Weekly Health Tech Reads 7/26/2026

Axios reports that New Mountain Capital is looking to sell Machinify, one of the New Mountain assets that was originally contemplated as part of Matt Holt’s Thoreau. New Mountain originally acquired Machinify in early 2025, combining it with Rawlings, Apixio’s payment integrity business, and VARIS. Machinify’s presentation at JPM earlier this year provided a glimpse into the financials of a business that has integrated five companies over the last couple of years: revenue was ~$750 million and growing at a 21% CAGR, while EBITDA was ~38%, growing to 51% by 2028.

CMS has opted to recalculate Stars scores for every Medicare Advantage plan after the spate of recent lawsuits from carriers following Clover’s legal win. Per Modern Healthcare, 69% of MA beneficiaries are in 4+ star plans, up from 65% originally.

ChatGPT launched its Health features this week for US users, allowing people to connect health information. The launch notes that 300+ million people turn to ChatGPT each week with health-related questions. The timing is notable here as it comes the same week the NYTimes reports that OpenAI is being sued over ChatGPT’s “extremely dangerous medical recommendations”. Bob Wachter penned a good Substack post on the juxtaposition of these two headlines and the implications.

Women’s health provider Wildflower Health acquired Every Mother, a D2C pelvic floor and core exercise program. With the acquisition, Wildflower enters the D2C market, which it notes is a rapidly growing channel given the accessibility/cost challenges of traditional healthcare models. We’ll be keeping an eye on this market, and how the unbundling of maternity payments starting January 2027 potentially impacts activity in the market.

Mindoula acquired Janus Healthcare Partners and Valera Health, positioning the combined entity to be a risk-bearing mental health provider that can partner with health plans and provider organizations to offer behavioral health services to complex and rising-risk populations.

Abridge acqui-hired Altrina, a YC-backed agentic AI platform.

Surgery Partners stock jumped 6% as it sold its stake in two Idaho-based hospitals to Intermountain for $795 million, valuing the two hospitals at $1.15 billion. Surgery Partners mentioned in Q1 earnings that it expected a divestiture to close in 2026, and given its activist investor’s push to exit surgical hospitals, it seems like a logical move.

AdventHealth and Intermountain announced a new joint venture in Denver, which will bring together five AdventHealth and three Intermountain hospitals. AdventHealth will manage the venture and lead daily operations.

DexCom is the first announced participant in the FDA’s TEMPO pilot, which also means DexCom will be participating in CMMI’s ACCESS program, focused on prediabetes and type 2 diabetes management (the eCKM and the CKM tracks). It’s fascinating to see DexCom participating in ACCESS as a more traditional medical device manufacturer that has been thinking about the D2C market with its Stelo product (although that appears to have had slower uptake than DexCom would have hoped). TEMPO is intended to approve ~10 devices for each of the four ACCESS tracks — will be curious to see if we see any other device companies in this group.

Candid Health, an autonomous RCM platform, raised $120 million. Sixth Street Growth led the round, reportedly at a 3x valuation increase from its February 2025 Series C. Standard dilution math would seem to imply that Candid is valued somewhere around $1.2 billion in this round. Candid reports 190% YoY growth in ARR, noting surging demand from enterprise provider organizations. It’s interesting to see how the language describing Candid’s customer base has changed slightly from its Series C in 2025, when it clearly focused on telehealth and named specific telehealth customers including Allara, Nourish, and Talkiatry. The logos on Candid’s website still seem heavily telehealth-centric, although the funding round talks much more generally about Candid serving healthcare providers, without naming a customer.

Assured Health, a physician credentialing platform, raised $19 million. Insight Partners led the Series A. Assured reports working with a wide range of 100+ customers, including Houston Methodist, Tono Health, and Birches Health. Given the amount of venture-backed startup energy that has gone into solving the provider credentialing issue over the last decade, it seems indicative of the complexity of the challenge at hand in onboarding providers. The underwriting case here seems to center on the idea that the complexity makes it the perfect opportunity to automate with agentic AI workflows.

Karoo Health, a VBC cardiology model, raised $16.2 million. 7wire Ventures and Allumia Ventures co-led the Series A. Karoo supports a network of 600+ cardiology providers across 11 states, contracting with national and regional health plans to implement value-based payment models that improve clinical outcomes while reducing cost of care. Humana appears to be one of Karoo's recent contract wins, as it launched a handful of new cardiology-focused VBC partnerships earlier this spring. We’re keeping a close eye on this and other “VBC 2.0” efforts, as it seems like a natural evolution of VBC models as payers look to manage high-cost clinical populations.

A new report written on behalf of the Coalition of Independent Dispute Resolution Entities makes the case that the No Surprises Act’s IDR process is working exactly as intended. The report argues that the NSA is designed to protect patients from out-of-network bills, and that Independent Dispute Resolution Entities are behaving as anticipated in resolving the disputes. The report discusses at length the various mechanics of the IDR process that have been heavily scrutinized recently, including QPAs and high dispute volumes. The fact that we now have political advocacy groups involved in this process on behalf of a newly-created cottage industry of IRDEs, I think, says everything that needs to be said about the No Surprises Act. It is hard to argue with the fact that it is reducing surprise bills, as the authors note. It also seems to miss the forest from the trees in terms of the broader ongoing healthcare affordability conversation, while providing a great example of how ineffective the government can be in stepping into the middle of a negotiation between two sophisticated counterparties.

The state of Delaware passed three pieces of legislation this week, which prohibit private equity from buying hospitals in the state for the next two years, expand charity care, mandate investments in primary care, and implement price caps on hospitals at 250% of Medicare rates. The coverage notes criticism that the bill has been gutted, with the price caps implementation pushed out to 2029. While the bills here are understandable politically, I’m not quite sure how the math works here on its face. I’d maybe suggest that Delaware could have skipped passing the private equity bill at this point, because I’m not sure what private equity firm would want to buy a hospital in an environment where charity care is increasing, and price caps are incoming — private equity firms generally prefer opportunities with positive cash flow. While the state is seemingly not happy with how Prospect Medical Holdings shuttered Crozer Health in 2025, I’m not entirely sure the alternative scenario would have been much more palatable here; without a PE backstop, it seems that Crozer Health would have just been forced to shutter sooner, no?

Cityblock’s Ohio market leader (and former Ohio Medicaid official) Marisa Weisel penned a commentary in a local Ohio newspaper arguing against state legislative efforts to scrap Ohio’s managed care system in Medicaid, in favor of moving back to fee-for-service. This is a conversation that seems to be picking up steam among multiple states, which is notable given Medicaid accounts for around 30% of total state spending. Also worth keeping an eye on here is the emerging fault line between local providers and VBC startups. As healthcare margins get squeezed and local provider groups compete harder for increasingly important Medicaid dollars, I’d expect we hear more of this narrative from local provider communities about how they are the trusted local partner for a community, while planting seeds of distrust in “new entrant” models. It strikes me as an unfortunate, albeit effective, political argument in the current climate, and one that venture-backed models will need to navigate.

A Science article featured the heart-wrenching story of a 6-year-old girl who died days after receiving an n-of-1 gene editing therapy in China to treat a gene mutation that causes a syndrome similar to autism. The girl’s parents apparently raised $860k for the treatment, receiving financial pressure from clinicians that seems… concerning. The family is now pseudonymously sharing the story because they feel there is a lack of accountability and they didn’t realize how dangerous the treatment was. The Science article highlights a plethora of safety, ethical, and financial concerns throughout the story that unfortunately seem like an ever-increasing reality these days, particularly when I think about the peptide conversation about what consumers want versus what scientists think. Caveat emptor feels like a depressing reality in this new era of consumer healthcare.

An article in Fortune by Evidenced Capital’s Brian Sivak and Ilant Health’s Elina Onitskansky makes the case that employers are mistakenly viewing GLP-1 coverage as a binary yes/no decision, with an increasing number of employers choosing not to cover them to save on costs. It argues for a more holistic approach to obesity care, with GLP-1s as one part of a broader model that combines medical care with broader lifestyle changes. The argument, which aligns closely with Ilant’s model, seems like an intuitive solution to the conundrum that employers face with GLP-1s. I’ve been quite intrigued by what Ilant is up to in the obesity care space, and am excited that Elina will giving a company update presentation to the HTN community this week (7/28 @ 12pm CT).

KFF highlighted an example of the individual patient challenges that feel inevitable ahead in the Medicaid market, discussing the story of a patient in Michigan who was incorrectly denied access to Medicaid benefits briefly after an error in Deloitte’s technology platform didn’t properly register that the patient is disabled and thought they earned too much to qualify for Medicaid. Deloitte, which has earned $756 million on Michigan Medicaid contracts since 2006, suggested its platform is working correctly and operates at Michigan's direction. Meanwhile, Michigan suggested its program has no widespread issues. Deloitte’s platform has come under scrutiny across a number of states over the last several years as KFF has noted Deloitte has been paid $6+ billion for platforms riddled with errors, including a Senate Finance Committee hearing, which included some rather insane examples — it cites how in Georgia, taxpayers spent $91 million on a work requirement system, which equates to $13,000 per enrollee, 5x higher than the total spending on health benefits. Ultimately, regardless of who is to blame here, it seems natural that we’ll hear more stories like this (and probably litigation around it) as states work to roll out work requirements.