrona with participation from Optum Ventures. The company has now raised $17M in total funding, including a seed round co-led by General Catalyst and GSV Ventures. The raise comes amid growing momentum for the application of AI in healthcare, fueled by regulatory shifts toward technology-enabled care delivery (e.g., CMS ACCESS model) and growing provider demand for clinical agents.
Amigo builds and trains AI agents that interact directly with patients across clinical use cases such as intake and triage, personalized care navigation, and 24/7 patient support. By handling high-value clinical workflows, Amigo agents enable healthcare organizations to improve patient outcomes and meaningfully expand the reach and impact of their existing care teams.
In just the last six months, Amigo agents have completed over three million patient encounters around the world with zero safety incidents. The company now powers clinical AI for leading healthcare organizations around the world, including Eucalyptus, Diverge Health, and The Care Clinic.
“Amigo is addressing one of the hardest problems in healthcare AI, deploying autonomous systems where trust and safety are non-negotiable,” said Sabrina Albert, Partner at Madrona. “Their simulation-first approach to clinical safety positions them to define the standard for patient-facing AI.”
By 2030, the world will face a shortage of 11 million health workers. Clinical agents offer a promising path to closing this gap, but only if they can deliver care as safely as human clinicians.
“We train our agents like doctors because mistakes can cost lives in healthcare,” said Ali Khokhar, Founder and CEO at Amigo…
Full release here, originally announced March 10th, 2026.
$150M Investment Validates Grow Therapy as the Trusted Choice for Health Insurers, Employers, and Health Systems
With $150 Million in New Funding, Grow Therapy is Expanding its Platform to Connect Insurers, Employers, and Health Systems to Integrated Mental Health Care
At Grow Therapy, we recognized a hard truth: when Americans need mental health care most, the system too often fails them.
It asks people to navigate a maze of disconnected providers, insurance gaps, and long waitlists. So we set out to clear the pathway to effective care by breaking down those barriers.
Today, I’m excited to share a meaningful milestone in that journey.
Grow Therapy has raised a $150 million Series D, led by TCV and Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, who led our Series B and C, respectively. New investors BCI and Menlo Ventures join existing investors Sequoia, SignalFire, and Transformation Capital.
This round is the direct result of what we’re seeing every day: health plans, employers, and health systems are choosing Grow as a partner to deliver high-quality, affordable mental healthcare to people who need it.
“TCV loves backing great entrepreneurs targeting very large market opportunities. We are excited to continue to partner with Grow on the journey to provide access to, and improvement of, quality mental health care,” said Jay Hoag, Founding General Partner at TCV.
Our Progress
In just five years, over two million people have turned to Grow for mental health care. In 2025 alone, we facilitated seven million visits, bringing the lifetime total to 10 million therapy and medication management appointments…
Full release here, originally announced March 3rd, 2026.
You had to know that we couldn’t skip a Fun Friday this week after seeing the MAHAspital featured on Saturday Night Light (SNL). Positioned...
