Weekly Health Tech Reads 5/31/26

Clover Health won a potentially major Stars lawsuit against CMS.

Oura joins the ranks of IPO candidates while hinting at healthcare ambitions.

The No Surprises Act continues to generate headlines, with providers pushing back over payer (specifically BCBS Texas) non-payments

Regional health plans continue to struggle as two plans in the Pacific Northwest shutter

WakeMed declined a $5 billion merger offer from UNC Health, opting for its deal with Atrium Health despite UNC’s offer being more than twice as much. WakeMed leadership noted that it is a competitive disadvantage because it charges 10% - 30% less than others in the market, which perhaps suggests what will happen to healthcare costs after a transaction here.

CMS sent a letter to Elevance on Friday, noting that Elevance completed the second of four steps it needs to finish by June 30th in order to avoid enrollment sanctions.

Amazon Health Services brought in a new leader, Dr. Roy Schoenberg, the co-founder of AmWell. Given how often I’m now seeing advertisements for Amazon virtual care, it seems indicative of the strategy moving forward.

The Massachusetts AG is suing UnitedHealthcare over $100 million in alleged upcoding in its D-SNP program between 2014 and 2025. For folks in the duals market, the case is a good read on just how complex these programs are.

Open Evidence partnered with Cedars-Sinai to integrate patient data into the OE search experience. Seems like a cool move for OE, particularly as it relates to about an enterprise sale into health systems. Worth keeping an eye on implications for OE’s go-to-market strategy, particularly given this coincides with Doximity talking about how the pharma advertising market has been soft recently.

WISeR continues to face pushback in DC, with House and Senate Democrats calling for an end to the program.

CVS filed a lawsuit against Tennessee over a new law barring a PBM from also owning a pharmacy in the state.

HCA announced an agreement to acquire The College of Health Care Professions, which provides healthcare education to 8,000+ students annually across ten campuses in Texas and online.

K Health partnered with UPenn Medicine for an AI-centric virtual care offering. Given all the excitement around AI for care delivery, K Health’s relatively quiet momentum with partnerships at UPenn, MGB, Northwell, and Mayo seems notable.

Innovaccer acquired CaduceusHealth to expand its revenue cycle capabilities.

Garner Health, a provider of data analytics platforms for employers, raised $100 million at a $2.74 billion valuation.

Index Ventures led the round. This comes three months after it announced a $118 million Series D at a $1.35 billion valuation. Garner cites 800 customers and $200 million of ARR, which has more than doubled each of the last five years. Per Bloomberg, revenue has apparently also doubled since the $1.35 billion valuation three months ago, which doesn’t quite compute. Either way, the general sense is that Garner has a lot of momentum with employers. Garner’s pitch increasingly sounds like a healthcare navigation play for employers, with the ultimate proof point being helping them drive 12% cost savings. Given the situation with employer costs, it’s not exactly surprising that we’re seeing a lot of activity in this market, and I’ll be keen to keep an eye on if we start to see consolidation in this market in the months ahead as winners start to emerge.

Nourish, a virtual dietitian-led clinical model, raised $100 million at a $1.75 billion valuation.

The round was led by Menlo Ventures, bringing Nourish's total capital raised to $215 million. Menlo noted in its blog post about the round that it thinks Nourish has cracked the patient acquisition problem by leveraging a pharma-style field sales motion with sales reps turning providers into referral engines for Nourish’s care model. Between this and the mental health market, it is interesting to hear more startups picking up on this notion of providers as a key go-to-market strategy.

Signos, a D2C continuous glucose monitoring brand, raised $20 million.
The round was led by Cheyenne Ventures and GV, with participation from DexCom and BCBS Alabama. Dexcom’s involvement seems notable as it manufactures its own D2C CGM, Stelo, which Signos uses. Dexcom is under pressure from an activist investor (Elliott Management) over a lack of execution recently.

Kin, an app that helps patients record provider visits, raised $9 million.
Maveron led the round, with participation from Town Hall Ventures and others. As I’ve noted here before, this model sounds conceptually similar to where Abridge started out. The timing of this round with Shiv Rao’s conversation on 20VC about Abridge’s “five-year desert to product market fit” recently felt serendipitous. We chatted with Kin’s Co-Founder and CEO, Arpan Parikh, about how they’re contemplating the business model for a free patient-facing app, and it very much sounds like the thesis centers around coordinating healthcare benefits for individuals and solving the “last mile” challenge in healthcare. Worth noting that the GoodRx co-founders are also co-founders of Kin, and I’d expect we'll see a similar model deployed here. Certainly an interesting twist on a cool concept that is worth keeping an eye on.

Paralign Health raised $3 million to build a network of paramedics providing preventive health services in rural parts of the US.
Flyover Capital led the round. Paralign helps fire departments and EMS agencies to implement Mobile Integrated Health and Community Paramedicine (MIH-CP) programs operationally. Our understanding is that in rural environments, much of care delivery already falls to fire departments/EMS, and something like this makes sense if the financing can be sorted out.

Last week, I spent some time checking in on Ezra, the D2C MRI brand that Function Health acquired a year ago. At the time of acquisition, Function noted that Ezra expected to be in 1,000+ clinics within a few months at a $499 price point. Function’s website this week notes it is available in 189 locations at a $999 price point. Seems like a clear indicator of slower-than-expected growth in that D2C market, given Ezra’s model is based on negotiating volume discounts from outpatient radiology providers like Akumin.

The WSJ riled up the online physician community the other weekend by penning a piece suggesting that Nurse Practitioners are the hottest job in healthcare because NPs can provide “doctor-like” services at a lower cost. Like most topics, I understand there is nuance to this conversation, but given the current state of healthcare access and costs in this country,

A JAMA Network article arguing that we should treat primary care as a public utility provided some interesting fodder for a Slack conversation about what it means to think of primary care as a public utility. The reaction to the WSJ piece above hints at the challenge of defining what access to primary care means (an AI chatbot? an NP? a MinuteClinic location? a physician?) Part of the challenge at hand is that I think the average American’s answer to that question is likely quite different from how a primary care physician might answer it.

Lest you think access to primary care is a uniquely American challenge foisted upon us by local monopolists and vertically integrated conglomerates, the Financial Times reports that the NHS is finalizing a workforce plan that will involve more AI for care delivery in order to help stabilize the workforce. Predictably, this is already being railed as a “massive, dangerous gamble” by the British Medical Association.