Health Tech Nerds Radio

Kevin and Martin open with a wild AI story: a personal-assistant app is now negotiating discounts with telehealth vendors on users' behalf, opening up some genuinely strange territory around bots negotiating with other bots.

From there it's Oscar's Investor Day: Bertolini's pitch that the individual market is a $350 billion opportunity, the ICHRA/Choice and Lucie marketplace ambitions, and whether any of it holds up against a shakier ACA market and skeptical brokers. Then Alignment Health, down 35% this week during CMS's Stars blackout, and OpenEvidence's confusing week — a $250 million raise at a lower valuation than they reportedly turned down over the summer, plus a surprise pivot into drug development.

Quick hits close the show: Thatch's $108 million raise, Walmart's new Scan partnership and pharmacist health-coaching pilot, and RCM moves at Waystar and Datavant.

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Links referenced
Forbes article on OpenEvidence's $250M raise and Memorial Sloan Kettering partnership: https://www.forbes.com/sites/innovationrx/2026/09/16/a-premier-cancer-hospital-makes-its-data-available-to-doctors-nationwide-through-openevidence/

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What is Health Tech Nerds Radio?

Where we share our weekly news debriefs and discussions with industry experts. These are lo-fi recordings aimed at giving our readers more opportunities to engage with our analysis and a view into some of the conversations that shape it.