Omar Najid

Three types of healthcare AI companies are emerging—and which one you bet on could determine if you succeed, get acquired, or vanish in the next five years. Here's what you should know: 1. The Platform Players: These are the ambitious companies trying to become the operating system of digital health. They unify patient records, analytics, communication, and care pathways under one umbrella. The dream? To lock in customers (hospitals, clinics, providers) for a decade. The risk? Big, slow, and at risk of bad rollouts. Epic and Innovaccer unify records, analytics, comms, and care into true digital health “operating systems”—locking in hospitals for years. 2. Agile Point Solution Specialists: These are nimble companies going deep on a single problem: automating documentation, accelerating prior authorizations, catching hidden diseases, or improving coding accuracy. They get pilots quickly and prove ROI. The upside? Easier entry and fast wins. The catch? They might get copied, acquired, or sunsetted when platforms roll out “good enough” features. Tempus (AI oncology) and Aidoc (radiology triage) dominate single high-value workflows and quickly prove ROI before expanding. 3. Infrastructure Enablers: Quietly powering the rest, these companies focus on secure interoperability, privacy, and compliance for everyone else. They offer the tools that allow others to scale or launch new features. They’re essential but low-key, often acting as the backbone for the industry. AKASA (revenue cycle automation) and Cedar (billing/payment AI) quietly power system-wide efficiency and compliance for everyone. Why does this matter? Because healthcare is about to consolidate again—platforms will be acquisitive, point solutions will either scale or sell, and infrastructure is the glue holding it all together. If you’re picking a partner or building your own offering, ask: Are you a platform, a point solution, or enabling critical infrastructure for the rest? And who’s best positioned for the next wave? What healthcare AI play are you watching—and have you seen a category-busting startup others have missed? Share below! Check out quick.md, @ryanlissack on X for more insights.

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I really found this chart by Javier Valverde at Prosus Ventures to be a great illustration of why the EHR market is not a cohesive entity, but a series of sub-markets. In his article, he details how the biggest opportunity to create and take market share are ones where there are: 1. Large end-markets 2. Some level of fragmentation As we talked about in "There Will Be Bundling" (and will continue to talk about in the series with Christian Kurth and Tidemark), fragmented large markets exhibit extremely different buying characteristics than mid-market, niche SMB, or enterprise-dominated ones. Healthcare is a superset of a variety of smaller industry groups. I overlayed Epic, athenahealth, and eClinicalWorks to give a simple idea of where each competes. Not surprising that we see the exact patterns he mentions in each category: subspecialization for top right's "goldilocks", layer cake for mid-market, and specific high-value workflows on top of the existing system of record for enterprise. This also implicitly explains why we won't see an imminent disruption of the Epic part of the market in terms of a system of record, increasing the importance of information blocking and other regulation to ensure new companies can create those specific high-value workflows without special effort or hindrance by Epic or other competitors. Would be fun to dig into all the raw data behind the healthcare bubbles and really map out the EHR submarkets in that way.

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Here’s a common cycle I’ve witnessed the past 12 years that lead to Health Tech startups starting and failing: → Innovator identifies problem that could be fixed by better Tech → Sees how “behind other industries” the Tech solutions in healthcare are →  Assumes no one has built the Tech to solve this, so once they build the Tech, it’ll be easy to get adoption → Finds a few excited health systems and makes some sales. Gets some exciting press coverage.  Raises some venture capital dollars. → Runs into lots of problems with implementation at health systems. Clinical workflows are complicated. Misaligned incentives. Integrations are hard to secure. Learning about change management for the first time. Ultimately while the basic Tech works, the user adoption is low and clinical outcomes data is poor. The company shuts down or gets acqui-hired or acquired for parts (but the press coverage of an acquisition sounds good so it sounds like a wild success). What went wrong? The big mistake, the original sin, was building the Tech and THEN figuring out all the stakeholders affected and how this would be successfully adopted into their clinical workflows. When the right order is: → Understand the problem to be solved → Map out all the stakeholders impacted by the program and their existing clinical workflows → Determine the ideal way to solve it - regardless of whether Tech is involved IF Tech is an advantageous way to solve it, ideate what that looks like in consultation with clinical stakeholders - so that you understand how to fit it into their workflows - and validate if that tradeoffs will be acceptable to them → Build and iterate the Tech with the clinical stakeholders Notice how building the Tech is the last step. I’ll admit we too made the original sin at SeamlessMD and we are lucky we survived long enough to course correct over time. But I’ll tell you this - despite having a robust platform that's had 12 years of improvement and evolution, when we implement with a new health system, we always, ALWAYS engage all the clinical stakeholders to validate the pain points and map out the existing clinical workflows - and see how we fit best. That process never goes away, and if you care more about building Tech and aren’t willing to stay in the trenches with clinicians for your entire startup career… Health Tech probably isn’t for you.

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🚨 Value-Based Healthcare is the Biggest Scam in Modern Medicine For over a decade, consultants, policymakers, and hospital boards have sold us the dream of “Value-Based Healthcare (VBHC)” — a utopian model where patients get better outcomes for lower costs, providers are rewarded for efficiency, and the entire system magically balances compassion with capitalism. Sounds noble, doesn’t it? Here’s the problem: it’s a hoax. 🔹 1. “Value” Was Never About Patients Michael Porter’s famous equation (value = outcomes / cost) looks neat on a whiteboard. But in the real world: Outcomes are impossible to standardize across patients. Costs are defined by hospital accountants, not by the biology of healing. What gets called “value” is usually just cost-cutting disguised as reform. 🔹 2. The ICHOM Failure No One Talks About Remember the International Consortium for Health Outcomes Measurement (ICHOM)? It promised to define standardized outcomes for every condition — hip replacement, cataracts, heart failure. Reality check: it failed. Why? Because the human body does not follow spreadsheets. A stent in 100 patients = 100 different recoveries. A hip replacement in a 45-year-old marathoner ≠ in a 75-year-old diabetic. The dream of universal outcome comparability collapsed under biological complexity. 🔹 3. Outcomes Can’t Be Predicted Healthcare isn’t car manufacturing. In Toyota’s factory, the same robot weld produces the same car door. In medicine, the same surgery or drug can mean: Full recovery for one patient. Permanent disability for another. Death for a third. Yet VBHC ties money to outcomes, punishing providers for variability of nature itself. 🔹 4. Who Really Benefits? Let’s be blunt: not the patient, not the frontline doctor. Insurers capture the financial upside. Consultants build endless dashboards. Administrators chase KPIs and bonuses. Doctors are pressured to do more with less. Patients experience rationed time, rationed care, rationed empathy. VBHC has become a Trojan horse for financial engineering, not a patient-first revolution. 🔹 5. The Ethical Trap By chasing “value contracts,” hospitals increasingly: Cherry-pick “easy” patients. Avoid complex, elderly, or socioeconomically disadvantaged patients. Document for metrics instead of delivering care. That’s not medicine. That’s market gaming. ⚡ The Bottom Line Value-Based Healthcare isn’t failing because it’s misunderstood. It’s failing because it was never built for the biology of real patients. It was built for spreadsheets, contracts, and quarterly boardroom wins. The human body doesn’t fit into PowerPoint. And it never will. 🔥 Controversial Takeaway: Until we admit VBHC is a scam dressed as innovation, healthcare leaders will keep chasing illusions while patients keep paying the price. 👉 Question for my network: Do you think VBHC can ever be salvaged — or should we finally admit it’s a failed experiment and start building something truly patient-centered? COFLET Empathify

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BREAKING NEWS: The White House & CMS just rallied 60+ tech and healthcare heavyweights—from Amazon and Apple to Epic and leading HIEs—to sign a pledge that promises to closes the “last mile” of interoperability. Expect CMS‑Aligned Networks, app libraries, patient‑controlled FHIR APIs, and digital IDs that replace the clipboard—all rolling out by 2026. https://lnkd.in/gHP2QdMG Why it matters: HIEs must gap‑assess and align now, or watch national networks claim their turf. Game on. #lastmileinteroperability #HealthIT #HIE #DigitalHealth

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📢 New AI implementation into the diabetes workflow When it comes to diabetic foot complications, the traditional care model has often been about reaction, not prevention. My own father, previously managed under a large traditional care system, whose diabetic neuropathy and the severe progression to Charcot foot only came when it was already too late, lead to a toe amputation as his only remaining solution. This story is tragically common, and it’s why we at GluCare.Health and meta[bolic] are committed to a different path bringing in new technology earlier into the workflow. The Problem: A Silent Epidemic in the UAE 🇦🇪 In the UAE, diabetic neuropathy is a widespread affecting up to 70% of people with long-standing diabetes. This nerve damage robs you of sensation, which means a small blister or a cut can go unnoticed and develop into a severe foot ulcer. This is why more than half of all foot ulcers will become infected, with 20% of infections resulting in amputation. While standard care focuses on annual foot checks, we believe in a more proactive, data-rich approach. Our new AI thermal imaging detects subtle temperature changes that are the first sign of inflammation, appearing weeks or even months before a foot ulcer becomes visible. What This Means for our patients: Early Detection, Non-Invasive and Fast, and a practice of Preventative health as standard. Amplifai Health was developed in Saudi Arabia by an all Saudi team lead by Dr. Meshari F. Alwashmi. We need more technology built in the GCC to tackle issues widely prevalent in the GCC, and I'm proud to be an early adopter and supporter. This is more than just a new test. It's another crucial biometric that feeds into GluCare.Health’s continuous care model, giving us a richer, more complete dataset to provide patients with personalized and preventive care. Ali Hashemi Zeina A. Dr. Rashed Mahboubi

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