Weekly Health Tech Reads: 5/17/26

OpenAI launched the OpenAI Deployment Company this week, joining Anthropic in launching a consulting firm that uses "Forward Deployed Engineers” to help enterprises adopt AI tools. Nineteen investment firms and consultancies have agreed to participate, a number of which have healthcare-related investments, including Welsh Carson. If I’m confident of one outcome of everything happening in AI, it’s that we’re entering a golden age for consulting. Keep in mind that the most tangible impact of AI on healthcare public earnings results over the last few weeks was Doximity's stock plummeting 30% as its EBITDA margin dropped 5% due to AI compute costs. I can see why the big labs are racing to bring in the consultants Forward Deployed Engineers here.

OptumRx is moving to a more transparent PBM pricing structure, offering clients a fee-based model that provides visibility into OptumRx’s fees, including those associated with its GPO. It seems like a logical move given the current state of the market.

Function acquired SuppCo, a startup offering a personalized supplement “stack”, for an undisclosed amount. SuppCo had previously raised $5.5 million in Seed financing from Union Square Ventures and others, and this thesis from USV at the time is worth checking out. It does a nice job getting at the heart of the bull case for the longevity market, centered around building a new healthcare system. I remain deeply skeptical of this vision playing out, but I would happily be wrong here.

Mass General Brigham was in the news again this week as the Boston Globe highlighted its effort to launch virtual visits via a partnership with K Health. Since launching in September, the service has seen over 14,000 virtual visits and appears to be well-received by patients. MGB primary care providers remain unhappy with the effort, suggesting MGB should instead invest in primary care. One week, MGB is getting hammered by the Massachusetts Health Policy Commission for increasing costs by adding access to primary care, the next, its own primary care providers are critiquing it for investing in a service that provides access to cheap visits instead of investing in the providers. It’s not all too often that I am sympathetic to the plight of academic medical centers, but I’m not sure what else we want MGB to be doing here?

Hippocratic AI responded publicly to Sergei Polevikov’s series of over-the-top critiques against the company. Once you get past the interpersonal drama, Hippocratic’s response had some interesting data points on the current state of the business — it is seemingly generating almost $5 million in revenue a month today while burning $3 million in cash a month. Based on the data provided, it would seem Hippocratic did at most $20 million of revenue in 2025, putting its $3.5 billion Series C valuation at a 150x trailing revenue multiple in November 2025.

OpenEvidence was featured in NBC News this week, with the report noting that it now has 650,000 US physicians actively using the platform and that it had 27 million searches in April 2026. Perhaps the most interesting note in the article was how NBC News noted that the doctors it talked to said that ads on OpenEvidence were “either unobtrusive or nonexistent.” Pairing that with the Doximity notes above about the softness of the pharma advertising market, and it’s interesting to think about the implications for the model.

CMS continues its push against fraud, waste, and abuse in healthcare across multiple fronts. On Wednesday, CMS announced a six-month moratorium for new hospice and home health agencies enrolling in Medicare. CMS also announced that it will defer $1.3 billion in federal Medicaid funding to California. Meanwhile, the DOJ issued a release noting that an individual was convicted by a federal jury of a $1+ billion fraud scheme in Florida.

Marty Makary is officially out as FDA Commissioner.

Forus (fka Tandem), an AI infrastructure layer for prescriptions, raised $160 million. Thrive Capital, General Catalyst, and others participated. Forus is rapidly expanding its network of providers, with 10x YoY growth each of the last two years, and currently supports patients in 80% of US zip codes.

9am Health, a virtual specialty care platform, raised $26 million. Define Ventures led the round. The press release notes that 9amHealth drove $50m of medical and pharmacy savings for two Fortune 100 employers in cardiometabolic care, and that it is expanding beyond that to other high-cost chronic conditions

BranchLab, a platform supporting pharma in commercializing new drugs, raised $26 million. McKesson Ventures led the round.

Tokaido Health, a behavioral economics model for pharmacy navigation, raised $25M, led by Primary Ventures. Tokaido appears to be focused on infusion and biosimilars as a first set of opportunities to help employers manage costs through a combination of AI-enabled behavioral economics suggestions and white-glove support.

Optura, an AI ROI calculator for healthcare enterprises, announced a $17.5 million Series A led by Salesforce Ventures. Optura cites enterprise health plans and providers as customers, including Independence Blue Cross, Prime Therapeutics, and Ardent Health. It notes that more than $2 billion in AI initiatives are being tracked on the platform.

Anomaly Insights, an AI revenue cycle platform, raised $17 million, led by Sound Ventures. Anomaly is focused on helping provider organizations collect on underpayments due to the information asymmetry between payors and providers. Anomaly cites being deployed across 20+ health systems that average $4+ billion in net patient revenue.

Clara, an AI PCP model, raised $12 million and joined YCombinator. A.Captial led the round, along with YC.

Knit Health, an LLM for behavioral health, announced an $11.6 million seed round led by Uncork Capital and Frist Cressey. It has trained its model on Truveta EMR data of 130 million patients across 30 health systems.

Saile, a provider-staffing marketplace, announced a $2.2 million pre-seed round co-led by Matchstick Ventures and Headwater Ventures.

Olivia Webb Kosloff and Alice Qin wrote a paper for the American Economic Liberties Project on the capital constraints facing independent providers and potential policy options to support them.

Grant Hesser wrote an article on X on how managed care has made a comeback in Q1, as it has worked its way through the 100-year storm facing the industry across Medicare Advantage, Medicaid, and ACA businesses. It is fascinating to go back and think about the ripple effects COVID has had on actuarial models and how the industry may finally be past that.

Brendan Keeler’s Daily Ping highlighted a DC challenge to WISeR, with the Government Accountability Office issuing a notice that WISeR is a rule that needed to be submitted to Congress before it could go into effect.

Zach Davis shared an interesting perspective on LI, highlighting how high-volume and high-variability specialist spend is a good opportunity for ACOs to think about CARA, a mechanism in LEAD to delegate specialty care risk.