OBBBA Requirements: Behavioral Health Clinics Must Modernize Their Technology Now
A practitioner perspective by Loren Larsen, CEO and Co-Founder, Videra Health.
The argument
Medicaid changes under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act threaten community behavioral health clinics financially. Clinics must adopt automated eligibility verification, proactive outreach, and data-driven operations now to survive the coming policy deadlines.
Why we picked it
The HTC editorial desk curates practitioner perspectives that pass a simple test: would a health system executive, product leader, or investor act differently after reading it? This piece by Loren Larsen earns its place - it comes from the operating trenches of policy & regulation, not the conference stage, and it takes a position specific enough to disagree with.
The bigger picture
The AI adoption question runs through every executive conversation in 2026. The evidence base is finally arriving: the largest controlled study of ambient documentation, published in JAMA, found clinicians saved 16 minutes of documentation time per day - but only a third of users hit the usage threshold for maximum benefit (our coverage). Meanwhile Rock Health has stopped labeling AI as a differentiator at all, because every company claims it - which is exactly why operating discipline of the kind described here separates winners from demo-ware.
Read it alongside our own reporting in Policy & Regulation, where the data behind this debate is covered daily on the HTC Wire.