HealthTap

HealthTap is growing its national practice significantly, we are hiring U.S. primary care doctors (MD/DOs) who want to work from home, set their own hours, and get paid competitively. You get use a modern tech EMR that makes seeing patients easy and either see patients efficiently in on-demand urgent care or build lifelong relationships to manage panel patients holistically and longitudinally. If you're a doctor and interested, please apply. If you know those that may be interested, please pass along the opportunity! (DM me if you want to sign up for a referral bonus program for sending us candidates that we end up hiring) Primary Care: https://lnkd.in/gkXsNsXf Urgent Care: https://lnkd.in/gKXNXE49

One number in the Star Ratings formula decreased by half this year, and it moved about a fifth of a plan's score. CMS assigns a weight to every measure, and patient experience and complaint measures are now weighted half as much as they were. In the 2026 Star Ratings, they account for about 22% of a plan's score. Clinical outcome and chronic care measures now make up a larger share than before. That means more of the score depends on blood pressure control, glycemic management, colorectal and breast cancer screening, and medication adherence. Reliable primary care can influence these measures. Blood pressure gets managed across repeat visits. Medication adherence depends on knowing what a member is taking and whether they are still taking it. Screening rates depend on the follow-up visit happening. Member experience still matters, and most plans have been working on both, but the plan's rating now reflects more of its members' health: blood pressure under control, blood sugar managed, and medications taken. Those are managed over months rather than fixed in one visit, and regular primary care does that better than anything else.

AI is most useful in primary care when it helps clinicians know their patients. HealthTap founder and CEO Sean K Mehra made that case in a recent HIMSS TV interview with Jessica Hagen. "AI shouldn't be a gatekeeper that keeps you away from your doctor," he said. "Its role is to make the precious time you do get with your doctor better." Getting there depends on memory, and on choosing what the AI pays attention to. A patient may have gigabytes of records, and only a small part of it matters for today's question. Pick the wrong part and the model can miss something important, like a medication allergy already in the chart. "Creating that context and that memory is actually the art," Sean said.

Geoffrey Rutledge, MD, PhD, HealthTap co-founder and Chief Medical Officer, spoke at InnovatorMD World Congress this month on the clinical use of AI. He covers where AI is deployed in care today, whether it makes physicians better diagnosticians, how we designed the pre-visit interview on HealthTap so that it collects history without giving patients advice, and what he thinks still requires a physician. Full talk (30 minutes): https://lnkd.in/eg6Dh9bm

The average American waits ~28 days for a primary care appointment. The average HealthTap patient waits less than 1 day. That difference explains most of what could go wrong downstream. Patients who can't see their primary care doctor use the emergency room instead. They skip preventive care, stop refilling medications, and delay follow-ups on symptoms until they are bad enough to require expensive intervention. Access is the variable most other outcomes depend on. The 28-day figure comes from ECG Management Consultants, which surveys wait times across major US metro markets. It is worse in rural areas and has been getting worse for a decade. The less-than-1-day figure comes from HealthTap's own operational data, tracked continuously since 2023. Same-day and same-week primary care appointments are the standard, not the exception. The difference exists because HealthTap is virtual. A primary care doctor licensed in a state can see every eligible patient in that state, so capacity isn't gated by geography or the size of a physical practice. The bottleneck that produces 28-day waits in the physical system does not exist in the virtual one. For Medicare Advantage plans watching their members drift to the ER, access matters. It is not a feature, but the operational precondition for everything else a plan wants to accomplish. Learn more about our approach to virtual primary care at https://lnkd.in/eiFUh_z6

There is nothing new about what we are about to say. Every family physician has known it for decades. A patient who sees the same doctor repeatedly costs less because the doctor knows them: their baseline, what changed, which complaint is routine, and which one needs attention this time. The question for virtual care has always been whether you can build that kind of relationship across a screen. So we tested it with Christian Healthcare Ministries, one of our partners. Members who had repeated engagement with the same HealthTap physician had total medical costs 26% below matched controls over 12 months. Members with one visit had costs nearly identical to controls. More visits with your doctor = lower medical costs. 

A $12 billion industry of medical records review is disappearing in 2026. Medicare stopped paying for diagnoses that come from records reviews rather than doctor visits. Medicare pays MA plans more for sicker members. For years, that created a market for vendors who searched through patient records after visits, adding conditions the doctor had noticed but did not fully code. Medicare changed the rules this year. Now, diagnoses count only when they come from an actual doctor visit. The Government Accountability Office estimated the records review practice generated about $12 billion per year across the industry. Now, MA plans that relied on it are rebuilding around the visit. The rule also happens to line up with better care. A vendor reading a chart can add a diagnosis code. A doctor speaking with a patient can catch a condition that was missed, adjust medications that no longer work well together, and explain what a diagnosis actually means. This means that the primary care visit just became one of the most valuable events in an MA plan's operations. Plans with real primary care infrastructure have a running start.

The US is training more physicians than ever before. The primary care shortage is getting worse anyway. - The Association of American Medical Colleges projects a shortage of 20,200 to 40,400 primary care doctors by 2036. - The Health Resources and Services Administration projects 70,610 by 2038. - About 74 million Americans already live in areas designated as having too few primary care doctors. - Rural areas are the worst, with projected shortages near 40%. The population is aging faster than the workforce can be trained. Healthcare tends to treat this as a recruitment problem, but it is a delivery model problem. Not enough doctors will set up practice where they're needed most over the next 15 years. Virtual primary care removes the geographic problem entirely. A doctor licensed in a state can see every eligible patient in that state, not just the ones within driving distance of a physical office. That changes the problem from impossible to solvable. Plans and payers who move on virtual primary care partnerships now will have primary care to offer their members through the shortage. Those who wait will be waiting for something that isn't coming.

In 2026, roughly 1 in 10 Medicare Advantage enrollees were forced out of their plan by insurer exits. Between 2018 and 2024, the average was about 1 in 100. Smaller and regional insurers drove most of the exits. PPO plans had the most cuts, and rural beneficiaries were about twice as likely to lose their plan as urban ones. The average Medicare beneficiary now has 32 plans with drug coverage to choose from, down from 36 in 2024. The plans that remain are competing for members who don't usually switch. Most MA members keep the same plan year over year, but this year, 2.6 million of them have to pick a new one. This changes what plans are competing on. When members rarely switched, insurers focused on the extras that look good in advertising: OTC cards, meal delivery, or dental benefits. When 2.6 million members are shopping, those extras matter less than whether patients can get an appointment quickly and consistently see the same primary care physician. Plans have spent a decade getting better at signing up new members. The next few years will be about whether their members can receive the care they need.

For years, the industry has been measuring virtual care adoption, video visit completion rates, satisfaction scores, and app downloads, but is it enough? What most still aren't measuring sufficiently is whether any of it changed what happened to the patient 12, 18, or 24 months later. Episodic telehealth was designed to be convenient. See a doctor for whatever is bothering you today. It's fast, accessible, and frictionless. The problem is that none of those things predict whether diabetes is controlled, whether COPD exacerbation gets caught before it becomes a hospitalization, or whether someone is actually managing their health or just handling their current complaint. The savings case for virtual care was supposed to follow from access. It mostly hasn't, because access to a transaction is not the same thing as a care relationship. Primary care has known this for a long time. The rest of virtual care is catching up. Read more about our approach to virtual primary care at https://lnkd.in/eiFUh_z6