Welcome to This Month in Digital Health, where I highlight news articles and trends that recently caught my attention and attempt to explain why they matter. The key theme for the month? Everything’s a mess.
Telehealth is in trouble. Medicare’s telehealth flexibilities expired at the end of September. With the federal government shut down and not authoring an extension, vendors and providers face a cliff, with some keeping services available and others opting not to. The hospital at home program faces a similar fate, as it too needs an extension from Congress to stay alive. Basically, care is now less accessible – just in time for flu season!
Rural health needs help. Applications are open for the Rural Health Transformation Fund – and just in time, what with multiple federal rural connectivity programs facing funding cuts. Amid the well documented rough road ahead, some rural providers are forming clinically integrated networks, though their aim is more about survival than about the traditional CIM focus on value-based care. Really, though – I feel like rural providers can and should do whatever it takes.
AI use isn’t equitable. HHS data released before the shutdown found an unsurprising digital divide in predictive AI use, with small, rural, independent, and critical-access providers all lagging. Groups such as the Coalition for Health AI fear safety net providers will only fall further behind unless they’re able to recruit the IT staff required to get AI efforts up and running. This is broadly consistent with pretty much every single type of healthcare IT, and sadly I don’t see it changing any time soon.
Insurance costs are going through the roof. No matter how you’re insured, you’re paying a lot more in 2026. Employers’ healthcare costs are poised to rise 9%, while Affordable Care Act premiums will increase close to 20% – and some will more than double is tax credits expire. The culprits? Drug costs (especially GLP-1s), the cost of care, and the impact of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Luckily, nothing else has seen significant price increases in the last year, right? Right?
Medicare Advantage is in trouble. Most MA insurers are scaling back their plan offerings in 2026, and annual premiums for the general MA population are expected to increase 22%. Many insurers are also trimming supplemental benefits from MA plans, too, as they say it’s getting too expensive to offer coverage. On a related note, non-profit MA plans didn’t fare terribly well in recent Stars ratings announcements. This all makes me wonder if the MA bubble is bursting: Though 54% of eligible beneficiaries are in MA plans, the pace of growth is slowing. (Remember the second derivative from AP Calculus?)
Also of note:
- Of the 5 million adults projected to lose Medicaid coverage due to work requirements, 41% have three or more chronic conditions – you know, the type that require frequent interactions with a physician to manage properly.
- Amazon is rolling out pharmacy kiosks, which are totally going to fare better than all the other pharmacy kiosks that have failed in the last 15 years.
- Apparently moving workloads to the cloud willy nilly has left lots of healthcare organizations with unpredictable and untenable costs, which means some workloads are coming home like the Prodigal Son.
- Foundation models are all the rage in radiology, as they’re based on millions of images and purportedly are more accurate. That said, FDA authorization is slow and typically tied to a single use case.
- As hurricanes in the Gulf intensify faster, it’s harder for states to plan safe and timely evacuations – and time is of the essence for patients in medical facilities and/or those with chronic health conditions.
That’s it for now. Leave a comment if I missed something interesting. We’ll see you next month. Hopefully things will be less depressing.
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