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Parents say Seattle Children's Hospital spied on their searches. CN 28 May 2026, 21:26 GMT+10 PORT ANGELES, Wash. (CN) - A class of parents asked the Washington Supreme Court on Thursday to find that Seattle Children's Hospital violated wiretapping laws by deploying third-party tracking technologies on its website, while the hospital insisted the law doesn't apply to communications with a corporation. "In the last decade or so, the corporate surveillance of our online activities has become increasingly invasive - this case is an example of that," said Ryan Ellersick, an attorney with Zimmerman Reed representing the parents. Three parents sued the hospital in late 2023, accusing it of intentionally deploying a software code owned by Meta that tracks website user activity to secretly intercept and record their sensitive health information. The parents said they used Seattle Children's Hospital's website to search for information about medical conditions on behalf of their children and later received health-related ads on Facebook, including some related to the specific symptoms they had searched on the hospital website. The trial court dismissed the parents' class action and the Washington Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal, finding the "click-and-search navigation" of the hospital's public website didn't fall within the state's wiretap prohibition. Washington's privacy act is one of the most restrictive in the nation and prohibits the interception and recording of certain communications without the consent of all parties. Before the Supreme Court, the parents argued their searches on the hospital's website counted as "private communication" under the state's privacy act. The justices questioned the parents' perceived bounds of the privacy act. "In your view, does the privacy act protect all of my communications with Wikipedia if I searched gambling addiction or miscarriage or anything like that?" asked Justice Colleen Melody. "Are those protected communications that no other party can track?" To the parents, such a search would be protected. "The statute talks about, again, in broad language transmitting messages through any device, and so I think that contemplates future communications technologies," Ellersick said. "I think if the court concludes that Seattle Children's Hospital is not an individual, then the statute will not apply to any communications transmitted through a company website, and there will be essentially carte blanche to engage in mass surveillance of those types of activities." Justice Raquel Montoya-Lewis asked whether the problem could be solved by the hospital adding a pop-up window letting website users know they are being tracked. The parents agreed. Seattle Children's Hospital argued the parents were stretching the privacy act beyond its bounds. "The plaintiffs cannot reconcile their claims with the WPA's plain language; WPA is an anti-eavesdropping statute," said James Sigel, attorney with Davis Wright Tremaine. The hospital argued that mere browsing and search history is not a "communication" as covered by the law, nor does the hospital count as an individual under the terms of the law. "The question essentially is: Is a website an individual? Are these really communications with another individual that the WPA requires in order to impose either civil or criminal liability? And I think the answer is no," Sigel said. The hospital also pointed out that the relevant law is specifically an anti-eavesdropping statute intended to prevent third parties from listening in on conversations between two individuals. Plus, the parents and hospital agreed the tracking software is only applied to the hospital's public website that provides general information rather than the private patient portal. "What we're talking about here is just simply the review of information that's sitting on the internet that happens all the time," Sigel said. "So you wouldn't say, for example, that someone communicated with this court when they went to the court's website to look up an opinion that was posted there, that's not within the ordinary understanding of communication." But the parents argued searching is a more dynamic process than the hospital suggested. "The problem was that they used an agent, a third party, to intercept in real time what people were doing on the website, and the consumers did not consent to them monitoring what they were doing," Ellersick said. The Supreme Court did not indicate when it would rule.

AI-Powered back-office automation: the unsexy revolution saving healthcare billions. IPS0 Team March 12, 2026 The administrative burden that's crushing healthcare. While headlines fixate on AI's role in diagnostics and drug discovery, a quieter revolution is unfolding in the back offices of hospitals, clinics, and payer organizations. Administrative overhead consumes an estimated 30% of U.S. healthcare spending - roughly $1.2 trillion annually - and AI-powered workflow automation is finally making a measurable dent. In 2026, the most impactful AI deployments in healthcare aren't replacing clinicians. They're replacing the endless loops of data fetching, claims reconciliation, prescription refill processing, and clinical documentation that drain resources and delay patient care. Why back-office AI is surging now. A Forbes report from October 2025 revealed a 7-fold increase in healthcare organizations implementing domain-specific AI tools compared to 2024. Health systems led adoption at 27%, followed by outpatient providers at 18% and payers at 14%. What's driving this acceleration isn't just technological maturity - it's economic pressure. Labor shortages, rising claim denials, and tightening reimbursement models have made the status quo unsustainable. Organizations are discovering that back-office automation delivers faster ROI than clinical AI because the workflows are more structured, the data is more accessible, and the regulatory bar - while still significant - is lower than for patient-facing algorithms. The new wave of operational AI platforms. Several developments illustrate how this market is maturing: * Google Cloud and Seattle Children's Hospital launched Pathway Assistant in January 2026, an AI agent that reduces the time clinicians spend searching for evidence-based clinical information from 15 minutes to seconds. While it touches clinical workflows, its core value is administrative: eliminating manual research overhead so staff can focus on patient care. * Honey Health, founded in 2025, has built an AI-based back-office automation platform serving hospitals and independent practices. Their system automates data fetching, patient note generation, and prescription refill workflows - the exact tasks that create burnout among medical office staff. * Innovaccer's Gravity platform, launched in May 2025, takes a data-first approach by integrating information from EHRs, claims systems, and other sources into a cloud-agnostic intelligence layer. This interoperability backbone makes downstream AI automation far more effective because it solves the fragmented-data problem that has historically blocked operational AI. Five high-impact back-office use cases. For healthcare technology leaders evaluating where to invest, these are the operational AI use cases delivering the clearest returns in 2026: * Prior Authorization Automation - AI agents that compile clinical evidence, match it against payer criteria, and submit authorization requests can reduce turnaround from days to hours. Some organizations report 60-70% reductions in manual prior auth workload. * Claims Denial Prediction and Prevention - Machine learning models trained on historical denial data can flag likely rejections before submission, allowing staff to correct issues proactively rather than reworking them after the fact. * Clinical Documentation Assistance - Ambient AI tools that generate structured notes from provider-patient conversations are reducing documentation time by 40-50% in early adopter systems, addressing one of the top contributors to physician burnout. * Patient Scheduling Optimization - AI-driven scheduling engines that account for no-show probability, procedure duration variability, and resource availability are improving throughput without adding staff. * Revenue Cycle Intelligence - End-to-end AI monitoring of the revenue cycle - from eligibility verification through final payment posting - identifies bottlenecks and revenue leakage that human reviewers miss. What leaders should consider before deploying. Operational AI in healthcare is not plug-and-play. Decision-makers should approach deployment with clear-eyed pragmatism: * Start with data quality, not model sophistication. Platforms like Innovaccer's Gravity exist because most health systems have data spread across dozens of disconnected systems. No AI model can compensate for incomplete or inconsistent inputs. * Measure time-to-value, not just accuracy. A model that's 95% accurate but takes nine months to deploy may deliver less total value than an 88%-accurate solution live in six weeks. * Account for change management. Administrative staff need training and reassurance. The organizations seeing the best results pair technology rollouts with structured workflow redesign and transparent communication about how roles will evolve - not disappear. * Keep security and compliance non-negotiable. Research published in January 2025 on integrating blockchain and AI for healthcare data security underscores that as automation handles more sensitive data at scale, the attack surface grows. Zero-trust architectures and robust audit trails are essential. The bottom line. The unsexy side of healthcare AI - automating paperwork, streamlining claims, optimizing schedules - is where the industry will realize its largest near-term gains. Organizations that treat operational AI as a strategic investment rather than a tactical experiment will pull ahead on cost efficiency, staff retention, and patient satisfaction. For organizations looking to build or integrate these AI-powered operational systems, firms like IPS0 bring two decades of experience in custom software development, data engineering, and AI/ML implementation that can accelerate the path from pilot to production. The most transformative technology in healthcare right now isn't making the news. It's quietly clearing the backlog.