Health Tech Bites

HTB::The Week the Guardrails Moved

Headline 1: Trump Signs Executive Order Blocking State AI Regulations in Healthcare (STAT News, Dec 11, 2025) — A messy state by state AI rulebook may get replaced by one lane, which means your internal governance becomes the real guardrail.
Headline 2: HHS Proposes Radical Overhaul to EHR Certification, Slashing 34 Criteria (STAT News, Dec 11, 2025) — If the federal checklist shrinks, this is your chance to stop buying “certified” and start contracting for measurable data flow in real workflows.
Headline 3: AARP Study: Tech Use Surges Among Adults 50 Plus, With Smartphone Ownership at 90% and AI Use Rising to 30% (AARP, Dec 2025) — Older adults are already digital, so the market is no longer about adoption, it’s about trust, usability, and follow-through.

HTB:: What Worked in 2025

In this episode we pull apart Rock Health’s new 2026 innovation map, walk through the six lanes they say actually mattered in 2025, then camp out in the AI lane to ask a simple question: what’s your park, and where do you need to stop pretending you belong?
 
 
AI Implementation Toolkit 

HTB::The Healthcare Return Desk

Headline 1: 40+ Health Systems Drop Medicare Advantage Contracts for 2026The MA growth story runs into its first real return line, as hospitals decide they would rather walk away than keep eating losses and fighting denials while seniors try to hang on to the doctors they trust.
Headline 2: Harvard Study Finds GLP-1s Have Little Impact on Obesity-Related Cancer RiskThe cancer halo around GLP-1s gets a reality check, nudging leaders to treat these drugs as powerful tools for weight and metabolic disease, not a shortcut around building a real prevention strategy.
Headline 3: AI Adoption Surges but 95 Percent of Projects Fail on WorkflowMIT’s ninety five percent failure stat meets a growing set of real wins, highlighting that the difference is not the model you bought but whether you walk a simple set of STEPS that give clinicians time back instead of homework.

HTB::Carrying Too Many Jars: Cost, Chronic Pain, and the Capacity Crunch

Headline 1: Brown & Brown 2026 Employer SurveyEmployers hand CFOs a permission slip to make cost control priority number one and quietly move “nice to have” benefits off the table.
Headline 2: Lin Health’s 11M Series A and Mayo PartnershipBehavior-first chronic pain care tries to prove it can live on real health system and payer rails, not just in the wellness tab.
Headline 3: WellSky 2025 Evolution of Care ReportFresh data on sicker patients, messier handoffs, and exhausted staff that shows exactly how overloaded post-acute and home-based care has become.
 
 
 
 
 

HTB:: ACCESS And The War For Chronic Care

In this episode of Health Tech Bites unpacks ACCESS, Medicare’s new chronic care model aimed at paying for what actually happens between visits, not just inside the clinic. The conversation digs into how ACCESS could reshape chronic care from punch-card phone calls to ongoing support woven into Tuesday afternoon life – and what that means for health plans, providers, and digital health vendors. Expect a clear-eyed look at who’s positioned to win, who’s at risk of getting buried in admin, and why this framework might finally force the industry to prove it can help real humans feel better between appointments, not just make dashboards greener.

HTB:: Do for one

Story 1: UnitedHealth to wind down most non-Optum revenue cycle contracts by 2026
Story 2: Elevance to roll out $0 primary care copays across its national ASO book in 2026
Story 3: Nvidia launches edge-based “AI doctor” toolkit with pilots at five major health systems
 
 
 

HTB:: Who You Innovation Actually Serves

Today’s BiteLocal coalitions are hacking their own benefits, employers are staring down rude 2026 cost projections, and Gen AI scribes just got their first real report card. The real question is not “what is new,” but “who actually gets equipped, encouraged, and empowered by all this.”
The Stories• Story 1: SF Chamber Care and the rise of local, chamber-backed coverage models• Story 2: Employers bracing for a 9 percent medical trend and rethinking the entire benefits chassis• Story 3: UCLA’s randomized AI scribe trial, where burnout relief shows up but magic productivity does not

HTB::Deductibles Dead, Workers Leaving, AI Saving Clinicians

Story 1 (Curative $150M Raise): Curative’s $150M Bet: Zero-Dollar Plans That Could Kill Deductibles Forever
Story 2 (Oscar Survey): 53% Will Quit for Better Insurance: The Benefits Exodus No Employer Can Ignore
Story 3 (Clinician-First AI): AI That Clinicians Actually Trust: The Burnout Fix Hiding in Plain Workflow

HTB:: The Wrong Place for the Right Tool

Story 1:Yara AI shut down its own mental-health chatbot after realizing the model worked too powerfully in contexts it couldn’t safely control.
Story 2:A surge of holiday health gadgets is creating a massive wave of unregulated health data as consumers build their own personal health stacks faster than the system can protect them.
Story 3:Tampa General transformed its call center almost overnight by deploying an AI voice agent named Amy that slashed wait times and abandonment rates.

HTB:: The Day the Gaps Got Exposed

Today’s Bite:
Today healthcare didn’t speed up — it jumped a gear and pretended nothing happened.
The Stories:
• The White House activates the CMS Health Tech Ecosystem – Real-time patient data just went from “someday” to “start preparing now.”• Cleveland Clinic collapses oncology turnaround times with Google Cloud AI – When results move from days to hours, expectations move with them.• House Rx raises $55M to rewrite specialty pharmacy – AI inside the clinic is coming for the slowest, messiest corner of drug access.
Quote of the Bite:
“If healthcare keeps speeding up, the organizations built for slowness won’t just struggle — they’ll get exposed.”