Stay up to date on the latest in health tech, digital health and health AI news with this weekly brief. Read below for news from the week of Oct. 5 to 9.
Nextech teams up with Assort Health, EliseAI for agentic AI tools
Nextech is partnering with Assort Health and EliseAI to integrate agentic AI tools into its specialty electronic health record (EHR) platform. Through the partnerships, Nextech clients now have a choice of two AI patient access platforms integrated into the company's specialty healthcare operating system, the companies said.
The integrations will connect AI capabilities with existing scheduling, intake, patient readiness, communications and follow-up workflows, with the goal of answering more patient inquiries, reducing front-office workload and converting more calls into appointments.
Nextech said both deals are multi-year partnerships that include joint product roadmaps and go-to-market efforts and co-investment in additional AI capabilities.
Assort Health will work with Nextech to co-develop an integrated agentic AI solution specifically for ophthalmology practices. Ophthalmology practices have complex patient access workflows that require far more than answering a phone call. A single patient request can depend on provider subspecialty, visit history, testing requirements, insurance, referral status, location urgency and clinical escalation rules, according to the companies.
Assort says it has built its ophthalmology offering around the operational rules and edge cases that make eye care unusually complex, including testing-based follow-up, optical versus medical routing, retinal injection scheduling, cataract surgery coordination, urgent symptom escalation, after-hours access and multi-location scheduling.
"Patients rarely call knowing the exact appointment type, provider, testing sequence, or next steps they need. The technology has to understand the patient and the practice well enough to resolve the request, not just route it. We've spent years building that depth across specialty care. Partnering with Nextech lets us bring it to many more ophthalmology practices and keep expanding how much of the work our agents can complete inside the systems they run on," Jon Wang, co-founder and co-CEO of Assort Health, said in a statement.
Nextech said it chose Assort Health and EliseAI to give specialty practices a choice of AI patient-access platforms that integrate directly into existing workflows.
"With Assort Health and EliseAI, we are giving practices the choice of two leading solutions, built into the Nextech operating system they already know and trust. This is an important step in bringing agentic AI into specialty practice workflows in a practical, connected way, and delivers on our vision to build an integrated ecosystem where the best capabilities work together as part of a unified experience," Rusty Frantz, Nextech CEO, said in a statement.
Elsevier launches ClinicalKey Nursing AI
Elsevier, a publisher of science journals and provider of clinical decision support tools, launched ClinicalKey Nursing AI, a new clinical AI tool built specifically for nurses and nursing workflows.
The company says the ClinicalKey Nursing AI tool gives nurses the ability to ask clinical questions using natural language, providing instant support for daily nursing practice, such as procedures, medications and discharge planning. Elsevier’s nursing solutions are trusted by over 2,800 hospitals globally, according to the company.
Many clinical AI tools are designed for physicians and are not built for nurses’ daily workflow. According to Elsevier’s global Clinician of the Future 2026: Nurses Edition report, only 41% of nurses use AI for work compared to 57% of doctors. With a lack of nursing-specific tools available, nurses are more likely to use tools that are generic, less trustworthy and not suited to their daily work.
Tracy Gosselin, Ph.D., R.N., Chief Nurse Executive at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, said having clinical AI solutions specifically designed for nurses’ complex workflows is essential. "For too long, nurses have been relying on AI tools that are too generic or made for physicians. Elsevier has been a longstanding supporter of nurses, and I’m delighted to see a product like ClinicalKey Nursing AI now available for the nursing profession," Gosselin said.
Elsevier put the clinical AI tool in the hands of 96 registered nurses across the U.S. for four weeks. The results found that 94% said it increased their confidence in clinical decision-making, 91% said it fit into their workflow, 73% reported time savings during their shift and 94% said they would continue using it if their organization provided access.
ClinicalKey Nursing AI provides nurses with access to expanded clinical content from full text journals, including the Journal of Emergency Nursing, AACN Advanced Critical Care, the American Journal of Infection Control and Geriatric Nursing, as well as Elsevier's clinical skills across acute care, critical care, mental health, oncology and general emergency. The content also includes best-in-class clinical practice books, including ENA’s Emergency Nursing Core Curriculum and Sheehy’s Manual of Emergency Care books, the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN) Procedure Manual for Progressive and Critical Care, Critical Care Nursing and Goldman-Cecil Medicine.
Solera Health launches oncology care network
Digital health company Solera Health announced Thursday the launch of its Cancer Care Network.
The network connects health plan members to Iris by OncoHealth for 24/7 care and treatment navigation and Fuze Health for at-home screenings and sample collection. Members answer questions about diagnoses, treatment stages and preferences, with Solera’s matching algorithm routing them to the appropriate service.
“Cancer care is the kind of health complexity our network model was built to solve,” said John Santelli, Solera Health CEO, in a statement. “Members facing a diagnosis shouldn't have to figure out on their own whether they need care navigation, emotional support, or in-home screening. Our matching engine handles that routing, so members can find the right resources the first time.”
The launch expands Solera’s whole-person care model beyond behavioral health and chronic condition care, executives say.
HHS awards $1.5M for healthcare AI development
HHS’ Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) announced Tuesday that MedStar Health Research Institute and Regenstrief Institute, Inc. received two awards totaling $1.5 million for clinical AI projects.
The awards fell under the 2026 Leading Edge Acceleration Projects in Health Information Technology (LEAP in Health IT) funding opportunity.
“We are at an inflection point in healthcare, where the promise of AI is rapidly moving from experimentation to scaled application in clinical care. Through this year’s LEAP in Health IT awards, we have an opportunity to help lead that transition,” said Steven Posnack, ONC principal deputy national coordinator for health IT, in a statement. “Laboratory data is among the most frequently exchanged and clinically consequential data in healthcare. Targeted improvements in how this high-value, high-volume data is captured, exchanged, and used can have an outsized impact on patient care. We are excited to see what the awardees will do.”
MedStar Health Research Institute will use the funds to advance the use of agentic AI in clinical care. Regenstrief Institute, Inc. will assess lab interoperability gaps to improve the use of standard terminology at small, independent labs.
Arcadia launches 3 new solutions with embedded AI
Healthcare platform Arcadia announced Monday the launch of a portfolio of solutions aimed at creating coordinated data and insights.
The three new offerings are:
- Arcadia Ascent
- Arcadia CareJourney
- Arcadia LifeScience
Ascent is a healthcare performance platform that unifies data, analytics and AI workflows, the company says. CareJourney provides market and network intelligence while LifeScience turns longitudinal clinical and claims data into real-world evidence.
“Healthcare organizations don’t need more insights—they need confidence and the ability to act on them for every patient they serve,” said Michael Meucci, Arcadia president and CEO, in a statement. “We’re bringing together the intelligence organizations need to understand what’s happening with the workflows they need to do something about it—all on a foundation they can trust.”