Insights
The work we publish,
from the field we work in.
Cara publishes white papers, field notes, and original research drawn from our Enablement Sprints and our evaluation of the healthcare AI landscape. Our partners and anyone thinking seriously about this space are welcome to read.
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Field notes
Showing 12 listed field notes. The EHR comparison is featured above.
The fractional, forward deployed CTO.
One person, two jobs, done in the codebase. The fractional CTO and the forward deployed engineer are usually sold as different products. For healthcare operators, they are the same product, and splitting them is the reason most engagements stall.
The FDE pod versus the consulting engagement: a buyer's contract checklist for healthcare AI.
Most healthcare AI engagements that fail in production failed in the contract. Ten questions a healthcare buyer should require a vendor to answer in writing before signing anything labeled FDE, embedded, or partnership.
AI market access is moving from workflow automation to intervention.
Prior authorization, benefit verification, patient support, and brand visibility are collapsing into the same operational layer.
Clinical-trial AI is moving upstream into protocol and site design.
The important shift is not just patient matching. It is feasibility, site selection, protocol realism, and activation speed.
Coding agents are becoming a healthcare integration strategy.
Cursor, Claude Code, Devin, and MCP-style gateways change how teams extend EHRs, but only when governance and testability are designed into the workflow.
The front door is now the growth engine for medical practices.
For specialty, DPC, concierge, and multi-site practices, patient experience starts before the first visit and keeps compounding after it.
Patient support is becoming the brand experience in pharma.
For specialty therapies, patients often experience the brand through access friction: benefits verification, prior authorization, copay support, hub follow-up, and therapy start delays.
Member experience is an operations problem, not a payer portal problem.
Members do not experience the payer as a website. They experience eligibility confusion, prior authorization delays, care gaps, denials, and call-center loops.
Health-system patient experience fails at the handoff.
Hospitals lose trust when scheduling, referrals, discharge, follow-up, prior authorization, and care management are fragmented across teams.
In digital health, retention is the patient experience.
Virtual-first care companies win or lose on longitudinal engagement: protocol-aware outreach, refill support, side-effect routing, and escalation.
Forward deployed engineering for healthcare: the operating model behind AI that actually ships.
Healthcare AI pilots are easy. Scaled production is rare. The reason is not the model. It is the operating model, and FDE is the answer the rest of the enterprise software world already arrived at.
The agentic year in healthcare operations: what is actually shipping in 2026.
Pilots are everywhere. Production is rare. The buyer's question in 2026 is not which agent vendor to pick, but which governance model, which evaluation harness, and which HITL boundary fits the workflow.
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Occasional research notes on healthcare AI, life sciences, integrations, market access, and agentic software. No generic newsletter drip.