Chutes & Ladders: UnitedHealth’s sideways ’26, longtime exec Cianfrocco departs; CHAI’s concept failure and future; KeyCare’s $27M Series A

March 4, 2026 | by

Having put a strained 2025 in the rear view mirror, it’s time for UnitedHealth Group to drive on. 2026, as previously noted on the Day the Stock Cracked [TTA 29 Jan] will be the first year that UHG expects to report less, rather than increased, revenue to $439 billion. Yet their adjusted earnings per share (EPS) is projected to be over $17.75, versus $13.23 in 2025, a decline from 2024. This is all assuming, of course, that medical utilization further stabilizes from the ‘hangover’ of the pandemic and thus the medical loss ratio improves. See pages 5-6 of UHG’s 2025-6 report (PDF). Even with a hard Q4, UHG issued a stock dividend of $2.21 per share for Q4, to be paid on 17 March, making shareholders happy. BusinessWire release  UHG was also the most profitable payer at over $12 billion, twice as much as Cigna and Elevance. FierceHealthcare

Despite all that, what didn’t make UHG employees happy was that Bloomberg News reported from inside sources that employee ‌pay raises this year ‌would be a scant 0% to 2%, ​depending on performance. Moreover, their sources stated that an undisclosed number of employees would be laid off. Yahoo Finance  This shouldn’t be unexpected. Scuttlebutt on TheLayoff.com pinpoints layoffs to hit around 19 March and 30 April. (Mind you, it’s only rumor–yet social media such as this site and Reddit often predict correctly.) But in November-December 2025, layoffs came for dozens of employees in Optum healthcare technology and services marketing, working remotely on the East Coast and in the Midwest.  But never fear–an independent audit has found opportunities for improvements through ’23 action plans’ to be completed 100% by this March. Areas to be improved are policy governance and maintenance and many more. Fast Company

And sometimes, a 24 year run is enough. Last Friday, one of the leading women in healthcare, Heather Cianfrocco, announced her departure from UHG, effective in March. She had been promoted only last April or May (reports differ) to a very top parent company position, EVP of governance, compliance and information security. She had been head of Optum for a year, replaced by Patrick Conway, the CEO of Optum Rx. In 24 years in the UHG universe, Ms. Cianfrocco had held senior positions in UHG’s major divisions including Medicaid, Medicare and clinical strategy. She led Optum Health starting in 2020, moving to CEO of Optum Rx in 2021. Interestingly, she announced her departure via a post on LinkedIn. Notably, she did not say she was retiring. Perhaps a Ladder To Be Determined later?  Healthcare Dive, Becker’s Payer

Perhaps it’s time to start breaking up, selling off, and spinning off. We know what happened to other giant companies on their long and troubled road to failure and breakup. It can be caught in time, if the C-levels wake up.  Should free-falling UnitedHealth Group be broken up? Or break itself up to survive, before it becomes another GE?

Another Chute, but hardly surprising, is that the Coalition for Health AI (CHAI) never delivered on the promise of establishing a nationwide network of AI assurance labs. FierceHealthcare has an unusually long exploration of CHAI’s development, from its showy start in March 2024 (a scant two years ago) to its still showy but confusing present. It documents the now-admitted failure of the AI lab network, now described as a ‘mistake’ by CHAI’s head Brian Anderson, MD, but it is still attempting to define responsible AI and its use in healthcare.

Money is continuing to pour in from well-heeled partners such as health systems and revenue-sharing startups. It has also had a scattering of initiatives. FTA: an ecosystem of AI governance providers, AI model cards and an AI outcomes registry; announced working groups on generative AI, prior authorization, Medicaid work requirements and a faith-based approach to AI alongside the Vatican.  It now seems to be coalescing around a voice for healthcare providers about AI through partnering with the National Association of Community Health Clinics (NACHC) and the Joint Commission.

We briefly covered CHAI at its 2023 start and were skeptical that major player members such as Google wouldn’t use their lobbyist influence on CHAI to get their way on AI in its infancy [TTA 6 Dec 2023]. TTA later noted that two HHS members (at the time), Micky Tripathi and Troy Tazbaz, left the CHAI board despite their non-voting status, discovering they had conflicts of interest [TTA 11 July 2024]. CHAI’s been off our radar till this very long article, which should be reserved for lunch or a longish break. It’s not precisely bite-sized nor linear.

We have one Ladder on tap–KeyCare’s $27.4 million raise. It’s a second Series A (!) that adds to a $27 million Series A raised in 2022, bringing its total raise to $55 million. KeyCare is built on the leading EHR system, Epic, acting as an integrated virtual primary care extension partner for health systems. It is not only a 24/7 virtual care model with clinicians that provide urgent, preventive, chronic, and primary care, but also connects that care back to the patient’s home health system. The Chicago-based company states that it will invest further in AI-enabled technology, expand operational capacity to meet growing demand from health system partners, and continue scaling its platform to improve patient experience and provider efficiency, 

This round was led by HealthX Ventures with participation from previous investors 8VC, LRVHealth, BOLD Capital Partners, and Ikigai Venture Partners. Strategic partners listed are WellSpan Health, Allina Health, University of Chicago Ventures, Edge Ventures, and Exact Sciences. 

Mid-week news roundup: HarmonyCares $200M round, Risant to buy Cone Health, Courier Health’s $16.5M Series A; Coalition for Health AI loses HHS/FDA members; Weekend Read–reining in AI’s Wild West?

July 11, 2024 | by

In further Signs Of Life in healthcare funding and acquisitions:

In-home primary care provider HarmonyCares obtained $200 million in an unlettered round. Lead investors are General Catalyst, McKesson Ventures, and interestingly, an unnamed large national payer. Other investors are K2 HealthVentures with existing investors Rubicon Founders, Valtruis, HLM Capital, and Oak HC/FT. HarmonyCares provides in-home primary care to 70,000 patients in 15 states via 175-plus providers. Care teams include nurse care managers, social workers, and pharmacists, reinforced by 24-7 on-call support. The integrated model serves higher-needs patients through value-based care partnerships with Medicare Advantage plans and Medicare ACO programs via Centene, Aetna, and others. The fresh funding will be used for market expansion and scale up new technology for clinical outcomes and patient satisfaction. The company was founded as US Medical Management in 2013, became majority owned by Centene Corporation, which then sold it off as part of their 2021 divestitures. Release, FierceHealthcare, MedCityNews

Risant Health, the nonprofit/community-based hospital system initiative of Kaiser, intends to acquire Cone Health of Greensboro, North Carolina. Cone has five hospitals and an insurance plan. Purchase price was not disclosed, but Cone’s 2023 operating revenue was $2.8 billion. Closing the deal is dependent on the usual approvals. Cone plans to continue to operate independently. It is the second of five planned acquisitions with a $5 billion war chest that kicked off with Pennsylvania-based Geisinger that closed in April, The systems are being chosen for value-based care and population health models–as well as financial health and geographic expansion. Geisinger added $4.6 billion in a one-time gain to Kaiser’s bottom line last quarter.  MedCityNews, Healthcare Dive

Geisinger also experienced a massive data breach initiated by a former Nuance Communications employee that potentially exposed 1.2 million records. While it took place in late 2023, it was reported only last week. TTA 2 July

Courier Health added a $16.5 million Series A from Norwest Venture Partners and existing investor Work-Bench to its existing $4 million in seed funding. NYC-based Courier is a customer relationship management (CRM) platform to manage specialty medications across the patient journey, coordinating information for biopharma companies from patients and providers for field access, patient services, and marketing teams. Release, Endpoints

The Coalition for Health AI (CHAI) is losing two members out of HHS: Micky Tripathi and Troy Tazbaz. They were named in March to the CHAI board of directors as non-voting Federal liaisons. Both withdrew from the BOD due to potential Federal regulatory conflicts surfaced by Congress with this primarily private and for-profit organization. Dr. Tripathi is head of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC-HIT) and Acting Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer at the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Mr. Tazbaz is Director of the Digital Health Center of Excellence (DHCoE) at FDA. An FDA spokesperson told Healthcare Dive that Mr. Tazbaz is stepping down after the agency decided it no longer needed to participate in CHAI as a non-voting member. Hmmmm…..

Weekend Read: despite CHAI and other well-meaning agencies, including Federal, AI still resembles The Wild West. The author of this MedCityNews influencer piece points out that a faulty algorithm can make the difference between life and death. While he credits AI scribes for lightening provider load, AI is no quick fix or a bucket of cherries. FTA:

  • Bold claims abound but aren’t backed up by clinical research or regulatory oversight
  • Healthcare has become saturated with AI solutions that blur the line between what’s regulated and what isn’t. Clinicians have been left in the dark and are pushing back–the nurses’ protest against Kaiser is but one example.
  • AI development should be viewed through a regulatory-grade lens. The ability to demonstrate that a solution is positively impacting the care of a patient and not creating patient safety issues is crucial.
  • Clinical AI needs to go through the FDA approval process and developers need to understand that process.
  • The solution is not there to replace the clinician

Of course, this is all happening as healthcare is targeted by ransomware bad actors–and while health systems are laying off experienced IT staff, who have to be part of this evaluation. The above-mentioned Kaiser laid off well over a hundred in the past few months. Becker’s