Aaron Brauser

One key reason why healthcare technologies like AI, telemedicine, and software haven't structurally lowered costs or broadened access for the entire system after decades of experimentation (excluding pure financial engineering of payer contracts) is the limited reimagining of care delivery itself, with asynchronous telemedicine as a notable exception. In the same way that digitizing physical paper failed to exploit the capabilities of a new computing medium for word processing, hosting physician-patient conversations over video does not transform the actual delivery of care. In telemedicine, many of the inputs (e.g., clinician time) and therefore cost structures of in-person care persist, which is why we often see fee-for-service telemedicine companies struggle to achieve economies of scale (i.e., growing revenues non-linearly while growing costs linearly). Until we deconstruct the components of a medical appointment – from intake and triage, to chart review, history gathering, physical examination, diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up – we will continue to be underwhelmed by the disconnect between the transformative potential of these technologies and real-world patient/system impact. I’m optimistic that the emergence of reliable and performant medical AI agents will urge us to perform this deconstruction and redesign the fundamental building blocks of a “medical appointment.”

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CY2025 MAPD Landscape File Released: Trends Accelerated or Surprises Uncovered? The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services just released the CY2025 MAPD Landscape file on Friday evening. While there's much to analyze, here's a quick overview (by the way, I remapped the column/values to match with the prior year files, CMS recently changed the file format): Key Observations: 1. Significant drop in available Part D plans per county - Continues the downward trend of recent years - Surprising in its suddenness but aligns with the overall direction 2. Slight decrease in HMO plans 3. Increase in HMO-POS and Local PPO plans - Possibly reflecting consumer preferences? The chart below illustrates the average number of MAPD contracts per county over recent years. For those interested in diving deeper, the new dataset is now available at mimilabs. Thoughts on these changes? What implications do you foresee for the Medicare Advantage market? [1] https://lnkd.in/ez5sC54X #medicareadvantage #partd #prescriptiondrug #medicare #healthcaredata #landscape #cy2025 #healthcareanalytics #opendata

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In healthcare, data alone won’t make an impact—what matters is what we do with it. Stop by Booth #501 at LUGPA 2024 to see how Preveta turns EMR insights into meaningful patient actions, producing outcomes that truly matter.

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Here’s your recap of last week’s health IT news 🗞️ 👇 🤖 AI Clinician Assistant • Avaamo launched an AI ambient scribe solution with support for over 50 specialties with pre-trained models. • Wound AI, an AI clinical decision support solution built by VANTIQ, Telemedicine Solutions, LLC, and NTT DATA, launched and is now available 📞 AI Contact Center • Premier Inc. awarded a group purchasing agreement to TeleVox Healthcare. 🏥 AI Facility Management • Medely has integrated with Oracle, allowing users to leverage Oracle’s Cloud HCM capabilities. 🌡️ AI Remote Patient Monitoring and Triage • The Alliance for Smart Healthcare Excellence—established by care.ai, now a part of Stryker, and developed with assistance from CHIME—was established to promote the Smart Hospital Maturity Model (SHMM). 📈 Data & Analytics • Epic expanded its set of APIs available to developers to support USCDI v3. • Health Catalyst will acquire Intraprise Health, a cybersecurity provider; it was also selected for analytics and interoperability by CyncHealth, Iowa’s health information exchange (HIE). • Health Commons Project acquired OneHealthPort • Socially Determined released a new application that helps organizations access data for minors. 🧾 Orders & Fulfillment • Surescripts is expanding its Medication History for Populations product to health plans, enabling care management teams to identify gaps in care and improve outcomes. 🧑‍💻 Virtual & At-Home Care • Mass General Brigham launched a partnership with the New England Center and Home for Veterans to provide hospital at home services for veterans experiencing homelessness. • MedStar Health expanded its partnership with DispatchHealth to support care transitions.    🍎 VBC • i2i Population Health is partnering with CureMD to surface actionable data to providers at the point of care. 🧠 Food For Thought • Brendan Keeler shared an interesting post differentiating AI solutions across augmentative vs. autonomous and then further breaking down each. One take we found interesting was, “Active interfaces are fun, but ultimately have some of the same problems as Siri - they require explicit engagement and cognitive overhead to use. This means their adoption and impact often fall short of expectations - users must actively remember to use them and overcome the friction of engagement.” https://lnkd.in/eR39qFpK --- Want the latest healthcare tech news delivered to your inbox each week? Sign up here 📬 👉 https://lnkd.in/e2UJ3ckP

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I am thrilled to introduce the latest enhancement to our RevConnect platform: RevConnect Workflow! This innovative addition brings powerful connectivity and automation tools, seamlessly integrating care delivery tasks and processes with AI technologies, analytics, external workflows, and healthcare applications. The result? Smarter, data-driven care at the point of delivery, leading to better outcomes for patients.

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The team and I wanted to bring quality data / on demand / at speed - to markets including pharma, consultancies, financial services and educational practitioners. Our new self-service platform pharmingo.com is now live and is the start of many technology-centric capabilities that we’re working on. All the power of our data, with no human involvement - unless you want of course 😉 Well done to everyone involved who worked hard to build this in just 3 sprints! #automatedata #youchoose #dataondemand #pharmaceutical #pricing

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LSI, BioscienceLA, #LAMedtechweek, and HLTH's #VIVE2024 event resulted in the latest GTM Pulse Check offering which has successfully taken off! As a result, I am continuing on last week's series of go-to-market tactics. Crafting a robust marketing plan is essential for medical device companies to thrive in today's world. By leveraging these outlined sections, organizations can optimize their marketing strategies and drive meaningful impact.This post takes a step back to outline the sections of a marketing plan. Read on 👇🏼 Looking for support in creating your marketing plan?  Let’s chat! Book here 👉🏼 https://lnkd.in/g92YA9WK _____ P.S. Enjoying my content? ⚕️Follow me for more tips on medical device commercialization and repost to share with your network. #medtech #gotomarket #medicaldevices #healthcareinnovation

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Employers crave verifiable ROI from their point solutions, not just lofty promises. Vendors who focus on the data can build trust, showcase the true value of their solution, and steer clear of exaggerated or false claims about performance.     Vendors - Wellnecity’s Smart Hub was built for benefits data, to improve the speed, quality, and access to the information needed to power performance. With Smart Hub you can    ✔︎ Continuously evaluate and objectively showcase the ROI of your solution.   ✔︎ Hold yourself accountable to performance guarantees by constantly monitoring utilization and impact. ✔︎ Help health plans leverage your data to proactively identify opportunities to improve performance and better outcomes. By prioritizing transparency, you build credibility and trust.  This approach positions you as a leader in the health plan ecosystem, clearly demonstrating your solution’s impact on the bottom line and health outcomes. What are you waiting for? Get started today at wellnecity.com 

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💜 Improve patient care 💜 Fast-track digital transformation 💜 Interoperability without disruption 💜 Faster ROI Toca.io's powerful combination of apps, automation and extensible integration in a single low-code platform enable Trusts to tackle interoperability challenges, streamline data flow and reimagine patient pathways. It saves time, minimises errors, and boosts patient satisfaction. 🟣 Clinic Scheduling & Management: Automate scheduling for clinician change management. 🟣 General Clinical Administration: Automatically build and update GP Practices in GPAS (Cerner). 🟣 e-Referrals & Appointments: Automate the download of e-RS referral notes & attachments and upload to EPR. 🟣 Comorbidity: Automate updates to patient records for comorbidities. 🟣 Data Cleansing: Data validation and cleansing of patient records. 🟣 Data Migrations: Moving and updating patient reports from legacy systems to a new Patient Administration System. 🟣 Patient Record Updates: Automate adding diagnostics and alerts for patients. Robotics AI 🟪 Unleashing human minds

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I’ve talked to many CMIOs and CIOs the past year. Wanna know the Number 1 mistake they’ve made when choosing a Digital Health solution? Evaluating based primarily on the Tech features (oh wow shiny features!), and not doing real due diligence on the Clinical Content & Workflows that come with the actual product. Here are the types of frustrations they tell me: → “The vendor said they had 100 out-of-the-box care plans… but the content is incredibly bare bones. My clinicians end up creating them from scratch.” → “Our clinicians are demanding a point solution now (e.g. for Ortho) because the clinical content in this supposed enterprise platform aren’t good enough.” → “We need content for this new use case, and the vendor has no interest in growing their content library.” → “The vendor says they’re willing to develop the content, but it’s going to take a whole year. That’s a LONG time.” The reality is Digital Health Tech is only as good as the Clinical Content and Workflows you put in them. The parallel reality is clinicians do not have hours and hours of time to create content, workflows and algorithms from scratch. They are happy to edit, but they have zero time to build from scratch. But what CMIOs and CIOs cannot do is simply trust the quality of clinical content a Digital Health vendor claims to have. Because unless you’ve practiced in that specialty, you don’t truly know if the content is good enough. So what do you do as a CMIO and CIO? You get your clinicians to weigh-on on the product you’re considering. Bring your clinicians to a product demo, and let them due diligence the quality of content, workflows, etc. for their own specialty. E.g. let the Orthopedic surgeon leaders diligence the quality of the Orthopedic content. They can tell you pretty quickly if the content is great or poor. If it meets their needs or not. They’ll ask very clinical questions, and tell right away if the vendor has actual clinical subject matter expertise or if they were talking out of their butt the whole time. Save yourself, your clinicians and your health system a ton of headache. P.S. If you’ve never heard of SeamlessMD, we provide digital care journeys for health systems to guide patients across pre/post surgery, oncology, women’s health, chronic care and more. We ACTUALLY have a library of customizable, evidence-based care plans that cover 150+ procedures and conditions, backed by 40+ studies and evaluations showing improved cost, length of stay, readmissions, ER visits, mortality and more. So if you’re a health system leader who is struggling with Digital Health vendors who don’t actually provide the Clinical Content and Workflows to make the Tech work… give me a shout.

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Here’s your recap of last week’s health IT news 🏥 💻 🗞️ 👇 Product updates 👩🏼‍💻 • Augmedix announced public availability of Augmedix Go, their gen AI documentation product, for Emergency Departments.    • Forcura released AI referral summaries for the post-acute market.    • UTM Healthcare and FirstHx are teaming up to provide more robust medical histories.    • AI phone call tech company, Standard Practice, relaunched after pivoting from Nibble Health.    • Revenue cycle management platform, Ensemble Health Partners, is leveraging Microsoft Azure GenAI to enhance their service.    • MRO is extending its clinical data access tool to cover automatic retrieval of continuity of care requests.    • DrFirst, Inc. is partnering with PatchRx to improve medication adherence data. Notable partnerships 🤝 • Brigham and Women's Hospital partnered with FeelBetter to launch a study on the impact of their AI-based population health platform on polypharmacy patient management.    • Community Health Network selected Biofourmis for virtual and at-home care.    • Humana is extending its current use of prior authorizations platform, Cohere Health.    • Louisianan Community Health System deployed Retrieve Medical's Retrieve Dx Smart App to enhance documentation.    • Anne Arundel Dermatology will expand its current partnership with Relatient, adding Dash Schedule. Posts we enjoyed 👏 • Spencer Dorn’s reminder that more mature tech + good process is in many cases the better option than gen AI. (https://lnkd.in/eiK2DNfw) • Graham Walker, MD’s homegrown demo exploring the combination of clinically-informed text search + retrieval augmented generation (RAG) to enable better EHR note summaries. (https://lnkd.in/eDaqCh5H) --- Want to stay in the loop? Sign up for the Elion Briefing to get all of the latest healthcare tech news delivered to your inbox 📬 👉 https://bit.ly/49z6AUW

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**In Case You Missed It: SEQSTER’s Innovations Are Making a Difference for Patients, Life Science and Healthcare enterprises! 🚀** We’re building an unbeatable partner network that’s shaking up the #Healthcare #Data space. Whether it’s 👉Antidote Technologies, Atropos Health, THREAD or UBC our operating system is accelerating and transforming how #healthdata is integrated and leveraged to help #patients. Don't miss out on how we're turning data into insights and action! #HealthTech #Innovation #Pharma #LifeSciences #SEQSTER #DigitalHealth https://lnkd.in/esYVaTk6

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New blog post by David Hewitt, "Top 6 Reasons Hospitals Must Focus On Uncovering The Dark Data In The Cost Cycle." Boost financial performance, decision-making, and patient outcomes by prioritizing dark data in 2024. #spendmend #healthcareData #darkdata #hospitals

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Thank you Bradford Haizlett for sharing. The healthcare industry is one of the most important infrastructures, but also the most poorly managed with regards to cybersecurity. Another reason why the healthcare industry is one of the main targets for the bad guys. Ascension, a major U.S. healthcare provider, reported a "cybersecurity event" after detecting unusual activity in its network, which has disrupted clinical operations. They have enlisted Mandiant, a team of incident response specialists, to investigate and have also informed relevant authorities. Early indications suggest that ransomware may be involved, with disruptions including disabled virtual desktop and VPN connections, forcing some staff to revert to manual operations. Ascension has stated it will notify and assist individuals if it finds that sensitive information was compromised, in line with regulatory and legal standards. This incident underscores the ongoing vulnerability of the healthcare sector to cyber attacks, which have targeted many such organizations due to their critical need for constant uptime and sometimes outdated systems. #cybersecurity #stayvigilant #ransomware #cyberdefense #hirevets #HBCU #HireMe

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Navina's teaming up with agilon health to bring its clinical AI to agilon's growing network. With a goal of improving workflows and reducing manual work for care teams, could this set the tone for nationwide scaling? Definitely one to watch in the value-based care space. https://lnkd.in/gKYq3VyN

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With each new technology that emerges, there are concerns about the risks and challenges that it will bring to organizations – particularly in healthcare, where the stakes are high. However, when handled responsibly, I believe the potential rewards outweigh the risks. I recently contributed my thoughts on the topic to MobiHealthNews, digging into the intersection of #AI and #ValueBasedCare, and how new tech can serve as an asset, rather than a threat. Take a look and let me know your thoughts below: https://bit.ly/4a3BvdT

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I never realized the magnitude of the clinical and financial impact care teams could have by finding and addressing clinical #malnutrition until I started working with Josiah Meyer. Most leading hospitals identify less than 1/3 of the patients where they could make a difference (and even then do it too late to change LOS) falling short of ideal care while also missing out on material revenue. I'm really looking forward to speaking with Richard Riggs about how Cedars-Sinai has fundamentally changed the game here. Their team achieved remarkable outcomes for patients and for the hospital. What I find exciting is that HealthLeap AI allows all hospitals to function as if they had a top-tier data science team and software development team, especially in areas where we can show the current reality of AI making a difference. If you'd like to learn more or have a nutrition or medical leader at your hospital interested in amplifying the impact care teams can have - with continuous high precision screening of 100% of patients and workflow automation to reduce effort - please join us! #healthcare #innovation #AI

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