Weekly Health Tech Reads 3/22/26

👋 Welcome to this Sunday’s recap of healthcare news. Sutter Health’s LOI to acquire Allina Health dominated the discussion early in the week, while Klomp’s commentary at a STAT summit later in the week provided some interesting signal on where Medicare is heading ahead of a much-anticipated Final Notice in a few weeks. Trilliant offered a helpful, nuanced perspective on increased coding intensity associated with AI, and I spent time reflecting on a recent conversation with North Carolina State Health Plan’s Tom Friedman. Let’s dive in!

- Kevin

The Trilliant team shared a thoughtful perspective on the role of AI in increasing coding intensity in health systems. It explored data for six health systems that have adopted AI scribes and found a consistent upward trend in intensity of outpatient E/M visits across new and established patients. The article does a nice job thinking through the various levers that might be driving this. Check out the chart below, which highlights the steady increase in coding intensity for New Patient Visits across the various health systems.

Last week I had the chance to record a podcast episode with the North Carolina State Health Plan’s Tom Friedman, discussing the efforts underway to turn around the plan. North Carolina has always served as a fascinating test bed for healthcare innovation in this country, in part due to the active role the State Health Plan (SHP) has played.

Friedman and others penned a Health Affairs Forefront article late last year outlining their effort to turn around the plan, which covers ~750,000 lives in North Carolina and was projected to be at a ~$1 billion deficit by the end of 2027. A number of aspects of this effort fascinate me, including the decision to unwind the Clear Pricing Project, a prior initiative aimed at driving price transparency and ultimately reducing costs in the market via a reference-based pricing model. The Clear Pricing Project was a great case study in how efforts to drive cost savings can have the opposite of their intended effect, increasing healthcare costs in the state (providers who were historically paid below the RBP rate chose to participate; those who weren’t didn’t need to participate, thus increasing costs).

One of the key efforts Friedman and the SHP are now rolling out is becoming more of an active purchaser of surgical care, and specifically, offering zero-cost bundles for specific surgery types in partnership with Lantern (which just announced a funding round this week). As part of that, the SHP is attempting to influence its enrollees’ behavior to drive volume to lower-cost providers, and Novant Health joined the effort as well.

One of the topics Tom and I discussed was the need to build trust with SHP employees when rolling out these changes, particularly after coming in and raising premiums for those employees as part of fixing the deficit for the SHP. He made the point that payers haven’t historically been particularly good at building trust, and that building trust is key as the SHP rolls out programs like these. It’s a fascinating framing as a critical ingredient in driving successful uptake of innovation initiatives. This concept of building trust seems to come up in most conversations I have these days, and feels like a critical element of any healthcare effort.

You can watch the full convo below, or listen on Apple / Spotify:

Medicare Director Chris Klomp spoke at STAT’s Breakthrough Summit East this week. Some of Klomp’s commentary was picked up by Bloomberg on Thursday, suggesting that the Medicare Advantage program is not sufficiently managing costs.

It is fascinating to juxtapose that headline with this quote from his interview with STAT’s Mario Aguilar, also at that event, about potentially enrolling Medicare beneficiaries into MA by default:

I think if you stitch together the various statements Klomp has been making over the past several months, there’s an interesting common thread coming from CMS at the moment. This idea of encouraging long-term, accountable relationships with enrollees seems central to the broader narrative at hand, which I think most would agree seems like a good thing.

So if I think about that relationship as the central tenet of what CMS is trying to accomplish, while simultaneously ensuring that programs like Medicare Advantage are good stewards of taxpayer resources, the commentary all seems to fit together nicely.

CMS Proposes Its Best NBPP Yet by Brian Blase
Blase calls this the best Notice of Benefit and Payment Parameters that he’s seen. noting the expanding options, increased competition, and payment integrity reforms, among other things. Read more

What’s Worse than a Ghost Network Plan? A No-Network Plan by Sabrina Corlette, Jason Levitis, and Lindsey Murtagh
A group from Georgetown’s CHIR critiques the NBPP’s encouragement of non-network plans in the ACA market, arguing that it ignores the realities of healthcare in the country today. Read more

Doximity Study Finds Physicians Rapidly Adopting AI, But Accuracy Concerns Persist
Doximity shared findings from a study it conducted on physician adoption of AI. Nothing groundbreaking, but good data points on how physicians are using AI in practice. Read more

The Peptide Boom Is Getting Out of Hand by Nicholas Florko
I must admit, I don’t pay too much attention to peptides. This week, they piqued my attention. Between this article in The Atlantic and Martin Shkreli’s X post, it will be interesting to see how mainstream this grey-market peptide craze conversation becomes. Read more

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