News roundup #2: Function Health’s jumbo $450M raise from General Catalyst, Hinge Health’s $105M Cylinder buy, and Throne Science’s $10M Series A

August 6, 2026 | by | No Comments

August is opening with a blood draw and a “flush” in two Financings and one substantial, additive GI Deal.

The much-ballyhooed Function Health raises another $450 million from General Catalyst. This debt financing adds to their war chest, now $804 million. Crunchbase The growth financing from General Catalyst, which makes news with its raises, follows on Function’s November 2025 Series B round of $298 million led by Redpoint.

Function provides direct-to-consumer 160+ lab tests in an annual self-pay subscription model ($365, HSA/FSA eligible). Their pitch is to enable you to “live 100 healthy years” by self-testing for conditions such as thyroid, cardiovascular, hormones, immune disorders, and early signs of fatty liver and cancer, plus two annual full-body scans. The tests are performed via Quest Diagnostics in 48 states (excluding Rhode Island, Hawaii, and the territory of Puerto Rico). Members also receive a physician-reviewed results and insights. Function also offers MRI and CT scans (for an additional cost below $1000). They acquired in the past two years Ezra AI (full-body MRI scans), Getlabs (at-home or office blood draw network), and SuppCo (supplements). Function members have performed over 100 million lab tests in the past three years.

According to their CEO Jonathan Swerdlin, their target is “anyone who wants to be healthy”, but drilling down, it is the worried well, those wanting to centralize their ongoing testing, and those managing chronic conditions. Having gone through (and will be going through) a battery of thyroid and related tests, those of us who don’t have a physician brother to write up testing (and now an endocrinologist) could find this very attractive indeed, especially those with HSA/FSA accounts. For Medicare beneficiaries, it’s strictly out of pocket but if you have a lot of testing to do, perhaps worth it. The next part of this, of course, is getting your labs to a specialist without going through a primary care provider.

Reaching out to sell memberships to a broad consumer audience via traditional and social media is going to be an expensive proposition. $365 is not a trifling sum and getting your labs done via procedures like blood draws isn’t wonderfully pleasant. It requires national marketing and promotion, with a value proposition that takes some of the sting out of that blood draw. We’ll see if this happens as a result of the debt financing this fall. Release, MedCityNews

Hinge Health expands into GI care with Cylinder Health. One-time MSK remote physical therapy specialist Hinge Health continues its specialty expansion with $105 million for gastrointestinal care management company Cylinder Health. The buy is all cash and expected to close during Q3, subject to the usual customary closing considerations.

Cylinder has already treated 150,000 people for gastrointestinal (GI) conditions and has a clinically validated ROI. From the release: “The acquisition will combine Cylinder’s clinical expertise and existing market footprint with Hinge Health’s AI-powered care model and technology platform to deliver support in a single app expected to launch in 2027. There is no mention of how the companies will go forward in management and workforce locations.

Hinge expanded from MSK therapy into pain relief via the Enso pulse wireless device, pelvic health, migraine care (Enso), and fall prevention. Interestingly, in the release the CEO quote from Daniel Perez, alludes to GI care being an unmet need.  “Many people we already serve for back, joint, pelvic, and migraine care also have chronic digestive conditions. After spending time with Terry Boch and the Cylinder team, it’s clear that Cylinder gives us a running start in a category with significant unmet need.” (If you, like this Editor, spend any time on YouTube, one is assailed with digestive health ads, often, as we said as teens but perfect here, ‘gross’.)

Hinge went public last year at $32/share [TTA 22 May 2025] and is currently trading at around $80/share, a gain of over 100%, so they are doing something right in a very competitive space against Omada Health and Sword Health. Mobihealthnews, Healthcare Dive

And while we are discussing things gastrointestinal, Throne Science raised a Series A of $10 million. It was led by Will Ventures with participation from Emerson Collective, Workshop, LEAD VC, Salt VC, Accomplice, Moxxie, Ventures Together, Symphony, Felix Capital, Cosmic Venture Partners, Offscript, V1.VC, and Morrison Seger. Throne Science has developed an AI-assisted toilet sensor for $399 (plus $5.99/month membership) that monitors for bathroom habits, specifically monitoring patterns around hydration and gut health. Last month, they launched the beta version of their Gut Health AI coach which allows users to query the app about their data. The fresh funds will be used for further R&D for the next generation of the device targeting early detection of colon and urinary tract cancers. Interestingly, one of the founders is John Capodilupo, formerly CTO at the previously mentioned WHOOP. Release, Mobihealthnews

Disclaimer: Throne Science has nothing to do with the British, or any other, Kings or Queens. 

News roundup #1: AI governance ‘in’ with Feds, ATA; Centene’s shrinking but more profitable future; repositions and partnerships for DispatchHealth, WHOOP; Te Whatu Ora Health New Zealand modernization

August 6, 2026 | by | No Comments

Besides data center worries, AI governance and cybersecurity are very near the top of AI concerns.

  • For the Feds, AI is being used to patch up cyber vulnerabilities at speed and scale. The Gold Eagle “Promoting Advanced Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Security” initiative established in Executive Order (EO) 14409 is designed to operate across agency lines, reduce bureaucracy, stimulate innovation, and utilize AI for security as well as develop internal, responsible AI practices. It also promotes cooperation between the private sector and government by being built out by open source software companies, The EO has three major parts: 
    1. Upgrading American Systems for Advanced AI–this sets a 30 day clock from 2 June for adoption across the Committee on National Security Systems, the Departments of War, Homeland Security, Treasury, OMB and others.
    2. Secure Frontier Model Deployment–setting benchmarking, frameworks, “covered frontier models” and partners within 60 days inclusive of confidentiality, cybersecurity, insider-risk, and intellectual-property protection.
    3. Protection Against Criminal Actors–tightening up existing US Code and criminal laws to penalize “anyone who utilizes AI to illegally access or damage a computer without authorization, or who utilizes AI while engaged in such illegal access to further any other crime”.

Healthcare IT News

The American Telemedicine Association (ATA) and its advocacy arm, ATA ACTION, are establishing three working groups to help shape AI governance policy affecting virtual care and telemedicine. The first is on state-level AI policy, the second and third groups are centered on Federal policy agendas, regulations, and how state and Federal governments approach AI in virtual care. The three groups will present their report outcomes in December at the ATA EDGE Policy Conference setting the direction for ATA ACTION’s advocacy priorities in 2027. ATA Release

As payers continue to shrink due to plan membership declines and closures/selloffs, Centene actually is notching some profit and having some sunnier days. Centene’s Q2 closed with a stunning $1.1 billion in profit, with H1 at $2.6 billion, reminiscent of the palmy Michael Neidorff days when the sky was the limit and what was on the ground with the operating plans/companies was a jungle. This was quite a contrast versus 2025’s Q2 $253 million loss and H1  $1.05 billion profit. Revenues were also up nicely with H1 this year at  $103.5 billion, compared to $95.4 billion last year. All exceeded Wall Street estimates and gave Centene the opportunity to boost its 2026 full year outlook to at least $4.80 in earnings per share and revenue to between $193.5 billion to $197.5 billion, a flat-to-boost from 2025’s ending $194.78 billion and $2.08 per share.

At this point, it’s apparent that despite shrinking memberships down to 25.9 million as of Q2, both their sizable Medicaid and ACA plan memberships shrinking sharply, Centene has wrestled that old devil, the Medical Loss Ratio (MLR) to 89.6%, down from 93%. Another bright spot has been their commercial plans which have notched growth and a 10 point less MLR. ACA memberships are down from 5.9 million to 3.5 million. The ACA premium tax credit subsidies expired at the end of 2025, effectively causing premiums to double for nearly everyone. Aetna exited this year and Cigna will be out in 2027.

Share price is also sunny side up. Since April, shares have gone from the $31/share bottom in April to the $60 plus range since June. Centene is reportedly working hard to improve their plan STAR (CMS) and HEDIS (NCQA) ratings.

What is not so sunny is the number of people being shed at Centene. They’ve reported a cut of about 1,200 people as of Q2. It’s unknown how many have accepted the voluntary separation plan (VSP) that was announced in June and deadlined on 27 July. TTA 18 June  Centene reported that they forecast H2 severance costs between roughly $315 million and $365 million. Many of these severances will hit between early September and December, although on the Centene page on The Layoff, some employees accepting the VSP have dates into late 2027.

The VSP is in addition to prior layoffs that took place in H1. Centene reported H1 severance and third-party vendor costs of $61 million, with $47 million hitting in Q2. (This Editor knows a former colleague who was laid off after 16 years in June.) There are also rumors of further layoffs in H2 not part of the VSP as memberships shrink. FierceHealthcare, Becker’s, Centene earnings release

This Editor will reiterate that rarely does shrinking to profitability work except as an interim strategy to stem losses or look better to shareholders. Even with AI tools, operating plans without people on a ‘bare bones’ basis gets plans into quality ratings trouble, the nature of the health plan ‘beast’. That’s even true of commercial plans where employers and third-party brokers shoulder part of the load.

(Disclosure: this Editor was briefly a Centene employee after the company she worked for, WellCare Health Plans, was bought by Centene. She is a holder of Centene stock converted from her prior company. The above is strictly her opinion and protected speech, and should not be used as investment advice.)

DispatchHealth brightly announced what they termed a ‘refined market focus’ and a new website. This terminology means that Dispatch, which was previously known for providing home medical care, recovery services, and hospital-level care at home, now is stating that they are focusing on their B2B health system customers, “offering solutions that empower health systems and risk-bearing providers to build and scale their at-home programs, under their own brands”. Translation: they are now white labeling their CESIA platform and services to health systems to turnkey complex care at home via their workforce. Dispatch merged with Medically Home in June [TTA 21 Mar]. Investment to date has been $733 million through seven rounds (Series E) through 2022, which means that they’ve been paying their own way for some time. Dispatch release

WHOOP continues to “it” up, inking a new partnership in increasingly popular women’s digital health. The Natural Cycles app, which tracks fertility via the menstrual cycle and overnight skin temperature, will integrate with WHOOP’s biometric data collected from their wearable. This past spring, WHOOP definitely whooped it up with a $575 million Series G (for Giant) funding in April and claims 2.5 million members internationally. Natural Cycles has also enjoyed strong funding, including $55 million in a Series C round in 2024,  Mobihealthnews

And flying off way down under to New Zealand, Te Whatu Ora/Health New Zealand has enlisted UCLPartners for tech  modernization. Te Whatu Ora is New Zealand’s largest employer and provides universal health care to 5 million Kiwis. The partnership is for deployment of technology and AI through their digital and AI innovation program, HealthX. In April, they announced that they were working on five initiatives: AI scribes, remote patient monitoring (RPM) for heart failure patients, AI-enabled skin lesion assessments, AI-enabled diagnostics, and CoPilot for leadership and digital services. Health Informatics NZ  UCLPartners is a health innovations developer in care pathways and innovations and workflows. London-based, it works extensively with the National Health Service (NHS). The company worked with Te Whatu Ora on the HealthX AI scribe rollout for horizon scanning work. Healthcare IT News

The week that was in M&A, financings: Included Health buys Firefly, Candid’s $120M raise, DarioHealth’s $23M RDO, TytoCare’s $25M growth round + new execs, Aurenar’s $5.7M seed for ICU neuromodulation

July 30, 2026 | by | No Comments

Mr. Market woke up out of his summertime nap with some surprising end-of-July activity. What will August bring?

On the M&A front, virtual care mega Included Health is acquiring Firefly Health. This adds a virtual-first health plan and advanced primary care services to Included’s established telehealth and care navigation business. In February, Included quietly entered the health plan business with an Alternative Plan Design for employers that offers an alternative approach to health benefits. Firefly is classified as an Alternative Health Plan as Administrative Services Only (ASO), quoting a 15% savings in total cost of care and 90% member satisfaction. Interestingly, San Francisco-based Included’s acquisition cost of the Watertown, Massachusetts company is not disclosed nor are any management or service transitions. The deal is expected to close in Q3 2026 and is subject to regulatory review. Readers will recall that Included was formed from telehealth pioneers (2011-12) Grand Rounds and Doctor on Demand, with the small LGBTQ focused Included Health picked up in 2021, then rebranded with that name. It is solely focused on employers, health plans, public sector organizations, and unions.  Release, MedCityNews

Candid Health raised a $120 million Series D. Lead investor for this revenue cycle management (RCM) company is Sixth Street Growth, with participation from Oak HC/FT, 8VC, and Y Combinator. This follows a February $52.5 million Series C led by Oak HC/FT for a total raise of $220 million since 2020. TechCrunch Candid concentrates on provider financials, automating medical billing and health insurance claims to speed payments. Sixth Street release, MedCityNews

DarioHealth’s latest ‘rabbit out of hat’ is a $23.5 million RDO. As we’ve previously noted, DarioHealth started in MSK therapies and by 2023 branched out to clinically-based interventional care management solutions through apps and consults in cardiometabolic and behavioral health, including GLP-1 prescribing for weight management. DarioHealth’s latest is true to its form in creative financings as previously noted here and here. This bit of funding legerdemain is an RDO, a registered direct offering. From the SEC Form 8-K, DarioHealth is selling to institutional investors 2.4 million of their publicly traded stock at $6.80/share plus pre-funded warrants for over a million shares at $6.7999. This raises $23.5 million before deducting the offering expenses. The RDO  closed on 23 July. Mobihealthnews

Our old friends at TytoCare, notably quiet of late, added $25 million to their war chest and brought on some fresh horses. The growth/venture round brings their total financing to $231 million. The round for the remote physical exam tech company was led by Insight Partners, with participation from existing strategic investors OliveTree, HOOP, Qumra Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, OrbiMed and others. In the release, the lead repositions of the company as now a “AI-First Clinical Enablement Platform, Bringing FDA-Cleared AI-Powered Insights into Virtual Primary Care to Support Cardiopulmonary and Oncology Care” which doesn’t quite follow through on the website which focuses on their devices. Joining the company are Adam Pellegrini as CEO, replacing co-founder/CEO Dedi Gilad who moves to chairman. The other co-founder, Ofer Tzadik, remains with the operating company in NYC and Israel. Mr. Pellegrini is the former CEO of MSK/pulmonary management company Kaia Health, acquired last January by Sword Health for $285 million, and previously co-founder and former CEO of cancer support company Jasper Health out of Redesign Health. Also onboarding as COO is Greg Orr, former Walgreens VP Digital Health and COO of Jasper Health. One suspects some changes are in the offing. Mobihealthnews

Our last and most unusual company is Aurenar, which has developed a non-invasive neuromodulator for inflammation that stimulates the vagus nerve in the ear. The destined use is for ICUs to modulate the body’s secondary and toxic inflammatory responses to conditions such as subarachnoid hemorrhages and stroke. The V-Link vagus nerve stimulator gained FDA breakthrough device designation on 30 June. The oversubscribed seed round of $5.7 million was led by American Heart Association Ventures’ Go Red for Women Venture Fund and Solas BioVentures, with participation from BJC Health and Kaleida Capital. Initial validation has been through multiple pilot clinical trials at St. Louis-based Washington University, where Aurenar is located. The funding will be used for pivotal trials around stroke, including final device development, verification and validation testing, plus regulatory submissions to the FDA. Other uses will center on additional inflammatory conditions disproportionately affecting women. FierceHealthcare, MassDevice, Mobihealthnews

Chutes & Ladders, Oracle Edition: Surprise! Project Jupiter data center build overages, “social costs” multiply. Pentagon inks $7B, 10 year deal for software.

July 29, 2026 | by | No Comments

The Unexpected in the Terra Incognita of data centers whip up The Perfect Pricey Storm for Oracle. Oracle knows how to build software, not huge data center buildings. Buildings have messy things like power supply, coolant, and permitting at the local and state levels. There is also The Unexpected that any experienced builder will factor in even when unknown, whether it’s overruns for wiring, racks, chips, out of spec cement, etc., that delay Opening Revenue Day. The Unexpected increasingly includes what is termed “social costs” that start around genuine concerns such as power draw, transmission lines, water usage, disruptions, even heat foci (a Cornell Tech study found a 10 degree rise on current data centers). Many local “interests” use these tentpoles to support the classic tactics of dissuade, delay, and (ramping up) the difficulty. When the pockets like Oracle’s aren’t deep and labeled ‘debt’, this hurts.

In the New Mexico west bordering Texas, where it’s underpopulated and land is cheap, Oracle’s 1,400-acre, 2+ gigawatt Project Jupiter super data center build for OpenAI is hitting roadblocks, primarily around power. The original plan to power it with gas from its own natural gas plants hit environmental potholes. Then Oracle switched to natural gas fuel cells from Bloom Energy. They use little water, pollute less and are reasonable in carbon emissions. But the cost? $8 billion, a few billion more than the gas plants. They also have other sticky requirements; to not degrade, the cells must continuously run, which scuppers Oracle’s plan to switch off to far cheaper solar on sunny days. TTA 7 May

New Mexico and to a lesser degree west Texas have rising environmental concerns. New Mexico in particular is generally hostile to big business and fossil fuels. The natural gas pipeline needed to supply the cells that runs through New Mexico is on its second rejection by the New Mexico Environment Department. The next hearing isn’t till 19 October. The cherry on this cake? The state Attorney General is investigating complaints from local residents that their names were used fraudulently in support of said fuel cells. The greenhouse gas emissions are also claimed by environmental groups to be equivalent to New Mexico’s two largest cities, a claim that evades logic for Albuquerque alone. These groups now are pushing for a data center moratorium, a growing national cause that ignores that the data center is partly built, the water being used is non-potable from outside the area, and that the builder, Oracle, is working hard to respond to critics in the local areas by plowing money into local concerns.

Oracle isn’t the only one, but the one with the least resources. Oracle, Microsoft and OpenAI projects in Wisconsin are having costly difficulties with power authorities on building transmission lines and cost sharing. This may add another overrun of $100 million to Oracle/OpenAI’s Port Washington, Wisconsin data center. Oracle’s low credit rating also hurts them, where Wisconsin’s state power regulator is requiring financial guarantees in cash or lines of credit in case the project fails. This will cost Oracle $100 million–annually. In Texas, Big AI such as Meta and Google are having more success in partnering with local power utilities in building permanent infrastructure and renewable sourcing, including closed water systems to prevent toxic wastewater runoff into land and local water systems.

So why is Oracle making a chancy bet at the Data Center Infrastructure Landlord Table? Concluding from The Information: “even though the cost to build and power a gigawatt of AI is bordering on at least $60 billion, Nvidia servers powered by its Grace Blackwell chips, renting out at $3.50 an hour, could generate around $12 billion to $13 billion a year, including operating costs.” Your Editor reads this simply as a 4-5 year payback. However, that statement rests on a mountain of assumptions–that hourly rental costs remain high, that build costs remain somewhat stable or lower, that land and construction stay relatively cost static, that the small coterie of AI customers keep paying their bills, and that local groups do not succeed, as they seem to be doing, in increasing costs, demanding moratoria, and delaying online dates.

There are many reasons why Oracle’s bonds are hovering just above ‘junk’, as Mr. Market keeps reminding us. Computing UK. Add to that list that data center cost assumptions have gone spectacularly sideways and the expectations within Oracle didn’t account for (drum roll) The Unexpected.

Oracle did have some very good news last week from the Federal Government for its first Ladder in awhile. The Department of War (a/k/a Department of Defense) is contracting with Oracle for software in a deal that could be worth up to $7 billion over ten years. The exact contract has a base value of $3.31 billion for the first five years of the agreement and a total value of $6.99 billion if the additional option years are exercised.

The DoW Enterprise Software Initiative (ESI) puts contracting into a centralized framework to expedite procurement, versus the typical individual procurement process by separate agencies. The DoW ESI covers procurement for intelligence agencies and the Coast Guard. According to CNBC, “The contract covers the use of Oracle software in on-premises data centers for branches of the military, the U.S. intelligence community and the Coast Guard, according to a statement. The Central Intelligence Agency was Oracle’s first customer. A five-year base period for the contract includes perpetual and subscription-based software licenses, maintenance and consulting, according to one description.” DoW in its own release expects savings of $441 million when compared to the cost of buying Oracle products separately. (And come on, fellow writers. It’s the Department of War at the top of the release, not the Department of Defense, whatever arguments including historical you may have about it.) Oracle release, Federal News Network

Catching up to Masimo’s ‘unfinished’ business: Danaher completes $9.9B acquisition of Masimo. $634 million damages from Apple upheld, but Kiani lawsuits continue

July 29, 2026 | by | No Comments

Danaher closing the Masimo acquisition for a eyewatering $9.9 billion in early June definitely flew under this Editor’s  radar. Let’s catch up. As your Editor “Alibi Ike’s” on this (blame it on an airshow, not an injury!), beyond its $9.9 billion “Hollywood Ending” deal in February, here’s the ‘need to know’ about the medtech giant’s final deal for Masimo and the latter’s future.

  • The completion was 10 June, when Masimo stock was delisted at a final price of $179.95 (MASI, Nasdaq). The closing beat the expectation of H2 2026 by a month.
  • The Danaher offer was $180/share (DHR, NYSE). When the offer was made, Masimo stock was trading around $130. This made for a very good deal for long-suffering Masimo shareholders and Politan Capital, which forced out owner/founder/CEO Joe Kiani in a blistering September 2024 proxy fight. Masimo shareholders approved it in May.
  • Masimo will operate as a brand and division under Danaher Diagnostics, led by EVP Diagnostics Julie Sawyer Montgomery with Masimo CEO Katie Szyman continuing as CEO of the division.

Danaher updated its full-year 2026 guidance on 21 July with its Q2 earnings release. “For full year 2026, the Company expects non-GAAP core revenue will increase in the 3.0% to 4.0% range year-over-year. The Company is also increasing its full year adjusted diluted net earnings per common share guidance to a range of $8.45 to $8.60 versus previous guidance of $8.35 to $8.55. to incorporate Masimo’s expected contribution.” The $150 billion market cap Danaher is likely to pursue other acquisitions as well.

Competitively, it positions Danaher against industry giant Medtronic in patient monitoring, specifically in pulse oximetry and related technology. Masimo’s pulse oximetry and patient monitoring devices overlap somewhat with but extend Danaher’s existing Radiometer products in blood gas analysis and testing. Denmark-based Radiometer is stronger in European markets while Masimo is primarily US/Canada based. There is also diagnostic segment overlap with Beckman Coulter Diagnostics. It also expands Danaher’s offerings in sensor-based technologies and overall to integrated delivery networks, or IDNs. Other Danaher products within Diagnostics are Leica Biosystems and Cepheid. Given Danaher’s extensive and existing footprint in diagnostics and a legitimate fit, Masimo may get some long-overdue capital development and real management attention.

Courtesy of Editor Ted Green at Strata-Gee, in closing out the Masimo/Sound United file at his consumer electronics/AV custom integrations business newsletter here, this is how Danaher’s current products and Masimo’s complement each other in diagnostic market segments.

One caution for Masimo’s independent operation is that Danaher will now start executing on $125 million of annual cost synergies and more than $50 million of annual sales synergies by the fifth full year after the deal closure. “Cost synergies” usually mean shared corporate infrastructure, supply chain efficiencies, and streamlined back-office operations, although Danaher to this point has not filed any WARN notices for Masimo in California or Federally. Another caution is the meshing of Masimo’s corporate operations and ‘culture’ with the Danaher Business System methodology, as Masimo’s recent history has resembled a roller coaster ride at an amusement park with pieces coming off and the occasional passenger doing an aerial. Danaher closing release, MedTech Dive, Yahoo Finance

What’s left in LitigationLand?

  • The Apple Watch litigation ended with a Federal win for Masimo. It won the Federal patent infringement case in November and was awarded $634 million in damages. A Federal appeals court rejected Apple’s request for a new trial last week. Orange County Business Journal, paywalled. 9 to 5 Mac
  • Contrary to this, in April the International Trade Court (ITC) refused to reinstate the import ban on the redesigned Apple Watches imposed in December 2023. Reuters Whether Danaher will continue to pursue this isn’t known, but given the win versus Apple and the Danaher emphasis on diagnostics, the ITC import ban on a consumer product goes far down the list in importance.
  • The Kiani lawsuits over his separation are proceeding in Orange County (California) Superior Court. These are over compensation owed to him when Kiani was ousted as CEO. His argument is that the employment contract is ambiguous about the timing of payments and that the unpaid compensation qualifies as wages. Judge Thomas Lo ruled last month that the suits could continue. The stakes are not small. The contract contained a $450 million severance payout. Kiani is seeking an added $100 million in damages from the company’s former six board directors affiliated with activist investor Politan Capital Management. Kiani is represented by Marshall Camp of Hueston Hennigan LLP. OCBJ In March, Judge Lo disqualified Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP from representing the six board members because the firm had originally defended Kiani’s employment agreement and violated ethics around confidentiality and loyalty. Daily Journal-Cal Lawyer 
  • There are other lawsuits active in Delaware and Washington, DC.

And in other June news, Masimo gained FDA 510(k) clearance for an opioid-induced respiratory depression detection capability integrated into the Radius VSM wearable continuous patient monitor. It uses Masimo’s smartSET pulse oximetry sensor platform to identify early signs of respiratory compromise in hospital patients receiving opioid therapy. Release 

One more TTA Hat Tip© to Ted Green of Strata-Gee for being an excellent inside source on Masimo, the agita around the (sold) Sound United, and the culminating proxy fight between Politan Capital and Joe Kiani. Here’s his history of Masimo’s “wild and crazy ride”.  He now returns to being THE newsletter for professionals in the consumer electronics/AV integrations business!

This week’s Must Read: the dangerous financing of AI data center buildouts–and how they resemble the 2020 health tech boom

July 23, 2026 | by | No Comments

For this week’s Must Read–now that we are past World Cup and mostly past America250–here’s another bracing essay from Ed Zitron’s Where’s Your Ed At in The Subprime Data Center Crisis. Get a couple of cuppas and some time–it’s dense.

Mr. Zitron compares how data centers are financed today to the pre-2008 boom in collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) that insured mortgage bonds. CDOs, by raising money around these bonds near-endlessly, subsidized an artificial boom in housing demand stimulated by  historically low interest rates. Those of us around (nearly all our Readers) know how badly that wound up in 2008, with the circular grift crash taking down Lehman Brothers and other financial institutions and putting us into a four-year recession. It also made financing nearly unavailable for health tech companies just getting out of their Series A or B.

CDOs aren’t financing data centers, but Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) are. The SPV raises debt financing for a data center and sells it to institutional investors, asset managers or banks. The SPV makes the payments to the contractors and suppliers such as Nvidia for chips. How they pay interest on the debt is via a special account. Finally, when the data center starts to generate revenue, the SPV uses those funds to first pay for the operating expenses of the data center, then creditors (based on their seniority in the debt), then whatever is left goes to the holding company, such as CoreWeave. It reveals how companies like Meta, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are financing their data center builds. (It does appear on this Editor’s reading that Oracle, by directly taking on debt, is taking a different route.)

It’s a complicated scenario. The analogy he draws is that the financing for data centers is equivalent to the subprime mortgages of 2008. It’s  compounded by the apparent fact that capacity being built in the pipeline far outstrips demand by a factor of 15, based on an industry report cited by Mr. Zitron. In addition, the demand is not from profitable companies. He cites that “70% to 90% of that demand is from Anthropic and OpenAI’s unprofitable services.”

It also assumes three factors govern AI expansion in a grab for world savings looking for safe bets:

  1. AI data center demand is infinite and all compute will be used.
  2. AI data centers all have “locked-in customer demand.”
  3. That these are “safe” investments, backed by the richest companies in the world.

Exactly what demand is out there? Companies and countries are guessing and making huge financial bets. Mr. Zitron basically calls it an AI bubble inflated by AI companies and abetted by the media because no one is accurately measuring the demand versus capacity.

It’s a scenario that screams ‘red flags’ and ‘Danger, Will Robinson’.

Read, you decide. 

But the scenario Mr. Zitron outlined raised the goose pimples on this Editor’s neck.

Those of us in healthcare have been to this rodeo before. And the bronco riders were all taken to the ER. Or the morgue.

If the term SPV sounds a little familiar to Readers, to this Editor, the term and the structure strongly resemble Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs) which for a time in 2020-2022 were the It Girl of getting around the typical IPO process for many a health tech company, such as Babylon Health. Admittedly, SPACs and SPVs work differently. SPACs raised money from investors, IPO’d themselves to raise more money, and then in an ‘blank check’ transaction, sometimes with additional investment, acquired a private company, thus taking it public. All in 3-6 months! Simple, right? None of the muss and fuss, due diligence, or SEC scrutiny of an IPO. And as a device, it’s still being used.

Yet look at the outcome in healthcare. Nearly all of the healthcare SPACs ‘cracked’ after 2023 with stock values cratering within months or a year, Hims being one of the very few exceptions and maybe the only one. 30% went bankrupt. 26% were acquired well below their IPO price. And the remainder survive, some having flirted with the Devil of Demise, all below their IPO and valuation. For a tidy summary of the rolling SPAC collapse, read TTA 10 April 2025 and 26 June 2024. 

But what CDOs, the current AI bubble, and the 2020-2022 health tech/telehealth bubble have in common is a complicated way of financing designed to skirt regulations and proper market analysis, coupled with a healthy dose of illusions. Each bubble is based on a set of assumptions that envisioned endless geometric growth and future profitability, coupled with a “desire to believe” that negated logic and the entry of outright fraud. In 2020, we had a real lack of accurately gauging demand for health tech and telehealth services, especially in direct-to-consumer and telementalhealth services. The healthcare SPAC bubble also misread the viability of companies and their business models, many of which had more in the realm of hopes and founder dreams than validity in the marketplace. SPACs evaded scrutiny and created great headlines for this Editor. It was endless. Apprehensions were brushed away. It was also unsettling to this Editor who had a very small role in a long-ago iteration of a financing and business boom/bust–airline deregulation–at two airlines.

When the 2023 crash came, wiping out billions in investment, it was pretty much confined to healthcare and health tech. It’s still being worked through in the consolidation of health tech (not all bad and to be expected), in bankruptcy court (23andMe), and the outright frauds in Federal courts (Done Global). To quote myself from June 2024: The investment scene in health tech and AI strongly resembles the Wild West days of airlines post-deregulation 30 years ago. Investor money in, now fleeing for the exits, whether the bankruptcy court or passing the hot potato to others with money.

AI, of course, dwarfs the SPAC-driven health tech boom by a 1000X factor. And has the capacity to take down a world economy.

Chutes & Ladders: Data breach clouts Clover, OpenAI agent escapes sandbox to attack Hugging Face, Precision’s surface BCI achieves thought control, Tempus AI $1.5B Personalis buy, Karoo Health’s $16.2M Series A

July 23, 2026 | by | No Comments

In the Chutes department, it’s an insurer breach and an AI model that broke dramatically out of its sandbox.

Clover Health reported that three employee accounts were breached. The breaches were implemented through a ‘classic’ social engineering scheme such as phishing–the kind that this Editor was trained on years ago when she worked in marketing for a unit of a well-known health insurer. This sounds minor except that the three accounts were of “non-managerial employees with access to member visit-scheduling and broker-facing sales functions.” However, these employees also had access to some personally identifiable information (PII) and protected health information (PHI) of members. Apparently, there was outside, non-authorized activity because Clover’s SEC Form 8-K filing reported that it was “contained and terminated” but Clover is still investigating the extent of the breach and must complete required reporting and member notifications. The employees did not have access to claims or corporate financial systems. Clover Health, considered a pioneering ‘insurtech’, has remained relatively small, with 156,000 Medicare Advantage PPO members in Georgia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Texas. Healthcare Dive

Agentic AI Gone Wild–the breakout of its sandbox of an advanced OpenAI agentic AI system into Hugging Face’s open-source AI model repository platform. OpenAI admitted in a blog post published yesterday (21 July) that the attack originated during internal testing of its own AI models. In what it called an “unprecedented cyber incident”, their own investigation revealed that “we now know that this particular incident was driven by a combination of OpenAI models — including GPT‑5.6 Sol and an even more capable pre-release model, all with reduced cyber refusals for evaluation purposes — while being internally tested on a benchmark⁠ of cyber capabilities.” Even though the testing was run in a ‘highly isolated environment’, OpenAI admits that the models found a way to gain internet access and attacked Hugging Face’s servers. Hugging Face detected and stopped the activity while OpenAI claims it found the activity internally. What’s scary is that Anthropic (Claude Mythos) and OpenAI now have had ‘out of the sandbox’ incidents in their frontier AI development worlds. As OpenAI put it, “The incident also makes clear that advanced models can discover and exploit novel attack paths in real-world systems without source-code access. It highlights that advanced cyber capabilities must be developed alongside stronger safeguards and defensive tools.” Hugging Face reportedly had to use GLM 5.2, an open-weight model developed by Chinese firm Z.ai, to investigate it because US AI models had restricting guardrails that blocked investigation. Computing 21 July, 22 July

And there are a few Ladders this quiet week.

Precision Neuroscience has successfully implanted its brain-surface brain-computer interface (BCI) into able-bodied test subjects and achieved successful thought-controlled cursor control. Unlike Neuralink, Precision’s implants rest on the surface of the brain, not in the brain. Neuralink’s subjects are also are mobility-impaired [TTA 10 July]; Precision’s patients have full movement but had neurosurgical procedures for a variety of reasons. By enrolling in the Precision research study, the patients were able to move solely by thought cursors to navigate games like Pong and Mario Cart on tablets and smartphones while in recovery. The 510(k) investigational devices were removed in a five-minute procedure before the patient went home. This is a real advance for a less-invasive BCI. Mobihealthnews, video (YouTube)

Tempus AI has agreed to acquire Personalis for $1.5 billion. Both are public companies listed on Nasdaq. Tempus AI is a precision medicine company using AI to analyze data for personalized care and therapeutics. Personalis is a cancer genomics company that uses DNA minimal residual disease (MRD) testing to detect cancer recurrence. The offer to Personalis shareholders is for $16.25 per share of common stock which was a 6% premium to last Friday’s closing price; it closed today (22 July) at $12.47.  The deal is for Tempus shares with the option for cash. Personalis had Q2 preliminary revenue of $22.4 million. The transaction is expected to close in late 2026 or early 2027. Mobihealthnews, Tempus release

We close with a fairly hefty (for these days) $16.2 million Series A for cardiovascular tech company Karoo Health. The oversubscribed raise for the Albuquerque, New Mexico company was led by 7wire Ventures and Allumia Ventures, with participation from First Trust Capital Partners, LLC, SpringRock Ventures, Hyde Park Angels (HPA), and other marquee investors. Karoo combines on-site and virtual care teams with their proprietary technology in cardiac care for cardiology practices and health systems in a value-based care model that connects, patients, providers, and payers. The technology platform is designed for earlier detection, improved coordination, and data-driven care delivery. Karoo release, FierceHealthcare

News roundup: Withings Medical Group service launches, MPs urge cancellation of NHS/Palantir FDP contract, IKS closes TruBridge buy for $557M, ATA comments on prelim CMS PFS for telehealth, Philips’ AI-powered…toothbrush

July 16, 2026 | by

Withings USA expands monitoring into clinical care services. Withings’ reach from devices into clinical care is definitely something unusual, as it’s rare that a device developer gets into the messy care space, much less with a ten-year commitment. Here Withings, with the Withings Medical Group, is entering care for Original Medicare beneficiaries via CMS’s new ACCESS Model (Advancing Chronic Care with Effective, Scalable Solutions). ACCESS is a ten-year CMS Innovation Center model that pays providers on chronic disease management outcomes. It launched on 5 July.

Withings Medical Group will concentrate on cardiovascular, kidney, and metabolic health (CKM), beginning with hypertension, diabetes, and obesity. The medical group’s care team will work with the beneficiary’s primary care providers to build an individualized care plan for each member. The Withings Medical Group teams can also prescribe and adjust medications and support the beneficiary on lifestyle changes.

From the release: “This focused scope reflects a deliberate, clinically rigorous approach to entering care, and it marks only the beginning of a broader ambition for how Withings supports health over the long term. It also aligns with the ACCESS Model’s ten-year, phased approach to testing whether outcome-aligned, technology-supported care can improve outcomes for Medicare beneficiaries nationwide.”

In the UK, two Commons committees have urged the Health Innovation Minister to cancel the contract for the NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP).  The developer, Palantir, has come under fire in both the UK and US on its ties to defense and security agencies in those countries and with Israel. Palantir contracted with NHS England starting in 2023. The Commons committees objecting to Palantir to Health Innovation Minister Preet Kaur Gill are the Health and Social Care Committee and the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee. They are urging using a contractual break in February 2027 to term the contract, seek another contractor, or develop one in the UK. The concerned Members cross parties and are joined by the trade unions and 100 NHS data and technology specialists, who have separately objected to the FDP in a letter to Health Secretary James Murray.

The FDP is a key part of NHS digital transformation to facilitate storage and analysis of health datasets to improve planning, patient care and hospital operations. But the concerns apparently are more political, targeting Palantir and alleging that its defense and security contracts will discourage patients from allowing their medical information to be used. If we in the US shared similar concerns, Microsoft, Meta, AWS, and Oracle wouldn’t have a single healthcare contract. Computing UK

IKS Health wrapped up its TruBridge buy last Thursday for $557 million. The acquisition, announced last April, closed a quarter earlier than expected. IKS is a healthcare software company for administration and documentation, with TruBridge an EHR and revenue cycle management (RCM) provider to primarily rural hospitals. The combined company now has a US customer base of 150,000 clinicians and 2,000 healthcare organizations. IKS Health is traded in India with US operations in Dallas. The TruBridge acquisition is their third this year, financed with $600 million over five years in debt sourced from Citibank, JPMorgan Chase and Deutsche Bank. TruBridge shareholders received $26.25 in cash per share as offered in April. The release is singularly unrevealing on whether TruBridge will continue as a separate product line, nor on any operational/management continuity. It is another example of consolidation and ‘line extension’ between similar companies. MedCityNews

If it’s midyear, it’s time for a preliminary CMS Physician Fee Schedule draft. ATA ACTION has an early review of its telehealth and technology changes proposed by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) that affect physicians serving Medicare beneficiaries. From the release (PDF):

  • Telehealth: In addition to changes to extend existing telehealth flexibilities, CMS proposes adding five codes to the Medicare Telehealth List, clarifying critical care consultation code descriptors, creating two new telehealth modifiers, and allowing physicians to bill for telehealth services involving residents when either the teaching physician or resident is in the room with the beneficiary.
  • Remote Patient Monitoring: CMS proposes tightening guardrails and recalculating payment for remote patient monitoring (RPM) and remote treatment monitoring (RTM) services. Key changes include restricting RTM billing to patients with an established relationship with the billing practitioner, requiring a separately reportable initiating visit tied to the start of monitoring services, prohibiting use of third-party remote monitoring companies, lowering monitoring valuations, and potentially consolidating current CPT codes into four new G-codes (two RPM, two RTM) covering initial setup and monthly monitoring/management.
  • Technology-Enabled Care: CMS is seeking broad feedback on modernizing Medicare reimbursement for technology-enabled care, with particular interest in primary care, care management, capitated payment models, and AI.
  • New–Software as a Medical Service (SaMS): Aligning with the OPPS proposed rule, CMS introduces a new category – Software as a Medical Service – defined as algorithm-based clinical decision-support software with clinical or diagnostic functionality (excluding remote monitoring and prescription digital therapeutics). SaMS providing secondary analysis of lab data would shift from the Clinical Laboratory Fee Schedule to the Physician Fee Schedule.
  • Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) Improvement Activities: CMS proposes two new technology-focused improvement activities: clinician use of AI to improve patient care, and use of interoperable clinical decision support.

Whether these survive to the Final PFS is dependent on comments, Congress, and budgets.

And now we have AI for our electronic toothbrush. Philips goes AI in its latest model, the Philips Sonicare DiamondClean 9900 Prestige. It uses built-in, on-device AI and spatially aware guidance to track brushing. There’s a 12-segment “Mouth Map” on the handle, with a light ring that gives real-time visual feedback on your coverage, pressure, and scrubbing habits. For those of us who like to press down, the SenseIQ sensor automatically adjusts intensity so we aren’t so bad. It has eight modes and three intensities, a bit more than their top-of-the-line existing Sonicares. And it comes in five premium colors! Well, well…as a faithful user of my Philips Sonicare toothbrush since a rather extensive dental  ‘remodeling’ a few years ago, and guilty of sometimes being a bit sketchy about my completeness, I am somewhat dismayed that to be au courant, I will need to acquire this new model…but it won’t be available till this fall in the US and Europe. Release, Mobihealthnews

A gloomy view on Oracle going forward: debt, cash flow, and dependence on OpenAI

July 16, 2026 | by

Oracle is beginning to turn into one of those cautionary case studies. And that’s not good news for healthcare. From their faltering EHR to the hacking of their software, Oracle’s news hasn’t been cheerful. While still profitable in the quarterly reports, the debt load and its obligations in their chosen wrenching changeover from a software developer/seller to an AI infrastructure landlord have been followed by speculation. The latest speculation from June is selling their EHR business [TTA 2 June]–if they can find a buyer. The EHR is a distant second to Epic in every metric [TTA 27 May] and Oracle has an immense obligation to the Federal Government for both the Military Health System (MHS) and VA’s EHR Modernization that won’t complete projected rollout until 2031.

A recent analysis published in Seeking Alpha (may require free account, PDF here) will give one further pause.

The debt load is a crusher. There’s anywhere from $72 to $100 billion in debt on Oracle’s books, and that preceded the PIMCO financing of $16.3 billion that included equity. Their credit rating from major raters is one step above junk: BBB-negative from S&P Global Ratings and Moody’s Baa2 Negative outlook. [TTA 7 May] Oracle has already projected it needs more: an additional $40 billion in fiscal 2027 through a mix of debt and equity.

Net debt is soaring. Oracle ended FY 2026 with net debt of $97.6 billion. This represents a ~20% increase versus the $81.4 billion of FY 2025. Looking forward, this analyst is projecting that the net debt by end of FY 2027 will be in the range of ~$120 billion.

There’s another little problem called cash flow. Years of positive free cash flow, even during the pandemic recession, turned sour in their FY 26 to a negative $23.7 billion. The analysis states that Oracle is now heavily dependent on external cash–debt–to finance its AI infrastructure building. S&P also noted that capital expenditure has been geometrically increasing: $6.9 billion (2024), $21.1 billion (2025) and $55.7 billion (2026). The guidance for fiscal 2027? Between $90 and $95 billion. That is over a 70% increase. Cash flow clearly can’t pay down the debt they already have, a fact that banks factored in to cut off the lending spigot.

Its performance obligations are also crushing. $553 billion has been reported for OpenAI alone [TTA 7 May].  This article reports remaining performance obligations of $638 billion, about half of which is for OpenAI. Despite the disparity in numbers (perhaps completed obligations?), in this analyst’s view, something happens to OpenAI–for instance, a pullback in the confidence of markets to finance their aggressive expansion (and, this Editor would add, an IPO)–Oracle would be hit hard. To paraphrase an overworked analogy, if OpenAI stumbles and sprains its ankle, Oracle would break both legs.

But..but…isn’t demand supposed to be increasing, infinitely?  Increased demand is critical to continued financing. Yet there are leading indicators that demand is leveling off. Corporations are increasingly limiting internal use of AI by employees to tamp down soaring token usage costs and control budgets. These companies have also found that AI tools often do not work as well in replacing humans as they were cracked up to be. And now seemingly every software offering is ‘powered by AI’. The newness is wearing off.

The chip cycle is speeding up–not good news for AI infrastructure builders.  Nvidia is now in full production of its Vera Rubin chip, which is dramatically faster than the previous generation Blackwell chip. Our March reporting picked up that Oracle had forward commitments with Nvidia to use the older Blackwell chip for the OpenAI data centers, and OpenAI wasn’t happy about that. It’s not a simple matter of going to Nvidia and returning old chips and getting new ones–that isn’t done. Vera Rubin is also twice as expensive on a per-rack basis than Blackwell–$7.8 million versus $4 million. Add to this the long taffy pull of building (online is 12-18 months minimum), power, water, and labor costs…it adds up, as any builder will tell you.

Given the above factors, it shouldn’t be any surprise that Oracle stock is down 30% since last December and continues to decline.

Extra: The article also contains a short history of financial cycles. There are parallels drawn comparing the AI boom we are in to similar technology-driven boom and bust cycles, dating back to the building of canals in the 1700s, railways in the 1800s, and electrification in the early 1900s.  

Editor’s note: Any analysis of Oracle’s financial health is based on this article, previous articles, multiple sources, and Oracle’s disclosures. Our interest is primarily in the well-being of Oracle Health and the markets it serves. We do not engage in stock picking and none of the above should be construed as financial advice.

News roundup: 23andMe settles with data breach victims for $46.75M, Neuralink implants #26 & first Canadian ALS patient, Resmed selling MatrixCare EHR for $490M, Teladoc now preferred telehealth provider for NBA players

July 10, 2026 | by

Bankrupt 23andMe finally settles with 2023 data breach victims. The settlement of $46.75 million was approved by the US Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Missouri. It will be paid first to Kroll Restructuring within five business days from Tuesday 7 July. It will then be distributed among those who filed with Kroll as affected by the breach of their genetic and personal information. The breach occurred between 1 May and 1 October 2023. 

The benefits to those affected and filing a claim are:

  • Up to $10,000 for Extraordinary Claims;
  • Up to $165 for Health Information Claims;
  • An estimated $100 for Statutory Cash Claims; and
  • 5 years of Privacy & Medical Shield + Genetic Monitoring

This is a second round settlement. The first settlement dates back to before the bankruptcy [TTA 17 Sept 2024] and was for $30 million. 23andMe filed for bankruptcy on 24 March 2025 after multiple buyout offers by Anne Wojcicki and others. Wojcicki eventually bought the company through her TTAM Research Institute in July 2025, then converted the holding company name to Chrome Holding Co. and ChromeCo, Inc. d/b/a 23andMe.

What exactly Wojcicki intends to do with what’s left of 23andMe after emerging from bankruptcy is anyone’s guess.

The estimated number of people affected by the breach was 6.9 million. $14.29 million has already been distributed, possibly through the earlier settlement agreement. At the time, 23andMe said that $25 million was covered by their cyber insurance. Kroll authorized website, BBC News, Fox 5 Washington

The Neuralink brain computer interface (BCI) implant hits #26 in clinical trial, has first Canadian ALS patient. Lee Marten is a sergeant with the Vancouver police department who has had ALS since 2022. His mobility is limited to his hands operating his electric wheelchair. With the Neuralink N1 BCI implant, he can move a computer cursor by thought. Sgt. Marten is part of a clinical trial at University Health Network’s (UHN) Toronto Western Hospital. He is the 26th patient in a series of US and Canadian clinical trials among spinal injury quadriplegic and the first Canadian with ALS.  Mobihealthnews, CBC News

Resmed sells its MatrixCare software business for $490 million in cash. The buyer is private equity firm Frazier Healthcare Partners. Going forward, ResMed will use the cash to expand and concentrate on its core sleep health, respiratory, and connected home-based healthcare. The press release anticipates the closing as Q1 2027. (Resmed’s FY closes in September so this is end of 2026.) There is no information in the release on management or headquarters transitions. The Reuters report ​said that “transition ⁠services agreements with Frazier are expected to help ensure continuity across systems and operations and ​largely offset stranded costs in the first year ​after closing”.

The haircut was substantial. Resmed purchased MatrixCare in 2019 for $750 million for its EHR and software products to expand into a specialized area of post-acute care–an extremely tough one. They currently serve 15,000 providers across ​skilled nursing, senior living, long-term care, home health and hospice ​markets under the MatrixCare, Healthcare First, and Citus brands. However, its growth lagged company averages, according to KeyBanc Capital Markets’ note to investors. The sale at a clear loss has all signs of ‘throwing in the towel’ on a difficult to market and lower margin sector.

ResMed is retaining Brightree in the US and MEDIFOX DAN in Germany. Brightree provides business management and clinical solutions for post-acute care providers. MEDIFOX DAN provides management software for the German healthcare and social care sectors. Their individual value and profitability is unknown.

MatrixCare in the preliminary filing generated about $220 million in revenue and about $55 million in adjusted operating ‌profit ⁠in fiscal year 2026. Healthcare Dive

And to wind up on a lighter marketing note, Teladoc is now the preferred telehealth provider of the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA). The NBPA is the union for the professional players in the National Basketball Association (NBA). Teladoc will provide virtual care services for active and retired NBA players and their families. They will have access to Teladoc’s multidisciplinary virtual services, including primary care, 24/7 urgent care and preventive health screenings. NBPA and Teladoc Health will also host a preventive health screening for NBPA members at Summer League in Las Vegas. NBPA release, Mobihealthnews

Chutes & Ladders: Done Global principals sentenced on Adderall fraud, Oracle E-Biz Suite hacked, OpenAI’s 5% offer to US government, Meta considers cloud AI, Pearl’s $110M raise

July 9, 2026 | by

One big years-long chute for Done Global’s Ruthia He and David Brody. The convicted former founder/CEO and clinical president were sentenced to substantial Federal prison terms this past Tuesday. Ms. He will be facing six years in prison, followed by three years of supervised release, and a fine of $1 million. Dr. Brody was sentenced to two years imprisonment, three years of supervised release, and a fine of $1 million. In addition, there will be restitution to fraud victims.

To be announced at a later date: when sentences will start and where they will be served, based on recommendations from the Bureau of Prisons.

While Done Global is effectively ‘done’, the company also does business under the name Mindful Health.

The points of the (at least) $100 million fraud were based on the illegal telehealth prescription of Adderall and other Schedule II stimulants such as Vyvance. Medications on Schedule II have accepted medical uses but carry high potential for abuse and psychological or physical dependence and thus are controlled:

  • A scheme that used the Done Global technology platform, compensation structure, and clinical protocols to unlawfully distribute over 37 million pills of Adderall, defraud insurers of over $12 million, and obstruct the federal investigation that followed.
  • The defendant (He) spent over $40 million on social media advertisements to deceive Americans into believing they had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), falsely diagnosing patients with ADHD, and distributing Adderall, including to patients who the company was warned were suffering from Adderall psychosis, bipolar, depression, anxiety, and other mental health conditions that were worsened by stimulant prescriptions. 
  • These were designed to boost the Done Global valuation to above $1 billion.

From the detailed Department of Justice press release: “The defendants refused to hire or fired Done clinicians who did not participate in the conspiracy, while paying up to $60,000 per month to clinicians who signed Adderall prescriptions every 30 seconds. The defendants also used an “auto-refill” platform technology feature after an initial diagnosis to minimize follow-up appointments, where prescribers signed prescriptions for Adderall based on an automatically generated message that a patient desired a refill. Because of these policies, some patients went years without seeing clinicians, who continually authorized refills even through involuntary psychiatric holds or after the patients had died.”

Dr. Brody alone personally wrote prescriptions for 394,324 Schedule II stimulant pills prescribed to 6,559 Done members. He never evaluated them nor reviewed a single patient record. Part of the case was Done’s record of misdiagnosis, over-prescribing, and patient death.

Additional charges against Ms. He included diversion of company assets and operations abroad. As indictments neared in 2023/2024, they both deleted records, instructed employees to delete  incriminatory documents and messages from the company servers, and transferred communications to platforms such as WhatsApp and Signal using disappearing message settings to conceal sensitive information.

After completion of her sentence, it is likely that Ms. He will be deported to her home country of China. She attempted to flee to Hong Kong in February 2023 and was forced to surrender her passport. Despite this, she made a second attempt after obtaining Chinese travel documents, then was arrested and detained before trial as a flight risk. Two other factors were that she transferred $4.6 million in ad-related revenue to China and set up a shell company there. 

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), HHS-Office of Inspector General, IRS Criminal Investigations, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicare Services (CMS) investigated as violations included financial diversion, record falsification, drug prescribing and Medicare/Medicaid fraud. The main DOJ units involved were the National Fraud Enforcement Division and the Health Care Fraud Unit.

The case was heard in the Federal Northern District of California by Judge Charles Breyer. Dr. Brody plans to appeal and significantly apologized for his actions. KQED and Behavioral Health Business.

Background on the indictment and conviction, TTA 24 January and prior as noted in the article. There is no additional information to date on the grand jury charges from December 2025 of the Done and Mindful companies. 

Editor’s POV: Done wasn’t the first–the far larger Cerebral was in 2022. While it is still in business, Cerebral has spent much of its time and fisc in litigation and settlements. Neither will be the last.  DOJ and Federal agencies are cracking down hard on waste, fraud, and abuse in healthcare; major targets of DOJ/HHS/DEA scrutiny are telementalhealth and substance use disorder (SUD) management, including prescribing and payments. More to come.

Another chute for Oracle, leading to the Hacking trap door. The vulnerability is within Oracle’s E-Business Suite (EBS) and affects the file transmission component of Oracle Payments payments. The flaw has been tracked as CVE-2026-46817 and carries a severity rating of 9.8 out of 10. 900 systems may be exposed, though Oracle flagged it in their May patch updates. The US National Vulnerability Database states that the vulnerability can be exploited remotely over HTTP without authentication. Oracle software seems to be a favorite target of hackers. Cybersec organizations Defused and Shadowserver, along with the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) have flagged multiple software vulnerabilities across Oracle’s EBS, WebLogic Server, and PeopleSoft.  Computing UK

Is it a Chute or Ladder? Or Run For Your Life? OpenAI and Sam Altman made headlines before the July 4 celebrations with an offer of a 5% share of the company to the US Federal Government. Both OpenAI and Anthropic are imminent IPOs. The Financial Times report is based upon “early conversations” cited from two insiders. A 5% share, based on current valuations, is about $42.6 billion. It is not only a nice chunk of change in the public fisc but also a clever PR move that may help neutralize public blowback and downright hostility towards unwanted technology; sprawling, noisy, spewing, heat pooling and energy-greedy data centers; AI job displacement; companies discovering that AI is draining them dry without ROI; environmental and community groups; unions, local governments, and more. How it will mollify people who are angry about any of the previous is doubtful. Nor will it please those aligned with socialist Senator Bernie Sanders, who is demanding close to half of OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s value to be held in a sovereign wealth fund.

Whether Anthropic and the hyperscalers building like mad such as Oracle, Meta, Microsoft and others would follow Altman’s lead is debatable. The Computing UK take on this is that it is a cynical and obvious bribe, perhaps one worthy of a Marie Antoinette (who may never have said ‘let them eat cake’…but nevermind). The accountant or computing side of this Editor’s brain flags that neither OpenAI nor Anthropic are remotely profitable. Oracle as a hyperscaler has already fallen into a debt canyon from where it may not emerge. Likely, Oracle is not the only one either, if you isolate AI from hyperscalers’ other sustaining businesses.

A generous offer or a Trojan Horse? You pick….

In this Editor’s view, it satisfies no one, solves no real problems, puts power in exactly the wrong hands, and creates a major conflict of interest in the objective and responsible development of AI.

In the Ladder department, Meta is talking up selling its excess AI cloud computing capacity, thus creating a new revenue stream. If this Editor is not mistaken, it’s similar to the Amazon Web Services model. A second stream would be renting out its AI application programming interface (API) to developers. The charge will be based on usage. That assumes that Meta is envisioning a time that they will have that excess capacity to sell. Right now, there is a dearth of actual, online data centers and a shortage of capacity [TTA 14 May].  Computing UK

A $110 million split raise for Pearl Health rounds it out. The Medicare value-based care management services organization (MSO) and population health services for providers gained a $50 million Series C equity investment from Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Viking Global Investors, AlleyCorp, and Ulysses Capital, plus a $60 million debt facility led by Trinity Capital. The new funds will be used for developing their AI platform, turning clinical intelligence into measurable outcomes, growing health system and payer partnerships, expansion into Medicare Advantage, and new risk offerings. Pearl’s funding to date is $205 million since 2020. It claims that it reached profitability last year and will triple its patient base from 2024 to the end of this year. It currently serves 10,000 providers across 40 states, with more than 250,000 Medicare beneficiaries, in CMS ACO models such as the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP) and ACO REACH ending this year. The shrinking list of competitors in this space include Aledade and Astrana Health (which bought one of the pioneers, Collaborative Health Systems).  Release, MedCityNews

Midjourney Medical audaciously promises a revolution in whole-body scanning, powered by Butterfly Network chips. Can the reality ever match the hype?

July 1, 2026 | by | 2 Comments

Editor’s Note: I am indebted to Stuart Miller of Haverin on Substack for the initial and later follow up (linked below)  articles on this, plus our exchanges. Feel free to read his first essay first and return here for a further discussion of both Midjourney Medical and Butterfly Network, plus his second article referenced in Part 2.

Part 1: Midjourney Medical and the Prototype Scanner

Can the reality match the hype that’s jumped the rails? Midjourney Medical is a new company (or division) that grew out of Midjourney, a organization claiming to be a “community-funded lab of 60 people known for building the most beautiful AI models in the world”. Moving past the breathless prose, Midjourney Medical has developed a prototype of a whole-body scanner that, unlike present CT scanners and MRIs, does two major things: it fully scans the body in a minute and there is no radiation. The methodology is almost Star Trek-ian: your body is lowered gently into a circular tank of warm water, and 40 chips arrayed in a ring generate waves that change shape when they meet parts of your body (e.g. from skin to fat to muscle to bone).  The waves generated by the chips are translated into  ultrasound computed tomography (USCT) creating a 3D map of a human body, with the completion goal at 60 seconds of scanning and computing time.

This is coming from a 1st generation prototype. The images in the announcement video are supposedly not AI-generated but actual from about a dozen subjects. The actual timing is about 20 minutes at present, a real time not in the announcement but in articles (see below), and the subjects were uniformly slim.

Yet it’s audacious as all get-out, in a time drowning with incrementalism and no Big Next Thing.

If the results from the prototype are real and the timeline/vision are achievable, the potential is stunning. Being lowered briefly into a tank of water is a far more pleasant experience than the tube and noise of an MRI, though for claustrophobics or just those afraid of being submerged in water, the fears are similar. If taken to its logical development, it could, in fact, threaten the business of nearly all of the mainline MRI/CT scan companies such as GE Healthcare, Philips, Siemens, and Canon if it is medically validated and gains FDA clearance.

As Stuart Miller pointed out and described well in his article, there is already an FDA-cleared water/sensor array for USCT used as a diagnostic adjunct for dense breast mammography–SoftVue, developed by Delphinus Medical Technologies of Novi, Michigan. So there is precedent, one already in place and accepted in mainstream medical practice. A device that every woman would accept as standard instead of current.

However, breast scanning does not go through bone (e.g. ribs) nor gas (lungs), which is USCT’s drawback. At present, when ultrasound is used, a trained technician has to work the device between the ribs a millimeter at a time to gain an unblocked view, not in 60 seconds but taking 60 minutes or more.

Midjourney Health’s ambitions are wellness, not medical grade, at least into 2028. The announcement states that this prototype is the first of three.

  • Their roadmap is that by end of 2027, Midjourney’s will open a 24/7 medical spa in San Francisco, with the 2nd generation prototypes providing detailed body composition maps for clients, accumulating data for its own case, scanner development, and yes, FDA.
  • 2028 would introduce a 3rd generation scanner with custom chips and a ‘night-and-day’ change in image quality and scan times.
  • The trajectory is opening proprietary medical spas, staying within ‘general wellness’ permitted by FDA, and gaining acceptance of the technology.
  • Ultimately, by 2031, the plan is “to have a fleet of over 50,000 scanners worldwide – with a total scanning capacity of a billion scans a month”. The rationale: early imaging without symptoms>>change in lifestyle>>avoidance of 30% of deaths and 50% of healthcare costs.

Mr. Miller’s skepticism in his article is well presented and warranted. He details that ultrasound can’t go through bone and gas, dunking has psychological and physical drawbacks such as consistently clean water, the ability to run spas at scale, the business drawbacks of no reimbursement, no billing codes, no FDA validation. Unless it is priced well, the Midjourney vision of a pop-in spa and wellness checks  will be confined to the early adopters and the affluent curious privately paying up to thousands of dollars for the experience, much as whole-body MRIs, also in the ‘general wellness’ category away from FDA scrutiny, are today. Can spas support 50,000 scanners? Not likely.

It all sounds rather vague and glossy in a song that this Editor has heard before in the digital health (IBM Watson Health circa 2012) and concierge practice areas.

What is also scarce in this announcement is that once you have this information, what do you do with it? Is it conclusive enough to take to a physician and do follow up?  Or if lifestyle, will these spas affiliate with clinicians who can do the counseling? From the Forbes article on the announcement:

“Whole-body screening of people with no symptoms turns up incidental findings in 20% to 40% of scans, yet only a small fraction ever require treatment, as University of Michigan radiologists have noted. At a billion scans a month, even modest rates imply hundreds of millions of ambiguous results a year, each one demanding a clinical decision and producing a worried customer.”

In the category of ‘it does what it says it does”–a must in generating credibility for a new technology–false positives or even ambiguity are killers.

Since Midjourney Medical is a separate community-backed research lab, they are seeking support from the ‘community’ and not, at this point, explicitly seeking investors. There are reports that the company generates hundreds of millions of dollars in annual recurring revenue, according to Mobihealthnews. Their substantial funding needed for development, chips, and spas has to come from somewhere, and this vagueness about their funding disturbs this Editor.

What Midjourney Medical has in spades is strong skills in generating press coverage. Besides Stuart Miller’s Substack article on 19 June, Mobihealthnews published their take the same day, along with a wave of articles over the next ten days from Radiology Business to Fox News’ Cyberguy to Futurism. The Verge’s 23 June critique proved to be a lengthy deflation. While it presented Midjourney’s side by interviewing their head of medical Tom Calloway, the bulk of the article consisted of far more critical comments from several imaging and radiology professionals. Matthew Davenport, a professor of radiology at the University of Michigan Medical School, said that (FTA) published images were “interesting” and that he could see a market for body imaging. But the company’s “claims are wildly unsubstantiated, perhaps the most grandiose” he has seen. William Morrison, a radiology professor at Thomas Jefferson University, was downright scathing calling it a “vibe-based rollout” and (FTA) that the whole move, he said, has the feel of an ad campaign. “It makes me think that this may be more of a grift than a pivot.” Words like “grandiose” and “grift” tend to stick. 

Part 2: Butterfly Network, Their Chips, and the Agreement with Midjourney

Midjourney Medical had a partner in this which, interestingly, was not mentioned in the announcement. Our Readers may be familiar with the name Butterfly Network. (more…)

Chutes & Ladders: Xsolis data breach affects 1.4M records, Five Eyes warns of AI-supercharged hacking; FDA closes Whoop BP warning, Centene adds HR/finance exec to board; $120M raises for Assort Health, $46M for xCures

June 26, 2026 | by

This week’s Big Data Breach affects 1.4 million patients at multiple healthcare organizations. The vector was a business associate, Xsolis, that is a vendor of utilization and case management software for providers and health plans. The phishing attack on an Xsolis employee took place on 20 January and by 22 January exfiltrated names, addresses, date of birth, health insurance information, Social Security numbers, and medical treatment information. They shortly thereafter notified client patients of the breach (Kroll Xsolis website notice) and offered data protection services to those affected. But only this month was the extent of the breach revealed: 1,396,519 records. Reports were submitted on 5 June to Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of Civil Rights (OCR). On 19 June, the California Attorney General’s Office posted a copy of the breach notification letter that Xsolis sent to its clients’ patients. To date, there have been no ransom or extortion demands nor dark web threats. Affected organizations have been reported as  Rochester Regional Health with 18,600 patients affected, Mayo Clinic and VHC. DataBreaches.net, Yahoo News–TechRadar

The multi-national data security alliance Five Eyes warns of AI supercharging hacking attacks. The three-page statement details how AI accelerates cybersec attacks and the need for ‘defence in depth’ with threats increasing in months, not years. It offers a five-point plan to reduce vulnerabilities and to use AI to defend against attackers. However, with most healthcare organizations overwhelmed with implementing AI tools, suppliers like Xsolis a vector for attack, and employees going outside for AI tools, the threat level has been amped 100x. The MIT Sloan article also warns that Anthropic’s Mythos, which is reportedly capable of autonomously finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities end-to-end with no human involvement, could be used for cyberattacks and chemical/biological attacks. Five Eyes is drawn from the US, UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia cybersecurity agencies. DataBreaches.net

In more cheerful news, Whoop announced that the FDA closed an investigation into their wearable’s Blood Pressure Insights feature. This started with a letter from FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH) in July 2025 challenging Whoop on the basis that the company did not have an approved application for premarket approval (PMA) or 510(k) approval of that feature.  Apparently, Whoop backed off of original claims that the BPI offered medical-grade health and performance insights and moved to general wellness claims ‘not intended for medical use’. It didn’t dissuade funders from a gigantic $575 million Series G in April. [TTA 9 Apr] MassDevice 

Centene, which in last week’s Chutes announced a voluntary separation plan (VSP) to most employees with 2 years or more in the company, added a board member. Lauren Tyler will be joining immediately to serve on Centene’s audit committee and compensation and talent committee. Ms. Tyler is a 20 year-plus JP Morgan veteran who was global head of human resources for asset and wealth management, global firmwide chief auditor, and global head of investor relations. That is an interesting skill set given what is happening at Centene and the need to compensate by downsizing for the crash in Medicaid and ACA members, as noted in the Release, Healthcare Dive

Raises have perked up again after a few weeks off.

Assort Health just raised a $120 million Series C. It was led by Menlo Ventures, with participants including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Felicis, First Round Capital, Chemistry, Joe Montana (!), Tau Ventures, and Quiet Capital. Assort provides an AI-assisted patient  voice agent along with an impressive AI model, Synapse, for specialty workflows that automate scheduling, intake forms, referrals, document processing, medication refills, real-time eligibility, lab requests, and payments. San Francisco-based Assort to date has raised $222 million and is now valued at $1.2 billion. Release

xCures scored a $46 million Series B. It was led by Innovius Capital, with participation from iGrow, GKCC, Spring Mountain Capital, and existing investors. Total funding is now over $76 million. xCures’ business model is focused on gathering scattered clinical patient data, assembling and structuring patient medical records into usable decision-ready data through its Clinical Clarity Engine. It is delivered to users via a web UI or a developer-friendly API. To date, they have 300 million medical records sourced from more than 550,000 healthcare locations nationwide. The new funds will be used for expansion of the Clinical Clarity Engine’s capabilities. Release, Mobihealthnews

Vinegary Must Reads This Week: Silicon Valley’s ‘Cargo Culture’; the clinical query tool explosion between OpenEvidence and general AI

June 25, 2026 | by

More than tart takes, these come with 8 ounces of distilled vinegar! Sip slowly and savor this weekend.

The always controversial Ed Zitron goes there. Way out there to challenge your preconceptions. If you’ve ever awakened at 3am wondering where in blue blazes AI is going, agonizing over where it fits in your platform or services, who is it really benefiting other than OpenAI and Anthropic, why VCs are so stingy because your tech isn’t AI All Over, and why despite the hype billions are going down a rabbit hole seemingly with no bottom [TTA 2 June, 25 June] –this article (not premium paywalled) is for you.

“Cargo Culture” refers to the cargo cults of the South Pacific. They originated after native contact with Westerners, usually Americans who landed in ships or built airstrips, mostly during WWII. When the Americans left, the indigenous peoples tried to recreate the “magic” of goods coming off the ship or from airplanes by creating a religion and ritual around these ‘miracles’ without, of course, the corresponding methods of delivery. Your Editor also found an IT version of this called “cargo cult programming“defined in a Wikipedia entry as “computing slang to describe the inclusion of code that serves no purpose in a program, indicating a lack of understanding of the program structure by the programmer.“

Mr. Zitron’s “Cargo Culture” refers to Silicon Valley. The endlessly reinforced belief system of the interlocked software, venture capital, and private equity businesses was built on decades of mythology of endless growth and endless Christensenian “disruption”. They want to believe that there will always be hypergrowth tech companies, always another ‘disruptor’. And the money to fund them will be equally endless. (Forgotten are the failures like Theranos and the billions down the drain.)

The reality, as he painstakingly explains, is that Silicon Valley and tech are, right now, fresh out of ideas. Worse, the software industry is declining. There’s no Google Search or iPhone waiting to be plucked from the ether. There is no New Big Transformative Idea. Company growth is incremental at best, declining or failing at worst. But instead of adjusting, the mythology is ingrained, and to doubt is heretical.

Any dissension, whether corporate or media, means you are Voted Off The Island.

The AI Bubble fits neatly and virally into Silicon Valley’s Cargo Culture and need for a disruptor. It’s a viral product, it was different, it meets a need for automating processes. It makes search a lot quicker. But will LLMs and agentic AI actually change anything other than make it faster, or reduce the need to perform your own logic in building a case/article–at amazingly high expense? Other than the spend, what’s exponential about it? Everyone’s buying a lot of GPUs–heck, Oracle at Larry Ellison’s behest is betting the company on moving out of software, including that ever-so-sticky EHR–and becoming a data center constructor and lessor to Open AI and Meta lest Microsoft eat his lunch. After a certain point, the beliefs become circular and self-reinforcing. 

Mr. Zitron argues the points at length. It’s minimum a 30-minute read and not an easy one. Stay with it. It challenges a lot of premises. It will make you think differently the next time you’re pitched on a company’s miraculous AI software–or if you are a developer, understanding your customer’s needs and likely confusion. It is 100% guaranteed to make you think about Silicon Valley, their modus operandi, and how it’s inflated the whole AI bubble.

Sergei Polevikov shines a light on a recent Nature Medicine study comparing specialized clinical LLMs against the generics–and finds that the generics win. The peer-reviewed study pitted specialized clinical tools like OpenEvidence and Wolters Kluwer’s UpToDate ExpertAI against general-purpose AI tools–ChatGPT-5.2, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and Claude Opus 4.6–using three different benchmarks*. The specialized tools lost every time. What was worse was OpenEvidence’s unprofessional overreaction on social media, namely X. Instead of responding directly to Nature Medicine as a comment, then publishing a peer-reviewed paper refuting the Nature Medicine team findings, citing their own research from independent studies, conducting fresh research, even better admitting that some of the research team’s findings were valid and appreciated, their ‘Twitterstorm’ only created more PR blowback. Social media amplified the damaging reach of one academic study. (Having managed a few ‘crisis communications’ as a marketer, the worst thing that you can do is bang back in anger, though cooling corporate tempers might require a Titanic-sized iceberg of ‘splainin’.)

Mr. Polevikov’s free excerpt of his lengthy article, OpenEvidence Goes Hippocratic AI, is published on LinkedIn, but why not kick in a few $$, support his independent journalism, and subscribe to AI Health Uncut (Substack)?

The Hippocratic AI reference is to that company’s ‘bare knucks’ approach to any criticism of their platforms. 

*FTA Nature Medicine: (1) 500 MedQA questions testing medical knowledge, (2) 500 HealthBench items measuring alignment with clinicians and (3) the real clinical queries (RCQ) benchmark, built from 100 de-identified queries from physicians to a general-purpose language model in a live clinical environment. 

Short takes: Bain report on anemic AI ROI, SVB report on women’s health, Ladder Health pedes virtual health raises $7M, an update on the Luigi Mangione trial

June 25, 2026 | by

Bain and Company dug into the Big Question surrounding AI–is there any real ROI there? How can companies get there? Their ‘to date’ results are not exactly stellar.

  • Nearly 40% of companies that measured AI cost savings landed below 10%. Another 29% achieved 11-20%. Neither are huge savings.
  • Yet 90% of companies are increasing their AI budgets, again. How they’re funding it? 44% of companies are funding it from prior automation savings that have consistently come in below target.
  • The operating reality is far more human, with only 7% of companies running fully autonomous agents in production today.
  • Data access and integration are the number one barriers to AI progress

Despite all this, Bain (of course) states that companies shouldn’t wait, that they need to close the gap between the business case and the operating reality. Their conclusions sound sensible, but to this Editor, they won’t necessarily bend the cost savings curve. And they sound like expensive, time-consuming work, further reducing initial cost savings:

  1. Pay down your workflow debt before deploying AI. Fix that before you automate it because it will be far more difficult afterwards.
  2. Validate the investment case and name a governance owner before programs launch.
  3. Use AI to solve the data problem; don’t wait for the data problem to be solved first. Automate one high-value, repeatable workflow and replace it with AI.
  4. Redesign the operating model, not just the process.
  5. Measure outcomes at the enterprise level, not the program level. Leaders must decide that they have a personal responsibility to create the organizational conditions for AI success. 

Your AI Budget Is Growing. Your Returns Aren’t. Here’s Why.

Our second report is on innovation in the women’s health sector. Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) examines trends in the venture-backed women’s health sector, which has grown into the full spectrum of women’s health needs. The sector is (finally) starting to thrive. Highlights:

  • $2 billion in venture capital was invested in women’s health in 2025. While this marked a dip from 2024’s peak, projections show a rebound in both deal volume and total funding for 2026.
  • $6.2 billion since 2019 has been invested into companies addressing women-specific conditions. 210 new startups dedicated to solving women-specific health challenges were launched from 2019 through 2025. 
  • The median pre-money valuation for AI-enabled women’s health companies is up to $35 million.
  • Women’s health startups using AI to personalize care are commanding valuations triple those of their non-AI counterparts.

The downloadable SVB report is here.

One of those women-founded companies, Ladder Health. announced seed funding of $7 million this week. The seed round was (happily) oversubscribed and led by Nina Capital, with participation from Mairs & Power Venture Capital, South Dakota First Capital, and incubating partner 25madison Health. Other investors in this round include Hatteras Venture Partners, Create Health Ventures, Jumpstart Capital, White Oak Enterprises, Groove Capital, and 7Rock Ventures. (Whew!) Ladder Health delivers speech, occupational, physical and feeding therapy through a virtual-first, AI-enabled platform available evenings and weekends. Their service is targeted to areas where pediatricians and developmental therapies are in short supply, wait lists are long, and to underserved Medicaid beneficiaries. It is currently available in three states, North Carolina, Massachusetts, and Maryland across 80 providers. The additional financing will support expansion in those states and others, as well as investment in the care platform. Ladder is based in NYC. It was developed in conjunction with clinical experts at Boston Children’s Hospital. Release, MedCity News

And lest we forget. Luigi Mangione, the accused murderer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on the dark morning of 4 December 2024, is still in the preliminaries of his New York State trial for intentional second-degree murder. His defense team from Agnifilo Intrater had filed to use a psychiatric defense based on Mangione suffering from an “extreme emotional disturbance” (EED), but that was withdrawn one day after it had been filed with Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Gregory Carro. It was a surprising development, as the admission could have reduced the charges to manslaughter, though it is tantamount to admitting the crime.

Based on reports, Mangione may be able to introduce EED through his own testimony, or that of the prosecution. Much of the evidence found in his backpack when Mangione was picked up at the Altoona, Pennsylvania, McDonald’s was excluded from the NYS trial, as well as two charges of terrorism and first-degree murder. He has pleaded not guilty to state murder and weapons charges.

Mangione’s trial is scheduled to start on 8 September. He faces additional trials in the Federal Southern District of NY as well as Pennsylvania state charges. Law.com discusses the EED strategy. CNN, Beckers

Amazon’s One Medical Seniors hacked by ShinyHunters, issues “final warning” on 8.8 TB of patient data

June 24, 2026 | by

Pepper faints again, reading Amazon’s response–it’s ‘archived’ data that “only impacts certain legacy Iora Health and One Medical Seniors patients”.  The ShinyHunters data extortion group published their ‘final warning’ on its ‘dark web’ site with a negotiation start date of last Monday (22 June) before they would publish 8.8 terabytes of stolen information. Making the ShinyHunters threat less credible is that they haven’t released any sample data, so there is no idea if the contents are high value–typically containing personally identifiable information such as Social Security number, credit cards, and sensitive health information. Amazon One Medical is admitting the loss of only a “subset of files containing demographic and clinical records”.

Amazon One Medical published a notification on its One Medical Seniors (the former Iora Medical) website summing up the following:

  • They learned on 13 June that a third-party file storage system used to store archived patient information had been accessed by an unauthorized person
  • Data had been exfiltrated between 8-11 June
  • It’s apparently “legacy” information only and affecting only certain old Iora/Amazon One Medical Seniors records
  • The clinics affected are legacy Iora clinics located in Atlanta, Cape Cod, Charlotte, Piedmont Triad, Denver, Houston, Phoenix, Tucson, and Seattle.
  • They took immediate action including the revocation of all user access and rotating credentials for all employees with access to the system. 
  • Neither Amazon One Medical (non-Seniors) patients, Seniors patients outside these markets, nor their EHR and medical services have been affected.

Patients are given a number to call and an email to write if they have questions. It is not known if patients were notified in other ways, for example through the patient portal, email, or standard US Mail. There is no public indication that Amazon One Medical has contacted ShinyHunters or is negotiating with them, whoever they are.

ShinyHunters is notorious for taking credit for other attacks on healthcare organizations, always going big, then going home after gaining their ransom. Their last target was Medtronic, hacking 9 million patient records plus terabytes of corporate information in April [TTA 30 April]. After the leak information was pulled from their website, the conclusion was that Medtronic paid up. ShinyHunters also attacked dental benefits administrator DentaQuest earlier this year. Other big game: Zara, Carnival, 7-Eleven, Pitney Bowes, The Canada Life Assurance Company, and Hallmark. 

Amazon One Medical is staying mum, but this will be updated as additional information is disclosed. Cybernews, Healthcare IT News, HIPAA Journal