Hospitals

Illustration: Anna Kim, Photos: Adobe Stock

It’s been almost a year since emergency department physician John D’Angelo took the reins as CEO of Northwell Health, the largest healthcare system in New York state.

D’Angelo took over from Michael Dowling, who served as Northwell’s first president and CEO for 23 years and helped to build Northwell into a healthcare giant with a $22.6 billion operating budget. After a recent merger with Connecticut-based Nuvance Healthcare, Northwell now operates 28 hospitals and employs 104,000 people.

In a recent interview with Healthcare Brew, D’Angelo—who has been at Northwell for more than 25 years and most recently served as EVP, market president, and chief of integrated operations—said he had three main priorities in his first year.

The first was to assemble a new C-suite, as a number of senior executives also retired around the same time as Dowling. Second was to navigate the Nuvance merger, the largest in the health system’s history. And third was to convert all of Northwell to Epic’s electronic health record.

D’Angelo also spoke with us about the hard parts of becoming CEO and how Northwell is navigating both federal policy changes and the current economic environment.

Read the rest of the interview.—MA

      

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Tech

Morning Brew Inc, Photos: Unsplash

The 2026 Oracle Health and Life Sciences Summit, held from Sept. 22 to 24 near Orlando, FL, highlighted AI’s potential promises—and pitfalls.

Seema Verma, EVP and general manager of Oracle Health and Life Sciences, led an opening keynote in which she introduced new AI products and shared the importance of building AI with strong security protections, governance, and human-in-the-loop protocols. She said that healthcare worker shortages, an aging population, and “unsustainable” high healthcare costs give the industry “no choice but to change.”

“Healthcare doesn’t just need AI; it needs AI built specifically for healthcare,” Verma said. “Healthcare requires AI that is trustworthy, with humans in control and always in the driver’s seat. AI that puts patient safety first, with strong guardrails—outputs that are transparent, traceable, and continuously monitored.”

Her comments about guardrails and trust came after months of reports of rogue AI agents hacking computer systems and warnings from researchers that developers are moving too quickly toward creating life-threatening “superintelligence.”

Oracle—the second-largest electronic health record (EHR) vendor behind Epic—has heavily invested in AI and borrowed billions of dollars to build a controversial New Mexico data center.

Get the rest of the story here.—CC

      

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Pharma

Similar, or not so much?

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Generic medications are one way to get a similar medication for a lower price. But are there hidden costs? Morning Brew explores the little-understood world of generics.

Check out the video here.

vital signs

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top healthcare reads.

Stat: 73%. That’s how much cases of Ebola have risen in Congo’s North Kivu province over three weeks as the country runs low on medical workers. (NBC News)

Quote: “Today, I spoke with the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, to express Australia’s extreme concern about this incident and I also expressed my disappointment that it took the company way too long to inform the government what had occurred.”—Anthony Albanese, prime minister of Australia, on how the country is launching an investigation about how an OpenAI agent hacked into its public healthcare system (the Guardian)

Read: Meet the college students using GLP-1s to lose weight for sorority rush season. (the Cut)

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