The wrapup line on ViVE

February 22, 2025 | by

Digital health conference ViVE 2025 in Nashville wrapped on Wednesday–and surprisingly, there weren’t any bombshells. The well-attended Sunday-Wednesday conference in the Music City was abbreviated due to…snow. Even though the snow came in at a less-than-forecast 1.5 inches, many participants, concerned about flights, headed for home.

Observations from an (anonymous) attendee on HIStalk (News 2/19/25 and 2/21/25) were generally positive. He or she reported a filled conference, show floor, and meeting spaces at the Nashville Convention Center and much more. Highlights:

  • 10,000 attendees–2,500 more than ViVE 2023 in Nashville, and 2,000 more than 2024 in Los Angeles. 30% were C–level from 725 provider and payer organizations represented. Tuesday was the busiest day but only 2,000 remained on Wednesday due to the snow report.
  • The real action took place in 1:1 and group meetings, most pre-scheduled–over 5,000 were booked in ViVE’s meeting spaces and “cubes”. The Provider and Payer Connect Lounge was much larger with at least 170 small tables for meetings with vendors. Unsurprisingly, the Investor Connect Lounge was smaller. The impression this person had was that there were fewer investors attending this year.
  • The show floor had a lot of activity and was nearly filled. Effectively every vendor pitched their AI capabilities. By the last day, usually the lightest anyway but with the snow, one-third were unattended or packed up. 
  • Sparsely attended and in smaller spaces: the four primary presentation stages.

ViVE has become a place to meet, talk, initiate/advance the buyer journey, and move towards a ‘deal deal’. It’s also for scoping out the competition. Presentations and panels have become beside the point.

A third article in HIStalk’s Readers Write were additional reflections from Mike Silverstein, a managing partner at DRI (Direct Recruiter Inc.), recruiting in the health IT and life sciences area. AI tools “are really getting smart, borderline scary smart”–especially AI agents being trained on “serious healthcare data and workflows”. Vendors are layering their workflows on top of off-the-shelf AI agents and the speed to market is “blinding”. Investment is up too with less ‘hand to mouth.’

Announcements, heavy on the AI, made during ViVE and recapped in MedCity News: 

  • Data analytics firm MultiPlan rebranded as Claritev. The company provides payments and pricing solutions based on healthcare claims data. It will start trading on the NYSE under CTEV next Friday 28 February. Release
  • Abridge announced their $250 million Series D [TTA 21 Feb]
  • Automation platform developer Innovaccer announced seven new AI agents. These ‘agents of care’ automate administrative  tasks in scheduling, protocol intake, referrals, prior authorizations, care gap, HCC, and patient access. The agents are designed to support multiple care teams, including clinicians, care managers, risk coders, patient navigators, and call center agents. Release
  • Lumeris launched an AI tool, Tom, that automates tasks like care coordination, chronic disease management and patient outreach in clinical workflows for primary care providers. Release
  • UPMC Enterprises soft-launched a virtual environment, Ahavi, for developers to test and evaluate the efficacy of AI models against UPMC’s patient population data. UPMC Enterprises is the innovation and commercialization arm of the UPMC health system. More on this from HealthPoint and FierceHealthcare.
  • IKS Health launched a generative AI scribe, Scribble Now. It automates notes during the patient visit via automated speech recognition (ASR) and generative AI (GenAI). Release
  • Healthcare operations software developer Symplyr launched the Symplr Operations Platform (SOP). It unifies separate solutions onto a AWS cloud-based infrastructure to unify disparate solutions. Release

Wrapping up many changes at Walgreens, VillageMD, CVS Health, Oracle Health

January 11, 2024 | by

Walgreens’ multitudinous c-c-c-changes from the suites to the streets. Financially, Walgreens’ US Healthcare segment in Q1 2024 (Oct-Dec 2023) grew sales to $1.9 billion versus prior year’s $989 million. This included VillageMD’s revenue from Summit Health and some growth at CareCentrix (home care) and Shields Health Solutions (specialty pharmacy). But losses continued, with an operating loss of $456 million and adjusted operating loss of $96 million, reduced from the prior year’s $152 million loss. This is also after their November layoff of several senior staff and 5% of corporate workers following a May layoff [TTA 10 Nov 2023]

  • On the earnings call, new CEO Tim Wentworth confirmed that VillageMD has closed 27 under-performing clinic locations. This is a little less halfway through the 60-location previously announced closure. This is a key part of the $1 billion in 2024 cuts announced at the end of last quarter by then-acting CEO Ginger Graham [TTA 18 Oct 2023]. Healthcare Dive
  • VillageMD’s weakness has been filling physician ‘patient panels’. A patient panel is one doctor’s patient count treated over typically 12 to 18 months. This can be as high in primary care as 2,500 patients, though no numbers were cited for VillageMD. According to Wentworth, VillageMD is now “on a diet”; fewer locations, more patient concentration at available clinics, patient panels and profitability goes up. Or so the math goes. Forbes
  • Walgreens also has trouble in the IT department. Key indicators: Neal Sample is their third CIO in a year, layoffs in staff among employees and contractors, departures of key managers, and the need for new technology including AI to support operations. Graham has cited the new pharmacy inventory system to more accurately forecast demand using AI as an example of the direction she sees IT taking. (Let’s hope it will quiet the rebellious pharmacists.) The former CIO, who departed in September, stocked up on AI and engineering talent at the expense of other needed roles. The Wall Street Journal’s deep dive from December.

Year’s end brought a stop to some of the musical chairs in the CVS Health C-suite. CFO and appointed president of Health Services Shawn Guertin turned his leave of absence due to family health reasons into a formal departure at the end of May. Interims Tom Cowhey moves from SVP corporate finance to CFO and Mike Pykosz, the CEO of Oak Street Health, becomes president of Health Care Delivery. Release, FierceHealthcare

Oracle Health also has the music up and the chairs out.

  • General Manager Travis Dalton is departing on 1 March to join MultiPlan as president and CEO. He succeeds Dale White, who moves to executive chairman replacing the retiring chairman Mark Tabak after 23 years with the company. MultiPlan is a payer cost management company that serves about 700 payers in payment and revenue integrity, network-based and analytics-based services. Dalton is the fifth of 10 senior executives from Cerner to depart after the late 2021 sale to Oracle.MultiPlan release, HIStalk 1/5
  • Oracle Health’s chairman, Dr. David Feinberg, has also been making some transitional moves of his own, joining Aegis Ventures as a senior advisor while remaining at Oracle. His role is to help Aegis work with a consortium of health systems on developing and launching digital health products. Interestingly, there has been no disclosure of the percentage of time he will spend at Oracle versus Aegis. Dr. Feinberg also is a Humana board member. He joined Cerner from Google Health and within a few months, Cerner was sold.  Modern Healthcare