Oct 19, 2025 Current Resources

Monday Morning Update 10/20/25

October 18, 2025 News No Comments

Top News

Alphabet-owned Verily launches Verily Me, a free consumer health app.

Verily Me lets users receive provider recommendations from their medical records from multiple sources, ask an AI companion questions about their records, analyze meal photos for nutrition, and join research studies.

A Reader’s Notes from the Georgia HIMSS Annual Meeting

Opening remarks by Hal Wolf, president and CEO, HIMSS

Eight years ago, HIMSS had 77,000 members (75,000 in North America). Now there are 135,000 members (80,000 in North America), with 54 North American chapters.
Anticipating a global shortage of healthcare workers of 10 million by 2030.
He argues that advancements in healthcare and research, as well as the sheer volume of new information coming out (thousands of peer-reviewed articles per year), makes AI-powered clinical decision support a necessity.
He sees leveraging AI and shifting scope of practice as solutions to the challenges of healthcare capacity (i.e., shift more work from physicians to other clinicians).
New Technology + Old Organization = Costly Old Organization. Technology won’t solve everything on its own.

Session on tech initiatives at Emory

Guru Patel, associate chief of clinical informatics, Emory Digital

Pilot of transition to Apple devices started at one unit in one hospital and ran for 6-12 months. Their biggest challenges were “tap to authenticate” and scanning integrations.
Next phase was converting Hillandale Hospital by rolling out ~2,000 Apple devices (workstations, tablets, smartphones, etc.). The rollout was challenging because it occurred during the time of the highest hospital census.
Separately, Emory worked on an initiative to leverage Epic Welcome kiosks for check-in and MyChart Bedside in hospital rooms.
Only 10% of hospital patients are using the kiosks, and of those, nearly half can’t complete the check-in process independently. Biggest points of abandonment were for questionnaires and guarantor / insurance info.
Emergency and OP rehab patients could check in on their own 80-90% of the time, whereas surgery patients could only 3% of the time.
In the rooms, only 7% of patients were requesting meals through Bedside. Emory has found that the steps needed for patients to make requests in Bedside (e.g., request ice chips) are too numerous and is working with Epic to try to cut that down.

Session on building resiliency for IT disasters

Stoddard Manikin, CISO, Children’s Hospital of Atlanta

Old way doesn’t work anymore: downtime procedures have often been designed for short periods of downtime, but the reality of ransomware attacks and recovery is that downtimes can be extensive. He cited Change Healthcare, Ascension, and Lurie Children’s as examples.
Can’t assume you’ll have access to any electronic systems (including email, SharePoint, or the organization’s website) in the event of an incident. Have backup paper copies of downtime procedures and contact info for each of your vendors.
You need to educate staff on what to use and what not to use during a downtime, otherwise they will go to whatever they can get to work, even if it isn’t the best or most secure option. Ensure they know to avoid texting, personal email, or social media. Ensure there are alternate, secure systems for communication. Ensure clinicians can (and know how to) access imaging directly on modalities.

David Kotz, VP of Technology Services, Children’s Hospital of Atlanta

Scanning and hardening Active Directory is a valuable preventative step for building resiliency.

Derek Spransy, CISO, Emory Hospital and University

Emory is moving their Epic production instance to Azure at the end of the month.
Resiliency is essential; Emory built redundant connections to the Azure data centers, yet at one point within an hour, they had a backhoe cut one fiber connection in Georgia and a squirrel chew through another connection in Pennsylvania. Had to scramble to shift to a third option.
They’re also looking into an isolated recovery environment for Epic to provide greater resiliency for extended downtimes.

Session on Grady Health’s adoption of AI

Wilhelmina Prinssen, Medical Director of Ambulatory Informatics

The biggest challenge of implementing AI is provider adoption. Grady has seen stronger adoption among younger/digitally savvier providers.
However, those physicians also show signs of relying on AI too much and not always thinking critically on their own.
She says you should introduce AI from the beginning with students, but you have to change how you assess competency. Don’t just take correct answers from students; ask them why the AI-generated solution was the best one.

Kerem Eroglu, Director of Partner Success, Abridge

There are numerous opportunities to leverage AI to enhance virtual care. A key use case is making telehealth visits easier by allowing the provider to focus on the patient and look into the camera, rather than having their head down typing a note.
They see receptiveness to AI among providers to be less of a function of age and more a function of personality and openness to change.

CIO Panel focused on AI

Geoff Brown, Piedmont (recently retired)

They kept AI governance separate from “typical” IS governance to allow for a laser focus and greater speed of AI adoption. In the beginning, their main concern with adoption was how to secure the systems and the data.
He feels AI has helped on the clinical side but has been even more impactful for revenue cycle, citing claims adjudication as an example.

Chris Paravate, Northeast Georgia Health System

Their C-suite is their IS governance team due to the sheer number of potential projects and their potential impact on the health system.
They have chosen to focus on AI solutions from their established vendors and partners, rather than new ones.
Completed an AI pilot with Epic that led to a 46% increase in coding efficiency.
On average, each provider who adopts ambient listening sees 1.3 more patients per week, so the solution pays for itself. Physicians have said it’s a life-changer.

Jeff Buda, Atrium Health Floyd

They have an AI council for governance. They start cautiously with any new AI solution and see if it passes the sniff test, then they move more aggressively to roll it out once it’s proven.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents say that technology investments are mostly driven, not shockingly, by the bottom line.

New poll to your right or here: Which social media platforms do you use regularly?

Become an HIStalk Sponsor for All Treats, No Tricks

I’m offering a few sponsorship perks to help push interested companies across the finish line before December 31. Contact Lorre if you’re curious (or read this to see why you should be).

New sponsors: Get the rest of 2025 free plus a free ad in a HIStalk email update, earning a full year of exposure for less than you’d spend on zero-ROI conference booth carpet.
Startups: You qualify for the new HIStalk Startup Scholarship package (which, to be honest, I just invented).
Former sponsors: Come back and I’ll throw in a few extras.
All sponsors: Renewals are locked in at current rates through the end of 2026.
Webinar promotions: Take 50% off of one or more (some companies bank a package of them for future use). Sign up before November 15 and Lorre will enter you to win a free webinar promotion.
All sponsors: in a “who’s paying attention” prize, email Lorre by end of day Tuesday, October 22 and she’ll give you a free email ad just for asking.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Virtual care operator Counsel Health raises a $25 million Series A funding round. The company offers an AI chatbot that answers health questions, then escalates the conversation as needed to a physician within its 50-state network. Bringing a doctor into the conversation costs $29 per use or a $199 annual fee that includes unlimited physician involvement.

Sage Care, which offers call triage, patient-provider matching, and scheduling tools, announces its launch and $20 million in funding.

Women’s health virtual and in-person clinic operator Tia lays off 72 employees, or 23% of its workforce, citing investor pressure to reach profitability.

Health smart ring company Oura raises $900 million, valuing its business at $11 billion.

People

Froedtert ThedaCare Health promotes Brian Sterns, MBA to SVP/CIO.

Announcements and Implementations

First Databank announces a Model Context Protocol servicer that connects AI systems and agents to its medication knowledge assets. The company is testing a prescription automation agent that can pre-populate medication orders by analyzing the ambient listening output from encounters.

Star Valley Health (WY) sues Change Healthcare, claiming that it failed to submit insurance claims on time after Change rolled out Epic’s billing software in mid-2023 without sufficient staffing.

Other

Oracle co-CEO Mike Sicilia and healthcare and life sciences GM Seema Verma say in a shareholder call that the CEOs of Epic-using Mayo Clinic and Cleveland expressed “a lot of enthusiasm for what we’re building” at Oracle’s recent healthcare conference. They say that the customers of competitors “are starting to understand the power, the value of AI” in being able to build and buy AI agents. Sicilia also said:

We’ve got dozens of AI agents live across our health ecosystem today, with many more planned. We’re looking at chart review care navigation, clinical decision support, patient risk predictions, preventative care, and many more. In fact, our next-generation AI EHR is now generally available … we’ve got a lot of competition in that market, but … the one question I ask our competitors is, see how many fuel cell power plants are you building on site right now? Because if you’re not doing that, then you probably are not going to have as good of a chance to be closely provisioned to a large language model and apply reasoning models and all the things you actually need to work to make this work at scale to automate an entire hospital.

Epic’s latest “Hey Judy” column explains why everyone pays Epic’s list price: she once felt sorry for an early customer who had “such nice people, and they didn’t know how to negotiate.”

A tongue-in-cheek essay suggests that belief in AI “magic” isn’t due to impressive capabilities of these “giant calculators,” but rather the user’s “Edge of Stupidity,” where their limited understanding prevents them from explaining it rationally. The author extends the Dunning-Kruger effect (which says that people are ignorant of their own ignorance), arguing that smart people are especially prone because they assume that their intellect allows them to detect “authoritative-sounding bullshit” in fields they barely understand.

Sponsor Updates

Netsmart celebrates client impact and the AI-driven transformation of its CareFabric platform at its recent Connections2025 conference.
Surescripts offers its new First-Fill Abandonment solution to Arcadia’s customers.
Nordic releases a new “Designing for Health” podcast featuring Greg Aukerman.
Redox releases a new episode of its “Shut the backdoor” podcast titled “An Intelligence Infiltration – Hacking AI Agents from Silicon Valley’s Hottest Startups with guest Rene Brandel.”
RLDatix will exhibit at the CIHQ Accreditation & Regulatory Summit October 21-25 in San Antonio.
TrustCommerce, a Sphere company, releases a new e-book titled “TrustCommerce Community Connect Program.”
TeamBuilder will present at the KLAS Healthcare Operations Summit November 4 in Salt Lake City.
Ellkay and Inbox Health will sponsor Greenway Health’s Engage 2025 conference November 5-7 in Tampa.
WellSky will exhibit at the 2025 AABB Annual Meeting October 25–27 in San Diego.