A Must-Read potpourri: the ‘math’ of AI data center builds, healthcare AI failures, telehealth in schools, Hippocratic AI’s problems, the loss of empathy.

May 14, 2026 | by | 1 Comment

Your Editor will be Away From The Desk more than a bit over the next two weeks that lead up to the US Memorial Day holiday. I’ve collected seven articles to read and consider over the next few days. Enjoy!

Where Are All The Data Centers?

Author: Ed Zitron.  Self-published on Where’s Your Ed At?

If you’re puzzled about the ‘math’ of data centers–what capacity is available now, what is actually online/operational, and what’s the pipeline like–you will appreciate the detail that Mr. Zitron has gone to in cataloging those and much more. It turns out that we are not in the Land of Math, but in the Land of Myth, ruled by the Great Oz.

Despite what the builders say, and Microsoft’s and Oracle’s ever-cheery press releases, operational data centers are a fraction of what’s needed now or projected. The centers take 18-24 months to build and then many more months to complete–to fit out with chips, cooling, power, and networking that links sites and the end users. The AI giants, despite all the money flowing their way, will run out of money before the operating capacity they need gets online. Every data center takes 18-24 months to build, and even with retrofitting older data centers, the capacity is not there, nor for some time to come. In other words, the cavalry is in a neighboring country, much less the next state. Nobody has yet built an operating 1 GW data center. Centers are in megawatts and that, not many MWs. 

FTA:

  • “Oracle is building 7.1GW of total capacity for OpenAI, and keeps — laughably! — saying 2027 or 2028, when at this rate, Stargate Abilene won’t be done until mid-2027, and the rest either never get finished or are done in 2030 or later.”
  • “This is setting up a horrifying situation where Oracle desperately needs OpenAI to pay it for capacity that doesn’t exist, and if it ever gets built, it’s likely to be years after OpenAI has run out of money, which is the same problem that Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have with their $748 billion of deals with Anthropic and OpenAI, though thanks to the $340 billion or more necessary to build the Stargate data centers, Oracle’s problems are far more existential.”

The article also makes the point that Oracle does not have the fallback businesses that Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have to cushion the blow of AI failure. Oracle has the bottomless pit of Oracle Health, only one part of which is the VA EHR. It has a crushing burden of a massive debt load, the most recent being financed by a large bond fund since banks wouldn’t touch it. It kicked 30,000 employees and their expertise  to the curb. Will Larry Ellison sell a yacht or an island to help finance this as a 40% owner? More in Oracle Steps Back From The Debt Brink and Oracle’s Rock and Hard Place in Abilene

This is one long, well-written, and researched analysis by Mr. Zitron, whose expertise is in PR and is a well-known Silicon Valley critic. 

Telehealth in Schools: Expanding Student Access in a Hybrid Health Care System

Author: Paul Samargedlis. Published on Telehealth.org

Healthcare shortages across the US are affecting K-12 schools and children’s health. School-based telehealth programs can reduce absenteeism, expand access to mental health care, and deliver preventive care, bringing that care to where children already are. School-based telehealth programs in states such as Texas and North Carolina have demonstrated measurable improvements in attendance and emergency department utilization. Much will have to change in coordinating efforts and obtaining funding among school systems, local providers, and governments.

Artificial Intelligence Acquisitions: Agencies Should Collect and Apply Lessons Learned to Improve Future Procurements

Author: Government Accountability Office (GAO) Report to Congressional Requesters. April 2026 (49 pages)

Federal agencies reportedly more than doubled their use of artificial intelligence (AI) from 2023 to 2024, and they used a range of approaches to acquire additional AI capabilities through fiscal year 2025. In April 2025, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued guidance to help agencies acquire AI responsibly, but agencies have not by and large shared that knowledge. This paper attempts to fill this gap in part. GAO identified trade-offs, challenges and benefits. The paper identifies approaches agencies made in acquisition and makes recommendations. The recommendations most impact DOW, DHS, GSA, and the VA.

Top AI Failures in Healthcare

Author: Dmitrii Gorbunov. Published on LinkedIn.

Mr. Gorbunov sums up five costly failures (or about to be failures) where AI has been used in healthcare: physician decision overrides (UnitedHealthcare), claims denials (Cigna), fabrications of consent documents (Sharp Healthcare), and adding diagnostic codes without physician confirmation (Kaiser Permanente). The fifth one, Doctronic, was spoofed by Mindguard to issue triple the dose of Oxycontin [TTA 26 Mar]. The lack of rules, audit and audit trails that can be confirmed and trusted will cost healthcare organizations money and already are having legal consequences.

The next may require subscription to view on Substack

The Architecture of Voice: Why AI Tools Can Mimic Style But Not The Voice

Stuart Miller (Haverin Consulting)’s fourth article on AI’s effect on language and writing. An AI LLM can partly fill two parts of the Competence Framework–Skills and Knowledge–but it does not have Experience. It is incomplete in these three points of Context, and Voice represents the accumulation of Context. FTA: “The dangerous part is the assumption that accelerated Knowledge substitutes for Experience, when in fact accelerated Knowledge, and improved Skills untethered from time, is precisely the recipe for the Builder’s Mirage. The Builder’s Mirage is the illusion of competence, produced without the underlying thing being present.”

Sergei Polevikov’s Substack under AI Health Uncut will require subscription to fully view. His latest are:

Hippocratic AI Fires Its International Sales Team

It’s turning into Theranos 2.0. FTA: “Revenue is an estimated $17–20M ARR. Burn rate is $404M.” Their customers are also their investors. and “Hippocratic AI has quietly withdrawn from all of its international markets, terminated every international contract, and let go of the international sales team that built those relationships.” Contracts were sold without country language versions, adequate GPU infrastructure, and compliance.

Christina Farr: “Where is all of our empathy? Where did it go?”

Christina Farr is the former CNBC healthcare tech reporter, founder of  Second Opinion Media, and is a funder/advisor in the field. The article is derived from his and Alex Koshykov’s interview for their podcast Digital Health Inside Out (48 minutes, go to YouTube, no paywall). “A no-holds-barred conversation about what’s broken in healthcare media, what’s about to break in digital health, and why she’s not coming back to journalism.”

Until next week….

Rock Health’s digital health Q1: more money, fewer deals, more additions and partnerships in ‘leapfrogging’

April 8, 2025 | by

There’s a small uptick and some optimism in the air for US digital health deals after all. After a 2024 that realistically was a ‘down round’ or Back To 2019, 2025 is picking its way through the New Reality of Global 52-Card Pickup, powered by a new US government and still-defining AI technology. Let’s unpack what Q1 was like in Rock Health’s view:

  • Funding was $3.8 billion across 122 deals, with an average deal size of $24.4 million. Compared to Q1 2024, total investment was up ($2.7 billion) as was the average size ($20.6 million) but number of deals were down (133).
  • Q1 funding also exceeded Q4 2024 funding in a pattern typical of the past few years.
  • 83% of deals were seed, Series A, and Series B rounds, not much different than 2024’s 86%. There were a few exceptions listed by Rock Health. By far the largest was Hippocratic AI’s $141M Series B but also Achira’s $33M seed, and Open Evidence’s $75M Series A. MSK player Vori Health sported a $53 million Series B in March
  • There were only 5 Series D or larger deals but three were jumbo sized: Innovaccer ($275M), Abridge ($250M), and Qventus ($105M), which pulled the average up to $105 million, nearly double that of FY 2024.

Rock Health is mum on unlabeled or funding not disclosed deals, such as the ones TTA noted through the quarter: Summer Health -Caraway, Neuroflow-Quartet Health, Iris Telehealth-InnovaTel, Dispatch Health-Medically Home, and Wysa-April Health.  It also doesn’t provide its usual analysis of healthcare value propositions and clinical indicators.

An interesting analysis in the shorter-than-usual announcement breaks down an approach they’ve dubbed ‘leapfrogging’, defined as ways companies can acquire knowledge or shift to respond to market dynamics:

  1. Tapestry Weaving. It’s a quaint way of saying that capabilities can be bought through M&A. (Business can be bought that way too–Transcarent closed its $621 million buy of enterprise care navigator Accolade today.) 
  2. Modular Tech Stacks. This type of tech design allows companies to switch out or add in tech as the market changes or better tech emerges.
  3. Channel Partnerships. Companies, by adding partners, add capability at low cost and reach, though the logistics of partnering, the integration cost and quality of service aren’t easy lifts.
  4. Engaging Disruptors. Companies invested in certain standard processes can expand by allying with their disruptors, versus viewing them as competitors. 

What’s not mentioned in the report are the high profile failures this quarter: 23andMe’s bankruptcy, Walgreens’ sale to Sycamore Partners, and Veradigm’s failure to sell itself.  Given the past few months, we’ll be doing a lot of ’embracing uncertainty’ this year!  Also FierceHealthcare

Are Hippocratic AI and AI “nurses” the wave of the future–or just another tide of hype? Two articles question.

April 3, 2025 | by

Gimlet EyeTwo Gimlety views of a hot AI player, Hippocratic AI. 2025’s first $1.6 billion valuation unicorn after its January $141 million Series B venture round is on a hiring streak. Their ‘safety focused generative AI for healthcare’ built on large language models (LLMs) has developed multi-age, ethnicity, and language AI-powered virtual “nurses” to interact with patients on post-discharge follow ups for medical and hospital visits, chronic care management, and medication reminders. The purpose of the agentic AI nurses is to close the gap of healthcare staff shortages.

On their website, the recorded demos of the ‘nurses’ roleplaying with real nurses sounded to this Editor responsive, warm, convincing, and uncannily human–the opposite of AI agents this Editor has dealt with, which are robotic, clearly on narrow scripts, and easily thrown off by off-script or critical questions, resulting in long silences and cutoffs. But none of the ‘patients’ threw curveballs, talked about multiple conditions, or deviated much in the Q and A. In other words, the bots got to shine.

Last month, it released its Polaris 3.0 product which organizes 22 LLMs having 4.2 trillion parameters, using proprietary data, documentation, regulatory documents and other training materials then tested by clinicians. It claims a clinical accuracy rate of 99.38% compared to 98.75% for their previous Polaris 2.0 version and upgrades in audio processing, agent emotional quotient, and improved clinical documentation. At the end of the month, Hippocratic AI announced seven new hires at C and VP levels, coming from major companies like Amwell, Blue Shield of California, non-profits such as Population Services International, and smaller healthcare companies such as Sidekick Health and Notable. Quite a move for a company only formed in February 2023, 22 months ago.  Release, Mobihealthnews

Hippocratic AI is on a roll, but as with any sudden rise and particularly with LLM AI, the technology and claims are being examined closely. Two articles on Substack take a critical view–this Editor strongly suggests getting a cuppa and taking time to read them carefully.

The shorter of the two (and open to all) is Thomas W. Dinsmore’s “No Bots, Please” . He looks at Hippocratic AI’s tech from the perspective of someone highly experienced in machine learning tools and platforms from back when we called them algorithms. He presents a lot of cautions and yellow flags.

  • Testing apparently not done on real patients
  • Their claims of Polaris’ accuracy are not benchmarked externally. “Independent benchmarks are impossible with a proprietary model like Polaris.”
  • LLMs are ubiquitous, costs are coming down, and investing in a company with proprietary LLMs may not be the smartest move.
  • Hippocratic AI has many healthcare ‘partners’ (this Editor counted 15), many glowing endorsements from healthcare leaders, an impressive timeline. The rub? They are likely not paying anything, which is unusual for a Series B anything much less a unicorn. (I can personally confirm this last point.) Everyone will say nice things about you if you are free.
  • He points out two types of value creation in healthcare. The first is doing a routine or even highly skilled process faster and better. The second is creating an entirely new capability.
  • The touted healthcare shortage number is way overstated. The 15 million healthcare worker shortage cited by WHO and Hippocratic is global. The need in developing nations is primarily midwives, which can’t be done virtually. In the US, the number reported by the Bureau of Health Workforce (BHW) is closer to 2 million, with about 1 million nurses and the rest in LPNs, adult psychiatrists, family physicians, internists, and other clinicians.
  • The Hippocratic pitch is that their bots can replace nurses. The irony is that what the bots do best–patient education–isn’t being done by nurses, based on a McKinsey study on nursing workloads. The nurses’ biggest time suck is updating documentation, followed by hunting and gathering (everything from locating patients to finding equipment), and medication administration. None of which can be done by Hippocratic AI. 
  • Bots have very limited use with mentally ill patients — and negative for those in crisis.

Conclusion: The model is shaky. The effort in creating bots is wasted. What would be a lot more useful in healthcare would be a system that prioritizes, flags, and notifies staff of a patient deteriorating who needs a real human being to call.

Want more? The Really Long Read is Sergei Polevikov’s Hypocritical AI: $45/Hour Human Nurses Babysitting $9/Hour “AI Nurses” in AI Health Uncut. This may be only partially viewable by those who are not subscribers (and it’s worth the small amount). It is a very deep and critical dive into Hippocratic AI, if what it is selling is real (red flag–their releases contain a lot of numbers which aren’t verifiable), and VC hype. The main sections of the article:

  1. What exactly Hippocratic AI is selling, including poor workflow and EHR integration 
  2. What’s really under the hood of its “AI agents.”
  3. The reality behind “AI nurses”—and the human nurses tasked with babysitting them.
  4. Whether Hippocratic AI fine-tuned its models using confidential insurance or health data obtained from Health IQ.
  5. The toxic corporate culture, code of silence, and reliance on H-1B/O-1 visa “slavery.”

Plenty of references and comparisons. If you aren’t skeptical after the Dinsmore article, you will be after this. A must read.

Mid-week roundup: UK startup Anima gains $12M, Hippocratic AI $53M, Assort Health $3.5M; Abridge partners with NVIDIA; VillageMD sells 11 Rhode Island clinics; $60 for that medical record on the dark web

March 21, 2024 | by

It may be a little chilly out, but it feels like Springtime For Early Round Funding and Big Partnerships.

Anima, a London-based startup fresh out of Y Combinator, now has a $12 million Series A raise. It was led by Molten Ventures, with participation from existing investors Hummingbird Ventures, Amino Collective and Y Combinator. Its platform combines online consultation with productivity tools for integrated care enablement in one dashboard for primary care. Their founders position it as a single source for patient truth across care settings, avoiding missed diagnoses. As of today, Anima is deployed in over 200 NHS clinics in England caring for a combined 2 million patients and a monthly request volume of over 400,000 requests. They also claim to halve the time the time practices spend on coding, processing, and filing documents and resolve 85% of patient inquiries within a day. Shun Pang, co-founder and CEO of Anima, who trained as a doctor at Cambridge University, told TechCrunch. “The entire clinic collaborates in a real-time multiplayer dashboard, like Figma, and can ping cases to each other, and chat with a Slack-like UX.” he said. He also added that Anima’s processing system can “autonomously ingest any document, like handwritten, diagrams, imaging, and output a summary, with structured fields.” Anima has not entered the US market yet. Anima blog/release, Tech.EU

Hippocratic AI raised a jumbo $53 million Series A for what they term the first safety-focused Large Language Model (LLM) for healthcare. AI of course is the hottest funding area in healthcare. With two previous rounds raised in mid-2023, their total funding is $118 million (Crunchbase), creating a valuation estimated at $500 million. Investors were co-led by Premji Invest and General Catalyst with participation from SV Angel and Memorial Hermann Health System as well as existing investors Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) Bio + Health, Cincinnati Children’s, WellSpan Health, and Universal Health Services (UHS). Their product is a novel staffing marketplace where health systems, payors, and others can “hire” auto-pilot generative AI-powered agents to conduct low-risk, non-diagnostic, patient-facing services to help solve the massive healthcare staffing crisis. This is now being released for phase three safety testing with 5,000 licensed nurses, 500 licensed physicians, and the company’s health system partners. Release

San Francisco-based startup Assort Health now has a seed round of $3.5 million to advance its generative AI approach to healthcare call centers. Its goal is to eliminate front desk stress and call center/service holds. Their system in development uses AI and NLP (natural language processing) to understand a caller’s intent, then to integrates with the medical providers’ EHR, including Epic, to resolve patient inquiries without human intervention. Funding was led by Quiet Capital (!) joined by Four Acres, Tau Ventures, and a number of angel investors from tech companies. Release

Another generative AI company with a substantial Series C under its belt, Abridge, is partnering with super-hot NVIDIA.  The partnership also comes with undisclosed funding from NVIDIA’s VC arm, NVentures, to add to last month’s $150 million raise. Abridge is developing conversational AI technology using LLM and speech recognition to ease the burden of taking notes during the doctor’s appointment, with fluency in 14 languages across 55 medical specialties. Abridge’s technology is designed to capture clinician-patient conversations and structure the scribing. NVIDIA’s partnership will give Abridge access to NVIDIA’s computing resources, foundation models, and expertise in efficiently deploying AI systems at scale. Release

Another episode in the continuing Walgreens Restructuring Saga has VillageMD selling 11 practices to Arches Medical Partners. The practices are located in the Providence metro area of Rhode Island and consist of three urgent cares and eight offices with a total of 50 physicians and 75,000 patients. It is unusual because it is the first time that VillageMD sold their practices instead of closing the offices, which they are doing with 85 to 90 offices. Transaction cost was not disclosed but closed on 2 March. Arches is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They acquired these practices but also deploy software from its wholly-owned technology subsidiary, New Era Medical Operations (NEMO), to enable IPAs to negotiate and manage global risk contracts. Arches release, Becker’s, Crain’s Chicago Business

Wondering why ransomwareistes, their affiliates, and hackers in general are attracted to healthcare? It’s the value of a medical record. Going rates on the ‘dark web’ are now topping $60, according to CNBC’s source, a cybersecurity researcher Jeremiah Fowler. By comparison, Social Security number are a bargain $15 and a credit card number but $3. It’s also easier to hack than ever due to affiliate relationships termed ransomware-as-a-service or RaaS. The ransomware is supplied, the affiliate hackers do the work, and they share in the rewards–most of the time (see ‘notchy’ being scammed by BlackCat/ALPHV on the Change Healthcare cyberattack TTA 5 Mar). But this doubles or triples the potential for company extortion, with multiple ‘actors’ attacking a company, extorting a ransom, and then keeping healthcare data and selling it through their channels.

The article concludes that healthcare execs need to get very, very serious about protecting their data. Yet this year has marked healthcare downsizing IT departments in order to save money. This is as security software has proliferated–but has to be purchased and managed. Another distressing fact: this Editor only last week attended a major NYC conference on cybersecurity. Healthcare was mentioned only in passing as a market. Worse, till this Editor questioned a speaker from the floor, was the massive Change Healthcare attack even mentioned–and unfortunately she knew more about it than the speaker!

Close of week short takes: Q2 earnings up for GEHC, Talkspace; UnitedHealth invests $11M in SDOH; fundings for two AI startups, K4Connect, UpLift, Family First

July 28, 2023 | by

Winding up this week on nothing but positive news.

GE Healthcare was up smartly on revenue. For Q2, GEHC reported revenue of $4.8 billion, up 7% versus Q2 prior year, and a 9% organic revenue growth.  The adjusted earnings before interest and taxes (EBITDA) was $711 million versus $719 million prior year, with net income slightly down at $418 million versus $485 million prior year. Adjusted earnings per share was $0.92. Orders were up 6%. GEHC is adjusting its earnings upward by one percentage point for the full-year guidance on organic revenue growth and 10 cents in adjusted EPS at the midpoint. GEHC spun off from GE in January. Mobihealthnews

Talkspace had a far more mixed picture. Their Q2 revenue climbed 19% versus prior year to $35.6 million. This was due to an 82% increase in B2B revenue partially offset by a 41% consumer revenue decline. The other good news was that they narrowed net loss to $4.7 million from the prior year’s $23 million. Adjusted for EBITDA, the loss was $4 million. Another positive factor was that operating expenses were reduced 32% to $24.2 million. They are seeing an increase in revenue for 2023 to $137 million to $142 million and moving towards breakeven by end of Q1 2024. Another entrant in the crowded telemental health space, Talkspace went public in 2021 through a SPAC, trading as high as $11.95. Late last year, it flirted with delisting on Nasdaq, but is currently trading at $1.70. Mobihealthnews

UnitedHealthcare’s big bet on social determinants of health (SDOH) involves $11.1 million in grants to 66 nonprofits across 12 states. Part of their Empowering Health initiative, the grants help organizations that aid uninsured individuals and underserved communities in areas such as food insecurity, nutrition, social isolation, memory loss, behavioral health issues, health literacy efforts, and more. Since its start in 2018, UnitedHealthcare invested $62 million in grants that serve more than 11 million people in 30 states and the District of Columbia. MedCityNews, UnitedHealthcare news

Digital health and AI fundings are also ramping up–a little–in the $9-15 million range:

  • Two generative AI startups, Hippocratic AI and GenHealth AI, had early funding rounds in the $15 million range. Hippocratic AI is a safety-focused large language model (LLM) for healthcare competing with GPT-4, outperforming it on 105 of 114 healthcare exams and certifications. Their second seed round funding of $15 million from Cincinnati Children’s and HonorHealth adds to their May $50 million seed. GenHealth AI raised $13 million in a venture round from Obvious Ventures and Craft Venture. Their form of generative AI they call a large medical model (LMM) trained on medical-event data called DOOG-E. Two Washington veterans joined their board: Dr. Don Rucker, former national coordinator for health IT in the Trump administration and currently on the 1upHealth board, and Aneesh Chopra, the first chief technology officer of the US in the Obama administration.
  • Senior housing focused K4Connect received a venture round of $9 million from AXA Venture Partners and Bryce Catalyst with existing investors Forté Ventures, Intel Capital, the Ziegler-LinkAge Fund, and Topmark Partners, for a total of $41 million. K4Connect is positioned as an operating system (FusionOS) that integrates multiple senior living technologies. Mobihealthnews
  • Telementalhealth provider UpLift raised $10.7 million in Series A funding from Ballast Point Ventures with participation from Front Porch Ventures, Kapor Capital, and existing investor B Capital for a total raise of $22 million. UpLift is a direct to consumer therapy model which promotes both insurance coverage, affordable rates, and medication management. Another Series A funding of $11 million went to Family First, a technology platform for enterprises that supports caregivers’ mental health and wellbeing, The round was led by RPM Ventures and Eos Venture Partners.  Mobihealthnews