Technology alone is not the answer to the capacity crisis facing healthcare. But when thoughtfully integrated into care delivery operations, digital tools can help healthcare organizations rebalance workloads and stabilize patient access.

The post Repurpose, Don’t Replace: Three Ways Digital Agents Are Improving Phone Access appeared first on MedCity News.

Layoffs tied to AI adoption will not be uniform; they will vary by sector, job function, and regulatory exposure. Nowhere is this more complex than in healthcare, where legal constraints, patient safety obligations, and labor dynamics intersect with rapid technological change.

The post AI-Driven Layoffs In Healthcare: Navigating Legal Risks and Operational Challenges appeared first on MedCity News.

Many health plans are discovering that even after digitizing medical policies and implementing FHIR APIs, prior authorization turnaround times remain slow and provider frustration remains high. The reason is straightforward: digitization alone does not make medical‑necessity determinations executable by automated systems at scale.

The post Digitizing Medical Policy Alone Will Not Automate Prior Authorization at Scale appeared first on MedCity News.

Nvidia and Hoppr are betting that healthcare AI will scale not through standalone applications, but through a new infrastructure layer that lets providers develop and deploy their own imaging models.

The post Why Healthcare AI Still Can’t Scale — and How Nvidia & Hoppr Are Trying to Fix It appeared first on MedCity News.

In dental practices, where reimbursement cycles are tighter and administrative inefficiencies are immediately visible, AI is already being evaluated not for novelty, but for operational impact.

The post What Dentistry Is Teaching Healthcare About Operational AI appeared first on MedCity News.

As patients take to social media, in all its ungated glory and promotion of misinformation, how can they be certain that what they are getting is accurate? What voices can they trust?

The post Patients are Turning to HCP Influencers in the Age of AI and Misinformation appeared first on MedCity News.

Midstream Health is taking a bit of a different approach to healthcare AI by focusing on reducing hospitals’ costs rather than boosting their revenue. The startup uses AI to identify savings opportunities across fragmented spending data, which helps health systems like Mount Sinai and CommonSpirit quickly improve their purchasing decisions.

The post Why Some Hospitals Are Betting on Midstream Health to Help Eliminate Waste appeared first on MedCity News.

Since its inception, AI in prior auth has only been at work in the commercial healthcare marketplace. Now new innovative approaches that reframe prior auth as a resource instead of a roadblock have come to Medicare via the WISeR model.

The post ‘Prior Authorization’ Has Become a Dirty Word in Healthcare, But it Might Be Medicare’s Smartest Path Forward appeared first on MedCity News.

Colon cancer has long been considered a disease that comes with old age. However, the trend line of disease has been moving in the wrong direction for years, in a population we long assumed wasn’t at risk. And while researchers continue to investigate the why, there’s a parallel conversation we aren’t having nearly enough. One that has nothing to do with science, and everything to do with operations.

The post The Cancer Crisis We Can See Coming And Have the Tools to Change appeared first on MedCity News.

The AI Health Fund launched Treehub, a new residency program designed to back and build healthcare AI startups at the earliest stages, often before companies are even formed. It is supported by prominent figures in the Silicon Valley venture capital world, including Tim Draper and Anne Wojcicki.

The post Top Silicon Valley VCs Are Backing a New Health Tech Residency Program appeared first on MedCity News.

By using AI-powered intelligence to shift clinical and coding validation earlier in the healthcare continuum, and unlocking upstream clinical data to inform downstream payment workflows, organizations can proactively prevent errors, reduce downstream churn and friction, and support more predictable, accurate, and timely payments. 

The post The Next Era of Payment Integrity: Earlier Clinical Validation, True Transparency appeared first on MedCity News.

The challenge isn’t whether AI can be used (it already is). It’s whether it can be trusted. And trust in medicine is not something healthcare professionals can afford to get wrong. 

The post Trust and AI Adoption in Medicine appeared first on MedCity News.

The difference between that last era and this one isn’t incremental. It’s categorical. Artificial intelligence isn’t optimizing the old system. It’s making the old system economically indefensible.

The post The End of Incrementalism: Why Healthcare Innovation is Finally Reshaping the Model appeared first on MedCity News.

Innovaccer is committing $250 million to expand its AI agent platform, which automates workflows across areas like prior authorization, revenue cycle management and population health. The move comes amid an ongoing debate over whether administrative AI tools can ultimately reduce costs for providers.

The post Why Innovaccer Is Pouring $250M into Its Agentic AI Platform appeared first on MedCity News.

These products have yet to offer treatment solutions designed to get users from their current health state to a desired future health state. This creates a massive, untapped opening for tools that move people from awareness to action in a clinically meaningful way, without the cost and access barriers of engaging the healthcare system or requiring a prescription.

The post From Insight to Intervention: Why Over-the-Counter Digital Therapeutics (ODTx) are the Next Step for LLMs and Wearables appeared first on MedCity News.

The next wave of radiology AI value will come from closed-loop follow-up. An actionable finding should start a pathway with a measurable end state: the follow-up exam is completed, the referral is completed, or the recommendation is clinically resolved with a documented rationale.

The post The Last Mile Problem in AI Radiology: Detection Improves, Follow-Through Breaks appeared first on MedCity News.

HeartFlow, which makes AI tools to analyze cardiac images, sued its rival Cleerly, alleging infringement on six patents. Cleerly is pushing back.

The post Heartflow Sues Cardiac AI Rival Cleerly Over Alleged IP Theft appeared first on MedCity News.

The question is where will healthcare see the greatest value? Here are five use cases that define the greatest ROI for leveraging agentic AI for clinical supply chain operations.

The post Clinical Supply Chain Hits Its AI Turning Point appeared first on MedCity News.

While many AI conversations revolve around regulated industry transformation, the question is where to actually start in a way that does not break trust, budgets or regulatory limits.

The post The AI Value Gap and Why Validation is a Practical First Win for Life Sciences appeared first on MedCity News.

Digitization has certainly cut down on the paperwork glut in healthcare. But if that’s the extent of technology’s impact on the patient experience, it’s clearly not enough. 

The post Know Your Patient: How Technology Can Help Health Care Providers Dramatically Improve One Key Aspect of the Patient Experience appeared first on MedCity News.

Luminai raised $38 million in Series B funding to scale its AI platform that automates healthcare administrative workflows. The company is working with Cleveland Clinic to expand the use of its system across high-volume processes, starting with referral management.

The post Luminai Raises $38M With Cleveland Clinic Using Its AI for Hospital Operations appeared first on MedCity News.

To give patients the care they deserve and improve healthcare’s return on investment, PCPs can harness intelligent, clinically fluent AI – not to replace or override physicians or give them what tech companies think they need, but to support them in pragmatic ways.

The post AI-Driven Precision Care is the Fix for Our Health System’s Failures appeared first on MedCity News.

Rural health organizations cannot afford to get dazzled by AI demo candy. There is no such thing as “FixHealthcareGPT,” and investing in the wrong technology for the future isn’t going to do anything to improve patient outcomes today.

The post Rural Healthcare Transformation Has to Focus on the Real World, Not Techno-Fantasies appeared first on MedCity News.

Innovation in women’s health technology is about improving input data, refining performance criteria and ensuring design assumptions align with biological reality and real-world usage. When those fundamentals are in place, products are more accurate, more trustworthy and more likely to be adopted by clinicians and consumers alike.

The post Women’s Health Is Central to the Future of Digital Health appeared first on MedCity News.

“We spend a lot of time focused on building the experiences that we think are the future of healthcare, and we don’t spend a heck of a lot of time worrying about what other people are doing,” declares Dan Caron, founder and CEO of Health Universe. Here’s a Q&A with the leader of the Kleiner Perkins-backed company.

The post CEO Building AI’s “Health Universe” Utterly Unperturbed By Rivals appeared first on MedCity News.

Startup Pinnacle Medicines is developing peptide drugs with the same efficacy as biologic medicines and the dosing convenience of oral small molecules. The lead program of OrbiMed-incubated Pinnacle is on track to enter the clinic in asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

The post Pinnacle Medicines Adds $89M for Oral Peptides With Properties of Injectable Biologics appeared first on MedCity News.

Uma (Veerappan) Nuggehalli of Flare Capital Partners thinks the healthcare AI startups that will come out on top will be companies that integrate seamlessly into workflows, build proprietary datasets and quickly determine how to sell their technology.

The post What Will Separate Healthcare AI Winners From Losers? appeared first on MedCity News.

An algorithm can flag an irregular heartbeat. But it cannot notice that Tom hasn’t mentioned his late wife in two weeks, or that he’s wearing the same shirt for the fourth day running. Those observations require a person in the room, not a sensor on the wall.

The post The Algorithm Won’t Hold Your Mother’s Hand appeared first on MedCity News.

AI takes care of the small but time-consuming stuff, giving responders more space to focus on what really matters: providing life-saving care to patients.

The post Smarter Documentation Is Changing EMS Operations appeared first on MedCity News.

In the latest episode of the Debunked podcast, MedCity News Editor-in-Chief Arundhati Parmar and Samir Batra, Managing Partner of Health Innovation Pitch, discussed recent M&A deals and how bots can be manipulated.

The post Debunked Episode 25: Sutter Health’s Allina Health Acquisition Strategy, a Deep Dive on Doctronic appeared first on MedCity News.