Hospital at home has a bit of a waste disposal problem, it seems.

While hospital-at-home care was only intended to temporarily increase hospital capacity during the Covid-19 pandemic, continued extensions have turned it into a more fundamental part of a hospital’s care offerings. As of Jan. 23, there are 373 hospitals approved for at-home care across 140 health systems.

With that, however, comes an increase in medical waste outside of a hospital room’s walls.

Hospitals themselves aren’t exactly known for having a low carbon footprint when it comes to waste and knowing what can or can’t be recycled. A 2020 study found one emergency department accumulated 671.8 kilograms of waste in a day, with only about 15% marked as regulated medical waste.

According to a 2023 report from medical waste compliance company Stericycle, the top challenge to clinicians working in hospital-at-home settings is managing pharmaceutical and medical waste. More than half of the healthcare professionals polled (58%) said they knew proper waste disposal methods and over 90% felt more resources were needed to help them understand what to do with waste.

Experts believe being proactive can help.—NO

Whether you’re a doctor, a manufacturer, or you just love drama, you need to know about recent medical device recalls.

The FDA gets 2+ million reports of deaths, injuries, and malfunctions allegedly associated with medical devices annually. Some of these reports prompt manufacturers to send correction notices to customers with updated use instructions. A few weeks or months later, the FDA labels some of these incidents as recalls, ranging from the least dangerous, Class III, to the most dangerous, Class I.

We keep you informed on the last month of Class I recalls here in our ongoing series. So, without further ado, welcome to January 2026’s Recall Roundup!

Diabetes dangers. Some sensors on Abbott’s FreeStyle Libre 3 and FreeStyle Libre 3 Plus continuous glucose monitors are giving inaccurate low glucose readings due to carbon buildup. In a Nov. 24 company announcement reposted by the FDA, Abbott attributed 736 serious adverse events and seven deaths to this issue worldwide, including 57 injuries in the US (but no US deaths). Customers can visit www.freestylecheck.com to see if their sensors are potentially affected. If they are, they’ll get a free replacement.

See the full list here.—CC

Each week, we schedule our rounds with Healthcare Brew readers. Want to be featured in an upcoming edition? Click here to introduce yourself.

There’s an oft-repeated adage in healthcare right now: An AI model is only as good as the data it’s trained on.

This truth has turned patients’ health information into a hot commodity. Healthcare organizations are increasingly using it to build AI-fueled drug discovery models, digital twins, and clinical trial emulations.

Eli Lilly is one such company. The trillion-dollar biopharma not only has its own vast library of 500,000+ data points but is also collecting data from other biotech companies in exchange for allowing those companies to use its AI models.

But as the collection and use of patient health information grows, so does its risk of compromise. Around 57 million patients’ healthcare records were exposed in 2025, per a preliminary count by the HIPAA Journal.

Alongside patients’ personal information, healthcare giants also have to guard their intellectual property and trade secrets. It’s not always easy, particularly when considering that many healthcare leaders have decades’ or even a century’s worth of files, sometimes stored on outdated legacy technology.

So how do major healthcare innovators balance their ambition with caution and make sure their work is secure? Andrea Abell, chief information security officer (CISO) at Eli Lilly, sat down with Healthcare Brew at CES to discuss her role.

See the full conversation here.—CC