< + > Weekly Roundup – June 7, 2025

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.

Easing Regulation Through Workflow and Automation. Meghan Mehlberg at Amitech and Michele Goodman at St. Peter’s University Hospital talked to John Lynn about automating the perinatal risk assessment and its 350 fields, which could take 20 minutes or more to fill out. Read more…

Doctors Are Finding Joy Again Thanks to the Right AI Tools. Colin Hung caught up with Dr. Seth Eaton at MedPeds to learn about how AI scribes are improving the clinician mood and helping then catch things they might miss. Read more…

MyHeartRisk Wins $10k from MeldRx FHIR Integration Contest. John interviewed Lim Bing Feng and Calvin Koay at MyHeartRisk, along with Pawan Jindal at Darena Solutions, about how the contest offered a chance to help the startup find an easy way to integrate its AI solution with EHR systems. Read more…

Life Sciences Today Podcast: Post-Surgical Care. Danny Liberman chatted with Ori Warshavsky at PolyPid about rethinking infection control, post-operative healing, and localized therapeutics. Read more…

CIO Podcast: How the CIO Role Has Evolved. Christopher Kunney at IOTECH Consulting joined John to unpack how tech leaders should be supporting new care delivery models, SDoH, and health equity. Read more…

Healthcare’s Most Pressing Revenue Integrity Issues in the Remote Work Era. A collaborative atmosphere is critical to reducing denials and speeding up time to approval – but that can be difficult to achieve when people supporting different RCM stages work in different places, noted Tanya Sanderson at Xsolis. Read more…

Why Healthcare’s Next AI Push Is About Empowerment. Joy Avery at CipherHealth said healthcare has moved beyond focusing on AI’s technical potential to looking at AI’s role in reducing administrative burdens and unlocking actionable insights, provided the right guardrails are in place. Read more…

Balancing AI Innovation and Rising Cyber Threats. Deepfakes, target phishing, botnets, and other AI-powered threats are reshaping the cybersecurity landscape, said Shane Cox at MorganFranklin Cyber. As a result, security teams must develop advanced forensic capabilities. Read more…

Simplifying the First Steps Into SDoH With AI. While data and AI play in helping organizations address SDoH, organizations need to start with the initiatives that will have the greatest clinical and financial impact, according to Brian Norris at MedeAnalytics. Read more…

How to Combat Physician Burnout With Clinical Decision Support. Today’s primary care providers spend 60% of their time on non-patient-facing tasks. Dr. McKinley Glover, IV, at Optum Insight described the role of automation in augmenting decision support and enabling value-based care. Read more…

This Week’s Health IT Jobs for June 4, 2025: Positions emphasizing privacy, public and community health, and billing and claims. Read more…

Bonus Features for June 1, 2025: 58% of patients frustrated by prior authorization for medications; meanwhile, Wolters Kluwer Health has a new CEO. Read more…

Funding and M&A Activity:

• Clinical workflow vendor Aranscia acquired Spesana, maker of patient navigation and oncology decision support tools.
• Clinical trial support vendor PhaseV landed $50 million in Series A funding.
• Care transition platform Kouper emerged from stealth with $10 million in funding.
• Mental health assessment tool Mentaily raised $3 million in Seed round funding.

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

< + > PhaseV Lands $50M Series A to Supercharge AI for Clinical Development, Backed by Top VCs and Trusted by Leading Pharma Clients

With a Growing List of 30+ Global Customers, Including Top Pharma, PhaseV is Poised to Transform Clinical Development at Scale with its Vertical AI Platform

PhaseV, a leader in AI/ML-driven clinical development, today announced the completion of a $50 million Series A funding round. Co-led by Accel and Insight Partners and with participation of existing investors Viola Ventures, EXOR, and LionBird, the round brings the company’s total funding to date to $65 million.

“The pharma industry is at a critical crossroads, as traditional approaches to designing and executing clinical trials struggle to meet growing demands for speed, cost-efficiency, and higher success rates,” said Raviv Pryluk, PhD, Co-Founder and CEO at PhaseV. “This funding fuels our mission to support more pharma, biotech, and CROs in embracing AI and machine learning to unlock the next era of clinical development. Our solutions deliver clear ROI by increasing trial success rates, reducing costs, and accelerating time to market.”

The funding will allow PhaseV to grow its vertical AI platform to provide holistic solutions for clinical development. It follows the rapid market adoption of PhaseV’s AI/ML-based platform by over 30 global pharma companies for clinical development. The platform is currently used across more than 20 therapeutic areas, including neurology, oncology, GI disorders, immunology, metabolic diseases, rare diseases, and others.

Augmented by a robust data lake that integrates high quality patient-level data, clinical trial results, real-world evidence, and peer-reviewed insights, PhaseV’s platform has demonstrated a reduction in trial costs by 50%, a decrease in enrollment size and trial duration by 40%, and a more than 30% increase in the likelihood of trial success. In one recent example, PhaseV helped a leading global pharma company to shorten time-to-market by 15 months.

“PhaseV is one of the most exciting companies on the rise and, with this financial backing, is positioned to lead the revolution of AI in clinical development,” said Matt Robinson, Partner at Accel. “We have been impressed with PhaseV’s ability to partner with the world’s largest pharma companies, which illustrates how hungry the market is for the company’s technology. We’re thrilled to back PhaseV and excited to see their continued growth and impact on the future of clinical development.”

PhaseV’s vertical AI platform supports end-to-end clinical development from design through execution. It currently comprises four core applications: Trial Optimizer for optimizing and implementing Bayesian, adaptive, and fixed trials; Causal ML for heterogeneous treatment effect estimation to uncover hidden signals in clinical data and identify subpopulations and endpoints with the highest potential for success; Causal Disease Modeling to inform new R&D and life cycle management; and Clinical Operations for Causal ML-driven site selection, site performance analytics, real-time trial progress monitoring, and integration of virtual control arms.

“We worked with PhaseV on one of our recent trials to identify clinically meaningful subgroups using Causal ML. Their expertise helped us identify a promising subpopulation that otherwise would not have been detected. They collaborated with our internal teams to ensure the findings drove real value for our development plan,״ said Stu Bailey, D.Phil., SVP Head of Clinical Measurement Sciences at EMD Serono. “We see opportunity to continue this collaboration with PhaseV as we seek to increase probability of success and drive efficiencies across our clinical portfolio.”

“As clinical trials rapidly evolve, accuracy remains critical for biotech companies. PhaseV enables this precision, paving the way for a new era of clinical development,” said Dylan Morris, Managing Director at Insight Partners. “They are already delivering promising results, proving the power of their AI-driven approach. This funding demonstrates our confidence in PhaseV’s potential to reshape trial design, accelerate the drug development process and bring new therapies to market faster. PhaseV has ambitious plans to add more capabilities and it’s an exciting time to join them on the journey to change the world for the better.”

About PhaseV

PhaseV is developing advanced AI/ML solutions to optimize clinical development. Biopharma sponsors and CROs are leveraging PhaseV’s platform to rapidly design and execute adaptive, Bayesian and fixed clinical trials, analyze data to uncover heterogeneous treatment effects, stratify patients, and inform future R&D and portfolio decisions. PhaseV’s platform has reduced trial costs by 50%, decreased enrollment size and trial duration by 40%, and increased the probability of trial success by over 30%. To date, the company has delivered results for more than 30 leading pharma/biotech sponsors and CROs spanning multiple therapeutic areas, including neurology, oncology, immunology, GI, rare diseases, and others.

Learn more at phasevtrials.com and follow us on LinkedIn.

Originally announced May 13th, 2025

< + > Australian Catholic University to develop digital nursing education platform and more briefs

Also, Tend Health has received funding to deliver the New Zealand government's new digital mental health and addiction service.  

< + > Gleneagles Hospital Hong Kong adopts LLM-based clinical solutions for new day centre and more briefs

Also, a new centre for excellence in AI in healthcare will be set up by two public universities in India.

< + > Hong Kong health service leverages world's first retinal imaging AI for Alzheimer's detection

The AI, trained on around 13,000 fundus images from over 600 Alzheimer's patients, has demonstrated up to 92% accuracy. 

< + > Smart Glasses, AI Call Centers, AI Medical Scribes, and Much More at the eClinicalWorks Health Center Summit

This week I’m lucky enough to be attending the eClinicalWorks Health Center Summit conference.  This is a really unique event since it brings together many of the 850+ FQHCs that are eClinicalWorks customers all in one place to hear the latest from eClinicalWorks and to connect with peers.  I’ve often referred to FQHCs as the gem of healthcare.  They serve some of the most challenging patient populations and provide much needed healthcare, dental, and behavioral health services to them.  Attending eClinicalWorks events, it’s been fascinating to see eClinicalWorks grow from an EHR company to so much more with their suite of healow services along with their AI Medical scribe solution, Sunoh.ai.

Below you’ll find a number of the key annoncements, insights, and takeaways from the conference along with some added commentary.

No surprise that Girish Navani kicked off the event with a nod to AI.  I like his tweak of Artificial Intelligence to The Age of Intelligence.  He said during the keynote that this technology is moving so fast that every few weeks there is something new to talk about.  It’s true and that’s what makes it hard to predict.  However, the best way to predict it is to be immersed in it and that’s what I see eCW doing.

A $375 million contract with Microsoft Azure is a big deal considering they announced a $100 million contract back in late 2022.  This illustrates both the growth of eClinicalWorks and also the growth in AI processing needs.  Navani illustrated this well when he said he needs as many GPUs for AI as for the rest of their infrastructure.  I’m confident this will continue to accelerate.

It’s great to see eClinicalWorks putting in extra effort and focus on various specialities.  This focus is in line with their current customers who need a pharmacy solution or behavioral health organizations.  I think many EHR vendors underestimate how much specialities love to see modules specific to their unique needs.

I first saw details of 360x referrals at the DirectTrust conference and saw how useful this could be.  Of course, it’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem.  I applaud eClinicalWorks for moving forward with this and I hope that all EHR vendors do as well so that referrals can be sent seamlessly between EHR systems.

I was fascinated by this comment.  I’d agree that the standards are there to exchange a lot of the health data that’s neeeded, but I think there’s still work getting some organizations on board when it comes to sharing.  However, Navani is completely right that information overload is a problem and only going to get worse as interoperability improves and things like AI medical scribes flood the EHR with more data.  The eCW PRISMA summaries are a good way to address this information overload.

I find it pretty laughable that we used to talk about the “paperless office.”  We’ve certainly gotten rid of some paper, but we’re still sharing lots of documents in healthcare and lots of them are arriving at our office that needs to be processed.  I like how eClinicalWorks is working on 3 major document areas: Internal, External, and Payer.

The demo of a lab result PDF having the data pulled into the EHR in a granular way is so powerful.  We all know the power of granular data and I’m happy that this is now possible from a PDF.

I think we’re going to hear a lot more from companies about AI companions.  We’re going to have companions for so many things.  You see that across the full spectrum of eClinicalWorks products.

This announcement may have been the most forward looking announcement at the conference.  Navani showed a demo of how a doctor may use smart glasses to interact with the eClinicalWorks EHR.  No doubt this demo was ambitious and showed a view of what it could look like.  It was particularly interesting because it leveraged voice so much more than previous smart glasses efforts.  Plus, it focused on completing tasks in the EHR instead of EHR documentation which I found interesting and a shift from the past as well.  Lots of opportunity here, but still very early.  I love that eCW is putting it out there so they can iterate on it with their users.

As Colin mentioned at the eClinicalWorks Enterprise Summit, healow Genie was one of the most exciting products at the conference.  I really do see this as potentially a new paradigm for call center agents in healthcare.  You can see why so many FQHCs at the event we’re excited to have this rolled out.

We didn’t get a lot of new announcements in regards to healow outside of Genie and Sunoh (which are massive projects), but some of the details and stats from healow were fascinating.  The survey completion percentage was one example.  It illustrates how a trusted message from your clinician to your cell can produce powerful results.

Patient payments are such an important topic in healthcare.  I loved this graphic that Navani shared which illustrated some of the complexities associated with patient payments.  It’s nice that healow Pay is addressing all of these aspects in one solution.

As tech people, we know all about 2 factor authentication.  In all my interviews with security professionals, I ask them what is one of the most valuable things an organization can do to improve their security.  Almost everyone suggests 2 factor authentication.  It’s great that eClinicalWorks is encouraging the same with their end users.  Plus, they included facial recognition which can provide a more seamless authentication experience.

As we’ve covered before, eClinicalWorks has an incredibly engaged community of users and this is particularly true in the FQHC space.  After 26 years in business, the marathon reference is particularly good.  However, AI is definitely making us all sprint.  The pace of innovation happening right now in healthcare IT is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.  The announcements at the eClinicalWorks Health Summit were one great illustration of this.

< + > Sentara enters health plan partnership with WellTheory

Through the company's virtual platform, the payvider's health plan members with autoimmune conditions receive an individualized care plan, one-on-one video visits with coaches, unlimited patient messaging and access to digital tools as covered services.