Jun 20, 2025 Current Resources

News 6/20/25

June 19, 2025 News 1 Comment

Top News

Commure raises $200 million in growth financing to advance its RCM, ambient documentation, and practice management tools.

The company now calls itself “the fast-growing enterprise AI healthcare technology company,” which is a phrasing shift from previous press releases that described it more generically as “a leading healthcare technology company” or “a leader in healthcare technology innovation.”

Reader Comments

From Significant: “Re: Commure. A $200 million investment to build what, exactly? RCM, ambient notes, and practice tools aren’t exactly underrepresented in health tech. Maybe Commure can use the cash to invent a fourth buzzword.” The company’s current website is at the top of the page, while the year-ago, AI-absent version that vaguely described the company’s product as a “healthtech operating system” is directly above. This was prior to its late 2024 acquisitions of Memora Health (care navigation) and Augmedix (AI-powered medical scribing). Certainly the current website is more specific about what the company actually sells, which was difficult to determine not long ago. The company launched as a FHIR-native developer platform in 2020.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Patient referral technology vendor Tennr raises $101 million in a Series C funding round.

Hoppr, which offers a platform for developing medical AI imaging applications, raises $31.5 million in a Series A funding round. Founder, CEO, and board chair Khan Siddiqui, MBBS spent executive time at Microsoft and Higi.

Consulting firm Huron will acquire Eclipse Insights, which offers revenue cycle consulting services.

People

Abby Polich, MBA (TridentCare) joins Health Data Movers as SVP of client services.

Announcements and Implementations

Oracle announces GA of Oracle Health Community Care, a cloud-based mobile extension of the Oracle Health Foundation EHR that can be operated offline.

Willis Knighton Health goes live with Meditech Expanse in its 132 clinics.

This may have healthcare implications and will almost certainly kill some competing apps. OpenAI announces ChatGPT Record, which records speech in real time (including from multiple speakers), creates a transcript, generates a summary, and allows rewriting into an email or project plan. A “reference record history” option allows ChatGPT to look back on previous transcripts to improve its responses and to recall previously shared information. The Record option is available only for paid users who run MacOS for now.

Government and Politics

I wrote back in the dark COVID days of early 2021 about Anosh Ahmed, MD, the COO of Chicago’s 122-bed Loretto Hospital who resigned after getting caught diverting scarce vaccine doses to his cronies. He’s back in the news for filing $900 million in bogus COVID testing claims, which netted him and his co-codefendants an astounding $300 million. Ahmed allegedly stole patient data from the hospital to bill the federal government for performing COVID tests on uninsured people who never actually received them. Beyond the $300 million, he also is accused of pocketing $147 million in kickbacks from a lab company. He put his $9 million Houston house on the market after the first round of charges, for which he generously threw in one of his Rolls Royces. He now lives in Dubai as a “wealth management strategist” and operates a charity whose books might warrant review. Kudos to Kelly Bauer of Block Club Chicago for originally breaking the story and chasing it aferward

Epic files a motion to move the CureIS lawsuit against it to a different venue, arguing that the Northern District of California doesn’t make sense given that both companies are based in the Midwest. CureIS’s lawsuit accuses Epic of anticompetitive behavior, requiring customers to use its own products instead of those of CureIS, blocking integration, stealing trade secrets, and violating Cures Act information blocking provisions. Epic says in the motion that the lawsuit contains “seven kitchen-sink causes of action” that “read like a bad spy novel.” In its motion, Epic argues that:

CureIS blames Epic for its stalled growth and fading customer relationships instead of looking inward.
Epic doesn’t need to steal IP given that its thousands of developers ship new software constantly.
CureIS cites information blocking rules that weren’t in effect at the time.
CureIS should win on merit, not in court, and its job is to prove to customers that its products are better than Epic’s.
CureIS wants to limit Epic’s ability to improve its offerings and inform its customers about what’s coming, which is “both absurd and antithetical to how competition works in the United States.”
This isn’t the first time a smaller company has tried to shift blame to a dominant competitor.

Privacy and Security

A late January ransomware attack on medical coding and risk adjustment firm Episource exposed the information of 5.4 million people.

Other

MIT researchers say that ChatGPT makes its users dumber, with brain scans of essay writers suggesting that they incur “cognitive debt” that dulls critical thinking, reduces creativity, and makes them more susceptible to manipulation. They found that 83% of the subjects couldn’t recall anything from the essays they had asked ChatGPT to write.

Sponsor Updates

Clearwater sponsors the Tennessee HIMSS Chapter Golf Tournament.
Black Book Research reveals the most promising European health IT firms selected by investors for their growth potential, regulatory preparedness, and ability to scale.
KLAS features Clearsense in its latest Emerging Insights case study titled “Clearsense Data Platform as a Service 2025: Reducing Costs & Increasing Efficiency Through Accelerated Data Archiving.”
Capital Rx releases a new episode of “The Astonishing Healthcare Podcast” titled “Inside Capital Rx’s Acquisition of Amino Health: Creating the Health Benefits Platform of the Future, Today.”
Netsmart announces that its MyUnity EHR platform has received the Community Health Accreditation Partner Verification for Home Health.
Ellkay will exhibit at Health Choice Network’s Annual Board Educational Conference June 20-22 on Marco Island, FL.
First Databank names Jessica Durm clinical informatics pharmacist, Ryan Cornell security operations engineer, and Keiron Jerome cloud operations engineer.
Linus Health receives Silver in the Connected Digital Health, Clinical Decision Support Tools category at the 2025 Spring Digital Health Awards.