Weekly Health Tech Reads 8/16/26

STAT released an excellent investigation into Commure’s commercial strategy, including details of aggressive sales tactics that involve paying medical groups for referrals. The article raises concerns over Stark Law violations as a result, and STAT also reported that Commure has decided to terminate its referral partnership program in the past few days. The optics of Commure terminating this program while STAT is investigating it seem bad, as do the specific examples that STAT gives in its coverage. And it’s particularly concerning given that nobody can seem to succinctly explain what it is that Commure actually does. If nothing else, it’s a major crack in the Commure / General Catalyst narrative about transforming healthcare, suggesting the growth here might be due more to VC dollars subsidizing aggressive sales tactics than any real industry transformation. It all feels eerily reminiscent of when Axios investigated Olive AI back in 2022, shining a light on the cracks in Olive’s model just as the wheels started to come off there.

Value-based rural primary care enablement startup Main Street Health topped the Inc 5000 list of fastest-growing companies, reportedly sporting a 546,533% increase in revenue over the past 3 years, sitting at ~$4 billion in revenue today. It is founder Brad Smith’s second company to top the Inc 5000 in the last three years, as CareBridge was #1 on the list in 2023, before selling to Elevance for ~$2.7 billion in late 2024. Per the Inc reporting, Main Street currently operates in 24 markets, down from 26 in 2024.

Innovaccer is reportedly seeking to raise $250 million in capital, per Axios Pro. This number matches the spending it committed to agentic AI back in April, citing the need to build out an end-to-end AI platform for healthcare enterprises, and not just point solutions. Innovaccer acquired the revenue cycle platform CaduceusHealth in May; perhaps this funding signals more deals on the horizon as companies compete to become the preferred platform partner for health systems.

Cityblock is expanding in North Carolina with its first partnership with Humana, serving ~20,000 Humana MA and Dual members in the state, deploying Cityblock’s model as a wrapper around an existing PCP for complex chronic patients. Humana is a notable win for Cityblock; it will be worth keeping an eye on if we see this expand into other markets in the near term.

Cadence’s HypertensionOS was announced as the second participant in the FDA’s TEMPO pilot program, the digital health device approval pathway tied to CMMI’s ACCESS model.

K Health continues its momentum, announcing a new partnership with Atlantic Health to roll out Atlantic Health PatientGPT, a patient-facing clinical AI tool that integrates with the EMR, alongside K Health’s virtual primary care model. Seems there’s a lot of activity as health systems think about their “front door” strategy in an AI-centric world, and it also seems like a logical conclusion for many of them to think they need their own ChatGPT clone. Whether consumers choose to use these health system-specific chatbots will be a big question to watch.

In the latest No Surprises Act legal win for providers, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that “ghost rates” can’t be included in payer qualifying offers. It continues to feel like we are in the early innings of conversations around the NSA, as these court victories help legitimize the outcomes of the IDR process, and presumably more providers take notice of that.

Flagler Health, an AI-enabled operating system for MSK practices, raised $50 million. Bessemer Venture Partners led the round. Flagler reports it has scaled to thousands of providers across 36 states, with an average of $164k in additional revenue per provider and 87% of patients reporting improvements pain, mood, sleep or mobility. The additional $164k in revenue per provider seems like the key number here, as AI revenue cycle capabilities appear to be identifying meaningful opportunities to grow revenue for practices. That revenue generation opportunity seems like a great wedge to win customers, helping land and expand relationships with practices in a manner that seems very reminiscent of the early VBC 1.0 enabler models, in that case, growing by helping PCPs capture additional revenue via VBC contracts. It’ll be interesting to keep an eye on how durable the revenue capture opportunity is here and the implications for sustained practice growth for Flagler.

Aligned Marketplace, a network of direct primary care clinics, raised $16 million. Venrock led the Series A. Aligned reportedly has 3,000+ in-person clinics in its network (plus virtual), ranging from small independent practices to groups like Marathon Health, Galileo, and One Medical, and also appears to include a growing virtual specialty care footprint.

Inova’s Chief Data and AI Officer was interviewed this week on Inova’s AI strategy. It’s a good read on the capabilities and infrastructure an organization needs to build to implement AI successfully. It picks up on the theme we’ve heard expressed by Centene’s Sarah London and others recently, focusing on the data and infrastructure needed to successfully implement AI organization-wide. It’s interesting to watch the industry narrative shift from describing one or two quick-win anecdotes about AI to a much broader conversation about the organizational redesign required to really lean in. Not surprisingly, that seems like the more sustainable path forward for large enterprises. We heard Doximity talk on its earnings call last week about how the industry is moving on from its “AI Wild West” stage, and you can see evidence of that shift in interviews like this one.

A team from Manatt shared a white paper on the impacts of the upcoming shift in maternity payment codes, as the industry unbundles its payment model on January 1, 2027. This shift in the maternity payment model is a fascinating change that seems to continue going under the radar more than it should. As we have industry-wide conversations about the merits of moving towards value-based care, here we are seeing a major movement away from VBC and back towards fee-for-service billing, purportedly to reflect how care is delivered today. The Manatt paper does a nice job of diving in and talking through the implications for various stakeholders involved.