When Jake Mazanke joined Imagine 360 as head of communications, one of his first hires was the broadcast journalist Sydney Moran to lead multimedia. Moran had started out her career in local news, making her way up from a producer role to on air correspondent. Mazanke saw an opportunity to create a trove of video content, where Moran could talk to employers, benefits leaders and members across the country about topics like the healthcare affordability crisis. 

Within a year, his team launched a multimedia program to spotlight broker and benefits consultant partners featuring high-quality video interviews and companion articles. The ROI? “The content was also incorporated into marketing campaigns that reached brokerage and consulting firms responsible for roughly 30% of new business that year,” he said. 

As newsrooms around the country continue to lay off staff, healthcare companies see a new opportunity. 

The traditional strategy involves turning reporters into public relations professionals. Instead, smart companies are recruiting their very own in-house journalist to do what they do best, storytelling. In the process, they’re finding a far greater ROI in building brand awareness in a market where attention is a scarce commodity.

According to comms pro Jacquelyn Miller, a former strategist who is now in-house at virtual care consulting company General Medicine, journalists who take PR jobs face a fairly steep learning curve. Journalism and public relations are not the same role. So this new trend actually leverages the skillsets of a trained journalist - good editorial judgement and writing skills - more directly. 

What’s the backdrop? Well, as newsrooms close, it’s become harder than ever to land media. Earned media, meaning publicity gained through organic channels, is “no longer a viable primary channel for most companies,” notes Miller. And yet, compelling writing does stand out in an era of AI. 

“Hiring a journalist aligns with a broader shift in how companies think about disseminating news. Owned content is becoming the primary channel; earned is increasingly opportunistic,” Miller explained. “The in-house journalist is the natural hire for that playbook because they are very skilled at producing work worth reading on its own terms, not just content optimized for a pitch.”

What other big names made the leap from newsroom journalist to in-house journalist? To name just a few, some notable examples include Gabe Perna, who made the jump from Modern Healthcare to health-tech startup Clarium as head of community and content. And well-respected Forbes journalist Katie Jennings recently got scooped up by ambient scribe Abridge as a communications strategist. 

And a scary thought: For our democracy to function, we still need newsrooms and journalists doing, well, journalism. So while we plot and strategize around how to prepare for the future, let’s also support journalists through subscribing to their outlets.

“I also remember news before Facebook ad revenue destroyed the media, and I know what we’ve lost,” says Miller. “Editorial standards are/were an important arbiter of facts in an increasingly inscrutable world, and that layer seems to be eroding very quickly.”

Reserve Your Spot for Upcoming Webinars!

NEWS OF THE WEEK

HHS launches Moms.gov

The Department of Health and Human Services launched a new website for people who are pregnant or looking to conceive, on Monday. The site, called Moms.gov, offers nutrition advice and links to Federally Qualified Health Centers as well as to tax-advantaged children’s investment accounts and to TrumpRx, President Donald Trump’s listing of lower priced drugs. Controversially, the site also links to Optionline, a 24/7 helpline run by pro-life group Heartbeat International.

Pro-life movement supporters see the website’s launch as a win.

FDA Commissioner could be out of a job

The White House is planning on giving Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary the boot, according to several media outlets and first reported by The Wall Street Journal. Under Makary, the FDA has been embroiled in controversy and seen the departure of several high-level officials.

Pennsylvania sues chatbot maker for practicing medicine without a license

Pennsylvania is suing chatbot maker Character.ai for practicing medicine without a license. Character.ai is a general purpose LLM that takes on characters or personalities and is known to impersonate doctors. Doctors, and the advocacy groups that represent them, have been trying to bring attention this issue for a couple of years. In 2024, the American Psychological Association sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission asking the agency to investigate companies including Character.ai for deceptively marketing their chatbots as psychiatrists. In 2025, the FTC launched an inquiry into AI chatbot companions. Still, the company continues to offer psychologist characters.

Other individuals have sued Character.ai over harms, but this is the first time that a chatbot company has been sued for provisioning health care without a license.

Mifepristone can be sold online

The Supreme Court has put a pause on a Louisiana appeals court ruling that effectively halted online provisioning of abortion pills. The nation's highest court is temporarily allowing sales to continue after Mifeprex-maker Danco and generic mifepriston manufacturer GenBioPro filed emergency petitions.

It’s unclear what the court’s next steps will be. Pharmaceutical companies believe the decision sets a bad precedent for drug development. “The ruling cut around the established process for how drug access and labeling decisions are made,” wrote Grace Colón, the CEO of OmniPulse Biosciences, in STAT First Opinion. “You can imagine the slippery slope: If one state decides it doesn’t like a medication (for example, vaccines, contraception, or other widely used treatments), it could try to use the courts to impose nationwide restrictions or barriers. Over time, this kind of instability slows innovation and risks driving away investment,” she wrote. 

Cigna is leaving the Affordable Care Act market

The Affordable Care Act marketplace is failing to deliver growth at scale for Cigna, which announced it will leave it in 2027. "This is small business for us today, and it’s been shrinking in recent years," the company’s CEO Brian Evanko told Fierce Healthcare. "The decision will allow us to further intensify focus on our core growth platforms across The Cigna Group." 

The FDA wants to exclude GLP-1 from a compounding list

The agency has determined there isn’t a need for compounding large quantities of medications containing semaglutide, the main ingredient of weight loss and diabetes treatments Wegovy and Ozempic, and tirzepatide, the active ingredient of Mounjaro and Zepbound. 

“This action reflects our responsibility to protect patients and preserve the integrity of the drug approval process while continuing to provide a transparent, science-based pathway for public input,” said FDA Commissioner Marty Makary in a statement. The proposal won’t be finalized until the end of June.

DEALS & LAUNCHES

• Kalashi raises $1 billion: The prediction market startup is now valued at $22 billion. But some mental health practitioners are asking whether the rise of online betting is fomenting a new crisis.
• Amazon Pharmacy goes big on GLP-1s: Amazon is now stocking the Ozempic pill at its One Medical kiosks, allowing patients to see a doctor and pick up their prescription in the same building or have it delivered hours later. Pricing is set at $149/month out-of-pocket, or as low as $25 with insurance.
• Seaport Therapeutics, clinical-stage biotech focused on novel antidepressants and anxiety treatments, filed a $255 million IPO, targeting a $912 million valuation.
• Photon, a startup modernizing prescription infrastructure, raised $16 million in series A funding to expand its engineering and commercial teams, plus health system and platform integrations. The round was led by Healthier Capital.
• Aidoc, a startup developing clinical AI solutions, closed a series E round, raising $150 million less than a year after she raised the same amount in new financing. The round was led by Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives.
• Iterative Health, a startup focused on accelerating clinical research, closed a $77 million series C round, led by Intrepid Growth Partners and GV (Google Ventures).
• Behavioral health platform Tava Health raised $40 million in a series C round led by Centana Growth Partners.
• Zocalo Health, a technology company enabling community-based care for high need patients, closed a $15 million series A round led by EO Ventures. This brings the total raised by the company to $22.75 million. 
• AI home health platform Enzo Health raised $20 million in a series A round led by N47, bringing its total raised to $26 million. 
• Oura buys Galen AI, an AI-powered personal health companion that brings together medical records, labs, medications, and wearable data into one platform. The value of the transaction was undisclosed. 
• Chronic care telehealth company Omada Health has signed up to participate in the Optum Rx Weight Engage program, which will increase the company’s ability to scale its cardiometabolic care and support offerings, in particular GLP-1 prescriptions.

WE ARE HIRING!

Data Analyst (Contract / Fractional) We are seeking a Data Analyst with deep experience in Clay to support a large-scale data enrichment and segmentation initiative. This role will focus on transforming a fragmented subscriber dataset into a structured, actionable database that supports marketing, audience segmentation, and revenue strategy. Read More.519.57 KB • PDF File Download

ON LIFERS THIS WEEK!

Christina Farr sits down with Dr. Oliver Kharraz, the CEO of Zocdoc, a platform for finding doctors and scheduling appointments, to talk about how artificial intelligence could make it easier to see a physician. He says that while it seems like it takes weeks to get an appointment, there is hidden doctor availability that could be unlocked.

4 Questions with Will Morris, Chief Medical Officer at Tennr

SO: You’re a physician who’s come out of Big Tech, having worked at Google Cloud in a prior life. We are hearing about the death of software. How do you think Big Tech’s role will change as it thinks about selling into healthcare in an era of AI?

Dr. William Morris: At Google Cloud, the pitch was almost always the same. Here's a world-class platform, build on it. And health systems would nod, do a pilot, and then... nothing scaled. Not because the technology was bad. It wasn't. But the gap between what a platform can do and what a health system can actually operationalize is enormous. 

What I saw at Cleveland Clinic reinforced that. You can have incredible infrastructure and still watch workflows collapse under their own weight. The bottleneck was never the compute. It was always the last ten feet: getting the right output to the right person in the right moment. Workflow and process are equally if not more important than the technology. 

So here's where I think Big Tech lands in healthcare: they become infrastructure. The value creation migrates to the application layer. But generic applications using generalized LLMs make it even harder for health systems to operationalize the tech they’re trying to implement. The winners will be companies that understand one clinical workflow deeply enough - with specialized models built for each specific use case - to automate it end-to-end. That's the shift from "selling software seats" to "selling solved problems." In healthcare, that specificity makes all the difference from a patient falling through the cracks and a patient getting seen. So, while Tennr is a healthcare technology company at our core, we have built out a services team as well. We feel you need to have both if you want technology deployed where work is performed. 

SO: What is the biggest problem to be solved when it comes to AI in healthcare today for health systems?

Dr. William Morris: The implementation gap, full stop. 

Every health system I've worked with, at Cleveland Clinic, at Google, and now at Tennr, is drowning in AI pilots that never operationalize. The crisis isn't a lack of good models. It's that we keep applying AI to the surface of healthcare while the underlying administrative plumbing stays completely broken. 

The inefficiencies in referral management don’t get enough attention. Somewhere between 25 and 50% of referrals never result in a completed appointment. Patients fall out of the system. They sit in queues. They get lost between a PCP and a specialist who never gets the right information. And somehow we've all accepted this as normal. 

The bigger issue is that FIFO, first in, first out, is still the dominant structure for how most health systems handle referral intake. Everyone talks about increasing access to care. Almost nobody talks about increasing access to what I call the Five Rights: care in the right place, at the right venue, for the right cost, at the right time, in the right format. That distinction is where the real value lives. 

The referral isn't the problem, the absence of intelligent triage and routing is. Fix that layer and everything downstream gets better. AI should be fixing this plumbing... not adding a chatbot on top of a broken pipe. 

SO: By now you probably read the Cirtini memo. So what is a healthcare scenario for 2028 that scares you the most? 

Dr. William Morris: Picture a major health system in 2028 running 40 different AI point solutions, one for prior auth, one for documentation, one for scheduling, one for triage, one for coding... none of which share a common data model. We'll have 10x more software and zero more operational clarity. 

This is what I'd call AI theater. The worst possible scenario is dashboards full of efficiency metrics that don't translate to patient outcomes, with mortality unchanged, preventable admissions unchanged, clinician burnout unchanged, or worse. Or the coordination layer, the part where a referring physician needs a specialist and the patient actually needs to get there, stays just as broken as it was in 2024. We just dressed it up. 

The antidote is straightforward in concept and incredibly hard to execute: AI that is embedded in workflows, not layered on top of them. The difference between transformation and theater is whether the AI actually changes what happens next for a patient. 

SO: And what’s a healthcare scenario that makes you most optimistic?

Dr. William Morris: The one that keeps me going is around orchestration: the specialist and system operating at the top of their licensure because everything outside their unique expertise has been handled before they ever see the patient I’m excited for more health systems to implement infrastructures of intelligent routing, priority management, and real-time adjustment. Healthcare referral management today is the opposite. The system has no routing logic, no priority intelligence, and no system-level view. 

Get that right, and you get a cascade. Specialists do what only they can do. PCPs trust that patients are actually getting to the right place. High-acuity patients get seen faster, and lower-acuity patients get routed to settings that cost less and work better for them. Providers focusing on the care of the patient; not playing phone pin-ball around authorizations and qualifications. A meaningful portion of preventable hospitalizations trace back to coordination failures, not clinical failures. This opportunity to collaborate on this is why I joined Tennr. 

And beyond the system efficiency... I'm genuinely excited about the patient who gains agency. The one who doesn't have to call the office four times, who doesn't fall out of a referral queue, who doesn't end up in the ED because nobody caught what was escalating. The best version of 2028 isn't just more efficient, it’s also a more humane version that serves both patients and providers.

Dr. William Morris is CMO at Tennr, the leading AI-powered healthcare automation platform that specializes in the orchestration of referrals, patient flow, and prior authorizations. Before joining Tennr, he was the Chief Medical Information Officer of Google Cloud Healthcare and Life Sciences. Before his work at Alphabet Inc., Dr. Morris served as the Chief Innovation Officer of Cleveland Clinic Innovations and as the Associate Chief Information Officer for Cleveland Clinic, where he had oversight of the design, development, and deployment of all clinical IT systems and health IT innovations. Dr. Morris also served on Cleveland Clinic’s Board.