VA signs $775.72 million ambient AI contract; Heidi raises $340 million for agents; robotic thyroid ultrasound tested; AMA presses CMS on prior auth deadline
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) on Tuesday selected Abridge and Knowtex for a five-year ambient AI enterprise contract with a $775.72 million ceiling across all eligible vendors, Abridge announced and Nextgov reported. The contract is a multiple-award vehicle; the ceiling is a maximum across every vendor eligible to compete for task orders, and money is awarded one task order at a time. The VA began piloting both scribes in October 2025, according to Nextgov. Abridge said its platform is live at more than 75 VA medical centers on both of the department's record systems, in primary care and about a dozen specialties. The VA has published no results from its pilot.
The same day, Heidi, a scribe company, raised $340 million: $100 million of equity at a $900 million valuation and a $240 million facility from General Catalyst. The company's pitch, reported by HIT Consultant, is that the scribe was a first step and that the next is agents that prepopulate order sets, draft referrals and assemble the chart before the visit, with a clinician approving before any action is taken. In Boston, Jane Moran, Mass General Brigham's chief information and digital officer, told the World Medical Innovation Forum that the system is "not allowing autonomous AI across different platforms." The Massachusetts Nurses Association rallied outside the forum's hotel, and about 4,000 Brigham nurses vote Thursday on authorizing an open-ended strike.
In other developments, a Shanghai group reported in npj Digital Medicine a prospective multicenter trial of a fully autonomous robotic thyroid ultrasound that avoided about three-quarters of on-site exams and missed about a fifth of biopsy recommendations; Jefferson Health said its ambient AI rollout saved 1 million clinician hours in its first year and set a target of 10 million by 2028; the American Medical Association (AMA) asked the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to hold payers to the Jan. 1, 2027, electronic prior authorization deadline; and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) updated its list of AI-enabled devices Tuesday to say "over 1,600," up from the 1,500 cited in this site's long read. The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee hears from Dr. Heidi Overton, the nominee for FDA commissioner, on Thursday at 10:30 a.m. Eastern time. Colorado's attorney general faced a Wednesday deadline for a revised draft of the state's automated-decision and chatbot rules, and the rulemaking page had not posted one as of Wednesday morning. California's governor has seven days left to act on four health AI bills.
- Deployment Sept 22, 2026The contract is a multiple-award vehicle with a combined ceiling of $775.72 million over five years for all vendors eligible to compete for task orders, Abridge said in its release. The company said its platform is live at more than 75 VA medical centers with thousands of clinicians and runs on both VistA/CPRS and the new federal record, in primary care, more than a dozen specialties and the Clinical Resource Hubs that provide virtual care. Knowtex was also selected, the VA started piloting both tools in October 2025, and the vehicle covers primary care teams, behavioral health, physical medicine and rehabilitation, and medical and surgical specialists, Nextgov reported. Becker's Hospital Review reported the same figures; no outcome data from the VA pilot has been published: no time-per-note figure, no note-quality audit and no clinician survey. Abridge's own figures are 100 million conversations a year across 300 health systems; the release quotes Dr. David Shulkin, the former VA secretary, and Abridge's chief executive described the deployment as "preserving clinical context across providers, specialties, care settings, and the EHR migration."
- Money Sept 22, 2026The round is a $100 million Series C led by Blackbird with Phoenix Court, Point72 Private Investments and Headline, plus $240 million of growth financing from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund, at a $900 million valuation, MobiHealthNews reported. The company's own figures, reported by HIT Consultant, are 2.8 million visits a week, 175 million visits supported in total, 67 million clinical hours, annual recurring revenue of $50 million by April and a 62% enterprise activation rate, all unaudited; Heidi's media page had not posted the announcement as of publication, and the figures come from the trade press. Thomas Kelly, the company's chief executive, said the ambition was "always bigger than writing doctor's notes," and the roadmap is agents that prepopulate order sets, draft referrals and assemble the pre-visit record, with the clinician approving before anything executes. SiliconANGLE listed the products already shipped, including an evidence tool the company said has answered 10 million queries since March, and named Beth Israel Lahey Health and NHS England's Midlands region as customers. This site reported Monday that Heidi's Asia-Pacific medical officer said 83% of the clinicians the company surveyed use AI with no employer policy.
- Deployment Sept 22, 2026Jane Moran, Mass General Brigham's chief information and digital officer, told the World Medical Innovation Forum on Tuesday that the system lets employees use two versions of OpenAI's tools, has Anthropic's Claude in a pilot ring-fenced inside its own environment, recently signed with OpenEvidence, runs Microsoft Copilot internally and keeps anything that touches patient data inside systems it controls, Becker's Hospital Review reported; agents that act across platforms are not allowed. The system's governance has gone through three versions since 2024, from usage standards to risk frameworks to what Moran called strategic prioritization, "not 1,000 flowers blooming." In a second Becker's piece the same day, Michael Sweet, Brigham's chief information officer, said every AI tool gets a decision date at launch for production or shutdown; Parkview's Hasan Ahmad called the kill switch "not optional, it's part of the design requirements"; and HealthPartners' Maggie Helms said her organization will not let an agent adjudicate a clinical disagreement. Outside the hotel, the Massachusetts Nurses Association rallied Tuesday and Wednesday against what it calls Mass General Brigham's focus on AI and corporate priorities over staffing, citing $22.8 billion in operating revenue and $2.39 billion in profit for fiscal 2025 and the chief executive's $9.2 million pay; about 4,000 Brigham nurses vote Thursday on authorizing an open-ended strike, after a one-day strike in July that The Boston Globe called the largest nurses' strike in state history. The Globe's account of the dispute centers on wages and health insurance, and the union's own release leads with staffing.
- Evidence Sept 22, 2026Xu and colleagues at Zhongshan Hospital in Shanghai reported in npj Digital Medicine on FARUSS, a six-axis robotic arm that positions the probe and scans the thyroid on its own using deep learning, feeding an AI platform that detects nodules and assigns TI-RADS categories. The team tested it prospectively against conventional scans in 262 participants at three Chinese institutions from March 2024 to August 2025: intraclass correlations for thyroid measurements were 0.76 to 0.80, nodule identification matched 85.6% of the time, and TI-RADS agreement after a sonologist revised the AI's call reached kappa 0.75 to 0.88. The robot was slower to scan, 202 seconds against 147, and the AI read faster than a human, 183 seconds against 254. In the authors' triage scheme, the system avoided 74.8% of on-site examinations that turned out not to be needed and missed 19.2% of the fine-needle aspiration recommendations a human would have made. Three authors work for the technology companies involved, and the study was funded by the Chinese government.Source: npj Digital Medicine
- Workforce Sept 22, 2026Luis Taveras, Jefferson's chief digital and information officer, presented the figures at a Becker's Hospital Review conference on Sept. 14, and Becker's published them Tuesday: 1 million hours in the first year, nearly all from the ambient documentation rollout to physicians and advanced practice providers, with adoption at 15% to 20% of the system's 5,000 physicians and a goal of 70% to 80%. Taveras said the system keeps a tracker, "so it's not just a number that we make up," and that the nursing rollout logged 350,000 hours by April, with about 30% of pilot nurses still hesitant because nurses chart in flowsheets rather than narrative; a commitment of 10 million hours by 2028 is now systemwide policy. At 15% to 20% of 5,000 physicians, or 750 to 1,000 physicians plus the advanced practice providers, 1 million hours works out to several hundred hours per user per year, more than an hour of every working day; the figure comes from the system's own tracker rather than a trial. A second Becker's piece the same day reported how systems value the hours: UT Health San Antonio's chief value officer counts the avoided replacement cost of a physician, $300,000 and up, as the return on ambient dictation, in a year when hospital margins average 0.75%. Jefferson's presentation did not say what the saved hours were converted into.
- Regulation Sept 18, 2026In a Sept. 18 letter to Dr. Mehmet Oz that Fierce Healthcare reported Tuesday, Dr. John Whyte, the AMA's chief executive, asked CMS to "stay the course" on the electronic prior authorization (ePA) requirements of the 2024 interoperability rule, whose API deadline is Jan. 1, 2027, and not to grant payers or vendors broad enforcement discretion through 2027. Whyte called the insurers' position that physicians are unwilling to use ePA a "manufactured problem," said practices are not getting implementation timelines or testing from their EHR vendors and plans, and asked CMS to require vendors to publish both. In the AMA's own December survey, 33% of 1,000 physicians said they believed the payers' 2025 pledges would make a difference, and the projected savings are about $15 billion over 10 years. Holland & Knight's summary of the more than 40,000 comments on the 2027 fee schedule lists widespread opposition to mandatory ePA "before the underlying technology is broadly available and proven effective," alongside opposition to the conversion factor cut, the same-day E/M reduction and the remote monitoring restrictions; the final rule is due around Nov. 1.
- Regulation Sept 22, 2026The Senate HELP Committee hears the nomination of Dr. Heidi Overton, who also holds a Ph.D., to be commissioner of food and drugs on Thursday, Sept. 24, at 10:30 a.m. Eastern time in 430 Dirksen, a hearing announced Sept. 17. Overton is a deputy director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, according to BioSpace, which reported in August that the FDA planned a deputy commissioner for "the intersection between health and AI"; The Cancer Letter reported Sept. 11 that Jared Seehafer, a former regulatory-software founder and FDA policy adviser, now holds that job as the inaugural deputy commissioner for technology and AI. The nominee would inherit an Aug. 18 discussion paper that proposes testing generative models the way a clinician is tested, with comments due Oct. 19; formal guidance promised by the agency's digital health center; a Sept. 17 final order that kept radiology AI under 510(k) review; and an agency that STAT reported lost about 5,000 people last year and cannot rehire fast enough. The FDA's AI-enabled device page, refreshed Tuesday, now says "over 1,600," up from the 1,500 in this site's long read.