We announced our Series B funding earlier this year, and it marked an important moment for Apella. It signaled our transition from working in a co-development framework with a number of early customers to having the backing to scale deployments across multiple health systems in the U.S.
What’s most exciting about the timing is that it coincided with the emergence of the evidence we’ve been building. People can now clearly see that deploying our technology has a measurable financial impact on health systems. With that evidence and this funding coming together, we’re in a position to grow rapidly and bring these technologies to health systems that are looking for real operational ROI — while also investing in modern AI tools.
Scaling AI to the enterprise means delivering impact from trustworthy data
When you scale to enterprise deployment, the dynamic changes. You’re no longer working with people who feel it’s their job to give you feedback. You’re working with people who expect it’s your job to make their lives better and solve the problems they face every day.
The technical and scaling challenges that come with this are really about handling edge cases. In healthcare, you can’t deliver a solution that works 95% of the time — or even 99% of the time — because it’s the remaining one to five percent where trust is lost if the technology fails. For a solution to successfully scale from pilot to enterprise, it must build trust by becoming a reliable, everyday tool that improves users’ ability to do their jobs, while also delivering ROI for buyers who are focused on improving hospital operating margins.
The innovation challenge in pilots is very different from that in enterprise environments. At the enterprise level, it’s all about consistent, reliable delivery to solve meaningful problems that users encounter every day.
Learn how hospitals using Apella added an average 2 cases per OR per month.
Read the full analysis
How we make sure that innovation continues and remains relevant
Our team continues to grow by recruiting talent from technical industries outside of healthcare and bringing them in to solve healthcare-specific problems. What’s exciting about this moment is that healthcare technology is now keeping pace with innovation in other industries — particularly in AI, where healthcare organizations are becoming some of the fastest adopters.
Ambient technology is the category I’m most excited about in healthcare. I believe it will have the greatest staying power and the most lasting impact across the healthcare system. Technologies focused solely on analyzing existing data will eventually commoditize, with the largest players becoming dominant in that space.
In contrast, ambient data collection — paired with agentic workflows — will drive the most important technological shift in healthcare. This combination represents a durable and transformative opportunity.
For healthcare executives making long-term investment decisions, investors evaluating where the market is headed, or employees deciding what skills to develop and where to work, I believe the most important trends to watch are ambient data collection and agentic workflows. These will shape the future of healthcare.
Learn how hospitals using Apella added an average 2 cases per OR per month.
Read the full analysis