TTA’s May kickoff: is Oracle back from debt brink or in deeper? Deep learning AI vs. LLMs, chatbots take a whack with a PA lawsuit and AMA’s Congress appeal; ad trackers, M&A, more!

May 8, 2026 | by | No Comments

8 May 2026

AI dominated this week in multiple ways. Dr. Eric Topol opined on how validated deep learning AI use in medical imaging is hardly seeing any takeup by companies while gen AI and LLM chatbots get the funders and founders. Chatbots took a beating, with Character.AI being sued by Pennsylvania and AMA lobbying Congress for mental health bot guardrails. Is Oracle back from the debt brink with PIMCO’s bond fund financing for a data center or in deeper? Problematic ad trackers appear on state HIX websites, a buy and a Series B round it out.

Please feel free to comment on the articles and pass along this Alert. Let me know if this is worth it to you!

News roundup: Amwell narrows Q1 and full year losses, AMA urges Congress for guardrails on mental health chatbots, hospital at home study finds lower ED visits and lower hospital mortality

Character.AI sued by Pennsylvania on its chatbots posing as licensed physicians and psychiatrists

Oracle steps back from the AI debt brink with $16.3B financing for MI data center, the Project Jupiter ‘clean energy’ experiment in NM, and a major Federal DOW contract

Chutes & Ladders: Ad trackers still on healthcare websites after lawsuits, FTC; the US Navy adds WHOOPs it up and expands Talkspace; HealthVerity to buy Symphony Health; Nervonik’s $52.5M Series B

Is the health tech business neglecting validated deep learning medical AI models versus less proven LLMs and generative AI?

Last Week’s Headlines

A quickie news roundup: ChatGPT for Clinicians unveiled, UHG to invest $1.5B in AI, Aidoc raises $150M, TriFetch raises $1.9M pre-seed, Boehringer Ingelheim & Eko Health partner on canine heart murmur detection

Breaking: OpenEvidence app access terminated in the UK and EU

(Updated) Medtronic reports corporate IT systems cyberattacked. 500K UK Biobank records breached in inside job. Are med device and research organizations the new hacker happy hunting ground?

‘Behind the Emergency’–a well-done presentation about and approach to a specialized healthcare market

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News roundup: Amwell narrows Q1 and full year losses, AMA urges Congress for guardrails on mental health chatbots, hospital at home study finds lower ED visits and lower hospital mortality

May 8, 2026 | by | No Comments

Amwell sees a light at the end of the tunnel while losses continue, as usual. Their Q1 closed with a reduced net loss– $10.3 million versus prior year’s $18.4 million and Q4 2025’s $25.2 million. Revenue was also lower: $54.9 million, down 18%, but exceeding their prior guidance. Revenue from subscriptions, Amwell’s current focus, of $24.9 million decreased about 23% from the prior year. Adjusted EBITDA also moved positively to a loss of $3.1 million versus Q4 2025’s $10.3 million. For their Q2, Amwell projects revenue in the range of $48- $52 million and adjusted EBITDA loss in the range of $2 to $4 million. Full year revenue remains at $195 to $205 million with adjusted EBITDA loss between $12 and $16 million, a reduction from prior projections. Healthcare Dive, Amwell Q1 statement

The American Medical Association (AMA) asks for more guardrails on AI mental health chatbots. In three letters sent to the House and Senate Artificial Intelligence Caucuses and the Congressional Digital Health Caucus, the AMA’s concern was around the emotional dependency on AI systems, the potential distortion of reality through prolonged interaction with chatbots. and the current lack of consistent safety protocols. They outlined several areas needing attention:

  1. Greater transparency in ensuring that users clearly understand when they are interacting with an AI system rather than a human being. Chatbots should not present as a licensed clinician or a human being. [See our earlier article on Pennsylvania’s suit against Character.AI]
  2. Clearer regulatory boundaries around how AI chatbots are used in mental healthcare, including diagnosis and treatment requiring oversight.
  3. Requesting that lawmakers direct agencies to establish a risk-based framework that clarifies when AI tools qualify as medical devices.
  4. Requiring developers to build safeguards, such as crisis-detection capabilities that can identify potential self-harm risk and direct users to appropriate resources and de-escalate harmful situations.
  5. Ongoing safety monitoring, mandatory reporting of adverse events, and stricter standards for tools used by children and adolescents.
  6. Limits on commercial influence, including restrictions or bans on advertising within mental health chatbots, and that chatbots aren’t ‘influenced’ by financial incentives.
  7. Robust data protection standards, including: limits on the amount of data collected and stored, safeguards to prevent unauthorized access or sharing of sensitive information, and clear user consent for data use.

Stanford’s recent research confirmed some common knowledge–that LLMs behind the chatbots pose significant risks by providing inappropriate responses, introducing bias and perpetuating stigma, which can result in dangerous consequences. AMA release, Mobihealthnews

Medicare beneficiary study compares hospital at home outcomes with traditional in-patient stays–and finds some good results. The JAMA Open Network published paper found that in over 15,000 patients (hospital at home, 4,174; in-patient 11, 697), treatment via “hospital at home was associated with significantly lower in-hospital mortality and emergency department (ED) use within 30 days of index admission discharge, with no significant difference in hospital readmissions within 30 days of index admission discharge compared with traditional inpatient care.” The study concluded that may maintain the same or better short term outcomes depending on “appropriately selected patients” (not specified) and that “future studies should evaluate implementation and equity”. The vast majority of patients in the hospital at home sample (nearly 97%) were urban. Healthcare Dive, JAMA Open Network

Character.AI sued by Pennsylvania on its chatbots posing as licensed physicians and psychiatrists

May 8, 2026 | by | No Comments

This takes AI hallucinations and chatbot dangers to a slightly higher level. The Pennsylvania Department of State and the Pennsylvania State Board of Medicine have filed a lawsuit requesting a preliminary injunction against chatbot developer Character.AI. The company, formally Character Technologies, Inc. of Redwood City, California, is charged with enabling its LLM chatbots to pose as licensed medical professionals, including psychiatrists, in violation of the state’s Medical Practice Act. that prohibits the unauthorized practice of medicine and false credentials. Their investigation of their chatbot characters, posing as therapists, invited users to discuss their mental health symptoms. In the key instance outlined in the suit, a chatbot presented as a physician and falsely stated it was licensed in Pennsylvania and provided an invalid license number. 

Character.AI’s chatbots are available for use by the general public. It has over 20 million active users worldwide. Anyone can go on the Character.AI website and register for free; a paid version costs $9.99 per month which provides priority access. According to the PA Professional Conduct Investigator (PCI), after creating a free account and his own character, he searched on ‘psychiatry’ and found “Emilie”. He presented with symptoms corresponding to depression. “Emilie” offered to complete an assessment for him as ‘within her remit as a Doctor’. “Emilie” represented herself as a physician graduate of Imperial College London, licensed with the General Medical Counsel in the UK with a full registration and with a specialty in psychiatry. When asked, “she” said she was also licensed in PA. The number “she” gave the PCI, however, was invalid. 

The Medical Practice Act prohibits engaging in the unlawful practice of medicine and surgery or purport to do so. The complaint seeks to restrain Character.AI in presenting its characters as licensed medical professionals.  Press release,  “Complaint in Equity”

Character.AI’s response, from a spokesperson quoted in The Hill, was to not comment on the litigation, to state that the chatbots were for entertainment and role playing, claiming that “We have taken robust steps to make that clear, including prominent disclaimers in every chat to remind users that a Character is not a real person and that everything a Character says should be treated as fiction.” In another statement to Becker’s, “We also add robust disclaimers making it clear that users should not rely on characters for any type of professional advice. Character.AI prioritizes responsible product development and has robust internal reviews and red-teaming processes in place to assess relevant features.”

Unfortunately for Character.AI, there’s a trail of additional lawsuits from families saying that the chatbot ‘characters’ led their children to mental health problems, self-harm, and suicide along with other forms of abuse. Kentucky earlier this year filed its own lawsuit in that the characters allegedly “preyed on children and led them into self-harm.” 

Its valuation stands above $1 billion and according to Crunchbase, between seed and Series A (both 2023), it has raised $230 million to date from Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, Greycroft, Elad Gil, and A. Capital Ventures.

Oracle steps back from the AI debt brink with $16.3B financing for MI data center, the Project Jupiter ‘clean energy’ experiment in NM, and a major Federal DOW contract

May 7, 2026 | by | No Comments

Perhaps the rabbit is being pulled from the top hat. Or it’s hungry. Three recent announcements are giving Oracle shareholders–of which founder Larry Ellison is a 40% holder–some confidence in a volatile market. While ORCL shares are slightly down year-to-date, in the past month since their massive layoff, Mr. Market has boosted them up close to 36% at time of writing, most of the runup in the past week. (Editor’s note: this analysis is meant to be directional and qualitative. It is detached from ‘stock picking’. For your Editor, the interest is in the future of Oracle Health, which is likely collateral damage from All This.)

Oracle is taking on $16 billion debt, this time largely funded by bond fund PIMCO. This funded a single data center campus in Saline Township, Michigan. Total financing announced in late April was $16.3 billion, anchored by PIMCO’s financing $10 billion of the bond tranche plus $2 billion in equity from Related Digital Infrastructure and Blackstone. It’s reported that this is the largest single-facility technology debt package ever assembled. PIMCO (Pacific Investment Management Company LLC)  is a bond fund, the largest of its type (active fixed-income), and a subsidiary of Allianz Global Investors. It stepped in because US banks refused for the reasons bulleted below.

What gives pause is the total debt picture that Oracle is taking on to develop data centers for clients–OpenAI primarily, but also Meta. 

  • $72 billion in total debt to finance the Stargate joint venture in Michigan, Texas, Wisconsin, and New Mexico. Other reports have indicated over $100 billion [TTA 10 Mar].
  • The PIMCO debt is structured as a 7.5% coupon with a 19.5-year maturity, with six years of interest-only payments followed by 13 years of amortization
  • Oracle’s long-term debt load has risen nearly 66% since the start of 2025.  Yahoo Finance
  • This is despite a BBB-negative credit outlook from S&P Global Ratings and Moody’s Baa2 Negative outlook (link), a major factor in why banks shied away from further financing.
  • $553 billion in performance obligations with OpenAI 

TNW discusses in a deeper dive the debt structure and why PIMCO could make this bet where banks could not.  The question it raises is whether the furious pace of data center building is another cycle of overbuilding–and if it is, will it be absorbed in time? The ominous parallels: the 2000s building boom in an earlier iteration of data centers, the fiberoptic boom of the early 2000s that broke WorldCom, Global Crossing, Winstar, Corning, and 360Networks, cloud overbuilding that left Amazon Web Services with years of excess capacity (it helps to have a deep-pocketed and not all that transparent parent), and others. This Editor would also liken it to the early years of 1980s-90s airline deregulation (too many airlines, too much debt, too many seats) and about a decade in the cruise ship industry where too many cabins were chasing too few people. These took decades and multiple bankruptcies to settle.

The Project Jupiter New Mexico Stargate data center is turning into an experiment to reduce the environmental/power impact of AI data centers. The alternative energy source for the Doña Ana County data center will come from fuel cells developed by Bloom Energy. The fuel cells have up to 2.45 GW of installed capacity and will replace the usual gas turbines and diesel generators, consolidating power into one single microgrid. How big this ‘microgrid’ will be is not disclosed. The data center campus is being built by a development company, BorderPlex Digital Assets, which is promoting this site as a “Tier 1 industrial engine for New Mexico”. 

Fuel cells generate electricity without combustion through electrochemically combining hydrogen and oxygen, producing water, heat, and electricity. Versus conventional power sources, they reduce nitrogen oxides emissions by approximately 92% and use a “negligible” amount of water. However, the overall picture is not quite that rosy. Other reports indicated that overall greenhouse gases emitted by the data center even with the fuel cell microgrid are estimated at 10 million tons per year, representing ~30% savings over a conventionally powered 14 million tons per year, the latter more than the cities of Las Cruces and Albuquerque. While preliminary construction is taking place, Project Jupiter is still awaiting approval from the New Mexico Environment Department and faces several lawsuits from environmental activists. SourceNM,  Oracle release

A Federal contract to expand the Department of War’s AI capabilities across their classified cloud network. No value attached, and details are naturally on the QT and strictly Hush-Hush, but Oracle’s May Day announcement says in about three ways that the agreement is for advancing AI capabilities as part of the DOW’s AI Acceleration Strategy by “enabling new capabilities across its three core tenets: warfighting, intelligence, and enterprise operations”. (Whew!) From the release: “This agreement accelerates the transformation toward making the United States military an AI-first fighting force and strengthens warfighters’ ability to maintain decision superiority across all domains of warfare.” Oracle release

Also Yahoo Finance

Chutes & Ladders: Ad trackers still on healthcare websites after lawsuits, FTC; the US Navy adds WHOOPs it up and expands Talkspace; HealthVerity to buy Symphony Health; Nervonik’s $52.5M Series B

May 7, 2026 | by | No Comments

In the Chutes department…remember the scandal around healthcare ad trackers back in 2022? After multiple lawsuits, Congressional hearings, Department of Justice (DOJ), Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and Health & Human Services (HHS) investigations that were supposed to curb their use three to four years ago, ad trackers are still being used by healthcare organizations.

A Bloomberg-Feroot Security investigation published this week uncovered that nearly all of the 20 health insurance exchanges (HIX) set up by states and the District of Columbia as part of the ACA use ad trackers. Information included sex, citizenship, and race. In New York State, the HIX shared the pages applicants visited during enrollment with TikTok, Meta, Snap Inc. and LinkedIn. Even details about incarcerated family members was shared. Over 7 million Americans buy health insurance through the state sites.

The problem is that Federal protections on personal information (personal health information–PHI, and personally identifiable information–PII) do not apply at the state level. State laws are inconsistent and incomplete. There are consumer protection laws, but again application is inconsistent. And rather neatly, the ad companies contractually place the compliance responsibility on advertisers. While ad trackers serve useful marketing and operational purposes for site analytics, data retention, and ad targeting, sending PHI and PII to third parties for that purpose violates privacy. 

The other 30 states use the Federal Healthcare.gov insurance exchange site. California removed trackers in 2025.

In 2022, ad trackers were on health system websites, large provider groups such as VillageMD, and e-prescribers such as the controversial Cerebral. Trackers such as Meta Pixel were disclosing all sorts of protected information that violated HIPAA and privacy guidelines to third parties such as Facebook, Instagram, and Google–and monetized. Most health systems removed them and Cerebral was fined for this as well as other issues. TTA 16 April 2024, 17 June 2022, 21 June 2022

The US Navy is sailing with WHOOP and Talkspace. WHOOP, through MIT Lincoln Laboratory, has been awarded a contract to support the US Navy’s Command Readiness, Endurance, and Watchstanding (CREW) program. The CREW program’s objective is to improve operational readiness by reducing fatigue-related risk. WHOOP’s fitness and health monitoring wearable will be used to integrate physiological data into the CREW system architecture by monitoring sleep, recovery, and strain.

To gain the Navy contract, WHOOP waged a successful Federal procurement battle with fitness ring Oura, which was awarded a $96 million contract in 2024. WHOOP argued that the specifications were too narrowly written in specifying a ring wearable and that the contract was awarded to a foreign company (Oura is based in Finland, WHOOP in Boston).  Certainly they had the funds to wage war with the Department of War; WHOOP scored a whopping $575 million Series G last month for a $10.1 billion valuation. The value of WHOOP’s contract via MIT is undisclosed. Oura has other contracts for projects with the Department of War. Release, Mobihealthnews

Talkspace is expanding its existing virtual behavioral health therapy program with the Navy to 40,000 sailors and families based at 13 Navy installations. They will have access to the Talkspace Go self-paced app and other offerings through their TRICARE benefits. Talkspace offers virtual therapy for anxiety, social anxiety, depression, ADHD, bipolar disorder, OCD, insomnia, postpartum depression, panic disorder, gambling addiction, schizophrenia, eating disorders and more, including medication refills. The company was bought for $838 million in March by Universal Health Services (UHS), a diversified for-profit health services provider, with the closing expected by Q3  [TTA 12 March]. There is no disclosure of the value of the contract nor the length. Mobihealthnews, Release

In M&A, ICON plc’s subsidiary Symphony Health is being acquired by HealthVerity. Purchase price is not disclosed. Symphony is a major company in the data analytics and clinical intelligence field with a massive commercial data repository, built on analyzing millions of patient claims and transactions for outcomes. ICON claims it stores 14 petabytes of data, sourced from over 900,000 providers and over 305 million patients. Clinical research organization (CRO) ICON acquired Symphony, founded in 2012 from four earlier health data companies, when it purchased PRA Health Sciences, also a CRO, in 2021. It was operated by ICON as a US subsidiary. The stated goal is to unite Symphony’s commercial health data with HealthVerity’s data exchange and patient identity systems. The deal is expected to close later this month. Release, Mobihealthnews

Medical device company Nervonik announced an oversubscribed $52.5 million Series B funding round. Their peripheral nerve stimulation (PNS) neuromodulation technology is used in high-motion areas of the body for chronic pain treatment. The financing was led by Amzak Health, with participation from Elevage Medical Technologies, U.S. Venture Partners (USVP), Lumira Ventures, Foothill Ventures, and Shangbay Capital, bringing their total funding to over $65 million. Their PNS integrates stimulation with advanced sensing to deliver more precise and personalized therapy. Nervonik completed a first human clinical trial of nerve stimulation for chronic pain in March 2025. Release, Mobihealthnews

Is the health tech business neglecting validated deep learning medical AI models versus less proven LLMs and generative AI?

May 6, 2026 | by | No Comments

Eric Topol, MD answers his own startling question, contrasting medical imaging with decision support for both clinicians and patients. His recent Substack ‘Ground Truths’ article (link below, free access) will make you think harder about what is being sold as ‘medical AI’ and what has actually been validated through multiple studies. 

Imaging AI is the Undiscovered–but Mapped Out–Country. Deep Learning (DL)-based AI models developed using medical imaging have substantial validation over more than a decade, and they are accelerating. There have been multiple validated studies using information from retinal scans as predictors of future medical conditions such as Parkinson’s, heart disease, stroke, and Alzheimer’s Disease. The retina is apparently a diagnostic gateway to nearly every organ; many studies have focused on it as scans are fairly routine. Other AI-assisted models have used deep learning to detect multiple health conditions: thymus, cardiovascular conditions, through mammography, colonoscopy, and importantly, detecting pancreatic and other cancers from computed tomography (CT) images done for other reasons. “Opportunistic AI” alone is being used in detection for a long list of health conditions. Dr. Topol’s point is that none of these new diagnostic methods have made it into standard practice, despite being used in other countries like China (PANDA) and with at least four companies developing uses for retinal AI to detect specific diseases.

Medical LLMs and Generative AI, on the other hand, are building what may be Castles In The Air.  Seemingly everyone is developing, funding, and selling a LLM-based chatbot, LLM-aided diagnosis, management, patient triage, and direct patient use. Unfortunately, they’re being sold without real, continuous evidence through rigorous studies over time. What studies there are, are generally simulations, small-scale studies, or individual case studies which need further real-world validation. The clinical trials, the infrastructure, and the monitoring for safety, effectiveness, and cost are simply not there yet, and it’s past time. (Raj Manrai quoted in Science). In addition, generative AI keeps changing making studies harder to track results over time. Dr. Topol’s conclusion: “In summary, there is very little evidence for LLMs benefiting patients or doctors for health outcomes.”

That is not to say, as Dr. Topol does, that AI won’t grow in usefulness in areas such as medical research and chart summaries, discharge instructions, translations, administrative work such as documentation of billing codes, clinical workflow, and insurance authorization. AI has already worked its way into RCM where no respectable company does not have an AI-enabled tool. The American Medical Association (AMA) study he cites indicates both current use and growing acceptance by physicians. (To this Editor, it resembles the telehealth usage graphs of a decade ago, and she expects the same progress.) 

He calls it a paradox between imaging AI and LLMs. This Editor calls it a shame that healthcare technology and investment keep chasing what’s easy, ‘sexy’, and can generate fast revenue/ROI. Not what is more difficult but proven, and that can have a potential huge impact on health outcomes.

Dr. Topol’s closing is fitting:

Let’s fix this paradox of medical AI implementation. It’s a two-fold and major undertaking. Amping up the use of medical AI where it’s proven and performing the clinical trials required to justify wide-scale adoption where pivotal evidence is lacking.

 
The Paradox of Medical AI Implementation

TTA’s Royal Visit Week: OpenEvidence goes dark in UK & EU, UK Biobank and Medtronic hacked, RapidSOS’s well-done docu-video, ‘fetching’ fundings, more!

May 1, 2026 | by | No Comments

 

Friday, 1 May 2026

This week saw King Charles III and Queen Camilla on our shores, from Washington to NYC to Virginia, before flying off to (hopefully) warmer Bermuda. Perhaps the pomp made for a quieter healthcare week. Perhaps the three most important stories were almost lost in the circumstance. “IT” clinical info app OpenEvidence stumbled over compliance with the EU AI Act–and chose to go dark in UK and EU. 500K UK Biobank records were hacked–by trusted Chinese researchers. Medtronic had what they depicted as a not-terribly-consequential breach of their corporate IT systems–we’ll see. A well-done docu-video on what happens when you call 911–and emergency services. Some fundings that ‘fetch’. And more!

Please feel free to comment on the articles and pass along this Alert. Let me know if this is worth it to you!

A quickie news roundup: ChatGPT for Clinicians unveiled, UHG to invest $1.5B in AI, Aidoc raises $150M, TriFetch raises $1.9M pre-seed, Boehringer Ingelheim & Eko Health partner on canine heart murmur detection

Breaking: OpenEvidence app access terminated in the UK and EU

(Updated) Medtronic reports corporate IT systems cyberattacked. 500K UK Biobank records breached in inside job. Are med device and research organizations the new hacker happy hunting ground?

‘Behind the Emergency’–a well-done presentation about and approach to a specialized healthcare market

Last Week

Weekend Must Read: The 10 point pattern of failure of healthcare tech companies

News roundup: (breaking) IKS Health finalizes TruBridge buy, Hims shares rise on independent Rx fills, Cala Health scores $50M, Joyful Health $22M, Tava Health $40M, actor Jeremy Renner partners with RapidSOS

Even famous doctors have their identity stolen: Dr. Eric Topol “authors” an apparently fake, AI-generated paper (This Editor’s investigation)

Teleprescriber Zealthy–and CEO Kyle Robertson–accused of asset fraud; DOJ moves to freeze assets and put company in receivership

Chutes & Ladders: Vendor protest filed against VA-OIT, Teladoc stock touted as ‘best buy’, Treehub ‘founder residency’ launches, AcuityMD raises $80M to near-$1B valuation

29th ISfTeH International Conference announced for 11-13 November in Germany–submit your proposal now!

Perspectives: What Healthcare Can Learn from Formula One About AI

 * * *
Advertise on Telehealth and Telecare Aware
Support not only a publication but also a well-informed international community.

Contact Editor Donna for more information.

Help Spread the News

Please tell your colleagues about this free news service and, if you have relevant information to share with the rest of the world, please let me know!

Donna Cusano, Editor In Chief
donna.cusano@telecareaware.com

Telehealth & Telecare Aware – covering news on latest developments in telecare, telehealth and eHealth, worldwide.