January 2026 has slipped away like a Nor'easter through the Northeast—fast, furious, and leaving everyone wondering what just happened. And much like those of you who got snowed in, we've spent the month mostly indoors, heads down, reading everything we could get our hands on about the flurry of health industry and policy developments that have swept through Washington and across the healthcare landscape. Let's go around the horn and touch on just a sliver of what our team h

CMS announced the launch of the ACCESS (Advancing Chronic Care with Effective, Scalable Solutions) model, a 10-year voluntary payment model offering outcome-aligned payments (OAP) for tech-enabled management of certain major chronic conditions, in early December. For health system and digital health leaders, it stands out as both a market awareness-raising opportunity and a large-scale test of potential for OAP effectiveness—a logical follow-up to value-based payments. Fair

An Interview with Brendan Keeler, AKA 'Health API Guy' Over the next few years, we all need to be tracking a new and highly active front in Health IT innovation and change: The emergence of an “individual access layer” that lets patients control how their data moves across tools and apps—and all the related healthcare industry ecosystem opportunities and risks that come that new infrastructure. I’m talking about a new class of players, known as Individual Access Services (IA

For so many mission and humanitarian reasons, let's all take it as a given that everyone in healthcare sees value in improving healthcare quality. And that, therefore, tools, services, resources, or process changes that improve quality will also be perceived as valuable and worth investing in. This is true enough; however, in the real world, it often happens that a more detailed quality ROI case has to be made. Both on the buyer (provider, payer) side and on the vendor (tech,

We don't just write things at Union Healthcare Insight—we are voracious readers, too. Welcome to our first edition of "What we're reading," in which we go around the virtual corridors of Union HQ finding out what healthcare (or healthcare-related) news been catching the eyes of the research team and why it resonated with us. Read on for more. Healthcare (and related) news highlights from this week Brandon Aylward, Research Consultant What's an article that caught your eye in

Over the past few weeks, all five national, publicly traded health plans have hosted their third set of earnings calls for the year, sharing their performance from Q3 and their outlook for the remainder of 2025. We make it a point to stay on top of these players’ performance to monitor the health insurance industry’s overall financial position and to see what the data tell us about ongoing demographic shifts, the margin outlook for providers, the real-world/cost implications

Agentic AI in healthcare has rapidly become the centerpiece of health tech discussions. We’ve been studying it because it’s an area of rapid growth and advancement—an outlier in this moment in healthcare, when stakeholders across the industry are struggling amidst rising expenses, workforce shortages, and patient experience frustrations. Agentic AI tools are being positioned as a game-changing approach to addressing many of the industry’s biggest challenges, given their state

For years, vertical consolidation has been a mainstay of the insurer playbook—blending payer, provider, pharmacy, and PBM assets into a single, integrated ecosystem designed to drive synergies, provide consistent margin performance, and withstand turbulence to any one part of the business. It’s a strategy that worked remarkably well through the 2010s and early 2020s. We may be reaching a turning point. Recent financial results across all national players —but especially from

Few categories in modern medicine have captured the imagination of patients, physicians, and investors as quickly as GLP-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1s). Originally developed for diabetes management, these drugs, popularized under brand names such as Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, and Zepbound, are redefining how we think about obesity, metabolic health, and even chronic disease prevention. And increasingly, GLP-1s are no longer just about controlling blood sugar. They have become c

With a new federal measure set to reward hospitals for participating in the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's (AHRQ) Patient Safety Organization (PSO) program starting next year—and a fresh government evaluation pushing for tweaks to the program to improve its effectiveness—PSOs have quickly moved from a relatively niche quality program to a potential strategy priority. PSOs play a strategic role by offering legal protections for safety event data and positioning o