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HealthTap Introduces Virtual Primary Care Program for DME Suppliers

HealthTap, a virtual primary care company, launched a new program on Monday to support sleep and respiratory durable medical equipment (DME) suppliers.

Sunnyvale, California-based HealthTap provides primary care across all 50 states in partnership with payers, pharmacies, providers, cost-sharing organizations and more.

The new program helps DME suppliers connect patients with sleep disorders to physicians for clinical evaluations, documentation or orders. Patients may need these services before insurers or suppliers can proceed with therapy or provide supplies. The program supports positive airway pressure (PAP) therapy from initial evaluation and treatment orders through compliance, resupply and device replacement.

After the physician visit, chart notes and orders are sent to the supplier. HealthTap also sends updates to suppliers when patients book, complete, cancel, miss or reschedule appointments.

“Physicians review relevant records and device data, evaluate the patient, and return completed notes and clinically appropriate orders through integrated workflows,” said Sean Mehra, HealthTap CEO. “Suppliers get real-time visit and documentation updates instead of chasing paperwork.”

Mehra added that DME suppliers often work hard to keep patients on therapy, but accessing physicians can be difficult.

“Delays in appointments, prescriptions, or required documentation can hold up orders, disrupt patient care, and delay reimbursement,” he said. “We launched this program to help DME suppliers overcome these challenges by giving them fast, reliable access to physicians, integrated clinical workflows, and timely documentation—so they can reduce administrative burden, keep patients on therapy, and keep their operations moving.”

Currently, about 30 million adults in the U.S. have obstructive sleep apnea. And for those using positive airway pressure therapy, physician involvement is very important. Under Medicare, continued coverage for certain PAP devices requires a treating practitioner to reevaluate the patient between days 31 and 91 after therapy begins and document its benefits and the patient’s adherence.

Ultimately, HealthTap aims to help patients easily get on and stay on therapy, Mehra said.

“Someone needing a follow-up evaluation or an updated prescription should have an easy way to see a physician and understand the next steps,” he said. “For DME suppliers, the goal is to remove uncertainty from helping that patient. Their teams spend significant time calling physician offices, checking if a visit occurred, and waiting for documentation before they can move forward. Through integrated workflows, completed visit notes and medically appropriate signed orders reach suppliers immediately after the visit. This gives their teams a clearer path forward and helps patients avoid further waiting.”

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October 14, 2026
Outro Raises $7M To Support Safe Deprescribing

Outro, a neuroscience-based platform, announced last week that it raised $7 million in pre-seed and seed funding.

The New York-based company helps patients discontinue psychiatric medications. Patients visit with clinicians trained in safe deprescribing and receive access to personalized tapering plans. They also gain access to compounded medication doses.

“Roughly 1 in 6 Americans take antidepressants. There are tens of millions of people on these drugs, yet no science-based way to get off safely. … Outro is the off-ramp that should have been built from the beginning. We want getting off a medication to be as supported as getting on it – arguably even more,” said Brandon Goode, co-founder and CEO of Outro.

Outro’s funding included participation from Listen Ventures, Cake Ventures, Jason Calicanis’s LAUNCH, Actions Capital, Hannah Grey Ventures, SemperVirens, Brock Recovery Group and Pave Health Ventures.

According to Listen Ventures, Outro is filling a gap in the healthcare system.

“Outro is building the infrastructure, therapeutic options, and support for deprescribing, starting with antidepressants — a model we believe will become a standard part of modern healthcare,” said Ellen Wilcox, partner at Listen Ventures, in a statement.

With the financing, Outro will expand its network of deprescribing-trained clinicians and create AI clinical decision support for deprescribing, Goode said. It will also expand beyond antidepressants into other areas. Several other drug classes require safe off-ramps, such as benzodiazepines, gabapentinoids and GLP-1s, Goode noted.

Research from Outro’s co-founder, Dr. Mark Horowitz, shows that four in five long-term antidepressant users were unable to stop their medications due to withdrawal symptoms. Horowitz helped create the hyperbolic tapering method that the company’s platform is based on. Hyperbolic tapering is a method of gradually reducing a medication dose by smaller and smaller amounts as the dose gets lower, rather than reducing it by equal increments.

“Deprescribing guidance has existed in countries like the U.K. for years,” Horowitz said in a statement. “Yet in America, where antidepressant use is widespread, tapering support is very hard to come by, so millions of patients are left without support when they are ready to come off. As someone personally impacted by a lack of tapering guidance, I am proud to be building a service to bridge this gap.”

Ultimately, Outro aims to make deprescribing a normal part of healthcare, Goode said.

“More than that, we want to empower patients with a fair opportunity to safely and sustainably transition to a life free from medication, if that’s what they want,” he said.

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October 12, 2026
Vitalize Secures $31M To Help Hospitals Manage Labor, Capacity

Vitalize, an AI platform that helps hospitals manage labor and capacity, announced Tuesday that it raised $31 million in Series A funding.

The platform functions like an “air-traffic control” system for the healthcare workforce, according to Veeraj Shah, co-founder and CEO of Vitalize. It coordinates scheduling, staffing and patient capacity. It supports processes across inpatient, ancillary and ambulatory care settings.

“Labor accounts for 50-60% of hospital operating costs, yet many health systems still manage staffing and capacity through manual, disconnected processes,” Shah told MedCity News. “Vitalize is helping move these operations from manual and reactive to automated and predictive, reducing administrative burden and unnecessary labor costs while improving patient flow.”

The Series A round was led by Oak HC/FT, with participation from Norwest, .406 Ventures, Constellation Ventures, Y Combinator, Rock Health Capital and MemorialCare Innovation Fund. Vitalize declined to share its total funding to date.

“Labor is a nearly trillion-dollar line item for U.S. health systems, making it one of the largest and most underpenetrated software markets in healthcare,” said Vig Chandramouli, partner at Oak HC/FT, in a statement. “What sets Vitalize apart is that it doesn’t just surface insight – it drives action, and the ROI shows up fast. We’re thrilled to back co-founders Veeraj Shah and Sanketh Andhavarapu, and a founding team with the clinical, operational, and technical depth to capture a market this size.”

The financing will be used to build Vitalize’s growth and deployment teams, as well as to invest in their AI models, Shah said.

The company’s platform is achieving results, according to some clients. St. Luke’s Chief Information Officer David Pereles said the company saw a 54% reduction in premium labor spend across overtime and agency costs in just 12 weeks. Rochester Regional Health Chief Nurse Executive Dan Ireland said its clinical leaders are spending 50% less time on manual staffing and scheduling.

Shah said the company’s ultimate goal is to “unlock healthcare’s full capacity.”

“Our thesis is that the workforce is the key to unlocking the hardest operational challenges in healthcare delivery and enabling our system to see more patients,” he said. “After labor operations, Vitalize will move to capacity management and supply chain optimization to serve as an intelligence layer for healthcare operations.”

Photo: Richard Drury, Getty Images

October 8, 2026
Trilliant Health: Misaligned Incentives Are Undermining US Healthcare

The U.S. healthcare system is facing a tragedy of the commons, in which each stakeholder is incentivized to act in their own self-interest. That is the focus of Trilliant Health’s report released on Tuesday.

Trilliant Health is a healthcare analytics and market research firm. The report examines six trends drawn from Trilliant’s claims database, price transparency data and government and industry sources.

“The six different trends that we cover all really tie into the tragedy of the commons, which ultimately is this idea that incentives reward individual actors for their behavior that the collective cannot sustain, and this is just something that we see throughout our healthcare system,” said Trilliant Health’s Chief Research Officer Allison Oakes. “Unfortunately, everyone in the healthcare system is really incentivized to be managing and sort of optimizing for their own revenue and profits, and no one is entirely responsible for actually improving health.”

The six trends include:

1. The healthcare system isn’t functioning as a system: About 70% of Americans believe the healthcare system has major problems or is in a state of crisis, and healthcare costs are continuing to rise. Employee deductibles and premiums are increasing faster than wages and inflation.

“Americans are more concerned about affording healthcare than they are about gas, housing, utilities, and groceries. … I think this affordability issue is really starting to hit a breaking point,” Oakes said.

2. Population unwellness is a systemic failure: The U.S. population is increasingly becoming unwell due to poor diet, physical inactivity and social isolation. However, healthcare incentives continue to prioritize sick care over prevention.

Pediatric behavioral health visits for pervasive developmental and anxiety disorders increased substantially from 2019 to 2025. In 2025, 6.4% of children were taking five or more medications, and more than 10% of patients in 11 states received opioid prescriptions from three or more providers.

3. Disconnect between demand and supply: Behavioral health and primary care physician supply is lacking. By 2038, the overall physician supply is projected to meet just 87.7% of demand, with adult psychiatrists and primary care physicians facing the largest shortages at 49.8% and 80.4% adequacy, respectively.

In addition, advanced imaging and behavioral health visits grew faster than primary care from 2019 to 2025, while consumers increasingly turned to self-testing and other nontraditional approaches to meet their health needs.

4. Value is not incentivized, nor measured or managed: CMS uses more than 800 active quality measures, but only 27% are tied to outcomes. In addition, hospital negotiated rates show little correlation with quality, with higher prices not necessarily associated with lower 30-day mortality rates, the report found.

5. Fraud, waste and abuse: Misaligned incentives are contributing to fraud, waste and abuse, the report shows. From 2019 to 2024, the number of for-profit hospices rose 11.2%, and nonprofit hospices fell 2%. In addition, for-profit hospices saw a 13.7% Medicare margin in 2023, versus -1.3% for nonprofits.

6. Negative-sum game: New medications are challenging the U.S. healthcare system’s traditional reliance on higher patient and procedure volumes to drive revenue.

The growing use of drugs such as GLP-1s and SGLT2 inhibitors has coincided with declines in certain procedures, suggesting that medications could increasingly replace or reduce demand for costly interventions.

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October 7, 2026
FTC Sends Warning Letters to 24 Healthcare Organizations Over Price Transparency

The Federal Trade Commission sent warning letters to 24 of the “nation’s largest” healthcare services companies, citing concerns that they may be failing to provide transparent price information.

The letters were signed by FTC Chairman Andrew N. Ferguson. The agency did not disclose which organizations it sent the letters to.

It notes in the letter that Section 5 of the FTC Act requires these organizations to provide patients with “timely, accurate, and complete pricing for healthcare services, especially for non-emergency services that are scheduled in advance.” The agency urged the organizations to conduct a review of their pricing practices and make changes if they find they’re in violation of the FTC Act.

The letter also stated that price transparency is a major priority of the FTC across several sectors, including rental housing, hotels and grocery delivery services. Consumers can’t compare offerings and make informed decisions without price transparency, the letter said.

“Price transparency is particularly critical in the hospital and healthcare setting because healthcare is often one of the most significant and financially burdensome costs consumers face,” Ferguson wrote in the letter. “Patients frequently must invest substantial time and effort to travel for in‑person visits, making it even more important that they understand costs upfront before committing to care. Moreover, hospitals and healthcare facilities can charge dramatically different prices for the same services, leaving consumers vulnerable to wide and often unexpected cost discrepancies.”

CMS requires hospitals to publicly disclose pricing information for healthcare services through machine-readable files and consumer-friendly pricing information. They also must provide uninsured and self-pay patients with good-faith estimates of expected charges before scheduled care. However, the FTC stated that complying with CMS price transparency requirements doesn’t necessarily mean a healthcare provider is complying with the FTC Act, which may impose additional requirements.

The letter notes that the price of healthcare services is a “material term,” meaning “clear and conspicuous disclosures” are needed so consumers are not deceived.

“Accordingly, failing to disclose the price of a healthcare service may be deceptive if it is likely to mislead consumers acting reasonably under the circumstances,” Ferguson wrote. “Even when some price terms are disclosed, disclosures may be deceptive when they are incomplete — such as when they omit certain charges like physician fees or facility fees, or cover only a portion of the expected care — because consumers may reasonably believe they have been provided the total cost of care. Likewise, inaccurate disclosures mislead consumers and cause substantial harm.”

The FTC said the letters do not conclude that the recipients violated the FTC Act.

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October 6, 2026
Trump Administration Announces $90 Payments to Help Cover Medicare Part B Premiums

On Friday, President Donald Trump announced that the federal government is making one-time payments of $90 per person for more than 20 million people to help them pay for Medicare Part B premiums.

These payments are coming from the Medicare Improvement Fund, which is meant to make improvements to the Medicare fee-for-service program and has been given $2 billion by Congress. Eligible seniors will receive the payment via a direct deposit in early October.

According to a fact sheet, those whose premiums are paid by Medicaid or who pay an Income-Related Monthly Adjustment Amount don’t qualify for payments. Those enrolled in private Medicare Advantage plans also aren’t eligible.

This one-time payment likely won’t do much when it comes to offsetting rising healthcare costs, noted Juliette Cubanski, vice president and director of the Program on Medicare Policy at KFF, in a recent post.

Currently, Medicare’s standard Part B premium is $2,435 and is expected to increase by $79 annually for 2027, according to KFF. This means that “this increase alone would consume most of the $90 payment,” Cubanski noted. In addition, beneficiaries will likely see healthcare costs rise in other ways, such as deductibles and cost sharing for medical and drug benefits.

Cubanski also compared these $90 payments to a similar proposal announced by Trump ahead of the 2020 election, which involved a $200 drug card to offset out-of-pocket drug costs for Medicare beneficiaries.

“The cards were to be provided under a Section 402 demonstration designed to test whether lowering out-of-pocket drug costs would improve medication adherence, reduce unnecessary health care use, and lower Medicare spending,” Cubanski said. “Ultimately, the drug cards were never sent, amid questions about the design of the experiment and its nearly $8 billion projected cost.”

Cubanski noted that the $90 payments will mostly deplete the Medicare Improvement Fund.

These payments also come after the Trump administration announced in September $500 refunds per person to nearly 1 million Americans with Affordable Care Act coverage. One healthcare expert previously told MedCity News that these checks will do little to address healthcare affordability.

“There is no question that $500 matters to a family struggling to pay its bills, and Americans are struggling,” said Dr. Adam Brown, an emergency physician and founder of ABIG Health. “Healthcare costs are a significant part of that burden. But we have to put this refund into context. For someone paying the full cost of an ACA plan, $500 doesn’t even cover one month’s average premium. … Ultimately, we shouldn’t confuse a check with a healthcare affordability strategy.”

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October 5, 2026
Trump’s ACA Fraud Crackdown: Experts Urge Going After Bad Actors, Not Patients

Addressing fraud, waste and abuse in healthcare has been a major focus of the Trump Administration, particularly with the creation of the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud. Last week, the task force took a rather aggressive tactic, announcing that it will cancel 315,000 unauthorized enrollments covering more than 760,000 individuals in the Marketplace. The move, however, is being criticized by many in the medical industry.

The administration anticipates that this will return about $2.2 billion in taxpayer-funded subsidies.

“We are shutting down unauthorized Marketplace enrollments and returning approximately $2.2 billion in taxpayer-funded subsidies,” said HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., in a statement. “CMS is strengthening safeguards, pursuing bad actors, and holding agents and brokers accountable when they break the rules. Under President Trump, HHS will protect Americans’ health coverage and ensure taxpayer dollars reach the people they are intended to serve.”

One healthcare expert argued that while there’s a need to address fraud in the Marketplace, patients shouldn’t be the ones punished.

“I agree we have to be going after bad actors, but we can’t be going after the patients,” said Dr. Adam Brown, an emergency physician and founder of ABIG Health.

Brown emphasized that these efforts can’t be looked at in isolation. The enhanced ACA premium tax credits expired at the end of 2025, increasing premiums for many Marketplace enrollees. In addition, the Trump administration is implementing Medicaid work requirements that states generally must begin by 2027.

“If you look at these things in isolation, you have a tendency to anchor to, ‘Well, that’s not a lot of people,’ or ‘I’m sure a lot of those individuals that are within that 760,000 number are not real individuals,’” Brown said. “But that all said, when you kind of look at all of these pieces of the puzzle, it makes me question: Are we trying to dismantle some of the important social service safety net type of programs in the country that so many people depend on, without a very clear alternative right now that’s affordable that gives them the necessary access?”

Brown urged CMS to establish a formal process for reinstating people who were wrongly disenrolled. He also called on Congress to extend the ACA tax credits.

Families USA, a patient advocacy organization, also spoke out against the decision.

“Once again, the Trump administration is using alleged fraud accusations as a political smokescreen to double down on what they are actually doing: taking health coverage away from hundreds of thousands of people,” said Anthony Wright, executive director of Families USA. “Real fraud should be stopped, especially dishonest brokers who sign people up without their knowledge. Previously, anti-fraud policies and procedures banned those brokers, but this administration reinstated them. Now families, not bad actors, are paying the price.”

This comes as recent research from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the broader implementation of the ACA was associated with an estimated 20% to 30% reduction in mortality among people who were uninsured before the law.

With the administration’s decision to remove 760,000 people from ACA coverage, it’s important to note that not all of those people will become uninsured, noted one of the paper’s authors, Robert Kaestner, research associate at the University of Chicago.

“The majority of them are going to have access to other types of health insurance… So 250,000 people who might end up uninsured out of a country of 333 million — that’s not a big change, but still, it’s 250,000 people potentially without health insurance. That’s a very serious consequence,” Kaestner estimated.

Photo: illustration, Getty Images

October 4, 2026