< + > Bonus Features – May 10, 2026 – Poor communication would lead 58% of patients to look for a new provider, Google extends Chrome with security features for healthcare, plus 27 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.

Partnerships

• CareQuest Innovation Partners and PDS Health are collaborating to expand blood pressure screening and patient consultation in dental settings.
• Talkdesk Healthcare Experience Cloud is now integrated with Epic Caboodle, the company’s enterprise data warehouse.
• SEQSTER and Astute are partnering to help organizations access patient data across clinical settings.
• The Veeva Vault Platform is now connected to Snowflake‘s AI Data Cloud for Healthcare & Life Sciences.
• Training programs from Skilltrade are now available in ShiftMed‘s workforce optimization platform.
• Care management and remote monitoring technology from ThroughCare is now integrated with Withings smart scales.
• Decision support technology from VisualDx is now integrated with Perplexity‘s Premium Health Sources.

Products

• Artera unveiled its AI Services Model for specialty care, FQHCs, IDNs, and federal agencies.
• Assort Health launched Assort Activate, which delivers personalized patient outreach across channels.
• Diagnostic testing company BillionToOne launched Unity Confirm to help analyze fetal DNA.
• Substance use disorder patient engagement application CaredFor launched its post-discharge Measurement Based Care platform.
• Google announced Chrome Enterprise Premium, which extends Chrome with enterprise-grade security and management capabilities for healthcare.
• Infinitus Systems launched Lens to help organizations evaluate AI agent calls and human-led calls using the same criteria.
• Mental healthcare provider Lyra Health updated its Empower platform with AI capabilities for members, providers, and employers.
• RxUtility launched Mimi, an AI agent for understanding medication cost options. It’s free to use while in beta.
• Tether launched QVAC MedPsy, a medical language model designed to run directly on smartphones, wearables, and other devices with limited processing power.
• VisiQuate launched Policy Pulse to help healthcare organizations identify payer policy changes before they go into effect and understand their likely operational and financial impact.
• WEDI launched a testing directory for organizations to find testing partners for the CMS Advancing Interoperability and Improving Prior Authorization Final Rule, which has a January 1, 2027 deadline.
• Zyter announced Zyter Praxis to help health plans embed automated workflows into enterprise operations.

Implementations

• Georgia-based Wellstar Health System selected BD to support medication dispensing and infusion.
• Massachusetts-based Holyoke Medical Center is partnering with IKS Health in an effort to improve clinical and revenue optimization.
• The Africa Clinical Research Network selected Oracle Life Sciences to launch its first clinical trial, which aims to predict the absence or occurrence of severe pre-eclampsia-related maternal and fetal outcome.
• Pennsylvania’s St. Luke’s University Health Network chose RapidAI to support imaging analysis in stroke care in the operating room.

Company News

• A RevSpring survey found 58% of patients would look for a new provider if they were unhappy with appointment or billing communication.
• Color’s Virtual Cancer Clinic earned ASCO Certified status.
• Transplants.org debuted as a patient education and care navigation platform for organ and stem cell transplantation.

People

• Heart and lung disease detection company Eko Health appointed Dr. Steven R. Steinhubl as Chief Medical Officer.
• Independent medical practice software maker AdvancedMD appointed Brandon Russell as Chief Customer Officer.
• Radiology workflow orchestration vendor NewVue named Patrick Zientara as Chief Revenue Officer.

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.

Happy Mother’s Day, everyone!

< + > Weekly Roundup – May 9, 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.

Hearing Firsthand How AI Is Being Applied in Healthcare. John Lynn attended Navina’s Ascend 2026 User Event, where sessions emphasized AI done right looks through the lens of the clinician, value-based care is a struggle, and officials at ONC and CMS are more than willing to listen. Read more…

The Quintuple Aim of Value Based Care Enabled by The Garage.  John also had the opportunity to attend the FUSE 2026 User Event put on by The Garage.  The conference focused on value based care and how organizations can leverage policy, process, and technology to achieve better value based care outcomes. Read more…

Unpacking Smart Data Archiving Features. Mike McGuire at MediQuant sat down with John to talk about using AI to gather insights from legacy data sources – including summarizing archived data, analyzing DICOM images, and even retrieving patients’ financial files. Read more…

Ensuring Successful Epic Go-Live With Real-Time Training Dashboards and Personalization. Dr. Rajeeb Khatua at ReMedi Health Solutions and Dr. Sara Helvey at Care New England discussed how specialized training paired with robust metrics contributed to successful Epic implementation. Read more…

Intelligent Monitoring Catches Accidental and Malicious Email Breaches. Brittany Quemby chatted with Andrew Goodman at Proofpoint about monitoring incoming and outgoing communication, with the latter bolstered by analysis of typical behavior for each user. Read more…

Life Sciences Today Podcast: Replacing the Microsoft Word Protocol. Danny Lieberman caught up with Scott Chetham at Faro Health, which built an AI platform that can do in 60 minutes what previously took multiple clinical trial design experts three weeks. Read more…

CIO Podcast: Balancing Hospital Needs, Technology, and Innovation. Nitin Agarwal at Pennsylvania’s Wayne Memorial Hospital joined John to discuss the intersection of AI, interop, EMR, ERP, and hospital operations. Read more…

The Speed of Trust: Why Healthcare IT Fails the “Midnight User.” Digital health tools struggle with retention when they’re harder to use that a search bar, said Lineo Chale at Perkily. Organizations need to build tech to support the high-stakes situations when users need answers they can actually act on. Read more…

From Visibility to Automation: The Next Evolution of RTLS in Healthcare. HT Snowday at Midmark RTLS said the value of real-time location services is what the data enables, from process automation to safety alerts to actionable operational insights. Read more…

Healthcare Needs More Than the Model Context Protocol. MCP addresses communication between agents and data sources but isn’t a framework for coordination, noted Adam Farren at Canvas Medical. Healthcare needs an AI orchestration layer with the EHR as its hub. Read more…

Why MDM Implementations Fail, and How to Get Them Right. Boiling the ocean is one of the most consistent drivers of MDM failure, said Verato’s Cheryl Griffin. Successful projects start small, but with clearly defined objectives that build trust and allow for deliberate scaling. Read more…

Beyond Data Exchange: The Next Era of Interop Is Inside Clinical Workflows. True interoperability is surfacing relevant information and predictive, prescriptive recommendations at the exact moment a decision needs to be made, according to Jonathan Shoemaker at ABOUT Healthcare. Read more…

This Week’s Health IT Jobs for May 6, 2026: Ohio-based Summa Health is looking for a CISO. Read more…

Bonus Features for May 3, 2026: 81% of patients repeat the same personal information multiple times to the same provider, plus 61% of orgs have made outsourced managed services a core part of IT strategy. Read more…

Funding and M&A Activity:

• Life sciences commercial execution support company AcuityMD raised $80 million in Series C funding.
• Claims and denials management company Joyful Health raised $22 million in funding.
• Clinical decision support platform Almanac Health raised a $10 million seed round.
• Prior authorization and medical-necessity automation company Ethermed raised $8.5 million in Series A funding.
• Wearable vendor ŌURA acquired Galen AI, a personal health companion.
• IKS Health acquired TruBridge, which provides healthcare technology solutions for rural and community hospitals.
• Specialty practice software maker ModMed acquired Bonsai Health, an agentic AI patient engagement platform.
• Medical imaging IT and cybersecurity company Sectra acquired Oxipit, a provider of autonomous AI for radiology.

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

< + > Canadian Healthcare Humor – Fun Friday

Happy Friday everyone!  You made it through another week.  We hope you had an amazing week and you’re ready for a great weekend.  If it’s Friday, then you know it’s time for another edition of Fun Friday where we look to entertain you and maybe educate you a bit at the same time.

This week’s Fun Friday is a bit of satire about the Canadian healthcare system.  If you listen to the Healthcare IT Today podcast, then you’ve probably heard Colin and I compare the US healthcare system to Canada in many episodes.  As you’d expect, there are pros and cons to every system.  I’m sure this points out some of the cons, but it’s pretty funny.

Full Disclosure: We love our Canadian healthcare friends starting with Colin and Brittany on the Healthcare IT Today team.

Thanks to everyone for supporting Healthcare IT Today.  We’ll be back next week with more great healthcare IT content.  Have a great weekend!

< + > How AI is Replacing the Microsoft Word Protocol – Life Sciences Today Podcast Episode 60

We’re excited to be back for another episode of the Life Sciences Today Podcast by Healthcare IT Today. My guest today is Scott Chetham, Co-Founder and CEO at Faro Health. In this episode, I sit down with Chetham to explore why the clinical trial industry is still designing $100M+ studies in Microsoft Word — and what’s finally being done about it. Chetham shares his journey from the Gold Coast of Australia to the heart of San Diego’s biotech scene, and how two decades of hands-on clinical development experience led him to build an AI platform that can do in 60 minutes what previously took five experts three weeks.

From a published Merck study showing $130M in cost avoidance to becoming the first company to automate study builds directly into Veeva, Faro Health is quietly becoming the backbone of protocol design for 6 of the top 10 pharma companies. We also dig into the future of vertical integration in drug development — from molecule discovery all the way through automated clinical monitoring.

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

• What is an Australian doing in the US, working in clinical development? How did that happen?
• Tell us what you’re doing at Faro Health.
• Who are your sponsors, and how do you create value for them?
• How do you capture value? What is your business model?
• What’s your superpower?
• What are three things you want to do for your sponsors in 2026?
• I’ve been thinking about vertical integration, on and off, for the past ten years. How great would that be?
• What is the biggest anti-pattern in the industry?

Subscribe to Danny’s newsletter to get strategic patterns for life science leaders building a defensible business.

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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!

< + > The Speed of Trust: Why Healthcare IT is Failing the “Midnight User”

The following is a guest article by Lineo Chale, Health Information Manager at Perkily

In the rush to digitize healthcare, the industry has fallen into a “complexity trap.” We frequently celebrate the launch of robust platforms capable of managing everything from electronic records to wellness tracking, yet we often overlook the most critical metric of all: the time-to-value for a concerned user. When a health question arises in the middle of the night, a user isn’t looking for a “comprehensive digital ecosystem.” They are looking for a bridge between their symptoms and a credible, immediate solution.

The Psychology of the Search Bar

The reason most digital health tools struggle with long-term retention isn’t a lack of engineering; it’s a failure to compete with the simplicity of a search bar. When professional tools feel like a chore to navigate, buried behind multi-step registrations or cluttered dashboards, users default to general search engines.

This creates a dangerous feedback loop. Search algorithms are optimized for engagement and clicks, not clinical validity. For the average person, a simple search for a persistent symptom doesn’t lead to evidence-based advice; it leads to a rabbit hole of worst-case scenarios and unverified anecdotes. This “Dr. Google” effect places an immense burden on the healthcare system, as clinicians must spend valuable consultation time undoing the misinformation their patients gathered online.

Closing the 17-Year Knowledge Gap

The challenge isn’t limited to patients. The medical community faces a staggering “evidence lag”—the reality that it takes nearly two decades for breakthrough clinical research to become standard bedside practice. This gap exists because the latest peer-reviewed data is often buried in fragmented journals or locked behind paywalls, making it inaccessible during the high-pressure moments of care.

To solve this, we must move away from “feature-heavy” apps and toward specialized decision-support tools. This is where the intersection of AI and evidence-based medicine becomes transformative.

The Evolution of Clinical Decision Support

Modern healthcare IT must prioritize tools like AskFleming that are calibrated for clinical reasoning rather than surface-level summaries. By pulling directly from PubMed, clinical trials, and systematic reviews, these platforms can surface the specific level of evidence behind every answer in seconds.

When we integrate these referenced answers at the point of care, we empower both the provider and the patient. Instead of a clinician navigating “40 open tabs” to verify a protocol, they can access cited research instantly. Instead of a parent spiraling into anxiety over an unverified blog post, they can access information grounded in peer-reviewed reality.

Building for Utility, Not Just Presence

The future of healthcare IT isn’t about who has the most features; it’s about who provides the most clarity. We need to build tools that respect the user’s time and the gravity of their questions.

If we want to see real retention and clinical impact, we must start building for the “midnight moment”—the high-stakes, high-stress window where a user needs an answer they can actually act on. By shortening the distance between the laboratory and the living room, we don’t just build better apps; we build a more informed, safer healthcare system.

About Lineo Chale

Lineo Chale is a Health Information Manager at Perkily. She specializes in digital health and healthcare IT, focusing on using AI to simplify complex health decision-making for patients and clinicians alike. She is passionate about closing the gap between clinical research and everyday patient care. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.

< + > AcuityMD Raises $80M | Almanac Health Raises $10 Million

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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AcuityMD Raises $80M for AI Augmentation to Medtech Sales Platform

AcuityMD has raised $80M to advance its provision for assisting medtech companies in accelerating the adoption of their products across healthcare settings and geographic markets.

The Boston-based company’s Series C financing round was led by existing investor StepStone Group. VC firms Benchmark, Redpoint Ventures, ICONIQ, and Atreides Management also participated.

Used by 16 of the top 20 medtech companies, AcuityMD’s platform identifies metrics including physicians, facilities, networks, procedures, and reimbursement dynamics. Aggregating this data alongside medtech companies’ internal data, including contracting information, product indications, territory structure, and CRM activity, companies can better estimate commercial execution and reach the right end markets for their products.

With the fresh funding in hand, which brings AcuityMD’s total funding to date to over $160m, the company plans to augment its existing platform with artificial intelligence (AI) with the launch of AcuityAI. According to AcuityMD, its AI platform’s overall aim is to avail medtech company sales representatives with more streamlined insights.

As well as advancing its AI capabilities, AcuityMD also intends to use the funding towards deepening the medtech ontology of its data model, and to expand the platform beyond commercial pursuits, with a view to accelerating adoption across the full product lifecycle.

AcuityMD CEO, Mike Monovoukas, commented, “AI will transform medtech, but only with the right context, deeply embedded in the workflows where decisions are made. AcuityMD is that context layer, serving the rep in the field, the commercial leader planning territories, and the teams launching the next generation of innovation.”

AI is having an appreciable impact on driving efficiencies in the broader healthcare space…

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

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Almanac Health Raises $10 Million to Empower Clinicians Across Specialties with Safe, Research-Validated Clinical AI

Seed Round Led by F-Prime, with Participation from General Catalyst and Lightspeed Venture Partners; General Catalyst Previously Led the Pre-Seed Round

Almanac Health, a research-validated clinical AI platform and evidence-based clinical decision support company founded by physician-researcher Cyril Zakka, MD, whose work at Stanford introduced retrieval-augmented generation to clinical medicine, has raised $10 million in a seed round led by F-Prime, with participation from General Catalyst and Lightspeed Venture Partners. General Catalyst previously led the company’s pre-seed round with participation from Soma Capital. This financing brings Almanac Health’s total funding to nearly $12 million and will accelerate the company’s mission to bring safe, evidence-grounded AI to clinicians and health systems.

Almanac Health is a unified clinical AI platform for clinical decision support that brings specialist-grade knowledge to every clinician at the point of care. It is designed to work within existing electronic health record (EHR) systems, governed by institutional controls, and grounded in peer-reviewed evidence. The platform is currently undergoing rigorous clinical validation in academic medical center settings.

“There is no shortage of technologies promising to transform medicine. But few are grounded in real evidence, built with integrity, and deserving of trust from the people and organizations using them. Almanac Health’s goal is to build clinical AI held to that standard. Validated through research, with incentives aligned with clinicians and patients. We’re focused on getting that right,” said Cyril Zakka, MD, Founder and CEO at Almanac Health.

Cyril Zakka, MD, has worked at the intersection of medicine and AI across clinical practice, academic research, and industry. After earning his MD, he went on to conduct machine learning research at Stanford, where he developed the first retrieval-augmented generation system for clinical medicine, an approach to grounding AI in trusted medical knowledge that has since been widely adopted across clinical AI. That work, published in NEJM AI, became one of the journal’s most-cited papers and established the foundational approach used by most clinical evidence AI products today. He subsequently led health AI at Hugging Face, the largest open-source AI platform, before founding Almanac Health.

“Cyril is one of the rare founders who has both the clinical training and the technical depth to build AI that clinicians will actually trust, as well as the discipline to validate it before deploying it. Almanac Health represents what we believe the next generation of healthcare AI should look like: grounded in research, governed by institutions, and built with incentives that put clinicians and patients first,” said Carl Byers, Partner at F-Prime.

The funding will allow the company to grow its team across clinical medicine…

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

< + > New Smart Data Archiving Features at MediQuant

MediQuant is a data migration and health data archiving company for hospitals, health systems and medical practices. It offers healthcare organizations the opportunity to retire legacy applications while maintaining compliance needs.  Plus, they keep important metainformation about the healthcare data so that the archive can be searched and data can be retrieved quickly. In a recent interview with Mike McGuire, Senior Vice President of Product Strategy, we dive into the wide variety of new products and features that MediQuant announced leading into the HIMSS conference.

For example, they can now create patient summaries from an organization’s full health data archive so that a doctor can see the most salient facts about a patient before a visit, without spending a lengthy time looking through all the archived health data. MediQuant also uses AI to retrieve health information from unstructured data, which they call “non-discrete” data. They also are working to provide different kinds of summaries for different medical specialties so the information is user specific.  If a clinician wants to see more details, the summaries provide a link back into the archived record for each piece of data.

Some of their other new features include support for DICOM images and revenue cycle data.  Often healthcare organizations need to archive DICOM images from legacy systems that can’t be put in their PACS.  MediQuant archives them to allow these images to be retrieved and compared to more recent imaging.  Plus, they provide those DICOM images in a lossless format so that all detail is present. Patient accounting data can also be stored in MediQuant’s DataArk archive.  This is done in a format where the healthcare organization can continue working on this data even from the archive.

The MediQuant interface makes it easy to see how old data is, how much it’s being used, and whether it’s old enough to be deleted according to regulations.  This is a powerful feature that helps healthcare organizations address risk and cost.

Another new feature is ApplicationArk, which aids application rationalization by indicating the state of each application: whether it’s in active use, just being viewed, etc.  Application rationalization has become an important effort in most provider organizations.  This tool gives them some structure to assess which applications they have in their organization and the state of each application.

If you want to see some of the great new features that MediQuant is rolling out to their customers and how health data archiving is moving past a static archive, you’ll enjoy this interview with Mike McGuire from MediQuant.

Learn more about MediQuant: https://www.mediquant.com/

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