Millions of prescriptions go unfilled every year and until now, the system had no way to see them.
In this interview, Dr. Lynne Nowak, Chief Data and Analytics Officer at Surescripts, joins Healthcare IT Today to discuss how her team is surfacing invisible medication gaps and tackling healthcare’s biggest workflow frustrations: prior authorization and prescription abandonment. She explains how Surescripts’ new First Fill Abandonment tool and touchless prior authorization are turning real-time data into timely care—helping patients start and stay on therapy sooner.
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Learn more about Surescripts at https://surescripts.com/
Find more great health IT content at https://www.healthcareittoday.com/
The vision for Optum Real is to create real-time transparency between payers and providers in the moments of care that matter. Current AI technology, according to Puneet Maheshwari, SVP, GM of Optum Real is making this possible now.
Optum is a major force in health care, serving nine out of ten health care systems and four out of five payers in the U.S. Optum Real is in pilot now with a number of health care organizations. During the pilot, the platform has achieved a 25% reduction in call volume in the first two weeks with one health care provider, a 42% reduction at another, and a reduction in errors in reimbursement submissions of up to 75% with a large health system in Minnesota.
Learn more about Optum Real: https://business.optum.com/en/operations-technology/optum-real.html
Healthcare IT Community: https://www.healthcareittoday.com/
According to research by enGen, a healthtech company that serves payers and providers with automated solutions, they found that each error in member enrollment data costs an average of $172 in fixes and downstream problems. A new solution called enGen enRoll(TM), an AI-driven collaboration between enGen and IBM, was designed to address this problem. Maynd Jolly, Chief Financial Officer and Senior Vice President of Client Partnership at enGen, and Matt Gierhart, Vice President of Product Management at IBM, discuss the implications and promise of the product in this interview at the recent HLTH Conference.
Learn more about enGen: https://goengen.com/
Learn more about IBM: https://www.ibm.com/industries/healthcare
Healthcare IT Community: https://www.healthcareittoday.com/
What do you do when your EHR vendor suddenly shuts down and you only have months to find a replacement? For Sound Physicians, that deadline sparked a bold pivot - one that put APIs and collaboration at the center of their technology strategy.
In this interview, Dria McCluskey, SVP of Innovation and Technology at Sound Physicians, and Venky Chellappa, VP of Sales and Business Development at CharmHealth, share how they tackled a high-stakes RFP and built a partnership that will help both organizations in the years ahead. What could have been a crisis, became a solid foundation through close collaboration, dedicated executive leaders, and a willingness to stretch in new directions.
The lesson for all Health IT vendors: It’s not always about features. It’s about being easy to work with too.
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Learn more about Sound Phyisicians at https://www.soundphysicians.com/
Learn more about CharmHealth at https://www.charmhealth.com/
Find more great health IT content at https://www.healthcareittoday.com/
Everyone talks about AI fixing documentation. But the real story is whether patients and clinicians will trust it enough to use it every day.
In this interview, Dr. Randy Thompson, Chief Health Analytics Officer at Billings Clinic, shares what it takes to bring Oracle Health’s AI tools into daily practice across Montana’s largest independent health system. From rethinking governance structures to gaining patient buy-in even during psychiatric visits. Thompson explains why adoption depends on building confidence first. Along the way, he also reveals an unexpected outcome: providers found the AI agent often produced better notes than they would have written on their own.
How is your organization handling patient consent and governance for AI tools? Drop your thoughts in the comments.
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Learn more about Billings Clinic at https://www.billingsclinic.com/
Learn more about Oracle Health at https://www.oracle.com/industries/healthcare/
Find more great health IT content at https://www.healthcareittoday.com/
Few patients take a paper prescription down to the local pharmacy any more. The modern era of prescribing is shockingly complex and getting more so, according to Dr. Colin Banas, Chief Medical Officer, and Drew Hunsinger, Head of Growth, at DrFirst.
Banas says that the goal at DrFirst, a 25-year-old company, has always been to provide an end-to-end medication journey: for patients, providers, payers, and pharmacies. Hunsinger points out that the prescribing workflow involves payers, PBMs, and even drug companies.
Plus, they share how many of the EHR companies they work with are happy to offload all these medication management complexities to DrFirst so that as EHR product managers, they can focus on other EHR innovations. Not to mention EHR vendors can benefit from the innovations that DrFirst continues to implement since their major focus is medication management.
Learn more about DrFirst: https://drfirst.com/
Healthcare IT Community: https://www.healthcareittoday.com/
emtelligent offers a variety of AI-based services in health care. In a recent interview at the HLTH conference with Tim O’Connell, MD, Co-Founder and CEO of emtelligent, explains how they ensure a good ROI, keep deployments affordable, and make each pilot a success.
The three services offered by emtelligent are:
* Medical Document AI: ingests documents such as faxes, splits them into separate documents, and categorizes them.
* Medical language engine: interprets and structures the content
* Chart review: offers a graphical user interface to make reviews more accurate and efficient for prior authorization, legal reviews, etc.
Learn more about emtelligent: https://emtelligent.com/
Healthcare IT Community: https://www.healthcareittoday.com/
Although providers and payers feel like they're engaged in an epic, ongoing battle over claims, Abhinay Vyas, Co-Founder and Chief Data Officer at RapidClaims, believes that approvals can increase when both realize that they are fundamentally interested in truth. RapidClaims' AI-driven revenue cycle tools help to uncover the complexities in care and provide the evidence to back up a claim.
Vyas says that AI has to be both accurate and explainable to be adopted. RapidClaims' algorithms are self-hosted and self-trained. They are flexible enough to support every specialty and adapt to the needs of different institutions. To this end, they have more than 118 AI models, which they set against each other to eliminate errors and hallucinations.
Lisa Rosenkoetter, Vice President of Sales at RapidClaims, says they address cost, revenue, and compliance. As the complexity and severity of health conditions increase, providers "need to recoup every dollar for the care you've provided."
Learn more about RapidClaims: https://www.rapidclaims.ai/
Healthcare IT Community: https://www.healthcareittoday.com/
PointClickCare is a major EHR service with a 25-year history, originally focused on post-acute care settings such as skilled nursing and assisted living but has expanded to provide health it services to the full spectrum of healthcare provider organizations. As they've expanded their services, one of the areas they wanted to help was care transitions between acute care and post acute care and back. After a two-year investment in AI, they've enhanced the services they offer to make transitions go more smoothly and intelligently.
Plus, they have recently unveiled a service named Chart Advisor within their skill nursing EHR. It looks through freeform documentation such as progress notes to find important information that isn't in the structured fields and could have an immediate impact on care. For instance, if the patient had a fall in the hospital, have the doctors performed the necessary assessments and accommodations to prevent more falls?
According to Chief Revenue Officer Brian Drozdowicz, who we interviewed at the HLTH conference, searches through plain text documentation can help with both liability and reimbursement. Leveraging technology to search and sort through all the unstructured data in documentation is really the key to improving care and revenue.
Learn more about PointClickCare: https://pointclickcare.com/
Healthcare IT Community: https://www.healthcareittoday.com/
Physician advisory programs, which educate clinicians in peer-to-peer fashion, are growing in several ways. This video at the AHIMA Annual Conference explores the many uses of these programs, as well as how to implement them and make sure they're effective. The speakers are Dr. Adriane Martin, Vice President of Physician Services at Enjoin, a CDI consulting firm, and Shameka Hooks, Executive Director, Midcycle Operations: Coding, CDI, Revenue Integrity and HIM at WakeMed, a teaching hospital with 970 beds and more than 1200 employees.
Learn more about Enjoin: https://www.enjoincdi.com/
Healthcare IT Community: https://www.healthcareittoday.com/
T.H.E. Clinic, a federally qualified health center serving a low-income communmity in Los Angeles, recently reduced missed patient visits ("no-shows") from 25-28% to 13-14%. To learn more about this exceptional improvement, we sat down with CIO Wilson Santos who describes how the healow AI-Powered No-Show Prediction Model helped their clinic achieve this goal.
Many factors create what Santos called an "unacceptable" rate of missed visits. People are tied down taking care of family members, forget visits, get busy, or simply get well before the time of their visit and fail to cancel.
T.H.E. Clinic was one of first adopters of healow AI-powered no-show prediction model, and after implementing it saw the great results. The clinic now identifies the appointments most likely to be missed through predictive analytics on EHR data, and dedicates front desk staff to contacting them.
Learn more about T.H.E. Clinic, Inc.: https://www.tohelpeveryone.org/
Learn more about eClinicalWorks: https://www.eclinicalworks.com/
Healthcare IT Community: https://www.healthcareittoday.com/
AI has proven itself as a way to remove the burden of scanning, identifying, and uploading information. For Nemours Children's Health, AI solutions from Vyne Medical completely restructured and optimized their document handling practices.
Cathy Murphy, HIM Operations Manager at Nemours Children’s Health, gives an account in this video of what data management consisted of before automation, and how Vyne's automated systems have transformed their practices. With the same staff, they can meet turnaroud times consistently and relieve clerical burdens on staff.
Andrew Loeffler, Technical Project Manager at Vyne Medical, meets with Nemours every two weeks to check on the progress of current data collection projects and discover new ones. Most of the operations that used to be performed through a sequence of manual steps are now available through the Vyne API. They continuously look at processes that are still done manually to find automation possibilities.
Learn more about Nemours Children’s Health: https://www.nemours.org/
Learn more about Vyne Medical: https://vynemedical.com/
Healthcare IT Today Community: https://healthcareittoday.com/
Although ambient voice transcriptions driven by AI are seeing widespread adoption in healthcare institutions, only 20%-40% of clinicians adopt it in each institution, according to Dr. Thomas Kelly, CEO & Co-Founder at Heidi. However, when Heidi's AI medical scribe is brought in, they achieve an average 60-70% adoption by clinicians.
This is because they focus directly on how to help clinicians do their jobs, according to Kelly, although they don't ignore the larger issues such as compliance and integration with EHRs. By maintaining independence from the EHR, and by offering many different templates for each specialty, Heidi allows more customization.
Learn more about Heidi: https://www.heidihealth.com/
Healthcare IT Community: https://www.healthcareittoday.com/
Dr. Mike Gao, President of Smarter Technologies, says that the distinction between clinical care and revenue cycle management (RCM) was a historical decision that is no longer valid. Clinical care is determined partly by what payers cover and what proof they require of the patient condition. In turn, the codes and other information used for billing are summaries of what happened in the clinical visit.
In this environment, doctors have to take into account not just the symptoms and history presented by the patient, but the patient's environment and insurance coverage. No one can keep all this in mind.
So AI tools such as Smarter Technologies provide a "super-intelligence" that can combine the data needed by the physician. Dr. Ruben Amarasingham, Co-Founder of Pieces Technologies which is now part of Smarter Technologies, says that AI can bring doctors "real contextual understanding of what's happening to their patients."
Learn more about Smarter Technologies: https://www.smartertech.com/
Healthcare IT Community: https://www.healthcareittoday.com/
Hyro's Responsible AI Agent platform enables health systems to safely automate patient workflows and conversations across key channels such as call centers, websites, SMS, and mobile apps, supporting use cases like scheduling, appointments, and prescription refills and more. But CEO and Co-Founder Israel Krush thinks that providers should look beyond just the high costs of call centers toward their potential for generating revenue.
Instead of being a "black box," a call center that leverages technology like that offered by Hyro measures how many calls were made and what the conversion rate (appointments scheduled) was.
To handle detailed and specific workflows (such as "I'm looking for a dermatologist in a specific area") Krush says that Hyro supplements the traditional large language models (LLMs) with "small language models."
Learn more about Hyro: https://www.hyro.ai/
Healthcare IT Community: https://www.healthcareittoday.com/
Thibodaux Regional Health System, a Louisiana health system with both a hospital and clinics, has focused on process improvement to pursue what they call “patient-centered excellence.” In this video, CEO Greg Stock and CIO Bryan Samaha talk about their use of the MEDITECH EHR and how they are reducing errors and improving clinical quality.
Advantages they cite for MEDITECH include the balance between a relatively low operating cost and proven results, as well as the ability to maintain their own autonomy over their EHR without being at the mercy of another health system. The latter advantage allows them to maintain control over downtime, updates, the flexibility of the EHR, and other operations. Stock refers to the partnership as a “marriage between a hospital and an IT system,” which now spans 24 years.
Learn more about Thibodaux Regional Health System: https://www.thibodaux.com/
Learn more about MEDITECH: https://ehr.meditech.com/
Community health centers make up the largest primary care network in the U.S. health care system, serving 1 out of 7 Americans—and in rural areas, 1 out of 3. Dr. Kyu Rhee, President and CEO of the National Association of Community Health Centers, says that their patient base has tripled over the past 20 to 25 years, and he expects it to triple again over the next 20.
Watch the video for details about the reach of community health centers, the role of the National Association of Community Health Centers, and Rhee's hopes for technology to meet clinicians' needs.
Learn more about National Association of Community Health Centers: https://www.nachc.org/
Reimbursements in health care have gotten more complex with the growing importance of risk-based, value-based plans and behavior change. In this video interview, Tiffany Waltos, Director of Revenue and Analytics at Community Health Care in Northern Ohio, discusses today’s pressures on revenue cycle management and ways health care providers can respond.
Community Health Care, with 19 offices and 65 providers with a focus on primary care, realized they needed to put clear rules in place for coding and billing and create consistency among doctors so that submissions would be approved the first time around. One of the big things that helped them do this was to contract for the RCM (Revenue Cycle Management) consulting services offered by their eClinicalWorks EHR vendor. Working together they were able to address some of the more complex issues they faced and improve their RCM efforts.
Learn more about Community Health Care: https://www.chci.com/
Learn more about eCW: https://www.eclinicalworks.com/Healthcare IT Community: https://www.healthcareittoday.com/
[SPONSORED] Empty shelves in a hospital aren’t just an inconvenience—they can delay care. Other industries solved this problem years ago with predictive tools and smarter supply chains.
At the 2025 Oracle Health Summit, Kristen Miles, Vice President of Healthcare Product Strategy at Oracle, discusses how automation, robotics, and AI are reshaping supply chain management in healthcare. Miles explains how Oracle is adapting lessons from retail and logistics, integrating them directly with Oracle’s EHR, and helping clinicians see inventory status at the bedside.
Do you believe that the lessons from retail can be effectively applied in healthcare? Share your thoughts in the comment.
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Learn more about Oracle Health at https://www.oracle.com/health/
Find more great health IT content at https://www.healthcareittoday.com/
In a recent interview at the eClinicalWorks National Conference, Josh Baker, Operations Manager at Orthopaedic Institute of Ohio, reports on some time-saving features offered by the eClinicalWorks EHR. A combination of mobile device support, rules engines, and AI takes administrative burdens off of clinical and support staff alike.
The Orthopaedic Institute of Ohio has 12 locations in northwestern Ohio and sees about 900-1000 patients per day. They have used eClinicalWorks since 2006.
Learn more about Orthopaedic Institute of Ohio: https://www.orthoohio.com/
Learn more about eCW: https://www.eclinicalworks.com/
Healthcare IT Community: https://www.healthcareittoday.com/