Meta is walking back its fact-checking efforts, Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, said in a January 7 post on the company’s website, raising concerns about the potential for health misinformation to increase on its social platforms.

Kaplan explained that over the next few months, Meta will phase out and replace its third-party fact-checking program—in place since 2016—with a community notes model, à la X, across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Through this model, users can identify and add disclaimers to posts with misinformation, and other users’ votes determine whether the note will be shown next to the original post.

While Kaplan said the move encourages “free expression,” experts say it should be a wake-up call for healthcare organizations. Multiple studies conclude that health misinformation on the internet has decreased trust in conventional treatments like vaccines.

For instance, a 2021 randomized controlled trial published in journal Nature Human Behavior suggested that some people were less willing to take a Covid-19 vaccine after viewing online misinformation. The portion of those “definitely” willing as of September 2020 was only 43% in the US. A 2022 study from Indiana University, published in Scientific Reports, also linked lower vaccine uptake to higher exposure to online misinformation.

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Physical therapy (PT)—the fifth largest clinical health occupation requiring a license, according to a 2023 report by the American Physical Therapy Association—is tapping into tech innovations.

Physical therapists use activities to help patients improve motor skills and brain function. The increased use of artificial intelligence (AI), computer vision, wearables, apps, and telehealth have all fueled advances in how PT is administered and how movement data can be captured, used, or shared. Market researcher Research and Markets projects the global PT software market will expand from $24.56 billion in 2023 to $34.87 billion by 2028.

“We’re going to continue to see how can AI and how can machine learning help with diagnosis…with doing tasks like checking in patients and…help surgeons read range of motion,” Jessica Wulke, a physical therapy and the clinical solutions implementation manager at health tech company Academy Medtech Ventures (AMV), told Healthcare Brew.

Wearables like Oura Rings and Apple Watches can also play a big role for monitoring personal health, she added. For example, they can track sleep, which correlates with mental fatigue and can be a factor in increasing risk of injury.

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Digital health has become a crucial sector of the healthcare industry, with companies leveraging technology for everything from lowering patients’ risk of developing heart disease to creating digital twins to improve clinical trials.

Researchers from digital health strategy group and venture fund Rock Health took a look back at where investors put their money in the digital health field in 2024. They found that venture capital (VC) firms are largely favoring early-stage startups and sticking to tried-and-true areas like artificial intelligence (AI). The report also found that major funds like Andreessen Horowitz’s a16z and General Catalyst are gaining more influence.

Numbers breakdown. In 2024, US-based digital health startups raised a total of $10.1 billion in 497 deals, according to Rock Health’s January 13 analysis. That’s slightly down from 2023 when startups raised $10.8 billion in 503 deals, and is almost the same amount they raised pre-pandemic in 2019 ($8.2 billion in 425 deals) when accounting for inflation.

Keep reading here.—MA