Digital Health & AI Trends (September 2026)

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Enterprise EHR Foundation

​AI investment and deployment continue to be top of mind in healthcare globally. KLAS reports AI is the top priority for healthcare organizations with 57% seeing it as such. A Bain and KLAS report on the US sees four core priorities for providers (ambient scribes, RCM, call centers, and administration); payers are focused largely on call centers with 59% satisfied with the ROI. Global sales data for 2025 is available with Epic, Oracle, and Dedalus as the worldwide leaders.

Healthcare Analytics and Intelligence

OpenEvidence is up this month as it aces the MedQA benchmark and announces a family of four medical AI models, based on how long the AI thinks, from five seconds to five minutes, and one model reserved for research. OpenAI is both up and down this month. The good news is it connects EHRs to ChatGPT and industry data sources. More questionable is it reveals that some of its AI agents have gone rogue (misalignment) and reports on what it intends to do about it.

Consumer Health and Technology

Paid engagement with fitness apps is down this month, with a Yale study finding premium users lost their entire logging advantage over free users within about two months. IPO follow-through is down too, with Oura pulling a priced $2.2 billion offering citing market uncertainty and extending a consumer-focused digital health IPO drought since Omada Health and Hinge Health listed in mid-2025. And virtual care CKD solutions are down, with PHTI reviewing eight major vendors and finding no consistent evidence they slow kidney disease.

Stakeholders

Workforce automation promise is up, with new modeling finding AI could close 37% of a projected 2.2 million-worker shortage, though training and retention investment closes even more (57%). Rural maternal access is down, with researchers finding 718 hospitals have dropped obstetric services since 2010, leaving 49.1% of all US hospitals with none. And biosimilar adoption is down for the first time ever, falling from 40% to 23% of eligible prescriptions in a single year, despite 80%+ discounts on biosimilars like Humira.