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<td><span style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size:20px;font-weight:bold;">Health Tech | Fierce Healthcare</span></td>
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<td><a href="https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/digital-health/benefits-leaders-report-increased-operational-financial-costs-amid-digital-health" style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing:-1px;margin:0;padding:0 0 2px;font-weight: bold;font-size: 19px;line-height: 20px;color:#222;">Digital health vendor management costs may rival savings: survey</a>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align:left;color:#999;font-size:11px;font-weight:bold;line-height:15px;">Apr 11th 2026, 13:45</div>
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<p><div class="col content" morss_own_score="5.193058568329718" morss_score="40.726009074208854">
<p>For many employers, digital health vendor management is creating both operational and administrative costs that potentially rival the savings that these programs are meant to provide, according to a new report.</p>
<p>Solera Health <a href="https://www.soleranetwork.com/latest-news/death-by-a-thousand-vendors?pp=1">surveyed </a>106 U.S.-based senior benefits leaders in mid-, large and major enterprises across various sectors, including healthcare. Forty-two percent of surveyed employers in the April 2026 report say they manage eight or more digital health vendors, and 90% report spending more than $1 million annually on costs. </p>
<p>“Employers are spending six figures just to manage the vendors that were supposed to save them money,” said Glenn Alphen, Solera Health chief commercial officer, in a <a href="https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2026/04/07/3269235/0/en/Death-by-a-Thousand-Vendors-81-of-Employers-Are-Hiring-Just-to-Keep-Up-with-Digital-Health-Vendor-Sprawl.html">statement</a>. “That's not a staffing problem; it's an architecture problem. When digital health is delivered as a curated network instead of a stack of point solutions, you eliminate the complexity at the source rather than hiring more people to manage it.”</p>
<p>According to the report, the estimated median cost of managing digital health vendors is $580,000 on top of annual digital health benefits budgets. “And as spending grows, the burden doesn’t flatten—it accelerates,” researchers wrote. </p>
<p>Sixty percent of organizations report that vendor management burdens have increased over the past three years, with 80% of benefits teams spending five or more hours per week on maintaining vendors. And 75% of respondents report that their organizations have two or more dedicated full-time employees for vendor management, and 81% have requested additional support. </p>
<p>For organizations needing extra support, 72% report using outside consultants, brokers or third-party administrators and 60% of organizations spending $500,000 or more on external consultants still intervene on issues weekly or more.</p>
<p>Moreover, 81% of respondents report other digital health benefit initiatives being impacted by implementation delays—69% report impact to “multiple initiatives simultaneously.”</p>
<p>When asked about an ideal vendor implementation experience, here’s what respondents told Solera:</p>
<ul><li>Pre-integrated with major human resources information systems/electronic health record systems: 39% </li><li>Guaranteed 90-day or less timeline with financial penalty: 32%</li><li>Clear change management and communication support: 31% </li><li>Vendor handling all IT integration: 29% </li><li>Dedicated implementation team that is not shared: 28% </li><li>Technical assessment prior to contract signature: 27%</li></ul>
<p>“Vendor sprawl isn’t just an operational headache—it’s becoming a strategic liability that erodes executive confidence, breeds team fatigue and blocks innovation,” the report said.</p>
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<td><a href="https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/health-tech/epic-rolls-out-health-alerts-flag-rising-rates-illness-county-level" style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing:-1px;margin:0;padding:0 0 2px;font-weight: bold;font-size: 19px;line-height: 20px;color:#222;">Epic rolls out county-level alerts to flag health trends</a>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align:left;color:#999;font-size:11px;font-weight:bold;line-height:15px;">Apr 11th 2026, 13:45</div>
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<p><div class="col content" morss_own_score="5.387470997679815" morss_score="40.93763662152965">
<p>Electronic health record giant Epic debuted a new feature that monitors county-level health trends and issues alerts when elevated rates of illness are detected.</p>
<p>The health alerts, developed by Epic Research, use statistical models applied to real-world medical records to detect when the rate of a health condition in a county is higher than expected. Each alert is reviewed by the Epic Research team, which includes clinicians and data scientists, before being published, Epic said in a <a href="https://www.epic.com/epic/post/epic-introduces-health-alerts/">blog post</a>. This manual review step assesses whether the alert is clinically meaningful and appropriate for public reporting, the company said.</p>
<p>Active Health Alerts can be viewed through this<a href="https://www.epicresearch.org/health-alerts"> Epic dashboard</a> and users can <a href="https://www.epicresearch.org/subscribe">subscribe</a> to receive Health Alerts by email.</p>
<p>The Health Alerts tool has so far flagged elevated rates of acute bronchiolitis, acute tonsillitis, measles, strep throat and viral gastroenteritis in some areas of Illinois, Missouri, Tennessee, Arkansas and South Carolina.</p>
<p>The alerts are based on data in Epic's Cosmos platform, which contains patient records for 300 million patients from 2,067 hospitals and 47,000 clinics.</p>
<p>The company notes that Health Alerts are based on data from Epic Cosmos' participating organizations, and the data does not reflect complete case counts for a condition but rather evaluates population-level trends in disease activity.</p>
<p>The Epic Research team's detection process monitors county-level diagnosis rates using ICD-10-CM diagnosis codes. The goal of the Health Alerts tool is to surface conditions that are both increased from historical rates and accelerating, Epic said in its description of the Health Alerts feature.</p>
<p>Alerts are most likely to appear for acute conditions, communicable diseases and rare or unexpected spikes rather than for chronic conditions or predictable seasonal patterns.</p>
<p>A condition is flagged for review when it meets a number of criteria, including a year-over-year increase in the diagnosis rate, which accounts for normal seasonal variation, and accelerating growth in diagnosis rates. Conditions that meet the first two criteria are then evaluated using a <a href="https://r-packages.io/packages/surveillance/farringtonFlexible">Farrington</a> improved algorithm, a well-established method in public health surveillance, Epic Research said.</p>
<p>"This model uses three years of historical data to establish expected baseline rates, further adjusting for seasonality and long-term trends, and confirms that the observed increase is statistically significant and not likely due to random variation," Epic Research said in an explanation of its methodology.</p>
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<td><a href="https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/regulatory/proposed-cms-rule-would-set-prior-auth-deadlines-drugs" style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing:-1px;margin:0;padding:0 0 2px;font-weight: bold;font-size: 19px;line-height: 20px;color:#222;">Proposed CMS rule would set prior auth deadlines for drugs</a>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align:left;color:#999;font-size:11px;font-weight:bold;line-height:15px;">Apr 11th 2026, 13:45</div>
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<p><div class="col content" morss_own_score="5.468812877263582" morss_score="46.46534787379858">
<p>The Trump administration has issued a proposed rule that aims to significantly overhaul prior authorization for pharmaceuticals.</p>
<p>Through the Interoperability Standards and Prior Authorization for Drugs rule, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said it would establish deadlines for payers in government insurance plans, setting the timeline at 24 hours for urgent requests and 72 hours for standard determinations.</p>
<p>In addition, the rule would require insurers to publicly report certain metrics around prior authorization, including approval and denial rates, appeal outcomes and decision timeframes, according to <a href="https://www.cms.gov/newsroom/press-releases/cms-proposes-major-reforms-speed-up-patient-access-drugs-increase-transparency-reduce-administrative">an announcement </a>from the agency.</p>
<p>The rule also builds on a 2024 regulation that took aim at prior authorization for non-drug services as well as <a href="https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/payers/insurers-pledge-smooth-out-prior-authorization-process">payers' 2025 pledge to significantly overhaul</a> their approach to prior auth, an agreement brokered in part by CMS officials.</p>
<p>“Last year, we got 80% of the insurance industry to agree to eliminate prior authorization for common medical services such as diagnostic imaging, physical therapy, and outpatient surgery,” Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in the announcement. “This rule builds on that agreement by making it easier for patients to get the medications they need by minimizing delays and enabling real-time decisions.”</p>
<p>Beyond greater transparency, the rule also aims to support electronic prior authorization and would require plans to report usage metrics for Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), which would allow CMS to track how these platforms are working and adoption rates.</p>
<p>CMS would also push to adopt Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR)-based standards for the small number of plans still using older models, making it easier for real-time electronic workflows to thrive.</p>
<p>These changes would better standardize processes across Medicare Advantage, Medicaid, the Children's Health Insurance Program, individual Affordable Care Act exchange plans and group exchange plans, per the announcement.</p>
<p>“Patients should not have to wait days or weeks for approval to start the medication their doctor prescribed,” said CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz, M.D., in the release. “This proposal moves prior authorization into the digital age, replacing fax machines and fragmented systems with real-time electronic workflows."</p>
<p>"We are standardizing the process, increasing transparency, and ensuring providers can focus on caring for patients instead of navigating red tape," Oz said.</p>
<p>In addition to the new provisions, CMS said it is also seeking feedback on five Requests for Information to inform further reform. Topics include ways to improve electronic notifications for care coordination; better cybersecurity and resiliency; enhanced oversight for insurers' APIs; ways to streamline step therapy; and strategies to improve prior authorization for lab tests as well as durable medical equipment, prosthetics and other supplies.</p>
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<p><strong>Forwarded by:<br />
Michael Reeder LCPC<br />
Baltimore, MD</strong></p>
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