Digital Health & AI Trends (July-August 2026)

Click the cover to download report highlights

Enterprise EHR Foundation

​Epic is up again announcing its impressive development calendar at its user group meeting, and its performance and pace in meeting last year’s AI objectives. Redesign Health finds that 71% of Epic customers see themselves as Epic-first, and 91% trust Epic will keep pace with the market. The top areas still open to competition include AI assistants for clinicians and patients and AI imaging.

Healthcare Analytics and Intelligence

Clinical AI is mixed bag this summer. Adoption continues, as we report each month on the diversity of clinical applications, however, Peterson Health Technology Institute raises concerns that the current payment mechanisms are ill-equipped to handle the new approaches. They recommend focusing on outcomes measures. AI in pharma is up again with more than $700m raised across eight deals in drug discovery, biologics, and trial simulations. The Medical Futurist identifies three key areas within drug discovery that AI supports: identifying targets, drug formulation, and drug repurposing.

Consumer Health and Technology

AI trust is up over the summer, with Venrock finding 73% of patients more comfortable with AI-assisted care, though mostly conditional on physician review, while Pew found 46% of Americans don't even know if AI has touched their own care. GLP-1 telehealth oversight is down, with a JAMA secret-shopper study finding 45 of 49 sites prescribed with minimal screening. And wearable privacy is down too, with EFF finding only two of ten major manufacturers publish transparency reports and just one offers real encryption.

Stakeholders

The ACA subsidy cliff is squeezing both sides of the ledger, with HCA's uncompensated care costs up 29% to $1.45b as insurers like Elevance exit Medicaid markets, leaving a smaller, sicker risk pool behind. Meanwhile, PBM market power is cracking for the first time in years. Employer scrutiny is up sharply, with Big Three clients nearly three times as likely to question their PBM's integrity (36% vs. 13%), and employer use of the Big Three itself falling from 63.4% to 54.3% in a single year.