Auddia Highlights Influence Healthcare's AI-Powered, Surgeon-Led Value-Based Care Model Ahead of S-4 Filing

Auddia Inc. (NASDAQ: AUUD) today highlighted Influence Healthcare, a healthtech company leveraging artificial intelligence and vertical integration to enable surgeons to drive adoption of value-based care (VBC) across surgical specialties. The announcement comes as Auddia prepares to file its Form S-4 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission later this week, a key step in the merger process that will combine Auddia with Thramann Holdings, LLC, the owner of Influence Healthcare, LT350, and Voyex.

Influence Healthcare is built on the premise that physicians deliver value and should lead the healthcare system. The company organizes surgeons into vertically integrated Value Based Enterprises (VBEs) that contract for bundled case-rate payments in spine, total joints, and other high-cost specialties. These VBEs are supported by advanced AI workflows that automate documentation, coding, episode validation, care-pathway coordination, staffing, supply chain, and logistics, allowing surgeons to focus on clinical care rather than administrative tasks.

Dr. Jeff Thramann, CEO of Auddia and founder of Influence Healthcare, emphasized the importance of restoring physician leadership. “Healthcare is about a physician and patient entering into a relationship to optimize delivery of the highest quality care. Only the physician has the knowledge, relationship with the patient, and clinical authority to make the many real-time decisions required to deliver the highest quality care at the lowest possible price,” he said. Influence Healthcare aims to leverage AI to minimize administrative noise so that physicians and other healthcare professionals can deliver the highest value care.

The model is designed as a structural alternative to two dominant models: hospital employment, which often reduces physician autonomy and increases administrative overhead, and private-equity rollups, which prioritize financial engineering over clinical leadership. Influence Healthcare creates surgeon-led enterprises where surgeons retain governance authority, episode-based economics flow to clinicians, and facilities participate through aligned partnerships rather than ownership. AI reduces overhead, making independent practice viable.

Post-merger, Influence Healthcare will leverage shared AI services from McCarthy Finney to deploy agentic-AI workflows that automate clinical documentation, coding and billing preparation, episode-of-care validation, prior-authorization workflows, care-pathway adherence monitoring, and communication across the episode. These workflows are designed to eliminate administrative layers that have historically required multiple full-time administrative staff per surgeon and contributed to burnout and inefficiency.

“AI should not replace physicians, it should replace the administrative friction that prevents physicians from practicing at the top of their license,” Dr. Thramann said. “Our platform gives surgeons the environment they need to deliver a more predictable, coordinated, efficient, and compassionate episode of care.”

Influence Healthcare’s VBEs are built around episode-of-care design, not practice acquisition. The model integrates surgeon leadership, facility partners (ASCs, hospitals, imaging centers), post-acute providers, AI-enabled care coordination, and episode-based financial alignment. This creates a cohesive, end-to-end specialty care model without requiring surgeons to sell their practices or surrender governance.

The company’s initial focus is on spine and total joint surgery, with plans to expand to additional specialties and markets through physician-led VBEs. The model is designed to deliver lower total cost of care through coordinated, efficient episodes; improved outcomes through surgeon-led pathway design; reduced administrative overhead through AI automation; predictable economics for payers and employers; and restored autonomy and economic participation for surgeons.

For more information about Influence Healthcare, visit www.influencehealthcare.com. The merger, announced on February 17, 2026, will result in Auddia changing its name to McCarthy Finney and trading under the ticker MCFN. McCarthy Finney is an AI holding company that will deliver AI and Web3 services to its four portfolio companies: LT350, Influence Healthcare, Voyex, and Auddia. The S-4 filing will include a proxy statement and prospectus, and Auddia urges investors to read these documents when available.