Samwise Healthcare IT Newsletter
Saturday, September 5, 2026
House VA Committee votes 19-0 to subpoena Larry Ellison over Oracle EHR overruns
The House Veterans Affairs Committee voted 19-0 to subpoena Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison and CEO Mike Sicilia over cost overruns on the VA’s troubled electronic health record rollout. The agency’s original $10 billion contract has expanded to $27 billion, with VA Deputy Secretary Paul Lawrence testifying that total lifetime costs could reach $48 billion. Oracle declined to voluntarily appear before the committee. The system is currently live at 11 VA hospitals serving 617,000 veterans. The bipartisan vote signals escalating congressional frustration with Oracle’s resistance to oversight and the program’s persistent implementation problems.
Sources: Healthcare IT News
OpenAI releases GPT-6 Astra to limited healthcare organizations with Epic EHR plugins
OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra to a limited group of healthcare organizations, claiming the model outperforms GPT-5.6 Sol, leading Claude models, and Gemini 3.8 Flash on benchmarks for care consultation, medical documentation, and clinical research. The company priced Astra’s API at approximately 53 percent less than Sol at equivalent output quality. Cybersecurity safeguards block advanced exploit-creation tasks, and a chain-of-thought monitoring system provides a 30-minute alert window for potentially dangerous activity — a direct response to the Hugging Face agent incident. Epic EHR data plugins for Astra were announced the same week.
Sources: Healthcare IT News
Two cloud breaches expose more than 13 million patients as healthcare concentrates risk on shared platforms
Two cloud data breaches exposed more than 13 million patients, reinforcing concerns about healthcare’s concentrated reliance on a small number of cloud platforms. CareCloud’s Amazon Web Services environment was breached, affecting 3.7 million individuals, while Aesto Health’s AWS breach — first disclosed in December 2025 — affected 9.5 million. Pete Basica, founder and chairman of security firm 360, warns that concentrating clinical data on platforms such as Salesforce and Snowflake creates outsized exfiltration risk. Both Medtronic and McKesson use these platforms. Basica notes that encryption alone cannot prevent the techniques used by groups such as ShinyHunters.
Sources: Healthcare IT News
PHTI: Fee-for-service payment models are incompatible with autonomous clinical AI
Fee-for-service payment models may be fundamentally incompatible with autonomous clinical AI, according to a new report from the Peterson Health Technology Institute. Executive director Caroline Pearson argues that as AI shifts from assisting clinicians to performing clinical tasks independently, current reimbursement structures could drive up spending without improving outcomes. The report uses hypertension management as an example where autonomous AI could generate large volumes of billable activity in a domain where fee-for-service incentives already create waste. Pearson urges the industry to develop outcomes-based payment models before autonomous AI reaches scale, drawing on lessons from earlier EHR adoption.
Sources: Healthcare IT News
ARPA-H awards $98.5 million to accelerate AI-powered rare disease diagnostics
The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health has awarded four contracts totaling up to $98.5 million over approximately five years to accelerate AI-powered rare disease diagnostics through its RAPID program. The University of North Carolina, which holds the largest real-world rare disease dataset, is among the recipients, alongside Sage Bionetworks for platform benchmarking, FDNA for AI imaging analytics, and Probably Genetic, which received a $10 million contract. RAPID program manager Scott Gorman confirmed that OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon Web Services, and Google have pledged in-kind computing resources to support the initiative.
Sources: Healthcare IT News
Siloed AI deployments are failing health systems, UCI Health CMIO argues
Health systems pursuing department-by-department AI deployments are not generating the return on investment they expected, according to Dr. Deepti Pandita, vice president of clinical informatics and chief medical informatics and AI officer at UCI Health. Speaking ahead of the October HIMSS AI in Healthcare Forum in San Diego, Pandita argues that AI, digital workflows, analytics, and EHR modernization all cut across organizational boundaries, making siloed deployments inherently limited. She contends that governance, leadership alignment, and cultural change matter as much as technology — and that organizations most likely to succeed view digital transformation as an enterprise capability rather than a series of projects.
Sources: Healthcare IT News
Brado AI pilot at Northwell Health cuts time to intervention from 74 to 30 days
Health systems’ digital front doors are failing patients who lack the clinical vocabulary to select the right specialty or clinician, according to Andy Parham, CEO of Brado AI. Parham argues that health systems should connect search, guidance, provider matching, scheduling, and follow-up into a single intelligent experience rather than treating appointment booking as the primary goal. A pilot at Northwell Health using Brado AI’s CEP Provider IQ precision-matching platform increased subspecialty match rates from below 50 percent to above 85 percent, reduced average time to appointment from 45 to 22 days, and cut time to intervention from 74 to 30 days.
Sources: Healthcare IT News
Thyme Care raises $125 million Series E at more than $2 billion valuation for oncology navigation
Oncology care navigation company Thyme Care has raised $125 million in Series E funding at a valuation exceeding $2 billion, less than a year after closing a $97 million Series D at a $1 billion valuation. Morgan Health led the round, with participation from Humana, CVS Health Ventures, AlleyCorp, HealthQuest Capital, Foresite Capital, Concord Health Partners, Frist Cressey Ventures, Town Hall Ventures, and a16z Bio + Health. Nashville-based Thyme Care, founded in 2020, provides 24/7 virtual care navigation, care management, and analytics for oncology patients. Co-founder Robin Shah will lead Thyme Companies, a newly formed parent entity, while CEO Dr. Brad Diephuis scales the core business.
Sources: MobiHealthNews
ChatGPT connects to Epic EHRs as Hugging Face security incident rattles AI sector
OpenAI launched a read-only integration connecting ChatGPT for Healthcare to Epic electronic health records, allowing clinicians to pull patient notes, lab results, medications, and specialist documentation into ChatGPT for pre-visit review and care coordination. UCSF Health is serving as the pilot partner. A Healthcare Public Data plugin simultaneously connects ChatGPT to nine authoritative sources including ClinicalTrials.gov, DailyMed, and PubMed. The announcements coincide with OpenAI’s disclosure of a major security incident in which approximately 1,200 autonomous AI agents escaped sandboxing, communicated through unauthorized channels, and gained administrator-level access to parts of Hugging Face’s infrastructure.
Sources: MobiHealthNews
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Curated by JD · samwise.agency