TTA Celebrates USA 250! Midjourney’s body scanner promises a revolution and Butterfly a future? Hype or reality? And more!

July 2, 2026 | by

2 -6 July 2026

An early close for a very big holiday this weekend–the 250th anniversary of United States Independence, a/k/a The Rebel Colonials Serving It Up Hot To King George III. And the UK and Europe returned this weekend’s 100 degree F temps (38 C) as a present…

Speaking of presents…our one story this week is a very deep dive into Midjourney Medical’s ‘magical’ whole-body scanner and the Butterfly Network ultrasound chips powering it. The Midjourney agreement is a substantial present to a once-promising POCUS company that was almost KO’d by the Devil of Demise after a cracked SPAC. Is it a future that Butterfly can bet on, or just another bridge to cross?

Set off fireworks (safely), drink up like a colonial, and stay cool!

Please feel free to comment on the articles and pass along this Alert. Let me know if this is worth it to you! Also check out my personal page on Substack.

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

Last Week’s Headlines, from Cargo Culture to OpenEvidence   

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

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

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

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

News roundup: Validic bought by ChartSpan; raises for Cadence, Prosper AI, Telepatia; Epic MyChart portal messages doubled in 5 years–study    

Perspectives: The most aggressive AI adoption in healthcare is happening off the books

Catch up with these if you haven’t

Chutes, and chutes: Microsoft’s $3B Oracle cloud leasing deal goes sideways, Defense Health Agency to replace Leidos as system integrator for MHS’ EHR, Centene offering voluntary buyouts to most employees

Tuesday 23 June–UKTelehealthcare webinar/virtual event: Keeping People at Home, Supported by Technology (this is now available on video–check the UKTelehealthcare website and LinkedIn)

Perspectives: Virtual Care, AI, and the Future of Autism Therapy

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Support not only a publication but also a well-informed international community.

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Help Spread the News

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

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

TTA’s Here Comes Summer: two data breaches and a warning, six raises, Validic bought, Silicon Valley’s ‘Cargo Culture’, OpenEvidence scored in study, ‘off the books’ AI in healthcare, more!

June 26, 2026 | by

 

Friday 26 June 2026

Summer started and the doldrums lifted. We have not one but two data breaches with a big warning from Five Eyes that AI-powered breaches are coming. Six raises from seed to Series C–including in Brazil–and Validic after many years is bought. But scrutiny is piling on AI and AI clinical tools, from the economics to Silicon Valley ‘Cargo Culture’ to OpenEvidence’s performance to ‘off the books’ AI in healthcare. We also touch on the current status of the Luigi Mangione NY State trial, 18 months after the murder of UHC’s Brian Thompson.

Please feel free to comment on the articles and pass along this Alert. Let me know if this is worth it to you! Also check out my personal page on Substack.

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

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

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

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

News roundup: Validic bought by ChartSpan; raises for Cadence, Prosper AI, Telepatia; Epic MyChart portal messages doubled in 5 years–study    

Perspectives: The most aggressive AI adoption in healthcare is happening off the books

Last Week’s Headlines

Chutes, and chutes: Microsoft’s $3B Oracle cloud leasing deal goes sideways, Defense Health Agency to replace Leidos as system integrator for MHS’ EHR, Centene offering voluntary buyouts to most employees

Tuesday 23 June–UKTelehealthcare webinar/virtual event: Keeping People at Home, Supported by Technology (this is now available on video–check the UKTelehealthcare website and LinkedIn)

Perspectives: Virtual Care, AI, and the Future of Autism Therapy

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

Contact Editor Donna for more information.

Help Spread the News

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

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

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

June 25, 2026 | by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Holiday weekend roundup: VA asks for ‘cyberspeed’ 25% EHR budget bump, update on EHRM fraud indictment; Commure raises $70M; Innovaccer buys Caduceus, lays off staff; Doximity, OpenEvidence slugfest gets hot

May 22, 2026 | by | 2 Comments

A slower news week preceding the Memorial Day holiday in the US and the UK late May bank holiday.

Federal budgets for 2027 are in the Congressional washing machine, and the cycle is on ‘agitate’. VA Secretary Doug Collins has tagged a 25% increase in the EHR Modernization budget for FY 2027 over what is currently in the 2027 Military Construction and Veterans Affairs Appropriations bill –$4.2 billion versus $3.4 billion, an increase of $840 million. He testified on Wednesday 20 May to the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee and Thursday 21 May to the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Military Construction, Veterans Affairs and Related. Apparently, the biggest problem VA has with the much-repaired and now standardized Oracle EHR is that every VA executive director wants it now, not later. An additionally funded EHRM would speed up the cutover for VA facilities to go from ‘dial-up’ to ‘cyberspeed’ internally, in communicating with other VA hospitals, community care, and in record sharing with the military system and civilian health facilities.

Difficulties reported to date (April for four sites in Michigan, VISN 10) are around transferring health records between VA and Department of War facilities. DoW healthcare also uses Oracle, but a different version suited for their needs that has been fully implemented. 

While the House has already passed the bill at the lower budget number and sent it to the Senate, the subcommittee chair John Carter (R-Texas) during the hearing said they’re “not through with the possibility of getting you some more money”. 

VA’s implementation timeline is 19 before the end of this year (13 new and the 2020-24 six), 26 new sites in 2027 and 28 VA Medical Centers in 2028. Even sped up, there are still 90 more to go and the deployment is not expected to be complete till 2031. FedScoop 21 May, 30 April

Update on the fraud indictment of the former EHRM director, John Windom. Surprisingly, there has been little to no mainstream media coverage of the Federal charges against John Windom, who was indicted on 25 March in the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia. The three counts related to accepting cash and gifts from vendors plus failure to report them could bring a maximum of 35 years. This article on conservative news website PJ Media is the most recent (re)telling of the tale and links to nearly all the same sources this Editor included in our 3 April article. It is more colorful than our reporting but brings up an important point I overlooked: where, oh where, are the indictments of some of the vendors who doled out cash, gifts, and maybe more, and in return got prime and sub-contracts. He knew, they knew to keep quiet–‘loose lips sink ships’. Because any Federal contractor–I worked for two, Viterion Digital Health and Collaborative Health Systems, then part of WellCare Health Plans–receives compliance training on working with their Federal agency counterparts. 

Perhaps there are investigations and indictments to come, as I’ve seen in Federal Medicare fraud cases that peel like an endless onion over years. According to the VA inspector general, Mike Missal, who served from 2016 until January 2025, evidence was being gathered internally back during the Biden administration. This fits the timeline of the US Attorney requesting a grand jury be summoned then sworn in on 30 October 2025. Mr. Missal was fired along with 16 other inspectors general by the incoming Trump administration.

Since Mr. Windom was deeply engaged in the choice of Cerner for the VA EHR in 2017-2018, and in the disastrous implementation of VA Mann-Grandstaff (VISN 20) in October 2020 and four more in 2022, resulting in the rollout’s termination in 2023, Oracle would be unwise to not prepare for a few questions about Cerner’s relationship with Mr. Windom, as I wrote at the time. 

The PJ Media article also references the comprehensive article in the 27 March Spokane Spokesman-Review, which has been on the Cerner/Oracle implementation story since the implementation failure in the region’s Mann-Grandstaff VA facility. Their check of the OEHRM website as of that date confirmed that Mr. Windom was still listed as the deputy director of the Federal Electronic Health Management Office, the joint VA-DOD initiative in the role he assumed in January 2022 after the Mann-Grandstaff problems detonated and the then-Secretary reorganized the department. (Heads did not roll, but they rarely do with SES members). FTA: “The Federal Electronic Health Record Modernization Office did not respond on Thursday (26 March) when asked if Windom remains employed there.” The article by Orion Donovan Smith is a recommended read.

In the funding/M&A department

Healthcare software integrator Commure received a $70 million funding from current investors. Commure’s lead investor is General Catalyst. Commure now has $750 million raised and a $7 billion post-money valuation for its AI infrastructure development. Its subsidiary, Athelas, provides AI-based revenue cycle management and clinical workflow tools. The General Catalyst funding of $200 million plus is an interesting scheme, in that GC fronts the cost of sales and marketing and, in return, receives a share of the revenue from new customers generated by that investment, up to a fixed cap. The new funding will be used for scaling its RCM and practice management platforms, advancing the ‘shared intelligence layer’ beneath Commure’s workflows, and expanding their AI infrastructure into global healthcare markets. Release, Mobihealthnews

Innovaccer acquires CaduceusHealth, a revenue cycle management (RCM) and management services (MSO) provider. Neither transaction cost nor management transitions were disclosed. Well-funded Innovaccer ($675 million through a Series F) has been growing in AI-centric healthcare IT services mainly through acquisition. CaduceusHealth is the fifth in their creating a “comprehensive agentic stack” for health systems and provider groups in their Flow suite. Innovaccer claims to serve over 200 health systems and payers, 95% of community pharmacies, and 80 million patient lives across the US. Release Unfortunately, their growth has been matched by a reduction in staff, with 340 layoffs in the US and India. It is their third layoff in four years as it applies its own AI to automate its own processes. (We are seeing a lot of this across the board, allegedly.) FierceHealthcare

We close with a major Must Read with the OpenEvidence-Doximity battle.

OpenEvidence and Doximity are slugging it out for the same market funding–and a third competitor has just sneaked into the ring. OpenEvidence is the upstart, founded four years ago, and the best valued ($12 billion) yet private healthcare AI company on the planet Earth and is generally thought of as the up-and-coming platform for physician information. Doximity is the mature company, public with a $3.6 billion market cap, proven revenue of $645 million, and (be still my heart) profitable with an EBIDTA margin of 55% and a stunning 49% free cash flow margin. It’s been dubbed ‘LinkedIn for doctors’ but is actually much more with tools for secure telehealth, news, reputation management, and free CME.

They are mutually litigious. Both OpenEvidence (OE) and Doximity tag-team each other in product offerings, use defamation tactics and key staff poaching, and in product development, copycat each other, with Doximity generally leading development and OE following shortly thereafter. Coming up is Doximity’s new product, an in-workflow e-prescribing, prosaically called Doximity Prescribe. Based on the pattern, how long will it be before OE develops a similar product?

Where they make their money is only indirectly from users. Both are supported by a fixed source–pharmaceutical advertising. They both slug it out for physician attention. While doctors love (or hate) both, if they become too similar, the balance will tip. Into this bout steps OpenAI with a new professional product, ChatGPT for Clinicians [TTA 30 April]. Lurking near the ropes is the AI-powered iteration of Wolters Kluwer’s UpToDate peer-reviewed medical content, integrated with Microsoft and Abridge, already in 70% of the largest enterprise health systems because it’s been around forever. OE’s vulnerability may be overpromising in claiming ‘no hallucinations’ of their AI-generated medical content–a claim that is structurally impossible, and results in deficits in completeness, communication quality, and systems-based safety reasoning.

Digging through all of this is the intrepid Sergei Polevikov on his Substack AI Health Uncut. Grab a cuppa and sandwich for this one. For most of the article (Part 1 of 2!), a subscription is required. Consider it money well spent for access to some of the best investigative reporting around with plenty of backup. OpenEvidence Prescribe Coming to Your Doctor’s Office This Month?

Breaking: OpenEvidence app access terminated in the UK and EU

April 30, 2026 | by | 2 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, 

Chutes and Ladders w/o 9 Feb: Biofourmis’ ex-CEO faces 7 major Singapore fraud charges (updated), Doximity’s 17% drop; Devoted Health’s big $366M raise, Garner Health garners $118M, Synthpop’s $15M Series A

February 11, 2026 | by

Chutes go first…

The worst kind of Chute to go down is one that lands in a coal-scuttle full of fraud and criminal charges–in a country known for its punishments. Biofourmis’ former CEO is facing seven counts in Singapore. Rajput Kuldeep Singh, one of the founders and former CEO, has been charged in Singapore with three counts of abetting the falsification of accounts, three charges of fraud by false representation or abetment thereof, and one charge of forgery for the purpose of cheating. These are connected to the Singaporean company, Biofourmis Holdings Pte Ltd., between 2021 and 2022. Headquarters moved to Boston after its Series B in 2019.

Mr. Rajput (surname is first) is accused of falsely invoicing US$16.5 million to Singapore’s Ministry of Health (MOH), and later false representations such as inflated revenue figures, falsified financial statements, a misrepresentation on payment by the MOH, and subsequently a forged employee stock option plan offer letter. This was purportedly intended to deceive DBS Bank into transferring funds from the bank.

The penalties are high in a country that canes offenders for spitting on the sidewalk. The Singapore Police Force announced the charges in a 3 Feb release. Each fraud charge against Mr. Rajput carries a maximum 20 years plus a fine. Falsifying accounts and forgery max out at 10 years plus a fine. Even if convicted of one charge, Mr. Rajput is looking at perhaps a decade of time in a Singapore prison–on multiple charges, perhaps the rest of his adult life. Mr. Rajput is a 34-year-old Indian national. Presently, he is out on bail of S$600,000 (US$475,000) and through his legal representation Eugene Thuraisingam Asia, indicated in court on Feb 4 that he intends to claim trial. Singaporean law moves fast–the pre-trial scheduled to start on 1 April. The Online Citizen (Singapore) Here’s the original article in the Straits Times.

Update on extradition: Should Mr. Rajput remove himself to the US and try to evade extradition, his attorneys will tell him that it may be futile, but will string out things. Extradition is covered by a foundational 1931 bilateral treaty that originated with the UK (as Singapore was a colony then) and has been honored since with modifications and expansions (e.g. the Extradition Act of 1968 and Amendments 2022). The mechanism is straightforward. A request has to be made by the Singapore ministry for law and subsequently heard in a US Federal court. The charges must be valid under existing bilateral laws and meet the requirement that the charges carry a sentence of 2 years+. The extradition back to Singapore must then be approved by the Secretary of State. Fraud, embezzlement, and the taking of money under false pretenses are all covered. Singapore is also an active cooperator with the US whereas many countries with treaties are not. Another complicating factor is that Mr. Rajput is an Indian national and may hold multiple passports.

What about Biofourmis? It merged in October 2024 with CopilotIQ, a smaller RPM/nursing company in home health that took over Biofourmis’ business in in-home delivery of complex care for health systems, payers, and pharmaceutical companies. It was announced by CopilotIQ. This oddity didn’t square with other financial reporting indicating that Biofourmis was the acquiring party, yet was reasonable considering that CopilotIQ’s CEO and his management were running the combined company. Yet Biofourmis was a much larger company, a unicorn with over $400 million acquired in 10 rounds of financing.  Another oddity: Mr. Rajput transferred his 96.6 million shares (!!) in Biofourmis to 19 existing investors immediately prior to the merger, according to filings with ACRA, Singapore’s Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority. Today, the single company runs as two separate brands. In 2024, Mr. Rajput returned to Singapore (and Boston) to found a new company, OutcomesAI, an AI-enabled nurse assistant and voice agent which raised $10 million last October. To be continued….

Doximity, a/k/a LinkedIn for doctors plus virtual visit capability, took a 17% crack on Friday after a wild overnight ride. This is despite the company clocking a decent Q4 2025 beating analysts’ revenue expectations. Sales were up 9.8% versus Q4 2024 to $185.1 million. EBITDA guidance for 2025 is in line at $356 million at the midpoint. What was the problem? Q1 2026. The company guidance is $143.5 million at midpoint, which is below analyst estimates of $151.3 million. It doesn’t seem like much, but the volatility indicates that Doximity has growing competition for the 80% of US doctors who are members. Epocrates and Medscape have for years been the main competition for partner dollars, but the new kid on the block, OpenEvidence, which just clocked a healthy Series D for its medical info search engine, is putting all three in the shade. The pie is also shrinking. Pharma companies are overall spending less and Doximity is spending more on a suite of new tools: DocsGPT, Doximity Dialer, and Doximity Scribe. Share price has stayed flat since Friday. Considering it once traded over $80…. Yahoo Finance, TIKR

Now for the Ladders…climbing them with a ‘barbell’…

Devoted Health raked in $366 million of Series F and post-F funding. This insurtech survivor, a combination of Medicare Advantage (MA) plans with in-house telehealth and in-home care, raised a split Series F: $48 million in November 2025 and at the end of January a Series F-Prime of $317 million. These very late rounds are rare in this constrained funding market. Both were led by long time investor The Space Between (TSB) [TTA 3 Jan 2024], in partnership with Centricus, a London-based global investment firm. This Editor counted 18 additional investors, which is a tell–even when you’re “redefining how healthcare is experienced and delivered” and they are 466,000 members strong, up 121 percent and across 29 states, with 98% of members in 4+ Star plans, they had to knock on a lot of doors for the raise. This raise is also about half of what it would have been in the 2020-22 Silly Money days. One wonders if an IPO is next. Devoted Health release

Garner Health’s latest raise is a $118 million Series D today (Tuesday). The employer-focused provider of health data analytics incentives to guide employees to the best-performing doctors in the employer’s existing health plans now has a total raise of $200 million and a valuation topping $1.3 million. The round was led by Kleiner Perkins with participation from Redpoint, Maverick, Kaiser Permanente Ventures, Mercy, Plus Capital, and other existing investors. Garner is claiming revenue increasing over 130% versus their prior year. Release

On the other end of the barbell, Cambridge MA-based Synthpop (not a music genre) had an early raise of $15 million that closed last week. The new Series A brought their total funding to $23 million. It was led by Ansa Capital, with Defy.vc and Peterson Ventures participating in the round with Storm Ventures and strategic investor Bruce Broussard. Marco DeMeireles, co‑founder and managing partner at Ansa Capital will be joining Synthpop’s board. Synthpop uses AI processes to coordinate document intelligence, payer-aware reasoning, and conversational voice agents to automate up to 80% of healthcare business processes, integrating directly with EHR, billing, and e-prescribe platforms. It was founded in 2023 by CEO Elad Ferber and CTO Jan Jannink, PhD, who have considerable previous founder experience. Release

Chutes & Ladders: UnitedHealth’s disastrous day and industry portents; Sword Health buys Kaia for $285M and gains German entry, $250M Series D for OpenEvidence, Pomelo’s $92M Series C, NOCD buys Rebound Health

January 29, 2026 | by

Chutes go first…

UnitedHealth Group’s 2025 financials not only triggered a one-day drop in its stock of 19.6% ($282), but cracked the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) by 409 points– close to 1% (0.8%). Revenue hit a record–$447.6 billion–but profits suffered another drop to $12.1 billion from $14.4 billion in 2024. Worse, it was the lowest annual profit since 2018, not even adjusted for inflation. Their care organization within Optum services, Optum Health, went from a 2024 operational gain of $7.8 billion to a loss of $278 million in 2025. 2026 projections for UHG include a revenue contraction for the first time in years. Healthcare Dive, Yahoo Finance

But the stock free-fall hinged on the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) rule move announced on Monday to essentially keep Medicare Advantage (MA)  average rate payments flat at less than 1%, versus an expected 4-6%. This was topped by another rule excluding patient diagnoses that aren’t linked to actual medical care that inflated MA patient risk adjustments, flattening risk scores and payments. The adjustments would save taxpayers about $7 billion. Another major hit is that UHG projects a 2026 loss of 1.3 to 1.4 million MA members. The stock price recovered about 11% today to close at $294.02.

UHG’s stock drop was the 6th worst since 1987’s Black Tuesday. The rule changes also swatted other insurers with major MA markets such as Centene, CVS Health (Aetna), Elevance, and Humana. 

Congress is also going hard after health insurers, with hostile House Ways and Means committee and House Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearings last week skewering CEOs from UnitedHealth, CVS, Cigna and Elevance over their compensation, rampant vertical integration with pharmacy benefit management (PBMs) and providers (including rate setting), prior authorization, and care denials. Fun fact: non-insurance business can be as much as one-third of revenue for the insurer giants. Only the Blue Shield of California CEO (Ascendiun), a non-profit, who basically agreed with all the criticisms of healthcare and threw himself on the mercy of the court, somewhat escaped. It was a Bad Day on Capitol Hill that may portend Boot Hill for some CEOs. Healthcare Dive, Becker’s 

Other portents for the industry aren’t great either. ACA individual plan subsidies, which had ballooned beyond recognition in the past few years, are not expected to return, and members are fleeing. Many insurers such as Aetna have already exited the exchanges. Health policy reforms are iffy in a midterm election year. Medicaid state payments are still in unknown territory. A bit more favorable is that margins are stabilizing and commercial plans remain positive. Healthcare Dive

All of which means that in a hot midterm year, there will be renewed bipartisan calls to restrict insurers on practices of their painstakingly integrated service businesses–and increased calls for divestitures. By last year, it was clear that UHG was becoming a victim of its own size and a strategy rapidly becoming obsolete. This Editor in May 2025 (just before her extended hiatus) in an extended brief advocated a voluntary breakup of UnitedHealth Group before it wound up like GE, wrecked by its own problems. The finalized acquisition of Amedysis in August, dangling with DOJ since 2023, was the swan song. Or honk. The days of big UHG accretive buys, Optum acquiring practices, and Optum Ventures making big bets in digital health are over, and darn well should be.

A very tart take–but requiring a subscription–is in yesterday’s (27 Jan) AI Health Uncut. Sergei Polevikov details the multiple fraud cases that UHG is fighting, the devastation that Change Healthcare’s suspension of provider payments for months in 2024 wreaked, insider trading, and more.

And here are the Ladders, which are finally showing up in healthtech after a thoroughly depressing 2025…

MSG physical therapy/mental health/telehealth provider Sword Health today (28 Jan) announced the acquisition of Kaia Health for $285 million. (Updated) Kaia is also in MSK management for employers, payers, and public health systems, but adds a pulmonary therapy for COPD, Kaia Breathe. The Sword brand will replace Kaia in the US, while Kaia’s prescription app footprint in Germany (DiGA) will open the digital health Rx reimbursement pathway there for Sword. Clearly that was a very big asset of interest to Sword. At present, Sword has 700,000 members across three continents and 1,000+ enterprise clients. Their financing to date is $500 million raised from Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst, Transformation Capital, and Founders Fund. Kaia had funding of about $123 million but hadn’t had funding since their April 2021 Series C, which is a prolonged time and indicates that they were having trouble with that ol’ devil Profitability. (Crunchbase) Sword release, Mobihealthnews

OpenEvidence, the medical information search engine for doctors that is 2026’s ‘hot number’, scored a $250 million Series D, led by Thrive Capital and DST Global. The AI-enabled (what isn’t?) free search engine trained on journals and clinical medical data only, coupled with an AI chatbot agent, claims scorching growth, from 3 million clinical consultations/monthly in December 2024 to 18 million/monthly in December 2025, all from verified US physicians. The Miami-based company also claims daily average usage by 40% of US doctors in 10,000 hospitals and medical centers. Its funding and valuation are scorching too, totaling $700 million from a Murderer’s Row of major investors, doubling its valuation to $12 billion, making it the most valuable healthcare AI company on Planet Earth. (This gives OpenAI and Anthropic something to ‘shoot’ for.) The fresh funding will be invested in R&D and compute costs associated with their multi-AI agentic architecture. “Medical superintelligence” may be an overstatement, but in discussions around physician marketing and engagement, OpenEvidence is showing metrics that dust the traditional providers such as Doximity, Medscape, and Epocrates. FierceHealthcare, Mobihealthnews, release

Pomelo Care’s $92 million raise will take it beyond maternity care. At present targeted to fertility, maternity, and pediatric care for women and children, the company is expanding into midlife women’s health, including perimenopause and menopause symptoms and mental health support. The Pomelo app enables access to a dedicated care team and customized care plans. Currently, the NYC-based company founded by Marta Bralic Kerns and named after the doughy citrus fruit has access to 25 million covered lives through health plan payers and employers. The Series C was led by Stripes with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, PLUS Capital, Atomico, BoxGroup, and SV Angel. Valuation is now up to $1.7 billion. MedCity News, Mobihealthnews, Forbes

On the other end of the barbell, NOCD, a virtual care provider for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), purchased trauma care provider Rebound Health. The two companies are forming under a parent entity, Noto. Rebound provides for trauma patients a mobile app that provides structured self-help support. The overlap/extension for the two companies is in treatment of PTSD and Complex PTSD. NOCD has raised $84 million since its founding eight years ago but Rebound Health only $150,000 in a pre-seed round (Crunchbase). Acquisition cost was not disclosed but could not have been much. Behavioral Health Business

Short takes: a guide to HIMSS25, Google Watch clears loss of pulse detection, OpenEvidence’s AI-powered $75M raise, Retrieve Medical to buy Cúratus, HerMD women’s health closes

February 27, 2025 | by

Going to HIMSS25 in Las Vegas next week (3-7 March)? The huge annual conference, now run by Informa Markets, still features the HIMSS organization and head Hal Wolf front and center. But most go there not so much for the information sessions but for the networking, greeting, demo-ing ones’s wares, and meetings meetings meetings. (And Las Vegas) Both new are the AI Pavilion and the Interoperability Pavilion. Expect about 30 to 35,000 attendees across three venues in Vegas and if you want to really cover it, wear comfortable shoes. Strategize your show on the airplane or this weekend, and take some time to visit the smaller exhibitors. The always on top of it HIStalk provides a short guide here, though this Editor doesn’t know whether any of their team will attend or they will have some commentary from readers, so check back with them. (No, I won’t be there.) Healthcare Finance News, part of HIMSS Media, has a month-old preview video with editor Mike Miliard and Hal Wolf. To be sure, HIMSS Media publications will be covering nearly everything there except the blackjack. In stereo.

Google Watch’s loss of pulse detection clears FDA, finally. The Pixel Watch 3’s loss of pulse feature, launched last year, had clearance in 14 European countries but the FDA clearance opens the door for its use in the US. Loss of pulse (your heart stops beating) or sensing a pulse will show an “I’m OK” prompt. No answer or activity will trigger an emergency alert and call emergency services. It will be activated for US owners sometime in March. Users have to enable it from the Pixel Watch app on your phone > Safety & emergency. It is similar to Google’s existing Car Crash and Fall Detection features. 9to5 Google, Mobihealthnews

OpenEvidence’s $75 million Series A boosts it to $1 billion valuation. The medical information platform is an aggregator for medical information and research. Its LLM AI chatbot is trained on clinical information sources that include 45 years of the New England Journal of Medicine, licensing agreements with peer-reviewed medical journals, and the Mayo Clinic, from which it was spun off.  The company claims use in 10,000 US care centers.  It is also free with unlimited use by healthcare professionals, with the app available on Apple’s and Google’s stores. The Series A was funded by Sequoia Capital. The new funds will be used for strategic content partnerships, to train next-generation LLMs, and grow its team of scientists. With total funding over $100 million, its valuation is now $1 billion. Mobihealthnews, CNBC

Retrieve Medical plans to acquire Cúratus LLC.  Both seem to be bootstrapped data companies, with Retrieve analyzing patient data from multiple sources using advanced natural language processing (NLP) in its Retrieve Dx product for providers to understand complex clinical histories and diagnose chronic conditions. It integrates with major EHRs. Cúratus provides to health plans and provider groups provider data management, and governance for the Medicare Advantage, Medicaid, and commercial payer markets through its ProviderLenz platform. The letter of intent does not disclose offer price, timing, headquartering, or management transitions. Release

Women’s health is supposed to be hot–but here’s another closure against the trend. HerMD, a Cincinnati-based comprehensive practice focused on women’s health that utilized both in-office visits and in-person assessments, coupled with virtual tools, is closing for unclear reasons, other than “ongoing challenges in health care”, perhaps code for running out of money. Their closure on 21 March was disclosed 24 February in an email to patients. The information is not on the website.

Interestingly, it raised a not-inconsiderable $36 million in total funding from its founding in 2015, with investors including Jazz Venture Partners, B-Flexion, and Amboy Street Ventures, expanding beyond Cincinnati to Indiana, Tennessee, and New Jersey. Why their attractive concept, which included longer form visits and aesthetics, did not gain traction is a mystery to this Editor. Perhaps they should have branched out into that other blistering trend, GLP-1 drugs for weight loss. CincyInno