Healthtech Roundup: Everything is wild now, + megarounds for AI healttech cos and 4 questions with Baptist Health CIO

Every call with an industry friend these days, whether it’s a startup founder, operator, provider or anyone else, seems to begin with the statement “everything is wild right now!” 

It truly is. 

From a macro perspective, we are living through an unprecedented time in healthcare. Millions of people face the prospect of losing their healthcare coverage, and providers are bracing for the fallout from that. There’s inflation, tariffs, rising prices for specialty drugs, and myriad other factors that are driving up costs. Employers are facing a double digit percentage increase in medical costs, related to factors like rising rates of cancer, complex surgeries, GLP-1s, cell and gene therapies, and more. Affordable Care Act health insurance premiums are expected to shoot up next year. 

Bottom line: Life feels like it’s increasingly expensive, and Americans are paying more for healthcare than ever. 

The only silver lining is that this picture could accelerate progress towards meaningful solutions that have made little to no progress in the past few decades. There’s not much enthusiasm around value-based care these days, especially as many payers are cutting teams that manage these contracts. But there do still seem to be tailwinds around ICHRA, telehealth, AI and direct primary care. I’m planning to write more about this ICHRA given the ongoing questions around ACA subsidies because I think there is a lot more to be said.

More of my time these days is spent on understanding the policy landscape. But most of the money I’m seeing get invested into healthcare is about driving us towards a future where care is heavily augmented by AI. We have gone absolutely gaga as a venture ecosystem for AI, with recent reports from Rock Health and Pitchbook indicating that two-thirds of all dollars (or more) are going into the tech. If AI isn’t a slam dunk, I’ll be very worried about the current vintage of firms. I’m convinced there will be some winners, but I do still have questions about valuations because I’m seeing them be very high even for pre-revenue, seed stage companies. These companies will all need to be valued in the billions, and historically there aren’t many in the healthcare sector that have reached that size and sustained it as a publicly-traded company. Are you all bullish we can get there because of AI? Love to hear your collective takes.

An invitation to my paid subscribers

On September 8 at 1 et, I’ll be teaming up with the brilliant Blake Madden from Hospitalogy, author of one of my favorite healthcare newsletters. We’re hosting a private Zoom “ask me anything” (AMA) on the topic of the future of media, how to pitch independent media, and what newsletters specifically are looking to report on - and why. This should be beneficial to our subscribers in communications, as well as any founders who’d like to attend. 

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The news worth reading this week

Tenet overperforms but investors have questions 

What’s been reported: Tenet Healthcare signals a confident 2025 outlook after reportedly outperforming in Q2. The health care operator increased its 2025 projections by $400 million, according to Fierce Healthcare. 

What investors said: During the earnings call, investors questioned the growth projection amid volume fluctuations and policy changes to the Affordable Care Act following Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” In particular, the concerns centered around the potential impact of Medicaid funding cuts. 

What Tenet said: “Our results in both segments exceeded our expectations and extend our track record of consistently strong fundamental execution,” said CEO Saum Sutaria during the shareholders' call. 

Our POV: There could be policy challenges ahead, but Tenet’s leadership suggested on the earnings call that the impact may not be felt for a few years. CEO Saum Sutaria emphasized the broader uncertainty facing health systems… and Tenet is no exception.

Hims & Hers gets sued 

What’s been reported: A stakeholder filed a lawsuit against the Hims & Hers board following the termination of a significant partnership with Novo Nordisk, citing a breach of fiduciary duties. Hims & Hers partnered with Novo Nordisk to offer both their Wegovy weight loss drug with another compounded version made by Hims. However, last month, the drug giant ended the partnership, citing “illegal mass compounding and deceptive marketing.” 

Why it's different: The lawsuit was a derivative suit, meaning “unlike those class actions—which typically focus on misrepresentation to shareholders—the derivative suit alleges governance failures and corporate mismanagement at the board level,” per Newsweek. 

What the stakeholders say: The saga highlights mounting regulatory scrutiny on telehealth providers selling compounded versions of weight loss drugs, putting pressure on stakeholders who feel misled. 

Our POV: Pass the popcorn. It has been a wild ride to follow Hims & Hers in the news over the past few months. It’s now being referred to in the media as a potential “meme stock,” given all the interest in the consumer health company, even in the absence of any news.  

Medicaid cuts could be very bad for ERs

What’s been reported: Cuts affecting the emergency room departments are threatening the backbone of the American healthcare system. The recent “Big Beautiful Bill” will cut Medicaid spending by a reported $1 trillion over a decade. 

The bigger picture: Approximately one in five emergency room visits goes unpaid, resulting in a total of $5.9 billion in healthcare costs. Many who receive Medicaid and live in rural areas will be especially affected by the cuts in the instance of a medical emergency. 

From the ER doc: “When someone who does not have insurance comes into the ER, I am forced to discuss with the patient what necessary care they may have to delay or forgo if they cannot afford it. These conversations will become only more frequent when millions of people are kicked off their health insurance,” writes Sophia Spadafore, an ER doc at New York City’s Mount Sinai Morningside/West Hospitals.

Our POV: The only path forward, in my opinion, is for us to invest far more in primary care, particularly in underserved areas. There will always be a need for certain patients to go to the emergency room to seek out care, but if they can be treated before the condition becomes urgent, that’s the only way to curb costs. 

Twentyeight Health expands in women’s health 

What’s been reported: Twentyeight Health is announcing three product lines it’s expanding into, including on-demand prescription consultations, weight management, and a skincare program. 

The bigger picture: Twentyeight Health, for the most part, does not take insurance so charges out-of-pocket fees for access to healthcare. Those include one-time costs, as well as monthly subscription fees. It is part of a growing trend of companies that are cash-pay, which consumers are increasingly opting into because of the convenience and the rise of high deductible health plans. 

Our POV: As we’ve been reporting in Second Opinion, there are some important tailwinds underway related to direct primary care, particularly as it pertains to employer coverage. The Trump Administration is reacting favorably to business models that allow patients to pay for care out-of-pocket, notably in letting them use pre-tax HSA dollars. Women’s health makes a lot of sense for this category because there are a lot of stigmatized conditions that patients may feel uncomfortable speaking about with their primary physicians. 

Major funding announcements and deals

$93 Million for an Slingshot, AI Therapist 

Slingshot AI, developed by a former Forbes Under 30 recipient, is the latest company to test AI for mental health care. Following a beta test involving 50,000 users, the company has raised a total of $93 million, Forbes reported. Its founder and CEO Neil Parikh is one of the founders of Casper Mattress. Hot space meets experienced founder is a recipe for a very large funding round. 

$150 million for Aidoc

Healthcare AI company Aidoc announced $150 million in a new round of financing, expanding its services to target AI-driven solutions in oncology and cardiovascular care, according to Fierce Healthcare. The company was started in Israel and it builds computer-aided triage and notification systems for providers. 

$22 million for Charta Health 

Charta Health, a health tech solutions company, announced $22 million in Series A funding led by Bain Capital Ventures, Axios reported. The revenue cycle management space is particularly hot right now, in large part because of the hype around the potential of AI in healthcare. 

$210 million for OpenEvidence 

OpenEvidence, the AI tool for doctors, announced $210 million in Series B funding, with a valuation of $3.5 billion. OpenEvidence is the large language model purpose built by healthcare, and we’ve heard very positive feedback from physician friends! It’s particularly interesting that they’re making it free to clinicians and trying an ad-supported model. I do wonder at whether that is a sustainable long term strategy.

Four questions with Aaron Miri — Chief Digital Information Officer for Baptist Health

SO) Interoperability sometimes feels like one step forward, two steps back. What's the timeline in your mind for true interoperability to occur, where patients can easily share their health records between systems, regardless of the EHR, and what would it take to get there?

AM) True interoperability is occurring in limited pockets and being done very well across certain limited use cases.  For instance, (my health system) Baptist Health was an early adopter in the TEFCA. For organizations that are early adopters of TEFCA, we are seeing tremendous upside from being a part of this national data-sharing network.

Let’s take one specific use case around public health reporting to public agencies, like the Association of Public Health Laboratories. In June of 2025, we had exchanged 333,640 electronic reportable case records leveraging TEFCA. With all that said, it’s a very inexact science and is not consumer friendly in any sense for a number of reasons. First, interoperability in healthcare is an incredibly complex topic that is governed both by federal and state law, which can vary state to state, and thus I use the term “your mileage will vary.” Achieving interoperability all depends on what facility you’re at and what data you’re trying to send. For example, there are some circumstances in which a physical wet ink signature is legally required to release certain types of information. 

Furthermore, there are national prohibitions on developing a national patient identifier. That makes finding the correct “John Smith” in a sea of “ John Smith” patients very challenging. Congress has tried to repeal this prohibition as most recently as this year and it continues to stall without being signed into law. 

As a former software engineer, I get the question, “ how hard can this (interoperability) be? Just link the records, release the information and you’re off to the races, right? The truth is that it’s not so much a technical challenge as much as an “other” challenge. The industry has been trying to slowly make incremental progress. It’s more magnified now that we are in the artificial intelligence era which requires massive amounts of data to truly refine AI models – and thus interoperability is a key component to get the right data together at the right place and in the right time. 

CF: Is AI overhyped, underhyped or just hyped enough as a technology that will transform health systems?

AM: AI is underhyped with the promise of what the “art of the possible” is all about – but overhyped when it comes to what the market can use right now. Let’s start with the the overhype: In healthcare, the issue comes down to a regulatory environment that can hamper free market development. As recently as this week, the Trump Administration issued an executive order on Artificial Intelligence that begins to call into question some of the prior administration healthcare-related finalized rules on AI formulated by the Office of the National Coordinator and other agencies. Will these rules have to be adjusted? If you’re a software developer down the road on building an algorithm, do you suddenly change course or shift? What companies are going to pour money into R&D when there’s such a wide variety of federal and state law changes around AI that could impact your final product and/or where you can sell your product? And ultimately, who is liable if an algorithm malfunctions?  

On the under hype question, we have seen the art of the possible real time where even with ambient listening AI tooling, our physicians and clinicians are positively seeing massive impact to reducing some of the administrative burden that’s required of them.

The issue is that hospitals are reluctant to truly go to the edge and push through the unknowns until some of those non-technical issues are resolved. I can imagine a possible world where covered entities can register an AI algorithm development with a respective agency. These entities are then permitted to trial it for patient care and treatment purposes and then publish the algorithm for the benefit of the entire industry similar to the “Right to Try” – an FDA policy related to  live saving cures that are considered experimental. 

3. A lot of people want to say that AI will only "augment" humans doing their jobs, and yet it's already had an effect of dislocating jobs across a lot of other industries. And it's clear that there will be jobs in healthcare that won't be required anymore. How do you think about that as a health system Chief Digital Health Information Officer?

AM: Let’s cut to the case - all industries will automate low-level task jobs when given a chance. We saw this with the automobile industry over decades and centuries of technology development - this is no secret and not a surprise. As a technologist, my view is that if we are not advancing humanity with technology, then that technology has failed. And we need to fail fast and pivot to technology that does unlock humanity’s abilities. However, with A.I., there will be numerous new jobs developed with new needs we can’t even foresee. These new jobs will unlock economies of scale that we can only dream of.  Take a look at the higher education space to see how this will develop. I have been seeing more universities integrating A.I. into all of their healthcare curriculum such as at my alma mater at MUSC, thus teaching future medical and allied health students that AI is indistinguishable from say a stethoscope in the future of care delivery.  

Imagine a world where your preventative wellness appointments are automatically scheduled for you based upon your known calendar availability and personal life conflicts and availability. And a hospital system adjusts dynamically to you. Imagine you get to take that appointment remotely on your own time without having to talk to a care team and automatically receiving medication or care that you need. Imagine it’s automatically billed and paid for without you lifting a finger. In today’s world, that would involve dozens of back office professionals calling and faxing, in an effort to work with numerous actors in a healthcare care continuum. If tomorrow that’s all automated, those dozens of these individuals can be re-tasked with reimaging a better patient registration process, figuring out how to insert advanced technology, or leveraging emerging tools such as robots and drone delivery. I’m a firm believer that technology will not replace humans in any sense. Technology, however, will free us up from the mundane and repetitive activity that is the bane of many people’s existence for all industries. 

SO: What are your thoughts on the near-term impact of the One Big Beautiful Bill on health systems, particularly with these cuts to Medicaid?

AM: I think it’s too early to tell when it comes to all the impacts of the OBBB. One area that I am particularly pleased about is the Rural Health Transformation Act which puts aside a $50 billion dollar fund for rural health providers.  As we have seen time and time again, rural healthcare has been marginalized with under investment and it’s time to fix that and give a level playing field across the care continuum, especially with the ability to bring desperately needed technology into the picture. For providers anxious about what the impacts could be which will vary state to state, my advice would be to partner closely with the American Hospital Association and other groups like it, as well as to collaborate with state legislatures to shore up that impact relative to other pieces of major health-related legislation. 

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