The AI Funding Divide: Why VCs Will Miss the Next Healthcare Category Kings
A practitioner perspective by Holley Miller, Founder and President, Grey Matter Marketing.
The argument
AI-powered deal screening at VC firms amplifies pattern-matching bias, making truly novel healthcare innovations look like noise. Breakthrough health tech CEOs should court family offices and sovereign wealth funds that combine AI tools with experienced human judgment.
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 Holley Miller earns its place - it comes from the operating trenches of funding & m&a, 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 Funding & M&A, where the data behind this debate is covered daily on the HTC Wire.