The Grand Roundup: Oscar's Investor Day, Alignment Health's mysterious 35% drop, OpenEvidence's oncology pivot, Walmart's GLP-1 pharmacist pilot, and more

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.

Brought to you by

Lorikeet is a leading platform health tech companies use to build, test, and deploy AI concierges for patient and provider support. lorikeetcx.ai/healthtech

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/

For more from Health Tech Nerds, subscribe to our weekly newsletters: https://www.healthtechnerds.com/subscribe