Tech

Amelia Kinsinger, Photos: Adobe Stock

Lately, hospitals and tech companies have been speaking the same language—or should we say LLM. They have been announcing seemingly nonstop partnerships to create new AI tools for healthcare.

The announcements are part of a push by tech companies to gain access to valuable health data. For hospitals, the partnerships offer AI expertise and the opportunity to implement AI tools faster.

Let’s just name a few: Mayo Clinic and Microsoft, Phillips and WellSpan Health, Samsung and Mass General Brigham, Boston Children’s and OpenAI, Cleveland Clinic and Palantir, HCA Healthcare and Google, and Amazon One Medical and Rush University System for Health.

Provider and tech partnerships are not necessarily new. They were very popular during the Covid-19 pandemic, for example, amid the rise of telehealth. Take Best Buy and Atrium Health for example, or Microsoft and Epic.

But now with the rise of generative AI in healthcare, from the use of scribes, to research tools and back office systems, tech is becoming a bigger part of the medical industry, experts told us.

Keep reading here.—CM

      

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payers

Benjamin Kornitzer

Health insurers are eager to regain patients’ and providers’ trust, but they have a long road ahead.

Government investigations over the last few years have alleged major payers were improperly denying prior authorization (PA) requests, particularly for costly post-acute care, and potentially with the help of AI algorithms that lacked adequate clinician oversight.

Payers have made attempts to win back trust through initiatives like a June 2025 pledge to improve PA. But that year, just 1 in 3 physicians told the American Medical Association they thought the 2025 commitment would make a “meaningful” difference for patients and physicians. Then in May 2026, nearly 30 healthcare organizations, including payers, pledged to be early adopters of new electronic PA requirements that will roll out in 2027.

Survey results shared in a July 15 press release by CVS Health’s Aetna suggests trust has increased slightly. PA is still a source of concern, however: 84% of survey respondents ranked administrative burden as their top challenge, pointing “overwhelmingly to managing patient records or prior authorization” as the source of the burden, according to the release.

Benjamin Kornitzer, chief medical officer of Aetna, told Healthcare Brew the survey results make him optimistic. He said Aetna will continue to work to regain provider trust, and technology may be a key tool.

Check out the interview here.—CC

      

tech

Unsplash

Every day, wearables track millions of data points about consumers’ health. But, for the most part, doctors don’t access that data.

Only 6% of US physicians have actually integrated wearable data into clinical workflows, according to a survey released July 8 by the American Medical Association (AMA) Center for Digital Health and AI, in partnership with Medscape.

The data is being held back from clinical use due to difficulties in putting it into electronic health records in an easy and standardized way, concerns about the accuracy of these devices, and concerns about legal liability, AMA CEO John Whyte told Healthcare Brew.

“If it doesn’t feed into the [electronic health record] where I need it to be, I’m not going to use it. If it doesn’t help synthesize data that I can ultimately oversee, it’s not going to be as valuable,” Whyte said.

Find out what the holdup is here.—CC

      

vital signs

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top healthcare reads.

Stat: 52. That’s how many measles cases have been confirmed in California in the first six and a half months of 2026. By comparison, there were a total of 25 cases in all of 2025. (LA Times)

Quote: “I see what happens when children with measles aren’t able to breathe on their own, and they’re in a hospital bed with a cannula in their nose, struggling to breathe, an IV in their arm because they can’t drink on their own. And the child is terrified, and the parents are scared that their child might die.”—Nathan Money, a Utah pediatrician, on treating unvaccinated children with measles (Wired)

Read: A Florida man is suing OpenAI, alleging ChatGPT provided him with “extremely dangerous medical recommendations” that threatened his health. (the New York Times)