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

April 30, 2026 | by | No Comments

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ChatGPT moves from healthcare enterprises to the clinician level. This new version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, ChatGPT for Clinicians, is designed to support clinical tasks like clinical search, documentation workflows, and deep medical research. It will be free for any verified physician, NP, PA, or pharmacist in the US, and is available now via their information page here. With its release, ChatGPT is also introducing HealthBench Professional, described as “an open benchmark for real clinician chat tasks across three use cases: care consult, writing and documentation, and medical research.” Release

ChatGPT for Healthcare was announced in January, but available to only a limited group of healthcare organizations.

UnitedHealth Group is having some better days. Last week on their earnings call, they announced that all units exceeded Q1 expectations. Their Q1 adjusted earnings per share (EPS) of $7.23 was well ahead of expectations, with total revenues of $111.7 billion, up 2% versus Q1 2025. Q1 membership fell slightly to 49.1 million from 49.8 million at the end of 2025. Their medical cost ratio (MCR) decreased to 83.9% from 84.8%, nearly a full point.

UHG is ‘on track’ to invest $1.5 billion in AI this year, especially at Optum with self-service digital scheduling that includes AI-enabled tools guiding patients “to the right appointment in the right setting at the right time”, plus increased digital access for members and providers with AI-enabled tools at UnitedHealth Care. 

UHG has been heavily criticized for its treatment of rural healthcare providers and hospitals. Timothy Noel, CEO of UnitedHealthcare Business, said that “We will accelerate payments in all lines of business by 50% for rural hospitals and exempt rural healthcare providers for most medical prior authorization requirements. And we are building network partnerships between rural providers and leading regional health systems.”  Let’s see if the good news stretches into Q2. Healthcare Finance News

Aidoc’s $150 million Series E brings their total funding to over $500 million. The AI-assisted clinical imaging system for radiology, cardiology, vascular and neurovascular healthcare teams is designed to help them find and triage injuries and other health conditions. It also integrates coordination software for stroke and cardiovascular care. The round for the NYC-based company was led by Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, with participation from General Catalyst, SoftBank Investment Advisors and NVentures (NVIDIA’s venture capital arm). The fresh funds will be used to grow global presence and expand into other clinical areas. FDA clearance for its AI triage tool was gained in January. Mobihealthnews, Release 

TriFetch has a healthy pre-seed round. A $1.9 million pre-seed these days is rather unusual but TriFetch, an AI automation platform built for independent specialty clinics just emerging from stealth, nabbed it from Nexus Venture Partners, with participation from angels with backgrounds at Google, Hippocratic, Mercor, and MIT. TriFetch’s platform automates three workflows that dominate clinic operating costs (the “tri”): patient calls and scheduling, referral processing, and prior authorizations. It’s led by UCLA graduate computer science PhDs  and researchers Varuni Sarwal and Rosemary He. So far results seem impressive, with their pilots at California ophthalmology, cardiology, and gastroenterology clinics with results that save time and money. In one GI practice, with staff processing up to 100 referrals per day, TriFetch handled that workflow end to end, freeing roughly 16 hours of staff time daily, saving the clinic $200,000 per year.  Pulse 2.0/release

And for those who fetch for us, a diagnostic for heart murmurs. Boehringer Ingelheim, the German pharmaceutical company with a specialty in animal health, and Eko Health, a ‘reimagined’ stethoscope for heart and lung disease, partnered to develop a device and app to detect, visualize, and grade heart murmurs in dogs. This combines BI’s CANINEBEAT AI diagnostic algorithm, the Eko Vet+ app, and the Eko CORE Digital Attachment that connects to most single-tube stethoscopes.  Canine heart murmurs and cardiac disease are difficult to detect in early stages, where diagnosis and treatment can be most helpful. Availability of the combined technology through both BI and Eko has started in the US and UK, with Germany up next month. Additional markets will be phased in during 2026 and 2027.  Release 

Breaking: OpenEvidence app access terminated in the UK and EU

April 30, 2026 | by | No Comments

The hottest doctor reference source withdrew its medical evidence and decision support app from the UK and European markets. The news, reported in HIStalk on 28 April, is shocking–but not surprising. EU sources have predicted that this would be an outcome of the EU Artificial Intelligence Act. While the UK is not technically subject to EU regulation, the regulatory guidance to date has been along the EU Act’s lines; clearly a decision has been made not to enter the UK market accordingly.

The screen at left (courtesy of HIStalk) cites the ‘regulatory uncertainty regarding the treatment of AI systems’ and invites potential users to ‘make their voice heard’.

OpenEvidence is perceived by most to be the ‘up and coming’ platform for physician information. Its momentum was solidified with deals such as with Mount Sinai NY to integrate it within Epic [TTA 9 Apr], a $250 million Series D funding, and a monster valuation of $12 billion, making it the most valuable healthcare AI company in this solar system. It couples a free search engine trained on journals and clinical medical data only with an AI chatbot agent, making it easy to use for doctors. OpenEvidence partners with prestigious sources such as the New England Journal of Medicine and the American Medical Association.  It claims a daily average usage by 40% of US doctors in 10,000 hospitals and medical centers, achieving 18 million clinical consults in December alone. It recently added clinical trial matching to its capabilities, filtering trials by study design, enrollment status, and geographic proximity. To the US industry, OpenEvidence fills a gap in clinical intelligence that competitors Doximity (public), Epocrates (athenahealth), and Medscape (WebMD) have not to date, which certainly hurts the latter as tight pharma ad dollars reroute to OpenEvidence, as TTA has previously noted. 

The EU and UK constraint will likely not hurt OpenEvidence’s growth, but will hurt physicians in those countries by blocking a reliable source of information. It hits the NHS where it hurts, in its desires for technology advancement and integrating AI in practices. DistilledPost has a more UK-specific discussion of the consequences. Meanwhile, this Editor doubts that OpenEvidence will let this sit, and will eventually find a way towards compliance while growing outside of those markets, such as the Middle East and Asia. They have the resources, the name, and the growth. Hat tip to HIStalk. Letsdatascience, 

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

April 30, 2026 | by | No Comments

Medtronic’s cyberattack apparently contained. The company reported in a corporate statement on 24 April that an unauthorized party accessed data in certain Medtronic corporate IT systems. Medtronic has not identified, to date, any effects on, as specified: products, patient safety, patient needs, connections to customers, manufacturing and distribution operations, or financial reporting systems. They are determining any intrusion into patient information. According to their most recent SEC filings, Medtronic does not anticipate any effect on its business or financial needs.

The criminal hacker organization taking credit for it is the interestingly named ShinyHunters (what, not Shiny Stockings?) which claims it exfiltrated 9 million patient records with personally identifiable information (PII), 38 million records in total, as well as “terabytes” of internal corporate data. This immediately contradicts Medtronic’s anodyne corporate statement. However, the leak is no longer published on their dedicated leak website, according to Cybernews reported in TechRadar, which may indicate that some negotiations are going on. We’ll see if Medtronic will be changing their statement.

ShinyHunters is indulging in some chest beating, bragging on its leak website that they’ve stolen data from primarily consumer companies such as Zara, Carnival, 7-Eleven, Pitney Bowes, The Canada Life Assurance Company, and Hallmark. 

This fits a pattern of major healthcare hacking. Orthopedic medical device and robotics company Stryker was caught in a massive breach, wiping tens of thousands of systems and servers across the company’s network including applications such as Intune Company Portal, Teams, and VPN clients often used on personal devices. The perpetrator, Handala, is “linked to Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) that targets Israeli organizations with destructive malware designed to wipe Windows and Linux devices.” This makes it political as a primary reason, economic secondary. [TTA 20 Mar]

Corporate IT is more vulnerable than production or patient-facing systems, according to Ensar Seker, chief information security officer at threat intelligence platform SOCRadar, quoted in MedCityNews. Corporate systems have high-value data but are less rigorously segmented and protected. MedTechDive

Another breach with international repercussions is that of UK Biobank. UK Biobank is a non-profit research database with information on 500,000 British citizens who volunteered their history and data. That data was found for sale on three separate listings on the Chinese e-commerce website Alibaba. Apparently no entity purchased the data. Unusually, the Chinese government assisted in the listings’ removal. (See below for the embarrassing reason why.)

Last Thursday (23 April), science minister Ian Murray told the House of Commons that the charity had informed the government about the data breach last Monday and thanked the Chinese government for assisting with the removal from Alibaba. Biobank has referred itself to the Information Commissioner’s Office. The hacker is not identified.

Dame Chi Onwurah, the Labor chair of the science, innovation and technology committee, scored her own Government, saying that it was “another blow to public confidence”, adding that it showed “little progress had been made” in protecting public data. Mr. Murray had assured her back in February that standards of public sector information security and data hygiene would improve.

The subjects joined the study over four years, 2006-2010, and at that time were between 40 and 69 years old. The information could include gender, age, month and year of birth, socioeconomic status, lifestyle habits, and measures from biological samples. The deidentified  information did not include names, addresses or contact details but what was included–genome sequences, hospital diagnoses, and biological measures–could be cross referenced and re-identified in experts’ view.

According to the Independent (via Yahoo UK), UK Biobank is the world’s most comprehensive dataset of biological, health and lifestyle information. It is used internationally and has been used to achieve improvements in the detection and treatment of dementia, cancers and Parkinson’s. DataBreaches.net

Update: the breach was apparently an Inside Job. The data was leaked dozens of times via GitHub. Three Chinese research institutions with legitimate access violated their data-sharing agreements. FTA: “It was not a hack. It was a contract violation by trusted researchers, and that distinction makes it worse, not better, because it exposes a vulnerability that no firewall can fix: the entire model of open research data sharing assumes that everyone who receives the data will follow the rules.” TheNextWeb

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

April 29, 2026 | by | No Comments

This is a follow up–and a short review–of last week’s mention of RapidSOS’s premiere of their ‘Behind the Emergency’ video. Your Editor viewed this today, along with most of the panel discussion following, which was aired as part of RapidSOS’ Innovation Day in Reno, Nevada. I have an interest in emergency services and first responders, having delved into their complex world during my time as the marketing director of the (now-defunct) Viterion Digital Health, and with a friend who is former EMS. Otherwise, I have zero connection to RapidSOS.

Being the cynical marketer and writer I am, I expected something more salesy, more commercial, more pitchy. This mercifully was not. It was informative. It used actor and endorser Jeremy Renner, plus testimonies from emergency service dispatchers and first responders, in a professional, low-key, and semi-documentary fashion. It was a video with real production values, increasingly a rarity. Not selling their AI assisted platform–the name wasn’t even mentioned–but in the circumstances of what public safety is, the people, what they do, and what they face, such as responding to emergencies in the rural backcountry of Nevada. Time is everything. It was about the problems they face and what emergency services need to be more effective. 

Why Mr. Renner? He was in a horrible accident in a snowcat three years in that backcountry, and became interested in emergency response as a result. While the benefit was clear–tech cuts the time for 911 public safety centers’ dispatchers and responders to coordinate multiple resources needed to respond to a call, and RapidSOS has the AI tech to connect the pieces more seamlessly and faster–it didn’t bang you over the head with The Brand or The Product even at the end. It may have been a 12 minute commercial, but it was a damn good one and a rare one today. You can view it here.

I also stuck around for part of the live panel that was with the CEO, Reno’s mayor Hillary Scheive, Reno’s director of public safety Cody Shadle, retired firefighter and founder of eFireX Jesse Corletto, and chaired by a company executive whose name I did not catch. It was again about the emergencies they typically face in both the city, the pressure on dispatchers in handling multiple situations, and more rural environments in Washoe County and how coordinating their resources over a large area is a huge challenge. Every connection made better saves time and is “good AI”. Drones, for instance, can get to a scene faster and feed data back to dispatchers as they coordinate, and responders as they are arriving.

A company that is beneficially using AI for the public, and an interesting, low-key exposition on how one company is integrating it into its services.

Editor’s note 1 May: Of interest to marketers re strategy is that the preview clip (on the website) is also being run as a RapidSOS commercial on streaming service Pluto. The spot closes with the logo and a link on a black screen. I suspect there are buys elsewhere.

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

April 24, 2026 | by | 1 Comment

This says it all for startups and early stage companies in the healthcare tech field. We feature today Haverin Consulting’s Stuart Miller, continuing his analysis of the signs that a health tech company, no matter how hot it may seem, is on its way to failure. All four, from startup to spinoff, were name companies that at one point were valued at over $3 to over $4 billion. All failed to deliver their main value propositions while having excellent ‘cover’ for a time. All were either parted out (assets sold) or were total hull losses.

Mr. Miller has drawn out 10 factors from the success, then failure of four companies: Olive AI, IBM Watson Health, Carbon Health, and Babylon Health–this last, one that TTA chronicled as far back as 2014, through the palmy Matt Hancock days, their questionable SPAC, and right to their near-complete dissolution. Back in February, we featured his article analyzing the Carbon Health failure. But all four have been profiled in impressive deep dives, available for subscribers on his Substack account. He does feature extensive free material and definitely is worth the follow.

This is not a long cuppa but very much worth your time and pondering. All This Has Happened Before

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

April 24, 2026 | by | No Comments

Breaking: IKS Health finalized their acquisition agreement with TruBridge, Inc. Today’s (23 Apr) announcement did not contain an acquisition price, but IKS is offering shareholders $26.25 per share, a small premium above today’s close at $25.27. Both are revenue cycle management (RCM) companies and will strengthen capabilities in the rural and community hospital markets. Since TruBridge is publicly traded on Nasdaq with 14.91 million shares outstanding, the deal is a minimum of $391.4 million, considerably less than the rumored $675 million [TTA 15 Apr]. TruBridge’s largest shareholders (27%) have agreed to terms, but it is subject to the usual regulatory reviews with an expected closing in Q3. Otherwise, the press release is short on details, but IKS will finance the TruBridge buy with debt financed by Citibank, JP Morgan Chase, and Deutsche Bank.

The unstoppable Hims & Hers notches another rise with wider GLP-1 med access. Hims announced a deal with Eli Lilly to fulfill Zepbound prescriptions via Lilly Direct. It also permits its providers to prescribe medications that are fulfilled by independent pharmacies, which essentially opens Hims up to all GLP-1 drugs, with restrictions of course.

Once largely wedded to compounded weight loss drugs, to the point of running commercials on 2025’s Super Bowl that their obesity drugs are priced “for profits, not patients”, Hims & Hers has flipped the script in less than a year to be the online prescriber of nearly all brand name weight loss drugs. This started about five months after the Super Bowl when FDA finalized the ban on compounding those drugs. Pretty soon Hims was inking deals, starting with Novo Nordisk in May 2025 to prescribe Wegovy and fulfill through NovoCare Pharmacy. In March, they settled their long-running legal tiff with Novo when they agreed to drop their just-debuted compounded pill to sell Novo’s Wegovy and Ozempic in both pill and injectable versions.  (The newest Lilly weight loss med, Foundayo, is only available DTC from them and commercial insurance/cash pay only.) Hims is up to $28/share. Sherwood News

News of raises for some interesting companies came thick and fast the latter part of the week

Wearable neuromodulator developer Cala Health gained $50 million in an unlettered raise. Unusually, it had a sole funder, Trinity Capital. Cala has developed the only FDA-cleared 510(k) wearable for action hand tremor in people with essential tremor and Parkinson’s disease. The funding will be used to scale commercial distribution and product development. The kIQ device uses transcutaneous afferent patterned stimulation (TAPS), which reduces hand tremors by measuring a patient’s tremor pattern and delivering individualized nerve stimulation. Prior rounds were in 2024 ($50 million), $77 million in 2021, and a $55 million Series B in 2019. Trinity Capital release, Mobihealthnews

Joyful Health, a financial operating system for providers, raised a $17 million Series A for a total of $22 million. It is designed as a claims denial intelligence and recovery infrastructure to work within an existing revenue cycle management system and connect claims data. The round was led by CRV with participation from seed investors XYZ Venture Capital, Designer Fund, Inflect Capital (the healthcare investment arm of Vituity, the largest physician-owned partnership in the United States), and Go Global Ventures (led by Commure founder Diede van Lamoen). Providers lose over $125 billion annually in lost revenue from unpaid or denied claims.  Joyful Health blog, Yahoo Finance

Back in the popular stomping grounds of telemental health, Tava Health raised a $40 million Series C. Tava, based in Salt Lake City, markets a  behavioral health platform to providers, employers, and health plans. It also announced three new products: Symphony for providers, TavaCare for the employer market, and Tava Guide for health plans, health systems, and care coordinators. Approximately 5,000 mental health providers are a part of the Tava Health network. Investors were led by Centana Growth Partners with participation from Catalyst Investors, Blue Heron Ventures, Peterson Ventures, and Springtide Ventures. Tava has raised $73 million since 2020 with its last raise in 2024. Yahoo Finance (release), Behavioral Health Business, Mobihealthnews

And an interesting partnership

Popular actor Jeremy Renner is partnering with public safety and first responder platform RapidSOS.  NYC (!)-based RapidSOS originally specialized in the technical aspects of public 911 systems and then developed integrations to link data from over 350 million connected devices, apps, and sensors directly to 911 centers and first responders. Increasingly, these integrations are AI-powered and even incorporate drones. Mr. Renner relates very well to first responders, having his own near-death experience on New Year’s Day 2023 where his snowcat machine rolled over and crushed him, breaking 38 bones along with blunt chest trauma. He is the focus of a 30-second documentary leading up to next Wednesday’s (29 April) premiere of Behind the Emergency. He is not only helping to tell their development story from his experience, but also as a partner plus investor. Mobihealthnews 

Even famous doctors have their identity stolen: Dr. Eric Topol “authors” an apparently fake, AI-generated paper

April 23, 2026 | by | No Comments

And now, it’s author names on research papers being spoofed. Eric Topol, MD, the noted physician, cardiologist, health tech maven, and director/founder of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, just experienced Grand Theft Auto on his identity. He was listed as the lead author of a paper entitled “Implementation Science for AI Integration in Digital Health Systems”, along with five other author/contributors. It was published in the “Journal of Digital Health Implementation” by Ellinger Publishing Media on 29 March.

Except, as Dr. Topol wrote in a post on his Substack blog, “Ground Truths“, he never wrote it.

From his post along with a screenshot of the ‘paper’ and a link:

“This is a FRAUDULENT paper, AI-generated. My name was used as an author and I had nothing to do with it, never saw it until today

The “Editors” Angelo Rossi Mori, David Mensah, and Zarnie Khadjesari and this “Journal” should be reported.”

Substack readers are often commenters, and your Editor is no exception. So she did some digging and commented on Dr. Topol’s post [Editor’s further notes in brackets]:

Dr. Topol, the link on your post [he provided a link to the publication] is not only going nowhere (to blank screen/’this site can’t be reached”), but also trying to reach the e-PubMed.co.uk site by entering it directly goes to the same screen. When I searched under Ellinger Publishing in Google and the same URL came to the top under them [see screenshot right below], the link equally does not work. The UK E-PubMed Central is now Europe PMC concentrating on UK/EU research and partners with the US NIH PubMed site on certain papers, from what I have read online.

Gemini came up with this about Ellinger: “Ellinger Publishing Media: An independent academic publisher specializing in open-access journals, specifically focusing on artificial intelligence, medicine, social sciences, and interdisciplinary research.” Again, links in the AI summary to e-pubmed.co.uk do not work. My conclusion is that this is a total spoof/hack using a URL similar to the former UK E-PubMed and this Ellinger Publishing is a fraud. I don’t know how you picked it up but it’s no longer reachable.

But, as they say on direct response TV…there’s more. I replied to my own comment, “The paper has a link [that goes to another website], Zenodo. It says clearly that it has been withdrawn from there too. Reason for removal—copyright infringement.”

https://zenodo.org/records/19337363

So what happened? Its withdrawal is as mysterious as its appearance.

At this point, we can draw only certain conclusions.

When research papers, apparently AI-generated, are being fraudulently posted with names as prominent as Dr. Eric Topol’s plus five other authors (who may or may not be real–have not checked), for content that is clearly academic-appearing (apparently a meta-analysis), anyone who publishes or has a public persona is in trouble. Big trouble. And with little defense against this happening.

But even worse, unless the Ellinger Publishing Media site itself has been hacked, this may well be a fraudulent publisher claiming open access journal status.

  • My prompt on Gemini, FWIW, indicates that Ellinger Publishing is a ‘vanity press’ for books, not a journal publisher; read for yourself here. So Gemini contradicted itself when asked the prompt differently.
  • The journal is fake as well. A search on Google on the name gives you a link to a website called Conference.Researchbib.com, but when you click on the link for the journal, it goes to the same E-PubMed UK ‘this site can’t be reached’ URL as above.

Open access journals per se are controversial enough since they exist to publish non-peer reviewed materials. For studies in progress, this is valid as a platform for further discussion and research. But it doesn’t and cannot carry the weight, the rigor of peer review. We all know that less than rigorous studies used by less than scrupulous companies have leveraged open access journals for sales/survival proof purposes.

Fraudulent open access journals on mysterious websites that spoof the names of once-authentic journal websites just take it one step further. One wonders how long has this been going on.

This Editor invites Readers to give their perspective on this matter.

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

April 23, 2026 | by | No Comments

A two-year+ story about teleprescriber illegalities that isn’t getting near enough attention. The Cerebral saga is far from over. Telehealth prescriber Zealthy, founded by former Cerebral CEO Kyle Robertson, is in deepening ‘hot water’ with the Department of Justice. The DOJ filed a motion last week in Federal Court seeking an immediate asset freeze and receivership for Zealthy. This is to stop what the DOJ called a “runaway campaign of lawbreaking” by both Robertson and Zealthy, “which is actively deceiving telehealth patients, endangering their safety, and raiding their bank accounts.” The asset freeze and receivership is being requested by DOJ because Zealthy’s liquidity is marginal at best.

Zealthy sells weight loss, birth control, ED, hair loss, mental health, and other prescription medications online. The DOJ is citing them for using the names and licenses of doctors who didn’t work there to fill thousands of prescriptions without the physicians’ knowledge or clinical supervision. The amended DOJ complaint states that both Zealthy and Kyle Robertson engaged in “systemic improper and dangerous telemedical practices,” including “the routine ordering of prescriptions by foreign call-center contractors and other non-clinicians with no medical license and the systemic misuse of the name and National Provider Identifier (NPI) number of doctors to order many thousands of prescriptions for patients they did not actually treat or order a prescription for, and without their knowledge or clinical supervision—and even when they have not even been employed by Zealthy.” Reportedly, the stolen identity of one doctor was used to write 8,000 prescriptions.

Zealthy lost its medical merchant certification from credentialing organization LegitScript in 2025 after it failed to disclose the DOJ litigation. Ad platforms and payment processors dropped Zealthy, which then created shell companies to get around this. Company executives also used credit cards to buy their own subscriptions, diluting the rate of consumer credit card chargebacks to improve their transaction dispute rates, a move to make them look better for their bankers and lenders.

This is part of the ongoing Federal lawsuit that started in June 2024 around deceptive practices that violated distribution of controlled substances, the FTC Act and Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act (ROSCA). It mainly covered activities during the pandemic. Companies named in the original complaint were Cerebral, Zealthy (renamed Gronk Inc), Bruno Health PA, and also named executives Kyle Robertson, former Cerebral executive Alex Martelli, and executive German Echeverry. The DOJ settled the controlled substances distribution charges against Cerebral in late 2024 [TTA 8 Nov 2024] but not the charges against Mr. Robertson, who departed Cerebral in May 2022 at the start of the company’s DOJ and DEA problems. The amended complaint called out Kyle Robertson specifically: “Robertson’s lawbreaking is only becoming more brazen, and dangerous.” One wonders if Mr. Robertson is considering residences in low extradition countries. Sherwood News, FierceHealthcare, HealthExec, HIStalk

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

April 23, 2026 | by | No Comments

This one’s a puzzlement. This Editor was ‘tipped off’ to a bid protest filed against the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), specifically against the Office of Information Technology (OIT) Industry Day that took place on 27 March. It was found on the Government Accountability Office (GAO) website, filed on 17 April by The Gilchrist Law Firm, PA on behalf of an undisclosed vendor, under the solicitation number for the OIT Industry Day. The update from the source, Orange Slices, a government contract (GovCon) news site, stated that “the vendor” (whoever enters the info into GAO) “made a mistake in their entry to GAO and it has nothing to do with the industry day…” It has still not been fixed on the GAO website on the bid protest page.

Run out and buy TDOC stock! That’s the advice from “Insider Monkey” publishing on Yahoo Finance. In fact the Monkey rates Teladoc “among the best medical AI stocks to buy now”. The article is an overview of the Pineal Capital Management call for $200 million in share buybacks, breaking up the Integrated Care and BetterHelp businesses, and other shareholder friendly cash-generating ‘reforms’ [TTA 3 April]. Teladoc’s 2026 revenue forecast under CEO Chuck DaVita is essentially flat–$2.47 to $2.59 billion versus 2025’s $2.53 billion. This Editor noted a small rise in the stock price in the past month of about 70 cents. There may be some drama around the Q1 earnings report which will be issued next Wednesday (29 April). 

The interestingly named Treehub launches out of Stanford University. It’s designed to bridge the gap between the extreme early stage of a developing healthcare idea or technology, usually out of an academic lab, to where the formed company is fundable. It seems to be a combination of a healthcare tech scout, a venture studio with hands-on support, and an incubator community, with the capital of a venture fund. The Los Altos-based residency program is funded via the AI Health Fund and has some heavyweight names attached to it: Mary Minno, herself a former venture-backed founder now at Google, a brace of Stanford professors, Derek Minno of Point Capital, and two Wojcickis: Anne Wojcicki, founder of 23andMe, as Operating Partner and her mother, Esther Wojcicki, as a Founding Advisor. One wonders how Anne Wojcicki is faring in rebuilding 23andMe’s business and the 23andMe Research Institute; certainly they haven’t been shy about new products such as add-ins of African genetic groups, reconstructing ancestors’ DNA, and genetic predictors for GLP-1 effectiveness (press release list). Treehub release, Mobihealthnews interview with Ms. Minno and Esther Wojcicki, ‘the godmother of Silicon Valley’.

Raises this week so far have been slim. Medical commercial intelligence platform AcuityMD announced a raise of $80 million in a Series C led by existing investor StepStone Group, with additional participation from Benchmark, Redpoint Ventures, ICONIQ, and Atreides Management. Previous investment was $76 million. The company’s valuation is nearing the $1 billion mark at $955 million. AcuityMD’s platform helps medtech companies towards commercial insights that are typically scattered across claims databases, FDA filings, government records, and market signals. The fresh funding will be used to accelerate platform capabilities via AI. The company claims as customers 16 of the top 20 medtech companies and helping to identify $34 billion in pipeline. Release, Mobihealthnews

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

April 22, 2026 | by | No Comments

Save the dates, be a speaker, and book the tickets! One of the oldest international organizations in digital health, ISfTeH (the International Society for Telemedicine & eHealth) is meeting again for the 29th year. This year’s host will be member organization Deggendorf Institute of Technology (DIT) at their European Campus Rottal-Inn (ECRI). The ISfTeH meeting will be in conjunction with DIT’s annual DigiHealthDay (DHD) conference in Pfarrkirchen, Germany, 11-13 November.

The DHD Conference is a global forum for education, research, innovation, and networking in digital health, presented under the theme “Global Digital Health – today, tomorrow, and beyond.” The annual DHD conference is a culmination of DIT’s series of onsite and online events throughout the year, all centered on the question “How are digital technologies transforming health and care around the world?” 

The ISfTeH track at the event invites proposal submissions from members. If you are interested in presenting your work on current research or practical experience, submit it at https://forms.gle/hMH9NtjHUgDhK68S6 by Monday 4 May 2026. Questions? Email info@isfteh.org.

Perspectives: What Healthcare Can Learn from Formula One About AI

April 21, 2026 | by | No Comments

TTA has an open invitation to industry leaders to contribute to our Perspectives non-promotional opinion and thought leadership area. We welcome back Iris Telehealth for today’s topic on how telehealth and clinical dashboards should be like modern Formula 1 race cars’–displaying the relevant information for that patient visit and increasing clinician presence versus being overwhelmed by data and documentation load. The author, David Bartley, is Iris Telehealth’s Chief Solutions Officer, with over 20 years of experience leading healthcare product strategy across payers, providers, and population health organizations including MedeAnalytics, Cotivi (formerly Verisk Health), eviCore, Healthways and Humana.

Behavioral health organizations are already absorbing a level of administrative pressure that has nothing to do with clinical care. I’ve spoken with CEOs of rural mental health clinics who are deciding between keeping a clinician on staff and sustaining the administrative infrastructure required to stay compliant.

One told me he had seven people on staff doing nothing but collecting state reporting data — compliance work that consumed payroll he would rather put toward clinical capacity. That tradeoff is exactly what funding pressure forces, and it is where AI can do something genuinely useful: absorbing the administrative work so that the next available dollar goes toward a clinician, not a spreadsheet.

What’s keeping organizations from achieving this reality with AI? Well, most of the industry is measuring AI’s value primarily through operational metrics, like how many more patients a provider can see, how fast documentation gets processed, or how lean an operation can run. Those are important operational metrics — but on their own, they don’t tell us whether care actually improved.

The organizations that figure out how to use AI to deepen the quality of each encounter, rather than multiply the number of them, will move care forward.

Leading health systems are already building toward it. At Mayo Clinic, for example, investments in integrated, AI-enabled platforms are helping bring together multimodal clinical data and advanced analytics in ways that surface the most relevant insights at the moment of care. It’s a signal that the industry is moving beyond AI as an efficiency tool and toward AI as a clinical intelligence layer.

Surfacing what matters, exactly when it matters

When I think about what AI should look like inside a clinical encounter, I keep coming back to Formula One. A driver at race speed does not receive every data point the car is generating. They get tire temps, oil pressure, wind shear — the six or seven variables that matter most in that exact moment, surfaced at eye level in what is known as a heads-up display, so they can keep their focus on the track.

A telehealth dashboard should work the same way. Data like relevant patient history, active risk factors and behavioral signals worth exploring, all fixed at the top of the screen. Something buried in a clinical note from two years ago that has not been relevant for months could resurface the moment the conversation makes it useful again.  The goal of AI in behavioral health should not be to simply accelerate care delivery but to increase the signal-to-noise ratio inside each clinical moment.

The provider never has to look away from the patient to find it, and the patient never loses the sense that the person on the other side of the screen is fully present. In behavioral health especially, where the therapeutic relationship is the mechanism of care, the quality of that connection often determines whether treatment actually works.

The value of presence

A JAMA Network study published in October 2025, with data collected in 2024, on ambient AI scribes found that documentation load directly erodes the attention providers can bring to each encounter. Clearing that load only to fill the time with more appointments trades one problem for another.

Providers need time between encounters to process what they heard, notice what did not get said and carry genuine context into the next conversation. That kind of reflection is where clinical judgment actually develops and is exactly what gets squeezed out when efficiency becomes the primary design constraint.

Patients who feel that a provider is fully present are more likely to disclose accurately, follow through on treatment, and stay engaged over time. AI designed around that outcome becomes a powerful tool that actually earns its place in the workflow.

Formula One teams do not build heads-up displays to increase the number of races a driver competes in. They build them to make each race winnable. The industry would do well to borrow that distinction.

Chutes & Ladders: Click Therapeutics raises $50M, lays off 27%; India’s IKS Health in talks to buy TruBridge for over $600M; TELCOR buys Sample for RCM expansion

April 15, 2026 | by | No Comments

So far, not a lot of ups and downs this week….

What’s both a Ladder and a Chute?

Click Therapeutics put together a healthy Series D of $50 million to commercialize its digital therapeutic for the treatment of the experiential negative symptoms of schizophrenia. That’s a cheerful earful, except for the reported 27% of their employees who just got chuted with a pink slip. In the reported range of 100-250 employees, that means 27 to 67 employees being told ‘no work for you’ after bringing the company to the commercialization point. That is a deep cut.

Boehringer Ingelheim and Click jointly developed the digital technology, which received Breakthrough Device Designation by the FDA in 2024 as an investigational technology. It provides an an adjunct to standard antipsychotic therapy through interactive psychosocial intervention techniques.

With the $50 million funding, Boehringer turned over commercialization to Click. What is odd here is that companies with investigational tech and large partners usually keep the staff lean. Commercialization and funding then means that hires change from researchers to marketers, sales, and compliance, for a net gain. The next question is…when?

Austin Speier, chief strategy officer, commented to Behavioral Health Business: “While we are incredibly excited about the potential of CT-155, that shift means making hard changes to our team to match our new commercial mission. These were not decisions we made lightly, and we are deeply grateful to everyone who helped us reach this stage.” CT-155, as it is formally known, does not yet have FDA clearance. It has a Phase III study, CONVOKE (NCT05838625), a Phase III, multicenter, randomized, double-blind, 16-week study evaluating the efficacy and safety of CT-155 versus a digital control app. Neither the BHB and FierceBiotech articles nor Click’s release reveal a timeline for FDA clearance and marketing. Which means that final FDA approval may be more distant than the funding and turnover make it appear.

Indian RCM provider IKS Health seeks to add TruBridge’s RCM for $675 million. Talks are reportedly in an advanced stage with an all-cash offer funded by a $675 million debt facility from banks like Citi, Deutsche Bank, and JP Morgan. It covers both purchase price and refinances TruBridge’s existing debt. No formal offer has been tendered to TruBridge’s board or shareholders. Surprisingly, this has gained little notice in the US healthcare press.

TruBridge provides HIT, an EHR, and RCM for health systems and practices. It is both established from the late 1990s, when RCM was new, and fairly large–it serves 1,500 healthcare organizations and employs 3,500 people with revenue of $347 million. It IPO’d in 2002 as CPSI on Nasdaq, converting to TruBridge in 2024. IKS Health is HQ’d in Mumbai but has a US HQ in Texas. It has 13,350 employees and a global base of 600 clients. It’s public on the National Stock Exchange of India Limited (NSE) and BSE Limited (BSE). In addition to RCM, it offers care coordination, risk and optimization, and utilization management tools for value-based care. Digital Health News (India)

Also in RCM, TELCOR is buying Sample Healthcare. Amount and transitions are undisclosed. Like TruBridge, TELCOR started in the late 1990s. It serves both hospital and independent labs’ RCM for billing plus point-of-care and laboratory data. It has a 57% market share in the US for point-of-care solutions and serves over 2,700 hospitals and laboratories. Sample will add an AI-driven workflow engine that will be marketed as a separate product. It received seed funding out of Y Combinator in 2024. It’s easy to determine that Sample is a tuck-in acquisition for TELCOR.  TELCOR release.

VA’s Oracle EHR resumes go-lives at four Michigan systems–finally

April 15, 2026 | by | No Comments

On schedule, the VA’s EHR Modernization resumes after a three-year-plus hiatus. The four VA Medical Centers (VAMCs) announcing their go-lives over this past weekend are all in Michigan’s VISN 10: Ann Arbor, Battle Creek, Detroit and Saginaw. Four more are planned for June, also in VISN 10 (a VISN is a VA region): Dayton Ohio, Chillicothe Ohio, Cincinnati, and Cincinnati-Fort Thomas Kentucky, then three more in August and two more in October. Based on the schedule, calendar 2026 will have a total of 13 system rollouts, all in VISN 10 except for the last in October, which will include VISN 20’s Anchorage, Alaska VA Health System. [TTA 8 Feb]

The only exception to the hiatus was a joint Military Health System/VA implementation at Lovell in Chicago, which has had its own bumps after its start in March 2024. VA previously had five disastrous implementations, VA Mann-Grandstaff (VISN 20) in October 2020 and four more in 2022. After many actions to fix them, the VA halted implementations in April 2023. Even in 2025, in its agency report, the VA’s Office of Inspector General in their March 2025 report, and their January 2026 report on VA’s Management and Performance Challenges for FY 2025 found a distinct lack of VA staff confidence in the EHRM and its performance to date [TTA 8 Feb].

Strategically, confining the rollouts to one VISN and a small group at a time is smart because of the geographical adjacency and not scattering efforts all over the US. After these 13 however, there are 157 more. VA has pegged a full completion by 2031.

In its press release announcing the April go-lives, the VA identified four factors that got the EHRM off the dime. FTR: 

  • Fixing hundreds of problems related to the initial rollout of the EHR system at the six original VA sites. Some of these related to efforts by local VA facilities to customize the system, which only complicated the process.
  • Eliminating the bureaucracy that was holding the project back. VA replaced that unwieldy system with a single council that answers to top VA leaders, increasing accountability and making it easier to find and implement common sense decisions.
  • Getting local facilities more involved. As VA’s lead official on the EHR rollout, VA Deputy Secretary Paul Lawrence has visited all 13 deployment sites this year and has engaged directly with facility leaders at each location to answer questions and make sure these sites are ready to go.
  • Hiring more people to ensure the rollout goes smoothly. VA has already hired dozens of staff to help with the rollout in Michigan and other locations and is in the process of hiring a total of 400 people.

Last year, VA terminated contracts for at least six independent contractors supporting the EHRM as part of a mass cleanup of department contracts. FNN

Federal News Network, Healthcare Dive

There is nothing in the release, of course, about Oracle Health’s manpower cuts, rumored to be 30%, nor the persistent talk that the EHR unit will be sold or spun off. Or the effects that the recent indictment of a former EHRM head will have in Congress. In this Editor’s view, Oracle’s corporate redirection to and big bet on AI datacenters strongly suggests that Oracle will not be engaged with this deployment by the time 2031 rolls around.

Two weekend ‘must reads’: the New Yorker’s Sam Altman/OpenAI exposé–and comments; a further deep dive into Carbon Health’s implosion

April 10, 2026 | by

Too long to summarize or opine on this week–but a must for your weekend reading. Grab the cuppa for the talk of AI World–a New Yorker dissection of Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI (link below). To say it is an exposé worthy, at first glance, of the Old School (ain’t no school like the Old School–Ed.) on probably the most important company of AD 2026 is to undersell it. It’s a long article and you’ll need at least one break.

OpenAI, founded as a non-profit with integrity at its core to “prioritize the safety of humanity over the company’s success, or even its survival”, recapitalized last year as a for-profit corporation with 26% of the shares owned by the OpenAI Foundation. It is now a trillion-dollar company that had no trouble raising a paltry $122 billion last week [TTA 2 April] though arguments are made that at least some of that money are IOUs or contingent. ChatGPT has become almost generic for AI, like Kleenex has become for tissues. The battles over control and direction of the company are now totally controlled by Sam Altman, whom former colleagues are not shy about pointing out his difficulty with the truth and a pattern of deceit, for instance to his board, to employees, and Microsoft. Yet everyone continues to do business with him. The FOMO Factor is very strong.

Mr. Altman makes extremely broad statements on the future of work (most traditional managerial, healthcare, and IT jobs will be taken over by AI, thus most of us will be unemployed), has easy access to President Donald Trump, as well as other world executives, and may, as the headline barks, control our future. Thus, he is a person of consequence.

My read so far of this is that within OpenAI, there is no one to counterbalance Mr. Altman’s immense ambition, his desire to dominate and win, not only with AI but also over all business and everyday life. These are character issues that also show up in aspects of his personal life, detailed in the article. If past results are predictive of the future, this flaw usually curdles into the desire to control countries and a complete disrespect for the rest of us leading our lives. 

Sam Altman May Control Our Future–Can He Be Trusted?, 

I will offer two LinkedIn comment posts on this article from an AI person I respect, the head of Curiouser.ai, Stephen Klein. Many of his posts on LinkedIn deal with what AI can and cannot do in business. He writes that he is “committed to designing technology that augments people, creates jobs, and elevates humanity. It’s time we all got back to thinking for ourselves.” 7 April, 8 April 

Our second Must Read is from Sergei Polevikov’s AI Health Uncut, a long analysis on the failure of Carbon Health and what it tells us in “this business we have chosen”. “What The Hell Went Wrong?” and its implications need answers–because it’s being repeated again and again. Today’s article (9 April) is Part 1 of 2, sets the stage about the mistakes made (insiders talk) and, with full credit, springboards off Stuart Miller’s (Haverin Consulting) original analysis made at the time of the Chapter 11 reorg. What we called the ‘Ominous Parallels’ was a Must Read here on 12 February.  TTA (as Telecare Aware, our original name) and this article are also mentioned twice (thanks!).

Those who have yet to subscribe for Mr. Polevikov’s analytic, erudite, and revealing (Emperor’s New Clothes!) POVs can read part of this article for free–but seriously, if you’re in this business, the subscription is worth your money. He also podcasts (links are on his Substack, link at lower right sidebar).

An early and scandalous publisher (before he utterly lost it), Matt Drudge, used to say that he ‘went where the stink is’. Mr. Polevikov does the same. The stink is of our broken primary care reimbursement system, the Covid steroids that pumped up the company, flailing management running through money like drugs, and good ideas for patient care buried under incompetence. 

Perspectives: Exploring the Telehealth Extension: Building Infrastructures for Better Access

April 9, 2026 | by

TTA has an open invitation to industry leaders to contribute to our Perspectives non-promotional opinion and thought leadership area. Today’s topic is on how the most recent two-year extension of Medicare telehealth flexibilities necessitate a more robust healthcare infrastructure to better utilize the additional data generated by remote patient monitoring. The author, Jiang Li, Ph.D., is founder and CEO of Vivalink, Inc., a Silicon Valley company developing digital health technology solutions for remote patient monitoring in healthcare and clinical research.

Ensuring equal healthcare access to Americans across the country is an ongoing effort. The latest funding bill from Congress looks to improve access by expanding where and how people receive care through a two-year extension of Medicare telehealth flexibilities. The bill adds to the five-year extension to the CMS Acute Hospital Care at Home (AHCAH) waiver, which allows hospitals to deliver acute inpatient care in patients’ homes with full Medicare reimbursement. Since its launch in 2020, the program has continued to receive extensions in the continued effort to ensure Americans living in rural or remote areas receive the healthcare they need.

Under the current Medicare extensions, telehealth provides real-time medical and mental health appointments over secure video from a patient’s location, along with a wide range of Part B services such as specialist consults, rehab, and psychotherapy. This latest extension allows beneficiaries to continue receiving this care from an expanded list of healthcare providers. While the original waiver was authorized in response to COVID-19, research shows that around 17% of healthcare visits were conducted via telehealth modalities post-2020, with over 116 million global users listed in 2024.

Telehealth helps address a gap in healthcare access felt by many Americans living in rural locations. While the extension provides flexibility for those patients to continue receiving remote care, it isn’t enough to close the gaps in American healthcare on its own. What will define its success is a deliberate investment in infrastructure from health systems, policymakers, and technology developers alike.

Exploring the Access Problem

Nearly 80% of rural America is classified as medically underserved, facing barriers such as provider shortages, high poverty rates, and a rapidly aging population. For Medicare-eligible patients in these communities, the obstacles to consistent care, including transportation limitations to caregiver responsibilities, can often prove to be insurmountable, blocking them from necessary medical care.

We see the direct result of these consequences in the data. One significant example is cardiac rehabilitation — more than one million Americans become eligible each year, yet fewer than 20% participate. Even among those referred, less than 34% enroll, largely because the model still demands repeated clinic visits that many patients simply cannot manage. This has been a slow but sure systemic struggle, embedded in how care has historically been designed and delivered.

We can see these consequences further compounded by issues with traditional monitoring. Episodic, in-clinic measurements offer only brief snapshots of a patient’s health, often missing transient but dangerous events occurring between visits. A study at Brigham and Women’s Hospital found that 27% of cardiac surgery patients experienced new atrial fibrillation episodes after discharge that traditional follow-up would have missed entirely. This post-discharge period, long treated as a clinical blind spot, illustrates the value of supporting remote care.

Making Changes for a Stronger Infrastructure

The outcomes of the AHCAH waiver have been significant: an analysis of over 5,800 patients treated under the waiver at Mass General Brigham found in-care mortality below 1%, compared to a national inpatient average of approximately 2%, with only 7% requiring return hospitalization. The cost savings are notable as well, with one review finding that hospital-at-home (HaH) patients cost approximately 20% less than traditional inpatients, allowing Medicare to spend $1,000 to $3,300 less per case across common conditions like pneumonia, heart failure, and sepsis in the 30 days post-discharge.

To ensure similar outcomes and savings at scale, a stronger infrastructure is needed. We’re already seeing movement in the replacement of traditional, episodic data by medical-grade wearable sensors capable of continuous ECG monitoring, temperature tracking, and real-time data transmission. We’re already seeing solutions for issues such as interrupted data capture during connectivity gaps, simply by expanding the storage capabilities of devices that support rural Medicare populations.

Interoperability is equally important. Biometric data from wearables should flow directly into electronic health records and centralized clinical dashboards, delivering real-time alerts without burdening staff with manual data entry. For regional and mid-sized hospitals that serve the most underserved populations, this means access to modular platforms rather than expensive third-party bundles that absorb reimbursements before they reach patient care.

Supporting a Stronger Future

The decision to extend Medicare telehealth flexibilities is a market signal for health systems. Regulatory uncertainty has been one of the greatest barriers to the advancement of remote patient monitoring platforms, wearable infrastructure, and other programs. When reimbursement timelines are measured in months, it is difficult to justify multi-year infrastructure investments. As the CMS update extends reimbursement by two years, at-home care now has the opportunity to become an evolving standard of Medicare delivery worth investing in.

The opportunity extends well beyond Medicare. The same remote patient monitoring infrastructure enabling home-based acute care is powering decentralized clinical trials, expanding access for older and rural patients historically excluded from research. These opportunities for growth and inclusivity, supported by CMS, signal that at-home care is becoming a permanent feature of how Medicare is delivered.

Funding/deal roundup: WHOOP’s $575M Giant raise, Anthropic buys med AI startup for $400M, early stage fundings for Jimini, Insight Health; Noom buys compounder; Mount Sinai NY to embed OpenEvidence

April 9, 2026 | by

Deals lately are very large…or very small. All have “AI” somewhere. Some unusual ones this past week.

The WHOOP wearable definitely whooped it up with a $575 million Series G (for Giant) funding. It’s a fitness and health watch that is reasonably trim and presentable sans a screen. It tracks sleep, activity, heart health and menstrual cycles (if applicable) through measurement of heart rate variability (HRV), resting heart rate (RHR), respiratory rate, and blood oxygen levels, and appeals to the very athletic with metrics around recovery and strain. The Boston-based company claims 2.5 million members internationally; in 2025 it marked 2025 growth of 103% and exited at the infamous ‘run rate’ metric of $1.1 billion. Their AI twist is around biometric data and how it is used to guide tracking and performance. It is heavily pitched to elite sports with famous athlete endorsers/investors such as soccer star Cristiano Rinaldo, basketball’s LeBron James, and golfer Rory McElroy.

The round was led by Collaborative Fund and includes global participation from a gang of investors including 2PointZero Group, Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Mubadala Investment Company, Abbott, Mayo Clinic, Macquarie Capital (entities administered by Macquarie Capital), Glade Brook, B-Flexion, IVP, Foundry, Accomplice, Affinity Partners, Promus Ventures, and Bullhound Capital alongside a group of prominent global athletes and individual investors. The additional funds will be used for growth in the US plus international expansion across Europe, the GCC, Latin America, and Asia. The wonderfully subjective (by investors) metric of valuation stands at $10.1 billion. Total funding since 2012 is over $900 million.

WHOOP received the infamous Warning Letter from FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH) in July 2025 regarding marketing claims for Blood Pressure Insights (BPI) on the basis that the company did not have an approved application for premarket approval (PMA) or 510(k) approval of that feature. The founder/CEO is contesting FDA as he believes that the feature is for general wellness purposes and is covered under the 21st Century Cures Act.  Mobihealthnews, WHOOP release

(In all honesty, this Editor had only vaguely heard of it, but her idea of a expensive watch usually has the name Elgin or Hamilton on the face and is usually antique (Omega too, sigh). In fitness watches, she thinks of Apple, Samsung, and the low-profile Withings (which makes traditionally styled smartwatches) but none of them have persuaded her to part with several hundred dollars.)

Anthropic buys a tiny bio research software developer for a stunning $400 million in stock. Coefficient Bio was founded only eight months ago and reportedly had only nine employees. It was so stealthy that it never got past the placeholder website. The amount was reported by its 50% owner, venture capital firm Dimension, which realized a hefty 38,513% IRR on the investment. Coefficient was working on AI models and software for biological research.  Apparently founder Samuel Stanton and his team will join Anthropic’s Health Care Life Sciences area. It’s interesting that Anthropic is building up their healthcare footprint after making their customized AI available to both consumers and clinicians, quite a contrast to OpenAI’s purchase of TPTN, a small podcaster of tech news and personalities (CNBC). HISTalk 4/6/26, Silicon Angle, Newcomer

Early stage companies also nabbed some decent fundings

Behavioral health therapy assistant Jimini Health raised $17 million in seed funding from M13, Town Hall Ventures, LionBird, Zetta Venture Partners, and OneMind, bringing total funding to more than $25 million. Their AI-forward (of course) Sage platform fills the niche left by fully remote telementalhealth companies in supporting large behavioral health provider organizations. NYC-based Jimini  promotes a clinician-supervised and controlled patient-facing, reimbursement-ready and compliant infrastructure with licensed clinicians maintaining oversight of every patient interaction. According to the release, the funding will be used to build partnerships with “several of the largest behavioral health provider organizations in the country and expand Sage’s clinical capabilities across comorbidities, care settings, and patient engagement modalities”. Release, Behavioral Health Business, Mobihealthnews

Insight Health’s $11 million Series A will be used to scale its agentic AI platform. The round was led by Standard Capital, with participation from Kindred Ventures, Pear VC, Eudemian, 43 and ElevenLabs. Insight Health uses AI to automate routine clinical and non-clinical tasks such as phone and front-desk coordination, referral and fax processing, pre-clinical intake, and clinical documentation. For instance their agents engage with patients directly via voice or text. Current customer base is in clinics. Their Aura AI Scribe and Virtual Care Assistant are available in athenahealth’s Marketplace. Their total funding is about $16 million. Release, Mobihealthnews

Short takes:

Noom buys 503A licensed pharmacy Tailor Made Compounding (TMC). The buy, according to Noom, will enable them to expand beyond weight loss GLP-1s further into the healthy aging segment, with longevity peptides, hormone replacement, and cosmetics. Noom has weathered several pivots, starting in 2008 with fitness apps, then added behavioral change with a weight-loss coaching app in 2017. It has pretty much settled into the lucrative e-prescribing and wellness ‘preventative care’ area targeting health plans and employers. TMC’s client base includes 400 clinics and multiple telehealth partners, which presumably Noom will let them maintain. Acquisition cost and staff transitions were not disclosed beyond integration ‘later this summer’.  Release, Mobihealthnews

‘IT’ clinical information search engine/AI chatbot OpenEvidence inks deal with NY’s Mount Sinai Health System. It is Mount Sinai’s first enterprise-wide AI deployment and integration across clinical roles, according to the health system’s announcement last week. It will be integrated into their Epic EHR. OpenEvidence, with a eyeblinking valuation of $12 billion [TTA 13 Feb], claims a daily average usage by 40% of US doctors in 10,000 hospitals and medical centers of their free search engine trained on journals and clinical medical data only. It fills a gap that competitors Doximity, Epocrates, and Medscape aren’t doing. It has added clinical trial matching to its capabilities filtering trials by study design, enrollment status, and geographic proximity. This adds on to Sutter Health’s integration into doctors’ Epic workflows announced earlier this year. Healthcare IT News