Ryan Gallagher

There’s a few flaws in the opinion that “digital health M&A will go crazy in 2026.” My thoughts: - Very few of the most obvious buyers (large digital companies), actually have $200M+ on their balance sheet to make meaningful cash offers. Standard debt isn’t an option, and venture debt can be extremely dilutive if things go south. - Given few digital health companies are cash flow positive, most do not want to fund a second cash flow losing business. - Equity-based newco merger deals are less attractive for most parties, since you are relying on a 1 + 1 = 3 valuation lift scenario. And the reality is that M&A doesn’t often yield that if both entities are sub-scale. - The legacy buyers (e.g., UHC/Optum, CVS Health, Cigna/Evernorth, Elevance, etc) seem to be digesting previous M&A and focused on shoring up their core businesses. If you take one company doing $30M revenue losing $10M per year and you merge with another company doing $10M revenue losing $5M per year, I’m not sure you created more economic value in today’s market. The digital health IPO market seems to want $200M+ revenue and near breakeven or cash flow positive. Now there are two archetypes who is extremely attractive and will still fetch high valuations: 1. Cash flow positive, profitable businesses with strong clincial models and long-term customer retention. 2. Best in class AI solutions that have a plan to manage inference / token costs and have built a repeatable sales motion. But these are my two cents. Thoughts?

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Here is a number of research reports on the state of #AI in #Healthcare - from Bessemer Venture Partners Ernst & Young Global Consulting Services KPMG Boston Consulting Group (BCG) NVIDIA Wolters Kluwer Deloitte Digital KPMG McKinsey & Company The question is no longer if and how but how fast we can implement!!! Thank you 🙏 Effie GUO for sharing

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OutcomesAI raises $10M to scale #AI-powered nursing services OutcomesAI, a Boston-based healthcare company building a new model of scalable nursing, has raised $10 million in Seed financing. The round was led by Sante Health Ventures II LP, with @Joe Cunningham, M.D., Linda Finkel, Dennis McWilliams, and Kevin White, Ph.D. joining the Board alongside Founder & CEO Kuldeep Singh Rajput. OutcomesAI combines AI voice agents with licensed nurses to extend nursing capacity, reduce costs, and improve patient access. Its Glia® platform captures symptoms, schedules visits, coordinates follow-ups, provides education in multiple languages, and supports nurses with real-time scribing and protocol guidance. Services include triage, virtual care, post-acute follow-up, and patient support programs. In 2024, OutcomesAI launched the OutcomesAI Collaboratory, partnering with five health systems and virtual care providers to validate Glia’s safety, accuracy, and clinical performance. Early findings show Glia reduced nurse workload by hundreds of hours per month while doubling patient-to-nurse ratios. The new funding will accelerate commercial rollout, launch dedicated nursing service lines, and scale enterprise partnerships across health systems, virtual care providers, and pharma. 🌐 Transforming nursing with AI for safer, more efficient, and accessible patient care. #OutcomesAI #DigitalHealth #HealthTech #AIinHealthcare #NursingInnovation #VirtualCare #PatientCare #HealthcareAI #FundingNews #SantéVentures #SeedFunding #Glia #HealthcareInnovation #EnterpriseHealth #ClinicalAI

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🎲 What's the winning hand in healthcare’s future? Here's how some of the most brilliant innovators at HLTH are working to make their visions into reality including: April Koh (Spring Health), Jenna Glover (Headspace), Trevor Martin (Mammoth Biosciences), Michael Serbinis (League), and Aidan Dewar (Nourish).

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Why did VC Firm General Catalyst Spend Billions to Buy a Healthcare System? What does it mean? Healthcare is a $4.5 trillion industry that still runs on fax machines. Physicians complete 39 prior authorization requests per week. Staff burn 13 hours chasing approvals that get denied and later overturned. $35 billion spent annually on paperwork that treats no one. AI adoption among physicians jumped from 38% to 66% in one year, but only in documentation. The operational layer remains untouched. Why? Because healthcare has walls that no startup has been able to break through: → Epic controls 39% of US hospitals and 80% of all patient records. Once a system adopts Epic, switching costs run into hundreds of millions. → The system is built for billing, not outcomes. Fee-for-service rewards volume. A hospital that becomes more efficient can actually lose revenue. The incentive structure fights the technology. → Procurement takes 12 to 18 months. Buying committees span clinical, legal, compliance, and finance. One no kills the deal. Most startups run out of runway before a pilot begins. → In every other industry, a software bug is a support ticket. In healthcare, it can kill a patient. Every change goes through legal, ethics, and patient safety review before anything ships. General Catalyst spent a decade trying from outside. Co-founded Commure for clinical workflows. Co-founded Hippocratic AI for patient interactions. Backed Aidoc for radiology.Every one hit the same wall. So in October 2025, they stopped selling to the system and bought the system. Summa Health. Two acute care hospitals, 15 medical centers, a health plan with 60,000 covered lives, 8,500 employees, $2 billion in revenue. Provider and payer under one roof. First healthcare system in American history owned by a venture capital firm. They control the entire chain. Scheduling, staffing, clinical workflows, claims, patient experience. The whole system. They can prove it works. They have a billion-dollar health system running their technology in production every day. If margins improve, that will become a proof point and have tremendous value which opens a lot of doors in the industry. Their portfolio gets a closed-loop feedback cycle. Commure, Hippocratic AI, and Aidoc are embedded in daily operations with direct clinician access. That iteration speed does not exist anywhere else in healthcare. And here is the real play. For decades, healthcare has resisted technology because no one has proven it works across an entire system. Every startup walks in with a slide deck. General Catalyst will have a $2 billion healthcare system running their technology in production every day. This can become the first proof point in American healthcare that technology can transform how a system operates. That changes the conversation with every healthcare executive in the country. If it works, it does not just change Summa. It changes whole US healthcare system.

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🎯🎯 W Health Ventures targets $70 million Fund II to build healthcare startups. 📍📍The investment firm will partner with 2070 Health, a healthcare venture studio, for the fund. 💸💸The W Health Ventures fund will support the development of eight to ten seed and early-stage healthcare companies over the next four years. 📍📍W Health plans to invest Rs 26-40 crore, or $3-5 million, per company. 🔎🔎Fund II will focus on two core themes: single-speciality care delivery platforms and AI-enabled business-to-business (B2B) healthcare services. Read the full story by Vaibhavi Khanwalkar on ETtech.

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