So why is there a ‘100% Written by a human’ flag in the header?

February 11, 2026 | by

And why is it even necessary? If you are a wide consumer of online media, including LinkedIn (oy!), all too many articles and videos are either AI-generated or heavily edited by AI. It’s not just grammar and spelling cleanup anymore (tools which this Editor happily uses, along with her own rolling edits). It has little to do with em versus en dashes or the stringing together of clichés in a Perfectly Processed Article.

TTA, whether written by your Editor Donna, Editor Emeritus Steve, or a guest post, is not written by AI. And we won’t be. (My 6 month layoff should be proof therein!). No AI slop here whether generative or agentic, except as In The News.

Steve Hards put it very well some years back. From the sidebar:

Telecare Aware’s editors concentrate on what we perceive to be significant events and technological and other developments in telecare and telehealth. We make no apology for being independent and opinionated or for trying to be interesting rather than comprehensive.

We don’t cover everything and don’t plan to. This perhaps makes us far less marketable than some of our sources, which don’t deviate much from the press releases or the packaged interviews because it pumps up the volume with only a few people writing. Yes, just like Joe Friday on Dragnet (=UK, Jack Regan on The Sweeney who was about 50x rougher than Joe at his worst), we start with just the facts, a/k/a the 5 Ws: who, what, when, where, and why. Sometimes that’s all that’s needed or wanted. But usually, there’s more to the story. I then fill out the background and then opine on What This All Means and why it’s interesting. And yes, we are opinionated, especially when there are broken promises, fraud, or lies, which I no lika.

In increasingly processed and reprocessed media, this Editor (Donna) wants to acknowledge the exceptions. They dive deep and make some major machers (Yiddish for ‘big shot’ or ‘movers and shakers’) uncomfortable. #1 in afflicting the comfortable–Sergei Polevikov. His Substack ‘AI Health Uncut’ goes where no one else does and is so jammed with facts/original research it is often a hard read. It’s linked on the sidebar and yes, requires a moderate subscription fee. #2 to me is MedCityNews‘ EIC Arundhati Parmar, with an honorable mention to Katie Adams. (See this Must Read from last February)

AI content has its place, but not here. For better or worse, irredeemably, Written 100% by a Human. For our Readers, thanks for staying with us especially after last year’s long hiatus. And thank you, Legrand, for continuing to advertise. (Your company can too.)

Do you want to try out writing for something like this? Contact Editor Donna.

(Editor’s Final Thoughts: Two handy guides to spotting (or fixing when you must) AI-generated content: Optimizely and in plain sales-oriented language, Troy Harrison’s blog.)

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!

Weekend reading: AI cybersecurity tools no panacea, reality v. illusion in healthcare AI, RPM in transitioning to hospital-at-home, Korean study on older adult health tech usage

February 23, 2024 | by

A potpourri of current articles. Hope you don’t feel like Pepper the Robot after you read them!

AI won’t boost cybersecurity, that’s cutting corners (Cybernews)

AI tools that make cybersecurity more effective and faster in response are increasingly available. They are estimated in a Techopedia article rounding up multiple studies to be a global market of over $133 billion by 2030. IBM claims that organizations with AI cybersecurity took 100 days less to identify and contain data breaches. Yet AI can also leave organizations more vulnerable to cyberattack. Hackers and ransomwareistes have been using AI for years in phishing and vishing (phone-based social engineering) attacks–now using OpenAI. What’s vulnerable? Large language models (LLMs) used in generative AI (AI with the ability to create content) can be corrupted and fed false information [TTA 7 Feb] or create deepfake images–Google Gemini is the latest example (not in article). FTA: “We need human critical thinking to use AI to solve and prevent problems. We’re adopting AI far faster than we have the ability to understand how to adopt it properly.” Another approach is to think like a cybercriminal and use AI to better understand how criminals can break into your systems.

What is real and what is illusion with healthcare AI? (03:16 video, Healthcare IT News)

This is a preview of a HIMSS24 talk on 11 March by Dr. Jonathan Chen, assistant professor at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research. Patient care and outcomes are dependent on discerning what is real and what is not, especially in the use of chatbots in patient notes. Generative AI can be very convincing even if it’s not accurate, and that is not what is wanted in patient care. We are at the Gartner Peak of Inflated Expectations when it comes to AI–and we’ve been there before.

RPM strategies for moving from discharge to hospital-at-home care (Healthcare IT News) 

How can the home be better treated as a fundamental care setting? Understanding this is key to transitioning patients from in-hospital acute care to hospital-at-home, which is in reality not being discharged and requires managing a significant number of complex layers. Interview with Cindy Gaines, RN, chief clinical transformation officer at Lumeon, a clinical automation company.

Tailor fit digital health tech to the elderly’s needs: study (Mobihealthnews)

This summarizes a South Korean study that compared the usage of digital devices, such as smartphone apps, health apps, and wearables, among healthy and pre-frail/frail Koreans aged 65+. Smartphone use is nearly universal in South Korea, but wearables are only lightly used. Frailer respondents used social media more than healthy ones and used more healthcare apps on their phones. From the study: “There was a notable difference in the services used by pre-frail and frail respondents compared to healthy respondents. Therefore, when developing digital devices for pre-frail and frail older adults, it is crucial to incorporate customized services that meet their unique needs, particularly those services that they frequently use.”

505 participants completed the survey, with 153 (30.3%) identified as pre-frail or frail and 352 (69.7%) as healthy. Full study in the Journal of Korean Medical Science 27 November 2023

News roundup: Owlet’s Dream Sock, BabySat go to market; General Catalyst’s HATco agrees to buy Summa; Cigna’s contrasting provider strategy; new ElliQ robot assistant debuts at CES

January 18, 2024 | by

JP Morgan’s Healthcare Conference (JPM) and CES are as expected big generators of news around digital health–here’s a selection from then and more:

Owlet launches Dream Sock and BabySat at CES. Both were FDA-cleared in November and June 2023 respectively. The Dream Sock baby monitor received first-of-kind de novo clearance for pulse oximetry and sends real-time Health Notifications for low pulse rate, high pulse rate, and low oxygen to parents’ smartphones. Target market is infants 1-18 months and 6 to 30 pounds with direct sale on the Owlet website at $299.

The BabySat is the prescription-only version (left) targeted to infants 1-18 months and 6-30 pounds, but with acute or chronic medical conditions. It also has the unique capability not only to track vital signs but also for the provider to customize alarms for oxygen saturation and pulse rate. Owlet’s BabySat information page explains in plain English the type of medical conditions where the BabySat would be of assistance and the steps to obtain a prescription that is fulfilled through their partner AdaptHealth. A virtual Rx and insurance reimbursement are in the works. A small drawback is that it is only usable with an iPhone. Happily, their stock is also on the rebound at the highest point in six months. Having followed them since the ‘telehealth for the bassinet set’ days of 2012-2013, their continued independence, their rebound from some dark days, as well as their focus on baby health, this Editor continues to wish them bonne chance. Owlet release (via Yahoo Finance).

Big Investor General Catalyst announced their first acquisition move for the Health Assurance Transformation Corporation (HATCo) not at JPM but today (17 Jan). Summa Health is a $1.8 billion (in revenue) non-profit integrated healthcare system headquartered in Akron, Ohio that encompasses hospitals, community medical centers, a health plan, an accountable care organization, a multi-specialty physician organization, medical education, research and the Summa Health Foundation. HATCo’s objective is to transform healthcare towards a goal of “health assurance”, defined as “a more affordable, accessible and proactive system of care” where presumably their extensive experience in investing in healthcare gives them expertise. [TTA 10 Oct 2023] The letter of intent initially sets up a partnership with immediate investment in Summa while due diligence takes place, then when completed moves to a definitive agreement with details of the acquisition and a transaction price in the next few months. Summa would move from a non-profit to a for-profit in becoming a subsidiary of HATCo. According to their information, current management will remain in place.

Summa’s incentive is to stem losses, reportedly at $37 million through Q3 2023, more than double the prior year. HATCo in November stated its desire to buy a health system in Summa’s $1 to $3 billion range. As usual, the buy is subject to regulatory approvals and a final closing date.  HATCo release, Summa Health statement on “our future”, FierceHealthcare

To the contrary, Cigna prefers to partner, not own, healthcare providers. As a payer closer by many degrees to hospitals and practices than General Catalyst, structured much like UnitedHealth Group with Evernorth its counterpart to Optum, they have avoided the aggressive ownership of physician practices. UHG employs about 10%–90,000–physicians through ownership of practices as of December 2023. MedPageToday  At JPM, Cigna CEO Eric Palmer emphasized ‘strategic relationships’ like a minority share of VillageMD (majority owned by Walgreens) in their acquisition of Summit Health, and creating an ‘ecosystem’ that connects to the best partners. Their investments will be wrap-around services in home health, behavioral and virtual care now that a merger with Humana is once again off the table. Becker’s Payer They’ll have some cash to do so; Cigna’s sale of their Medicare Advantage business will likely be to Health Care Service Corporation (HCSC) and fetch $3 to $4 billion. Becker’s Payer

Intuition Robotics debuts ElliQ 3 at CES. An interactive desktop companion robot designed to improve social connection and alleviate loneliness of older adults and those with assistive needs, the new version updates the robot hardware and software capabilities including generative AI capabilities powered by Large Language Model (LLM). The new design from Yves Behar’s design studio, Fuseproject, is also 1.3 pounds lighter and has a 36% smaller footprint which makes it easier to both place and handle, along with a fully integrated screen. Technical improvements include an octa-core SoC and a built-in AI processing unit (APU); 33% more RAM, twice the amount of computing power and memory, and an inclusion of a dual-core AI processing unit (APU), all of which are needed to power generative AI for greater ‘conversant’ capabilities. The LLM technology integrated into the Relationship Orchestration Engine makes real-time decisions regarding actions, scripted conversation, and generative AI conversations. For instance, the person speaking with ElliQ may talk about activities and beliefs, which are stored and classified. In another conversation, ElliQ may use that information to suggest participation in activities and social interactions, while ensuring that the context and flow of conversation is ‘guardrailed’ and appropriate. The AI can also assist the person in activities such as painting or writing poems together.

Current partners include the New York State Office for the Aging, Inclusa (a Humana company), and the Area Agency on Aging of Broward County, as well as newer partners like The Olympic Area Agency on Aging, Ypsilanti Meals on Wheels, and others. Release

Israel-based Intuition Robotics most recently raised $25 million in August 2023 in an unlettered round with $20 million in venture capital plus $5 million in venture debt. TTA 19 Sept 2023