Bitcoin briefly dropped below the $90,000 mark on Monday, extending its slide as investors continue to dump growth oriented assets like crypto and tech stocks.

The price of the flagship cryptocurrency was last lower by 3% at $91,358.66 to start the week, according to Coin Metrics. Earlier, it fell as low as $89,259.00. Bitcoin is down 10% in the past week.

Ether lost 7% Monday and the broader crypto market, as measured by the CoinDesk 20 index, dropped more than 5%. Shares of Coinbase and MicroStrategy slid 4% and 3%, respectively. Mara Holdings declined 4% and Core Scientific retreated by 2%.

Crypto assets’ decline began last week after stronger-than-expected payroll numbers caused a spike in bond yields and amid concerns about President-elect Donald Trump’s tariff plans – both of which gave a boost to the dollar while pressuring bitcoin and other risk assets.

“The need for liquidity is caused by FX spikes because of strong end-of-year U.S. economy number, the stock market rallying strong, and there are other places money is needed in the short-term,” said James Davies, co-founder and CEO at crypto trading platform Crypto Valley Exchange. “If we want bitcoin to act like a currency, we need to accept when it does, and this is one of those times. The U.S. Dollar has gotten stronger ad everything else including bitcoin is weaker when measured in dollars.”

Investor sentiment was optimistic coming into 2025, with markets looking forward to having a pro-crypto Congress and White House. That hope had outweighed any concern about macroeconomic-related speedbumps, until last week.

Investors are now warning that the first quarter of this year could be more turbulent for crypto than previously anticipated.

Bitcoin’s price grew 120% in 2024 but is down 3% so far in the new year.

Health-care payments company Waystar on Monday announced a new generative artificial intelligence tool that can help hospitals quickly tackle one of their most costly and tedious responsibilities: fighting insurance denials. 

Hospitals and health systems spend nearly $20 billion a year trying to overturn denied claims, according to a March report from the group purchasing organization Premier. 

“We think if we can develop software that makes people’s lives better in an otherwise stressful moment of time when they’re getting health-care, then we’re doing something good,” Waystar CEO Matt Hawkins told CNBC.

Waystar’s new solution, called AltitudeCreate, uses generative AI to automatically draft appeal letters. The company said the feature could help providers drive down costs and spare them the headache of digging through complex contracts and records to put the letters together manually. 

Hawkins led Waystar through its initial public offering in June, where it raised around $1 billion. The company handled more than $1.2 trillion in gross claims volume in 2023, touching about 50% of patients in the U.S. 

Claim denials have become a hot-button issue across the nation following the deadly shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December. Americans flooded social media with posts about their frustrations and resentment toward the insurance industry, often sharing stories about their own negative experiences. 

When a patient receives medical care in the U.S., it kicks off a notoriously complex billing process. Providers like hospitals, health systems or ambulatory care facilities submit an invoice called a claim to an insurance company, and the insurer will approve or deny the claim based on whether or not it meets the company’s criteria for reimbursement. 

If a claim is denied, patients are often responsible for covering the cost out-of-pocket. More than 450 million claims are denied each year, and denial rates are rising, Waystar said. 

Providers can ask insurers to reevaluate claim denials by submitting an appeal letter, but drafting these letters is a time-consuming and expensive process that doesn’t guarantee a different outcome.

Hawkins said that while there’s been a lot of discussion around claims denials recently, AltitudeCreate has been in the works at Waystar for the last six to eight months. The company announced an AI-focused partnership with Google Cloud in May, and automating claims denials was one of the 12 use cases the companies planned to explore.

Waystar has also had a denial and appeal management software module available for several years, Hawkins added.

AltitudeCreate is one tool available within a broader suite of Waystar’s AI offerings called AltitudeAI, which the company also unveiled on Monday. AltitudeCreate rolled out to organizations that are already using Waystar’s denial and appeal management software modules earlier this month at no additional cost, the company said. 

Waystar plans to make the feature more broadly available in the future. 

“In the face of all of this administrative waste in health-care where provider organizations are understaffed and don’t have time to even follow up on a claim when it does get denied, we’re bringing software to bear that helps to automate that experience,” Hawkins said.

Amazon Web Services and venture capital firm General Catalyst on Monday announced a new multi-year partnership in their latest push to carve out a piece of health-care’s growing artificial intelligence market. 

Through the collaboration, General Catalyst portfolio companies will use AWS’ services to build and roll out AI tools for health systems more quickly. Aidoc, which applies AI to medical imaging, and Commure, which automates provider workflows with AI, will be the first two companies to participate.

No financial terms were disclosed in the announcement.

“Without a strong partner like Amazon and AWS to stand alongside them, to co-develop and support these companies … it’s not going to move as fast as we hope,” Chris Bischoff, head of global health-care investing at General Catalyst, told CNBC in an interview. 

Health systems are strained in the U.S., with staff burnout, growing labor shortages and razor-thin margins. These challenges often seem enticing for enterprising tech startups to tackle, especially as the multi-trillion dollar health-care industry dangles the prospect of large financial returns. 

Hospitals operate in a complex, technology-weary and highly-regulated sector that can be difficult for startups to break into. General Catalyst is hoping to help its companies fast-track the development and go-to-market process by leveraging resources like computing power from AWS.  

General Catalyst is no stranger to taking big swings in health-care. 

The firm has closed more than 60 digital health deals since 2020, behind only Gaingels and Alumni Ventures, according to a December report from PitchBook. Last January, General Catalyst shocked the industry by announcing that its new business, the Health Assurance Transformation Company, planned to acquire an Ohio-based health system – an unprecedented move in venture capital. 

General Catalyst’s “deep understanding” of health systems’ financial and operating realities made it an attractive partner for AWS, Dan Sheeran, AWS’ general manager of Healthcare & Life Science, told CNBC. Sheeran and Bischoff began outlining the collaboration between the two groups after meeting in London around nine months ago.   

AWS also has an established presence in the health-care sector. The company offers more health- and life-sciences-specific services than any other cloud provider, according to a release, and it inked other high-profile AI partnerships with GE HealthCare, Philips and others last year. 

The partnership between General Catalyst and AWS will stretch over several years, but new tools from Aidoc and Commure are coming in 2025. Aidoc is exploring how it can use the cloud to tap data modalities across pathology, cardiology, genomics and other molecular information, for instance. 

Aidoc and Commure were selected to kick off the collaboration because they have both established a product-market fit, are operational and are focused on issues that are a high priority for AWS customers.

“GC has spent a lot of time thinking about how health systems can transform themselves, and we recognize that it’s not going to be through 1,000 companies, and we need solutions that are really enterprise grade,” Bischoff said. “Amazon shares the same vision, so we are starting with these two.”  

Though the partnership between General Catalyst and AWS is still in its early days, the organizations said they believe it will help serve as a way to meet the market’s growing demand for new solutions. 

“Health system leaders who want to realize the benefits of AI now have an easier way to accomplish that,” Sheeran said.