Samwise Healthcare IT Newsletter
Sunday, September 6, 2026
House VA Committee votes to subpoena Larry Ellison over Oracle EHR overruns
The House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs voted unanimously to subpoena Oracle chairman Larry Ellison over ballooning costs in the VA’s troubled electronic health record project. The VA’s EHR modernization initiative, initially contracted at roughly $10 billion, is now projected to cost $48 billion — a cost overrun that has drawn bipartisan condemnation. Currently deployed across 11 VA hospitals, the Oracle system serves approximately 617,000 veterans and 35,000 clinicians. Go-live dates in Cleveland and Anchorage remain scheduled for October 2026. Lawmakers are demanding Ellison appear before the committee to account for delays, cost increases, and reported patient safety events linked to the system.
Sources: Healthcare IT News
Cloud data breaches and stopping data exfiltration
Three major healthcare cloud breaches in recent months have exposed the records of more than 13 million patients, highlighting growing risks in cloud-hosted environments. CareCloud saw 3.7 million patient records compromised via an Amazon Web Services vulnerability, while Aesto Health lost data on 9.5 million patients through a separate AWS exposure. McKesson became a third victim when the ShinyHunters threat group exploited a Salesforce and Snowflake environment through a vishing attack. Pete Basica, founder and chairman of security firm 360, said healthcare organizations must implement robust data exfiltration controls and zero-trust architectures to contain cloud-native threats before they escalate.
Sources: Healthcare IT News
ARPA-H awards millions to make precision medicine more accessible
The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health has awarded four contracts totaling up to $98.5 million to make precision medicine accessible to patients beyond major academic medical centers. Through the Rapid Acceleration of Precision Intervention Delivery, or RAPID, program, ARPA-H is funding teams from the University of North Carolina, Sage Bionetworks, FDNA, and Probably Genetic to develop scalable tools for genetic diagnosis and care. OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon Web Services, and Google have pledged in-kind resources to support the initiative. The five-year program aims to give patients in underserved and rural settings access to precision treatment pathways previously available only at specialized research hospitals.
Sources: Healthcare IT News
Clinical AI forces a rethink of reimbursement
Autonomous clinical AI tools are exposing fundamental flaws in the fee-for-service reimbursement model, according to a new analysis from the Peterson Health Technology Institute. PHTI executive director Caroline Pearson warned that layering AI automation into existing billing frameworks risks a dramatic escalation in healthcare costs. “If autonomous AI tools simply get layered into fee-for-service, we risk exploding healthcare spending,” Pearson said. The institute is calling for outcome-based payment models that tie AI reimbursement to measurable patient benefits rather than volume of procedures. As AI increasingly handles tasks previously billed as physician services, payers, providers, and policymakers face growing pressure to redesign the economic architecture of care delivery.
Sources: Healthcare IT News
OpenAI launches GPT‑6 Astra model
OpenAI has released GPT‑6 Astra to a limited set of healthcare and enterprise customers, with broader availability planned for ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise users through Microsoft Azure and AWS Bedrock. The model outperforms predecessor GPT‑5.6 Sol and competing models from Anthropic and Google on healthcare benchmarks covering care consultations, medical documentation, and research — at an estimated 53 percent lower API cost. Astra includes cybersecurity capabilities such as secure code review and vulnerability patching, backed by chain-of-thought monitoring that triggers alerts within 30 minutes of flagged activity. OpenAI also announced Epic EHR and Healthcare Public Data integrations allowing clinicians to connect patient and population data directly to ChatGPT.
Sources: Healthcare IT News
How AI can improve patient access – beyond simply filling the next open slot
Generative AI can improve patient access by going beyond the next available slot, according to Andy Parham, CEO of Brado AI. A pilot at Northwell Health using Brado’s CEP Provider IQ tool demonstrated the impact: subspecialty match rates rose from below 50 percent to above 85 percent, average time to appointment dropped from 45 to 22 days, and time to intervention fell from 74 to 30 days. Parham said health systems must connect search, symptom triage, provider matching, and scheduling into one intelligent workflow — beginning with the patient’s need rather than calendar availability. The goal is to guide patients to appropriate care, not just any open slot.
Sources: Healthcare IT News
Malaysia boosts digital health funding to $250M
Malaysia has increased its digital health investment to RM1 billion (approximately $250 million), with Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim announcing an additional RM350 million to accelerate EMR rollout and expand internet connectivity across public hospitals. The funding supports PERSADA, a joint Health and Communications ministry initiative piloting a cloud-based clinical management system across 150 government hospitals and 2,488 public healthcare facilities, targeting 81 percent of patients treated within one hour. The government has brought forward its public health digitalization deadline from 2045 to 2028, with the One Record, One Citizen national EMR program central to meeting the accelerated timeline.
Sources: Healthcare IT News
Korea, India outline healthcare AI strategies
South Korea has approved a national healthcare AI strategy that will connect 72 designated medical institutions through a GPU-based Public Healthcare AI Highway, with nine institutions joining a pilot network in the second half of 2026. The strategy also includes a National Health and Medical Data Hub, a sovereign Korean healthcare AI model, and AI packages for primary care covering medical imaging, clinical documentation, and chronic disease management. India, by contrast, lacks the ecosystem to move AI from pilots to deployment, according to a Praxis Global Alliance and FICCI industry paper that identifies fragmented data, evolving regulation, and limited reimbursement pathways as the three primary barriers to adoption.
Sources: Healthcare IT News
NZ to begin radiology modernisation
Te Whatu Ora Health New Zealand has issued an advance notice for a radiology modernisation programme budgeted at up to NZ$100 million (approximately $59 million), seeking vendors to deliver four capabilities: an enterprise imaging integration layer, an integrated reporting environment, an imaging AI orchestrator, and a national image archive. The programme targets a single connected radiology service across a network performing 2.5 million imaging procedures annually. Acting Chief IT Officer Darren Douglass said the upgrade will allow clinicians to access a patient’s full imaging history from anywhere in New Zealand. The business case is in final approval, supported by NZ$300 million from Budget 2026’s Health Digital Investment Plan.
Sources: Healthcare IT News
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