David Osborne

Healthtech CMOs: want to take advantage of the Rural Health Transformation program? Guide your ICPs on how to apply for funding. There are plenty of providers currently actively trying to figure out how to tap into all of that cash. And it's not always the easiest or most obvious process. - Does a particular technology fit the RHT criteria? - How should I apply? - How do I evaluate the specific vendor or offering? - Does our organization qualify as a rural provider under the program rules? - Which funding stream is the right one for our use case? - What outcomes do we need to demonstrate in the application? - What documentation will we need to submit? - What internal resources are required to manage the grant? - Can this funding cover implementation and training, or only the software itself? - What reporting obligations come after we receive the funds? All of these, and many more, are questions CFOs | CIOs | CMIOs are asking right now. None of these execs wants their org be the one that gets it wrong. So if you're a healthtech vendor, provide them with that guidance and lower the friction for them to get funding. If you want to drive real adoption, offer a roadmap to funding as part of your marketing strategy. It will enable them to come back to you later for investments in your offering. I'm Abdul, the healthcare and life sciences marketer, and co-founder of Sirona Marketing. We focus on GTM and marketing support for healthcare and life sciences companies. If you need help with your marketing, including on how to tap into RHT funding, let us know. If we can't help you, we know people who can.

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Most growth-stage companies don’t need a bigger data team or more tools. They need better questions and clear definitions. That was one of the clearest takeaways from my conversation with Ryan Koonce on Health Tech Builders. What I see (and Ryan sees) over and over: Teams argue about numbers because they never agreed on definitions Leaders ask dozens of analytics questions, but prioritize none Data teams become translators and bottlenecks Decision velocity slows—even as dashboards multiply Ryan put it simply: “Data isn’t just the number. It’s the definition behind the number.” And this is the part many companies miss: If you can’t clearly answer what decision this data is meant to inform, then more tools, more reports, and more analysts won’t help. What actually works: Leaders align on a small set of business-critical questions Metrics are defined once and owned at the exec level Clean data foundations make answers accessible And increasingly, executives explore data directly—often with AI Clarity first. Data second. That’s how analytics turns into leverage instead of noise. #Leadership #DataStrategy #ScalingCompanies

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Matt Holt, former New Mountain Capital executive, is exploring a $30 billion deal to combine five health tech startups into a single platform called Thoreau. The venture would set out to simplify and integrate services across payers, providers and data — and if completed, it would rank among the largest private equity-backed health tech companies ever. Time will tell if this massive consolidation ever gets completed or translates into real value — or if it's just another bet on scale.

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What needs to change first and foremost is healthcare finance. These insurance bizdiots consume more than half your healthcare dollar, up front. Then we need to make the big hospital systems run efficiently. Finally, we need to stop hemorrhaging 84% of healthcare expenditures on avoidable, behavior-based chronic disease. These three financial problems can be solved with education and automation. 1. Automate the health insurance industry. Provide the EMR, pay 150% of Medicare for procedures documented. 2. Provide an ERP style hospital administration system to find cash leaks and inefficiencies. 3. As the insurance company, offer double digit discounts for improved lab results. Problem solved Overview of the solution (that's in production, by the way): https://lnkd.in/eUt_HTQX

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2025 was a defining year for Hyro. We raised $45M, worked with dozens of enterprise health systems, won category awards and pushed our responsible AI chat/voice agents to new heights. Below are 6 highlights we’re extremely proud of: 1) We are now partnered with 50 major health systems across the US. In 2025, we welcomed over a dozen new enterprise health systems and expanded deeply with long-standing partners across more service lines, workflows and patient journeys. 2) Raised $45M to accelerate AI agent adoption in healthcare. We raised $45M in a round led by Healthier Capital, with participation from new investors -- Define Ventures, Norwest, ServiceNow and Mercy Health -- and existing investors: Macquarie Capital and Black Opal Ventures. We’re grateful for this major vote of confidence in our mission! The new funding allows us to: - Further deploy our responsible AI agents across more major US health systems to improve patient access - Build five new engineering teams to support new workflow layers - Expand our focus to mid-market health systems and specialty clinics (orthopedics, pediatrics, etc) 3) Won 3 major awards for Hyro’s responsible AI agents. In 2025, Hyro received three major awards: - Salesforce 2025 Partner Innovation Award - CB Insights Digital Health 50 - Fierce Healthcare Innovation Award 4) Launched proactive outreach for patient access and coverage. In 2025, we expanded beyond inbound automation with: - Proactive Px™ for outbound patient communications - ARMR™ Outreach to support patients at risk of losing coverage due to regulatory changes (e.g. OBBBA) Health systems can now proactively reach patients via voice and SMS in order to close care gaps, improve access and help patients stay covered. 5) Real customer impact at scale at the Tens of Millions. Our AI agents worked this year at never-before-seen scale: - Tens of Millions of patient interactions handled successfully over voice, web/mobile chat, and SMS - Tens of Millions of staff hours saved - Tens of Millions in dollar value of appointments scheduled Every one of these numbers reflects patients who received faster care and staff who got back more time to focus on what matters. 6) Rang the NYSE bell. Very fun, and a nice prep for the future :) Last but not least, thank you to our entire team of Superhyros! Couldn’t be more proud of our team’s incredible ambition, execution, and care this year for patients. Onto 2026!

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𝗛𝗲𝗮𝗹𝘁𝗵 𝘀𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺𝘀 𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗽 𝘂𝗽 𝗱𝗶𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗶𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗿𝗲𝗳𝗼𝗰𝘂𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗳𝗿𝗲𝗲 𝗰𝗮𝗽𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹 Health systems are stepping up divestitures and joint ventures to shore up finances ahead of looming reimbursement cuts. Non-core assets, such as labs, long-term care facilities, and real estate, are being sold or spun off, and some hospitals are being sold in markets where systems lack sufficient scale. The goal is to free up capital for reinvestment in ambulatory and specialty services.  - Ascension has exited markets like Binghamton, NY, and Michigan, selling hospitals where it lacked scale, while refocusing on ambulatory care with a $3.9B deal for 250 Amsurg surgery centers.  - OhioHealth sold select lab services to Quest Diagnostics, which can manage volumes more efficiently and reduce costs, freeing OhioHealth to channel capital into oncology and women’s health. Executives say these moves are less about distress and more about long-term strategy: simplifying operations, gaining cash reserves, and partnering with specialized operators. Analysts note that the trend reflects a broader rethink of what services health systems must own versus what can be outsourced or managed with partners.

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Introducing the Health Innovation Strategy Framework After two decades of building health startups, advising Fortune 500 life sciences firms, and designing care delivery programs at scale—I've distilled what works (and what fails) in transforming healthcare. 💡 That’s why I created the Health Innovation Strategy Framework—a blueprint to help healthcare leaders and organizations move beyond the buzzwords and into measurable outcomes. This framework is designed for: Health tech founders navigating go-to-market chaos Provider groups launching digital-first services Employers, payers & PBMs aiming to improve access, cost & experience Investors evaluating scalable models in a complex care ecosystem Organizations looking for the next best health innovation to partner, adopt or acquire 📊 Core pillars: •Innovation Culture and Infrastructure •Partnership Readiness •Product-Market Fit in Healthcare •Regulatory & Payer Navigation •Clinical Workflow Alignment •Patient Engagement •Sustainable Growth Strategy Here’s a quick look ⬇️ I’ll be diving into each of these in subsequent posts. 🔍 Want to see how this applies to your organization? 📬 DM me or contact me directly for a custom Innovation Readiness Assessment. Let’s build smarter, faster, and with real impact. #HealthcareInnovation #HealthTech #PartnershipStrategy #DigitalHealth #GoToMarket #ValueBasedCare #HealthEquity #LifeSciences #StrategicGrowth #HealthStrategy

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Morgan asks the $1TN question: As a healthcare CEO, can you trust OpenAI or Anthropic as your AI one-stop-shop? On the ground implementing AI at healthcare enterprises, the answer is nuanced. It's a trade-off between 2 options: 1. Self-hosted ("Control"): Data security, vendor flexibility, more customizable, more workflow control, but higher maintenance costs. 2. SaaS/API ("Convenience"): SOTA models, built-in best practices, potentially higher availability via SLA, but less workflow control and lower maintenance costs. A hybrid option is emerging: managed AI/automation where you control infrastructure, data, and integration with help from a managed intelligence provider, while the model vendor handles upgrades. AI model companies would be wise to lean into this option. Ultimately it comes down to data security and workflow control. ERP and SaaS cycles taught us that "out of the box best-practice" workflows don't work at enterprise scale without massive customization. AI that learns may ease some of this, but not all. We'll need headless automation that decouples AI models from workflow. (Disclaimer: My own professional opinion, not that of any of our healthcare clients or their PE funds) #AI #healthcare #enterpriseAI

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The tune was different at ViVE this year. For those who haven’t been, ViVE sits at the intersection of health systems, payers, digital health, AI, and venture. Operators and tech companies come together to share (and debate) big ideas about the future of healthcare. What struck me most last week was how central the workforce conversation has become in rooms that historically focused almost exclusively on technology. AI was everywhere. Ambient listening. Predictive analytics. Automation. Staffing optimization. Virtual care. Every panel had a slide about efficiency. But underneath the buzzwords, one question kept surfacing: Are we building technology that actually works for the people delivering care? I spoke with CIOs, founders, investors, and health system executives who are waking up to the same truth nurse leaders have lived for years. You cannot separate financial performance from workforce experience. If your clinical teams are not bought in, no amount of sophisticated technology will fix your margin problem. Technology does not create ROI on its own. Adoption does. Trust does. Workflow fit does. The most promising conversations were not about replacing clinicians. They were about removing friction, forecasting more intelligently, and aligning staff and tech proactively to forecasted demand. If you were at ViVE this year, I’d love to keep the conversation going. What gave you confidence about where healthcare technology is heading, and where do you think we still have blind spots? #ViVE2026 #DigitalHealth #HealthcareIT #NursingLeadership #HealthcareInnovation #WorkforceStrategy #AIinHealthcare

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𝗔𝗜 𝗜𝘀 𝗥𝗲𝗱𝗲𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗥𝘂𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗛𝗲𝗮𝗹𝘁𝗵𝗰𝗮𝗿𝗲 — 𝗡𝗼𝘁 𝗦𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗱𝗮𝘆. 𝗧𝗼𝗱𝗮𝘆. Rural healthcare providers aren’t just fighting disease. They’re fighting inefficiency, documentation overload, staffing gaps, and time. At the Center for Health Systems Innovation and OLSF Ventures, we believe the next wave of transformation isn’t about adding more people. It’s about amplifying the people already there. That’s why we’re excited about the work of companies like: Ambience – Using ambient AI to instantly document and code physician-patient encounters in real time. No scribes. No dictation. Just more time for care. Lumeris – Providing value-based care platforms and physician enablement services that optimize workflow, improve patient outcomes, and reduce unnecessary costs—especially important in resource-scarce rural markets. Percipio – Delivering advanced diagnostic support through AI-driven clinical decision tools, helping rural physicians confidently manage complex cases when specialty referrals aren’t an option. These aren’t abstract ideas or future-state visions. They’re live solutions—already deployed, already making a difference. Because in rural America, workflow is survival. If we want to close the health equity gap, we need to equip providers not just with compassion, but with the tools to do more with less. #RuralHealth #HealthcareInnovation #ArtificialIntelligence #Ambience #Lumeris #Percipio #CHSI #OLSFVentures #HealthEquity #Startups #DigitalHealth #AI #WorkforceEnablement #ValueBasedCare #Leadership #PrimaryCare

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Say you know me without saying it ... "Hey, let's improve healthcare purchasing!" Durable goods, every day disposables, every part of purchasing in healthcare products continues to be broken. Natan Wise and team Conduit Health are improving the spend process for consumers, healthcare providers. This moves $100b in annual spend, but also improves people's lives. You can read our deeper take at XYZ here: https://lnkd.in/gEhfACtB Thrilled to have more money to run with the Drive Capital partnership! And Maybe you want to improve people's everyday lives? Live in NYC? You probably want to work here: https://lnkd.in/gtGEB8Ku

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It would be valuable for CMS to clarify whether the process was based on objective metrics or strategically focused on partnerships with well-connected organizations.

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