Weekly Health Tech Reads 8/2/26

Clinical AI startup Doctronic acquired Summer Health, a virtual pediatrics model. Doctronic, which has been in the news lately for its AI prescription renewal pilot in Utah, shared that this is the first of multiple new product expansions, both organic and inorganic, to be announced over the next year or two. It plans to launch a behavioral health program in the next quarter.

Akido shared an update on its AI platform, noting that it is in use across 100 clinics and 1 million patients in California, New York City, and Rhode Island. Akido got an early start on what has become a popular strategy over the last several years, acquiring stakes in a handful of provider groups (Chapparal Medical Group in CA and Rhode Island Primary Care Physicians Corp in Rhode Island) to deploy its AI platform within the practices. I’m reminded of the Thrive Holdings Long Humans thesis recently; while Akido started down this path way back in 2022. Akido is also deploying its software across a variety of other clinical use cases, including in a street medicine model in California and for Uber / Lyft driver healthcare needs in NYC. I am curious to keep an eye on whether we see Akido acquire more practices, and if not, how it continues to scale the platform.

Included Health acquired Firefly Health, in the latest signal of momentum in the alternative plan design market for employers. Firefly, which started as a virtual primary care model before adding an alternative plan design wrapper, will bolster Included’s clinical capabilities. Seems like a logical combination for the two companies as employer interest in the market picks up. If you’re pitching employers on managing the total cost of care, having a strong clinical component as a front door to a navigation offering strikes me as a needed feature these days. As always, I’d imagine the key question for employers remains how to drive employee adoption of the various perks they’re provided.

Dispatch Health announced it will focus solely on growth as a white-labeled platform for hospital-at-home moving forward, seemingly jettisoning its core historical model in favor of the Medically Home business it acquired last year. Hospital-at-home has seemingly lost a ton of momentum due to uncertainty in the payment model in the post-COVID era, but perhaps there are some glimmers of hope in Current Health’s post-Best Buy strategy, which focuses on complex patient populations.

Hippocratic AI is expanding its deployment at WellSpan systemwide, noting it is moving past “one-off pilots and into platform-wide deployment.” As part of the expanded relationship, Hippocratic will be deploying a team of clinical, technical, and deployment resources to work alongside WellSpan teams to help roll out these new tools. It seems one can infer quite a bit from those past couple of sentences summarizing the press release, both about the current state of the deployment and the opportunity the two organizations see. It seems that the transition to platform deployments in this market is happening very quickly, and that winning models will have a heavy human component.

The FTC filed a lawsuit against Hims & Hers, alleging misleading marketing practices and privacy violations. Hims responded, suggesting the claims are baseless. Given that much of the D2C healthcare industry seems to lean on Hims as a source of best practices, it will be worth keeping an eye on the ripple effects of this lawsuit.

Expert interview: Vertical integration and value-based care in the Aloha State with Jason Chang, CEO of The Queen's Health Systems

Company presentation: Value-based care's next chapter with Vytalize Health co-founders Faris Ghawi and Amer Alnajar, M.D.

Function Health secured $450 million in revenue-based financing from General Catalyst’s Consumer Growth Fund. General Catalyst’s Consumer Growth Fund is a debt vehicle used to fund sales and marketing expenses, and in exchange GC gets a cut of future revenue generated. I will admit, I do not understand this move in the least. GC notes that this Consumer Growth Fund vehicle is for late-stage companies with clear CAC:LTV ratios that can use revenue-based financing to avoid dilution from losses associated with CAC. Ok, that part makes sense. Where I lose the plot is applying it to Function, particularly when the $450 million financing is 4.5x Function’s trailing revenue, which was reportedly $100 million in 2025. Couple that with the fact that Function has been on an acquisition spree recently to round out its product offering, and that those acquisitions appear to be lagging from a demand perspective — we’ve discussed in Slack how Ezra, the network of facilities offering whole-body MRIs, is growing slower than announced while it is still 2x the cost that was originally promised. Then add that we’re hearing about affordability challenges from public healthcare companies, and that this is a market that has historically been difficult to translate early-adopter momentum into mass-market appeal. Ask BetterHelp how it feels about the D2C cash pay business at the moment. The most plausible explanation I can come up with is that Function has gotten itself stuck on the hyperscaling rollercoaster ride at this point. After raising and acquiring companies at an astronomical valuation, it now needs to demonstrate that it can grow quickly on the heels of that, while hoping the CAC:LTV ratio holds steady so the model doesn’t implode. This capital will either help with scaling, or if it doesn’t, the outcome will be bad regardless, so why not double down on growth, I guess? I’ll be watching the forthcoming advertising/marketing campaigns from Function with curiosity here.

Healia Health, a model that helps dual-income families reduce their healthcare spend via one of their employers, raised $14 million. It’s an interesting model that appears to partner with an employer to offer HRAs to cover healthcare expenses in exchange fro that employee switching off their plan and onto their spouse’s plan at another employer. Logically, it makes sense that both the employee and the employer working with Healia would benefit from this move, although I’m not as sure that the spouse’s employer would appreciate it as much in this scenario. Either way, it seems to highlight the level of interest in concepts that help employers get creative in managing their healthcare spending at the moment; one way to do that is to pay people to switch to their spouse’s plan.

The Primary Ventures team mused on the role of the provider of the future in an AI-centric world, highlighting how AI could help panel sizes get up to 12,000 per PCP, and the various billing, regulatory, liability, and cost tensions inherent in that conversation. The future PCP, as argued here, is one who is playing a population health management role across tens of thousands of patients, overseeing AI that is doing most of the work. It is interesting to see them note that the math of AI care delivery is bullish for an FFS health system (more visits!), seemingly implying the answer that many now seem to be reaching: AI is having an inflationary impact by helping organizations bill more. Interestingly, one of the other luminaries I hear talk about this idea of a 20k - 30k PCP panel size, Vinod Khosla, has made the argument that risk-bearing providers should be best suited to benefit from this shift, using AI interactions to keep costs down. It will be worth keeping an eye on this dynamic and how incumbent orgs adopt these tools in FFS and VBC environments. Certainly, from the lens of a taxpayer, I’d prefer the latter.

The Cut, a New York magazine, featured a piece on the rise of concierge primary care models, examining it through the lens of providers who prefer working in DPC settings and the access issues it is causing for patients, both in theory and anecdotally in practice. It’s fascinating to read the Primary Ventures piece and then this piece in juxtaposition, and think about how two countervailing forces on the primary care supply side will work out. On the one hand, technology should, in theory, enable larger panel sizes, as Primary Ventures articulates. On the other hand, concierge clinics seem to be popping up everywhere in affluent neighborhoods, promising smaller panel sizes as a perk for both patients and providers. If a PCP’s options are increasingly to either manage 20,000 patients as an AI air traffic controller or to manage 200 patients in a concierge clinic, while likely getting paid more, I can’t fault doctors for choosing the concierge route. At the same time, it is interesting to note the critique of concierge organizations that seem bashful about the $20,000 annual prices they charge.

Something curious seems to be in the water at Kaiser’s VBC health system platform, Risant, at the moment. This week, its founding CEO, Jaewon Ryu, stepped down, with an interim CEO named while a national search is conducted. This comes the same week that Risant pushed out two articles on how it is succeeding in VBC: one an NEJM Catalyst interview with Ryu, one a Modern Healthcare interview with Cone Health’s CEO. The Modern Healthcare interview seems telling in that at one point, when asked about Cone’s VBC initiatives, the answer was essentially: it may seem like we’re just investing in growing acute care facilities, but that’s just so we can deliver on our ultimate goal of spreading VBC. Ah yes, the tried-and-true “I’m going to build hospitals as a Trojan horse for VBC" thesis at the center of every VBC platform. Keep in mind that Risant intended to acquire 5 to 6 health systems over several years; it is still at two after acquiring Geisinger and Cone in 2024.

Redesign Health released a survey of health system executives at Epic-based health systems, exploring how they think about working with startups while navigating Epic. It certainly seems like health systems expect Epic to win here, with 80% of executives expecting Epic to become a higher priority moving forward. Worth perusing if you’re a startup, investor, or executive thinking about how to play nice with Epic in the years ahead.

Morgan Health and EBRI released a survey of 984 employers, roughly 1/3 with 100+ employees and 2/3s with <100 employees, on the state of the ICHRA market. It’s worth noting the level of interest from employers in adopting ICHRA, with the biggest ask being that ICHRA plans look more like employer plans today in terms of benefits levels and coverage. While ICHRA may not be materializing as quickly as some of the venture investment in the market may have hoped, it still seems there is ample reason to be bullish about this market over the longer term.

Vizient published a good report looking at utilization demand trends over the next decade, highlighting slowing inpatient growth relative to ambulatory assets, as it expects outpatient volumes to grow 20% while inpatient discharges grow 7%. In particular, cancer outpatient volumes are expected to grow 20% versus 2% inpatient.