Weekly Health Tech Reads 10/5/25

CommonSpirit's 2025 financial results, the 2026 MA landscape, Assort's funding, and more

Author

Kevin O'Leary
October 05, 2025

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HOSPITALS

Commonspirit Health reported FY2025 business results

CommonSpirit held a Investor Presentation this week to review its FY2025 business results, providing an interesting glimpse into the performance of the organization as it gears up for a new bond issuance. On the whole, CommonSpirit generated $40 billion of revenue in its 2025 fiscal year (ending June 30) and $1.3 billion of EBITDA. CommonSpirit had $40.3 billion of expenses for the year, losing $225 million from operations in total. The operating loss was buoyed by the California Provider Fee Program, as it would have seen an operating loss of $687 million without that, compared to a $581 million operating loss the prior year. Meanwhile, CommonSpirit made $1.7 billion in investment income for FY2025, up from $1.5 billion FY2024.

A couple of key strategic takeaways:

  • CommonSpirit noted it is pleased with its key business performance drivers, as shown in the slide below. It’s interesting to see the uptick in revenue per adj admission in Q4 2025 in the top right. In the bottom left, labor as a % of revenue also improved meaningfully in Q4 2025. It’s interesting to think about the juxtaposition of the ‘why’ behind those two numbers and if that is evidence of some AI-driven financial improvement

  • Not surprisingly, CommonSpirit leadership expects OBBB to have a negative impact on the business, although that impact won’t be felt until 2028. They bucket the OBBB headwinds in the slide below. It’s interesting to see them call out that the rural health transformation program could be a tailwind starting in 2026

  • CommonSpirit is joining the chorus of provider organizations seeing a growth opportunity in ASCs. CommonSpirit noted it is exploring acquisitions here but won’t chase them at unreasonable prices. Also interesting to note on the slide below the innovation partnerships called out, where CommonSpirit is taking equity stakes in businesses.

MEDICARE ADVANTAGE

The Medicare Advantage picture in 2026 comes into focus

News has been trickling out this week about how the Medicare Advantage landscape is shifting for 2026 based on the CMS landscape file realeased. The headline is that UnitedHealthcare, Humana, and Aetna are all reducing the number of states / counties they will serve in 2026. This ATI Advisory report notes that collectively those organizations are exiting 41 counties and reducing their collective product offerings by 11%. The data from the report also indicated that regional carriers and provider-sponsored health plans are growing, with ATI noting that:

This marks a new phase in the MA market: growth is less about geographic saturation and more about focusing on populations and markets where plans can succeed clinically and financially.

Source: ATI Advisory

It’s an interesting shift in the market, most notably highlighted by the growth in the Special Needs Plan market, specifically C-SNP and D-SNP plans. The number of C-SNP plans offered is increasing by 42% from 2025 to 2026, from 391 to 556 plans. Still, you can see in the chart below the general shift in the market — across the country in almost every state there are fewer plans offered in 2026 than 2025:

Source: ATI Advisory

If you look in the Northeast, you’ll see that Vermont is by far the biggest drop in 2026. Vermont provides an interesting microcosm of the change afoot in the MA market, with this this LinkedIn post that Vermont will only have one Medicare Advantage carrier operating in the state in 2026. Only Humana will remain in the state, after UHC and Vermont Blue exited the market. On top of that, Humana will not be operating in all counties in Vermont, meaning some counties will have no access to MA products. Of the 51,000 Vermonters who currently have Medicare Advantage, the UHC and Vermont Blue exits mean 33,800 will lose their current coverage. You can see the tradeoffs of a disruption like this in the local media coverage there, with VT’s state health insurance director quoted below:

Carleton echoed this view: “There is a part of me that’s like, ‘Maybe people will be better off in certain circumstances where they’re not on an Advantage plan,’” he said. “Not always, though. I think there are people who it did work for, and I know that the Blue Cross plan did work for folks.”

He added that for his office, the biggest concern with these plans’ closures is the timing and volume of people affected. 

“When it happens all at once, like this, it is really a challenge. There is going to be a giant wave of folks who reach out to us during open enrollment this year.” 

Source: vtdigger

✍️ Going Deeper

Personally I struggle to square the news that regional plans are growing in 2026 while national plans are generally contracting with this chart below that I included in last weeks newsletter about the poor financials of regional health plans from this excellent HealthScape report:

Source: HealthScape

Conceptually, it does not seem like a recipe for financial success that you have the profit-conscious nationals pulling back product offerings while regional plans appear to be set to grow into that membership. HealthScape already noted that many regional plans likely have less than two years of cash. It’s not hard to envision a scenario where we see a lot of M&A activity among regional health plans next year. I’m pretty sure there will be folks looking to sell, although I’m less sure there will be very many folks looking to buy.

All in all, 2026 seems like it could be another very challenging year for the MA market as these plans grapple with the last year of the phase-in of v28 and adjust their product offerings for the new reality. It’ll be interesting to keep an eye on how brokers and consumers react to all this change — i.e. the pullback from PPOs in favor of more HMO models — and where the enrollment numbers for the broader landscape comes in for 2026.

AI

Assort’s rapid ascent to a $750 million valuation

Assort Health, a AI platform helping providers handle patient phone calls, officially announced a $76 million Series B, brining its total funding to $102 million. The Series B comes just four months after Assort raised a Series A as it is seeing rapid adoption from providers.

Per this LinkedIn post, you can see how Assort is growing rapidly as it has hit 40 million total phone calls answered on behalf of providers, less than two years after launching its product. I did the math on what that looks like for the monthly phone calls answered, the chart below:

In August, TechCrunch reported that this funding round is at a $750 million valuation and that Assort was on track to hit $3 million in annual recurring revenue at the time. That would imply Assort did roughly $250,000 in revenue in August across almost 7 million visits that month, meaning that it is generating roughly $0.04 per phone call.

Assort’s website is filled with impressive metrics it is generating on behalf of its provider clients, an seemingly indicator both of the incredibly poor state of provider scheduling today, and the relatively straightforward sales process for Assort. It’s also an interesting use case because you can call all of these providers and see how it’s implemented in action. For instance, one of its customer success stories is Barrington Orthopedic Specialists. The stats are really impressive, with $120k in incremental appointment revenue coming in from after-hours scheduling. It’s no wonder they want this service.

If you call Barrington Orthopedic Specialists — (847) 285-4200 — you can see Assort’s product in action. It’s an automated call tree that answers the phone. When you get into the scheduling part of the call tree it tells you that you’re talking to a virtual assistant, and goes through some questions to help schedule an appointment. It feels like the same automated call center technology I’m used to in other parts of life. So that seems like a pretty straightforward use case — and honestly the most confusing part of it all is why the current state of these systems is so poor. I’d prefer scheduling with a person when available (or just use online scheduling), but I’d also probably prefer this over waiting to talk to someone.

When you juxtapose that capability as an AI-based phone tree with them reportedly raising this round at 250x revenue, I think it is pretty indicative of the AI bubble we are currently in. It seems like there is going to be a very fast sprint here to either become the winning platform — or part of the platform — before the carnage sets in.

Other Top Headlines

  • Humana shared in an SEC filing on Thursday that it will have only 20% of Medicare Advantage members in 4 star plans in 2026. While it noted that these results are unacceptable, they are in line with its financial model and it reaffirmed guidance for 2026. Humana also reaffirmed its expectation that it will be able to double its individual MA margin in 2026 as it is confident in its pricing and plan design decisions.

  • Zelis Healthcare, the Bain Capital-backed healthcare payments platform, has reportedly hired banks ahead of a planned Q1 2026 IPO per Business Insider.

  • Peloton announced a new partnership with Hospital for Special Surgery as part of a broader product refresh focused on customer wellness. It appears that HSS will produce MSK-related content for Peloton. This idea of health systems as content creators is vaguely reminiscent of Northwell’s move last summer to create Northwell Studios.

  • The Trump administration announced a new initiative called TrumpRx, a government-run website to purchase medications. Pfizer is the first pharma company to agree to participate in the program, although as I read Pfizer’s press release on the matter I have zero clue what they actually agreed to. apparently agreed to participate The WSJ’s sub-headline of “If you are among the 90% of Americans who have health insurance, it’s unlikely to save you much money” seems like the takeaway here.

  • NeueHealth’s chapter as a public company officially came to a close this week as NEA closed on the transaction to take it private.

  • The Trump administration rebuked the Coalition for Health AI (CHAI) this week, with Deputy HHS Secretary Jim O’Neill saying that CHAI risks becoming a cartel attempting to corner the AI market.

  • The government shutdown is wreaking havoc on the telehealth and hospital at home markets, among others. This PBS coverage notes the uncertainty for telehealth at the moment as providers have to assess their risk tolerance for providing these services without payment, at least until the government reopens. The hospital-at-home program has less uncertainty, with Stat highlighting how programs are grinding to a halt across the country.

  • Specialty care marketplace Switchboard has acquired Conduce, an AI-driven tool for patient-provider matching.

  • Wysa acquired Kins, a virtual and at home physical therapy provider. Back in March, it was reported that Wysa acquired April Health, which expanded Wysa’s model from an AI-only technology that it deployed with the NHS to a human-centric model. At that time, Wysa noted that acquisition was necessary from a reimbursement perspective to grow here in the US. It’s interesting to see them now growing again and deploying AI into another care model.

Funding Announcements

  • Assort Health, an AI platform helping providers handle patient phone calls, announced a $76 million Series B, as discussed above.

  • Midi Health, a menopause care model, raised $50 million. The Business Insider article notes that Midi is now at a $150 million annual revenue run rate, up from $60 million at the end of 2024. If you assume Carta’s median dilution for Series C rounds here (it appears the Series B was close to the median), that would imply a ~$400 million valuation, which would imply a pretty reasonable 2.6x revenue valuation.

  • Visana Health, a women’s health care model, raised $24 million.

  • Neura Health, a neurology care model, raised $11.5 million.

  • Confido Health, an AI platform helping providers handle patient phone calls, raised $10 million.

  • Koda Health, an advance care planning platform, raised $7 million.

What I’m Reading

Thatch. Curing American healthcare through incentives and choice by Packy McCormick
I’m not sure you’ll find a more bullish case on ICHRA than this piece from a Thatch investor articulating why the ICHRA opportunity is going to change healthcare. I think it’s interesting to read this while thinking about the underlying goal for Thatch in publishing it now — to me it comes across as a grassroots advocacy piece ahead of potentially meaningful legislative change for ICHRA this fall. A lot of the article makes me scratch my head, particularly the notion that somehow ICHRA is going to make Prenuvo scans, Eight Sleep mattresses, Oura rings, etc, more affordable. Personally, it seems safe to say that ICHRA will be a meaningful healthcare market, netting out somewhere between the bear case and the bull case that is articulated here, driven by employer dissatisfaction with the cost increases they’re facing. But I also think it’s worth keeping in mind that employers are driving adoption of this product because they want to spend less, that means someone else is paying those costs. The 401k for healthcare moniker is a really powerful construct, but I also doubt that ICHRA will make money grow on trees, as would seem to be necessary to make Eight Sleep mattresses and the like more affordable via ACA insurance plans. That said, it does seem like an effective political move to suggest it can, and I imagine we’ll see some positive news for the ICHRA market this fall as part of the broader changes to the insurance markets in this country. Read more

Russell Pekala, co-founder of Yuzu Health, on the merits of employer-sponsored health insurance and the role of Yuzu in managing plan operations by Martin Cech, Claire Trautz, and myself
This interview with Russell Pekala provided a fascinating lens into the mechanics of the TPA market and how Yuzu Health is helping employers manage bespoke plan designs. If you’re interested in the employer market and how the TPA space might evolve over time, it’s worth your time. It’s also interesting to read this piece and the article above while thinking about the role of the employer in American healthcare. Obviously the employer-centric system is often noted as the ‘original sin’ of American healthcare, but I’m not so sure many employees will be thrilled moving to ACA plans. Read more

Medicine’s AI Knowledge War Heats Up by Bob Wachter
This is a good perspective from Wachter on the race between OpenEvidence, UptoDate, ano Epic to become the leading AI clinical decision support tool for providers. It provides some interesting historical context on how UptoDate disrupted the publisher market in the late 1990s / early 2000s, and how a similar dynamic is playing out now with AI. Read more

Patients Are Diagnosing Themselves With Home Tests, Devices and Chatbots by Laura Landro
An interesting piece in the WSJ looking at the growing trend of ‘DIY health’ with people taking health matters into their own hands driven by the rise of preventative screenings and other tools. The articles mention of Alivecor makes this all feel vaguely reminiscent of all the excitement around activity trackers and the like a decade+ ago. I know the technologies have advanced, but I’m not sure the outcome will be very different.
Read more

When the Phone Knows It's Not Human: The Coming Reckoning for Voice AI in Healthcare by Trey Rawles
A helpful look at how patient facing AI solutions may face adoption issues and suggesting that the voice AI market will separate into three use cases, arguing that B2B applications will be a big opportunity moving forward. Read more

Founding Strategy & Operations Lead at Sailor Health, a digital mental health care provider for seniors, covered by Medicare. Learn more.
$125k - $175k | In-person (NYC)

Payer Strategy & Operations Lead at Sailor Health. Learn more.
$125k - $175k | In-person (NYC)

VP, Marketing at Pearl Health, a primary care physician enablement platform. Learn more.
$210k - $250k | In-person (NYC)

Senior Manager, Clinical Innovation & Design at Thyme Care, a VBC oncology care model. Learn more.
$145k - $165k | Remote

Principal Care Transformation Lead at Reema, a community-based social and behavioral health provider. Learn more.
Hybrid (Minneapolis)

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