The trouble with AI for Medicaid work requirements

Following the passage of President Trump's big bill that creates new eligibility requirements for Medicaid, the Coalition for Health AI (CHAI) raced to assemble a group of experts to develop best practices for using artificial intelligence to automate elements of enrollment and adjudicating eligibility. The organization hopes to produce a draft within six months.

As STAT's Brittany Trang reports, the effort is unusual for a few reasons. First, it's not clear why CHAI is racing into this instead of focusing on more urgent projects, like assurance labs and a registry of model cards describing how AI products work. Few states use AI to manage Medicaid programs so there's little experience to draw on. And patient advocates warned that people affected by such tools should be included in the process.

interoperability

Health IT heads to the White House

On Wednesday, the Trump administration will convene health IT company leaders at the White House to announce a plan to promote the easier transfer of data among various health care organizations as well as easier access for patients. The plan was teased by U.S. DOGE Service acting administrator and CMS advisor Amy Gleason on YouTube and reported by several outlets. STAT was able to confirm the meeting is happening, as well as one attendee: electronic health record vendor athenahealth. The details of the plan haven't been released but in the video Gleason hinted at some of the use cases the government would like to enable, like sharing your medical data with a QR code.

Despite over a decade of regulatory efforts meant to promote interoperability of health systems, seemingly simple tasks like transferring medical records between a patient's providers or even obtaining your own medical records can be difficult. Led by CMS leaders like Gleason, senior advisor Arda Kara, and Medicare director Chris Klomp, the administration has made it a priority to solve some of these problems. I previously reported on Gleason and Kara here and Klomp's tech ambitions here.

Separately, athenahealth is today announcing that all of the providers using its software will be able to exchange records over the federally supported data sharing network TEFCA.

We're following, if anyone has intel or wants to chat.

finance

Medtech investment: Steady as she goes

Venture investment in medical technology companies like device and diagnostic developers racked up $6.8 billion in funding in the first half of the 2025, according to a report from J.P. Morgan. I know it's a little hard to read in the shrunken-down chart above, but that's just under the $7.2 billion raised in the first half of last year. Nevertheless, the optimists at Morgan hold that investment is poised "to potentially exceed" last year's $12.7 billion total. We'll see!

industry news

An RPM study, a Google model, an AI scribe update

Remote patient monitoring company Cadence published a new study including over 20,000 people with hypertension who received its services. The top-line claim: A 70% relative increase in the number of patients at blood pressure goal of 130/80 mm Hg.
Google Research published a new post on SensorLM, "a family of sensor-language foundation models" meant to help interpret and generate descriptions of wearable sensor data.
Eleos Health, the behavioral health-focused ambient AI company, announced an expansion into home health, palliative, and hospice care. The company announced a $60 million fundraise in January.

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