Deployment
21 items from the daily postsWhere AI is actually being switched on: health systems, record vendors, the model companies, and AI-first care. Each item links to the day it ran and to its original source.
- Deployment Sept 23, 2026Fierce Healthcare reported that Epic CEO Judy Faulkner told a conference audience this week that the company had paused most technology development, roughly six weeks of work, to concentrate on security, and that a spokesperson then said the roadmap "hasn't changed since it was presented at Epic's August 2026 Users Group Meeting." Epic's full statement lists what continues, including expanded AI capabilities, Agent Factory, EpicOps and interoperability for prior authorization, and says the company is "participating in Project Glasswing," the Anthropic program that lets an unreleased model hunt for vulnerabilities in partners' code. Epic's chief security officer, Stirling Martin, has said the model finds things in a codebase of several hundred million lines that his developers cannot see.
- Deployment Sept 22, 2026Reuters reported Tuesday that OpenEvidence, already free to clinicians in the United States and Europe, will be free in about 100 countries, among them Uganda, Sudan, Haiti and Mongolia, with Anthropic supplying the models; neither company disclosed terms. U.S. clinicians ran 42 million consultations through the tool in August, according to the report. Daniela Amodei, Anthropic's president, said the market alone "would not let it happen," and The Next Web reported that each version is meant to be adapted to local disease patterns and diagnostic resources. On Sept. 16, Memorial Sloan Kettering put its OncoKB genomic annotations inside OpenEvidence, in Epic, at the point of care. A June Nature Medicine paper found two leading clinical AI tools no better than a Google AI overview on physicians' real questions, and on Sept. 3 it drew a formal critique for contaminated benchmarks and a narrow real-world test.
- Deployment Sept 23, 2026Oracle Health announced Wednesday five tools, all due in "the coming months": a prior authorization tool that checks coverage, pulls documentation requirements, prefills the request and works it with the payer; a "clinical document quality integrity" review that looks for gaps in the note and surfaces coding recommendations; charge capture; professional-fee coding recommended from the documentation; and an appeals tool that analyzes payment variances and assembles the packet. The announcement named no customers and gave no figures, and it quoted Seema Verma as saying AI "gives us an opportunity to prevent revenue cycle problems before they lead to denials." The same day, at Mass General Brigham's forum, Colin McHugh, chief executive of Southern New Hampshire Health, described the current state as "the bot wars," with payers denying by algorithm and providers answering by algorithm. Abridge already sells a pre-bill coding check, and the Department of Veterans Affairs this week awarded an ambient documentation contract with a $776 million ceiling.
- Deployment Sept 22, 2026The North Carolina Collaborative Health AI Network launched Tuesday with a three-year grant from The Duke Endowment and a roster that includes UNC Health, Duke Health, the Sheps Center and the Duke-Margolis Institute. Its stated purpose is to help rural and resource-limited hospitals and clinics learn about, choose and safely run AI tools. UNC Health's David McSwain called the widening digital divide "a very real and poorly addressed risk of rapid AI growth in healthcare."From the Sept 24, 2026 post · Source: UNC-Chapel Hill
- 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."
- 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.
- Deployment Sept 21, 2026Becker's Hospital Review asked seven health systems how they handle the AI features Epic now ships by the dozen with each upgrade. Rush's chief information officer, Jeff Gautney, said a clinical registry task that had taken five people reviewing charts under an outsourced contract of about $1 million a year now runs on Layer Health, while Epic has been "threatening for two years to deliver a product." Of the five jobs, he said: "That's not a job that's coming back." Seattle Children's runs an AI Review Board, chaired by its chief medical information officer, Clara Lin, that ranks features by expected return before anyone pilots them, because "it's impossible, obviously, to do a six-month pilot with every single one." Andrew Rosenberg, Michigan Medicine's former chief information officer, described the default: "We'll start with Epic, and even if it isn't as good, it's good enough." Sam Amirfar of Brooklyn Hospital Center said: "We prefer not to go first." The five Rush positions were administrative chart-abstraction roles at a single hospital.
- Deployment Sept 21, 2026DexCare, a patient-access platform that says it has handled more than 10 million bookings for 57 million patients at systems including Kaiser Permanente, Piedmont, Texas Health Resources and Tampa General, announced the acquisition on Monday; terms were not disclosed. Mila's agents make the outbound calls and texts that a call center used to make, to schedule visits, prepare patients for them and follow up afterward, and the company said the agents produce a 54% patient response rate on outreach, cut no-show rates in half and lift revenue 18%; the figures are the company's own, with no published study behind them. Tampa General's Peter Chang said DexCare codified 260 scheduling policies for his system and found more than 50 gaps in them. Fierce Healthcare reported two similar moves last week: Hello Patient bought Converse Health on Sept. 17 to add referral and fax intake, authorization paperwork and registration to its patient-conversation agents, and Luma Health's Navigator agent now rebooks missed appointments and closes care gaps on its own. Zocdoc has also opened its rails to Gemini and Amazon.
- Deployment Sept 20, 2026Darran Foo, Asia-Pacific chief medical information officer at Heidi, told the HIMSS Asia-Pacific meeting in Singapore that the company's ambient scribe supports 2.8 million patient visits a week across 190 countries and 110 languages, and that a New Zealand emergency department cut documentation time from 17 minutes to four per patient. The figures are the vendor's, presented from a conference stage and unaudited, and no published study was cited for the New Zealand result. Foo also cited a survey Heidi published in July of 1,823 clinicians in 25 countries: 86% said they use AI daily or several times a week, 83% said they do so without employer guidance or a formal policy, and 68% named hallucination as their top concern. The 83% figure is consistent with an Imprivata survey of U.S. health system leaders released last week and covered in the Sept. 15 post, in which 72% reported AI deployed without IT approval.
- Deployment Sept 18, 2026Lee Schwamm, Yale New Haven Health's chief digital health officer, said at the Becker's health IT conference in Chicago that the system is "not evaluating launching a pilot unless the executive sponsor commits to paying for it if it's successful," and that it pushes back on vendor deals that pass frontier-model costs through with a markup. Jeff Gautney, Rush's chief information officer, said vendor pricing has moved from subscriptions to token consumption, that every platform has its own console and that "there's not a common way across those platforms to really do financial modeling"; Rush has spent 18 months building patient-facing agents for hours, directions and refill requests, the second most common reason patients call. University of Utah Health's Donna Roach said her clinicians say "give it to me, quick, quick, quick" while finance says "pump the brakes," with about 70 use cases in development and 20 running. Under Schwamm's rule, a documentation tool that returns time to physicians would continue past its pilot only if an executive sponsor had agreed in advance to pay for it.
- Deployment Sept 17, 2026Frank Liao, who leads digital health and emerging technology at UW Health, told Becker's that one platform upgrade brought more than 100 AI features spanning several software versions, that the system triaged them into risk tiers with only a handful in the top tier, and that governance was widened to include human resources and administrative leaders because the features no longer stop at the clinic door. Responsibility for outcomes sits with the business unit that uses the tool, Liao said, adding that "governance actually allowed us to go faster." UCLA Health's chief AI officer, Paul Lukac, said his system has run a biweekly AI review for about nine months. In hospitals running Epic or Oracle record systems, AI features arrive with version upgrades rather than through separate purchasing decisions, and at UW Health the governance review, rather than the departments that use the tools, determines which features are switched on.
- Deployment Sept 16, 2026Zocdoc's Care Access Network lets outside platforms book real-time appointments with the marketplace's more than 200,000 providers across 10,000 insurance plans, using data feeds, an application programming interface (API) or, for AI assistants, a Model Context Protocol server, the company said Sept. 16. Named partners are Google's Gemini, Amazon Health AI, Yelp, Healthgrades, Blue Shield of California and WellHive. For Blue Shield, Zocdoc reported 2 million bookable hours opened in 90 days and a 600% increase in booked appointments with a six-day average wait; the figures are the company's own. The same week, Ferry Health came out of stealth with $9 million from Andreessen Horowitz and Index to run AI agents that phone clinics and book on a patient's behalf.
- Deployment Sept 17, 2026GW RhythmX's platform reads the chart, guidelines, care gaps, social and financial determinants, payer requirements and formulary, and hands the clinician a next-best-action recommendation during the visit rather than after it, the companies said in a Sept. 17 release. Phase one covers 30 physicians and advanced practice providers in family and internal medicine across two markets for 90 days, out of 473 primary care clinicians in the medical group, Fierce Healthcare reported. The company's reference customer is Presbyterian Healthcare Services, where it said the tool delivered 17,000 personalized responses and, in its chief executive's words, "supported $1.1 million in condition capture" over six months. Condition capture is a coding measure, not a clinical outcome. Payer requirements, including prior authorization rules, and the formulary are among the platform's inputs, and its recommendations arrive inside the clinician's electronic health record (EHR).
- Deployment Sept 14, 2026The pre-bill review product compares coded diagnoses and diagnosis-related groups (DRGs) with the clinical documentation before a claim goes out and surfaces supporting evidence for clinical documentation integrity and coding teams, without changing the note or the codes, Fierce Healthcare reported. Reid Health in Indiana is the named early customer. Abridge said it works with 300 large health systems and handles more than 100 million conversations a year; both figures are the company's own. Shiv Rao said health systems "aren't reimbursed for the care they deliver. They're reimbursed for the care they document that they delivered." The tool draws on the same ambient recording that produces the clinical note.From the Sept 16, 2026 post · Source: Fierce Healthcare
- Deployment Sept 15, 2026CareIntellect for Operations runs two proprietary models, Pressure Forecast and Estimated Day of Discharge, on bed, staffing and patient data to give capacity managers a three-day view, GE HealthCare said. The system is live at Duke and Queen's in Honolulu. Duke's patient-flow lead said it lets her team move faster from analysis to action. The company has published no accuracy or outcome figures.From the Sept 16, 2026 post · Source: Fierce Healthcare
- Deployment Sept 9, 2026The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) is paying $62.7 million to Kaiser, Duke, Stanford, Tempus, UpDoc and Atman to build agents that assess symptoms, titrate guideline-directed therapy and order labs inside a physician-prescribed plan, with mandatory escalation and FDA authorization packages due within two years, STAT and Fierce Healthcare reported. Kaiser will run a trial of about 2,500 patients. A health system chief medical information officer described the approach as the shift from human-in-the-loop to exception-based oversight.
- Deployment Jul 30, 2026Akido Labs describes itself as the first AI-native health system, with 1 million patients, 100 clinics, medical assistants running AI-guided visits with a physician approving remotely and, by its own figure, four to five times the patients per physician. No outcomes trial has been published. Hims & Hers said AI answers 80% of the questions from weight-loss patients on its new care platform. Doctronic's Utah refill sandbox remains at 100% physician sign-off after seven months.
- Deployment Aug 20, 2026At its August user group meeting, Epic shipped Ergo Visit, live at Ochsner since Aug. 3, in which the assistant drafts the note and the orders for the physician to review; an Agent Factory for building no-code agents, widely available in 2027; and a generative model trained on 310 million patients' records to predict readmission and stroke risk. Oracle extended its clinical agent to nurses this week, and OpenAI's ChatGPT for Healthcare now reads Epic charts at UCSF, Healthcare Dive and Fierce Healthcare reported.
- Deployment Sept 15, 2026The Sept. 15 Imprivata survey of 250 health system leaders responsible for identity security or AI strategy found 83% have AI across multiple departments, 28% have agentic AI in production and 44% are piloting it. It also found 79% expect agents to change clinical workflows significantly, 88% expect agents to act with some autonomy and 17% consider their current identity controls adequate. Imprivata sells identity management software, and the figures are the company's own. Advocate Health and Penn Medicine leaders described the same pattern of unapproved AI use at Becker's Health IT conference the same day.
- Deployment Sept 14, 2026Advocate Health paused an ambient voice documentation rollout for nurses after finding that little inpatient nursing care is done by voice, Dr. Bobbie Byrne, the system's chief information officer, said at Becker's Health IT conference in Chicago; nurses chart in structured flowsheets, not narrative notes. Byrne also said AI raises the cost of health care in total, not for any one organization. Dr. Mitchell Schnall of Penn Medicine cited roughly 30% efficiency gains in pharmacy prior authorizations and said jobs change and the system commits to retraining rather than guaranteeing roles. Mayo Clinic said its Abridge-built nursing tool has made documentation latency an obsolete metric. Mercy, FMOL, Northeast Georgia, Mount Sinai Miami Beach, Jefferson and Northwell are running or planning nursing ambient documentation, and Mercy reported 22% less flowsheet time per shift on three pilot units.
- Deployment Sept 15, 2026Knowtex, which won a $15 million Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) contract in October 2025 after the VA's ambient-scribe tech sprint evaluated more than 150 tools, said it is live at 79 VA medical centers across 10 Veterans Integrated Service Networks within six months, with 88% sustained clinician adoption, 450,000 documentation hours saved and more than 300 customer organizations. The new lab will build specialty-specific models and evaluation benchmarks, the company said. All figures are the company's own. The VA is the largest single employer of physicians in the country.