Healthcare Brew covers pharmaceutical developments, health startups, the latest tech, and how it impacts hospitals and providers to keep administrators and providers informed.

Healthcare Brew

Maia Anderson

Healthcare Brew delivers the latest news and trends in healthcare.

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A smiling young woman with a hearing aid talks on the phone.

Hearing aids can now be sold over the counter

The FDA began allowing hearing aids to be sold over the counter in late 2022.

Newly approved OTC hearing aids could rake in billions

A collage of different tech products our reporter tried out at CES.

CES 2023 put digital health on full display 

The pervading theme was bringing healthcare to the consumer.

Shannon Young

A collage of young people in cities using their phones.

AI literally makes breathing easier

Your wi-fi router could help doctors detect and monitor breathing problems.

Every breath you take, every move you make, wi-fi’s watching you

Healthcare Innovation

illustrated headshot of caroline catherman, healthcare brew reporter

Caroline Catherman

About 44% of global healthcare and life sciences companies that use generative AI have added 

 to the mix, according to a survey released Oct. 16.

The survey, conducted by Google Cloud and global insights and strategy firm National Research Group, polled 605 leaders of global healthcare and life sciences companies from April to June to see how they use AI—in particular, AI agents—and what return on investment (ROI) they’re seeing. 

Healthcare most commonly uses AI agents for tech support (53%), followed by security operations and cybersecurity (49%), then productivity and research (46%), the poll found.Agents represent a new frontier because, as opposed to traditional large language models that take commands, they can autonomously work together to complete a task, Aashima Gupta, Google Cloud’s global director of healthcare strategy and solutions, said during a virtual roundtable on Oct. 14.

“This multi-agent framework is the evolution [of AI],” Gupta said.

About 1 in 3 surveyed organizations have deployed not just one but 10+ AI agents.

Mayank Pant, EVP of product management at care enablement company IKS Health, said during the roundtable his organization uses agents to automate the journey from an appointment to a prior authorization request.

 agent takes notes on an appointment. Then, an autonomous coding agent checks the notes for accuracy and assigns medical codes. If prior authorization is needed, a prior authorization agent steps in. The agents lastly bring a human into the loop to sign off on their work.

“What we are seeing on the ground is that this clinically connected…system is delivering better experiences for patients, for clinicians, their staff,” Pant said.

The push toward AI agents is accompanied by an increase in spending, as 74% of leaders said they’ve upped the amount they spend on generative AI and 48% said they’re reallocating money from other areas toward their AI investment.

The good news: It seems to be working. The majority (73%) of healthcare and life sciences executives said they’re seeing ROI in generative AI, compared to 74% in 2024.

Among 221 executives reporting ROI from AI, 83% estimated generative AI directly increased their company’s annual revenue by 6% or more.

When it comes to AI agents, however, the numbers get a bit more complicated.

Healthcare executives pointed to a few specific categories where they felt this newer technology was already making up for its 

Among 161 health execs whose company used AI agents, 34% said they saw ROI within patient experience and tech support. This was closely followed by software development at 33%.

Sameer Sethi, SVP and chief AI officer for New Jersey-based Hackensack Meridian Health, said during the roundtable it’s difficult to precisely link patient outcomes to AI.

Hackensack Meridian Health uses AI agents to call patients post-discharge to ensure they’re adhering to instructions. While Sethi said this was followed by a reduction in the number of readmissions within 30 days, there are other factors, like a patient’s support system, that also contribute.

“Attribution is going to be very difficult,” Sethi said. “What matters is that we’re doing the right thing for the patient and making sure that they’re healthier, and AI and other capabilities are helping with that.”

Correction 10/17/2025: This story has been updated to reflect that Mayank Pant, EVP of product management, was the speaker for IKS Health, not Sri Madabushi, EVP of health system partnerships.

Business hand handing money over to AI hand representing venture capital funding to AI startups.

Healthcare, life sciences companies are betting big on AI agents

From scribes to coders to prior auth, AI agents are starting to work in teams and deliver ROI.

Cassie McGrath

I like some of Fujifilm’s cameras. But what does it know about pharmaceuticals?

And on Sept. 24, its drug manufacturing arm Fujifilm Biotechnologies made its next big investment: a $3.2 billion facility in Holly Springs, North Carolina, part of the state’s biotech hub—aka the Research Triangle.

Fujifilm Biotechnologies launched as a drug manufacturer in 2011, making a big shift into healthcare as its film business was failing. Over the last almost 15 years, the company has found success in this model, reporting $2.1 billion in revenue for its healthcare segment in Q4 2025.

In 2006, Fujifilm lost a significant portion of its revenue when digital cameras took over and the company could no longer make as much profit from physical film, Lars Petersen, president and CEO of Fujifilm Biotechnologies, told Healthcare Brew.

So the company began to pivot toward healthcare and launched a research lab in Japan in 2006. Then, five years later, Fujifilm had an opportunity to buy two manufacturing facilities reportedly worth 

 from drug company Merck: one in Morrisville, part of the Research Triangle Park, and one in Billingham, England. It also marked Merck’s transition out of the biologics business, 

That marked the official launch of Fujifilm Biotechnologies.

The company now has 10 manufacturing sites across the US, the UK, Japan, and Denmark, including the new site in Holly Springs (its second in the Research Triangle Region).

While it may seem weird for a camera company to manufacture medications, “it’s not strange at all,” Pankit Bhalodia, partner at consultancy West Monroe, told us.

Camera companies like Fujifilm are already good at engineering, he continued, meaning they are well positioned to make other complex products—like medications.

Kodak, for example, took a similar path and entered into pharmaceutical ingredient production in 2020, 

 As a contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO), Fujifilm Biotechnologies doesn’t work in drug development but instead has contracts with drug companies to make their medications. Those include a $3 billion contract with biotech Regeneron signed in April and a $2 billion deal with Johnson & Johnson in August.

The CDMO industry is currently valued at $139.3 billion, according to 

, and is expected to grow to $273.9 billion by 2034.

“We are actually proud of calling ourselves a pure CDMO,” Petersen said. “We are not competing with our customers [which are biotech companies].”

The camera maker has also had previous partnerships with Eli Lilly as well as Japanese drugmaker Takeda Pharmaceutical Company.

A lot of pharmaceutical companies are announcing 

 in the face of the Trump administration’s tariffs. But this new Fujifilm facility was planned back in 2021, Petersen said, “far before anybody thought about tariffs.”

The building is instead part of the company’s business model, dubbed kojoX, which establishes the concept of facilities designed as replicas of its other buildings around the world, so they can therefore make the same products using the same tactics.

Having an international footprint is also a benefit to biotech companies looking for drug manufacturers, Bhalodia said, as it helps diversification and avoids “geopolitical risk” so companies can make strategic decisions about where in the world would be best to make their product. 

“It gives them the flexibility to leverage, whether it’s the Europe-, Asia-, or US-based facility,” he said. “It’s probably a larger strategic play to become a more global CDMO.”

Cambridge, USA - 26 July 2024. A colorful facade wraps around FUJIFILM Diosynth Biotechnologies, blending science and design in a playful, modern exterior and street reflections.

Fujifilm Biotechnologies builds new manufacturing facility in North Carolina’s Research Triangle 

From cameras to drug manufacturing, Fujifilm is staking its claim in the pharmaceutical industry. 

Nicole Ortiz

 showed hospital executives are still holding strong to sustainability-related commitments regardless of 

. University of California, Irvine (UCI) Health is embodying that with its new all-electric hospital, set to open Dec. 10.

 is the first all-electric acute care hospital of its size in the country, featuring renewable solar park structures, electric instead of gas for utilities like heating and hot water systems (which also extends to water used in sterilization and humidification), and even all-electric appliances in its kitchen, Joe Brothman, UCI Health’s director of facilities and general services, who has overseen portions of this new project, told Healthcare Brew.

And electricity isn’t the only sustainable feature at the 350,000-square-foot, 144-bed hospital, Brothman said.

The hospital also has rainwater collection built into its landscaping that uses recycled water, bird-friendly glass, around 87% outdoor water reduction and about 38.5% indoor water reduction, and energy efficient equipment for lighting along with other building components.

“It’s a significant cost to make this all-electric [hospital], but we do anticipate, in the long run, that we will have a cost savings, especially with the rising costs of natural gas,” Brothman said.

A big impetus behind this project has been reducing healthcare’s impact on the community, Brothman said.

“Hospitals, typically, are significant burdens on the local community with their output, both with carbon emissions and with waste,” Brothman said. “This hospital is going to be different.”

 analyzing how health systems impact the environment concluded their global greenhouse gas emissions are equivalent to that of 514 coal power plants.

On top of that, Brothman noted, California is particularly keen on environmental initiatives, especially as the state often bears the brunt of climate change-driven 

“We wanted every aspect of sustainability. Our priorities here at UCI Health is to model environmental stewardship, and we wanted this [hospital] to be an example of that in all aspects,” Tony Dover, energy management and sustainability officer at UCI Health, told us.

A rendering of a single-occupancy hospital room with sliding glass doors.

According to Madhura Dhayagude—assistant VP with engineering consultancy WSP and an energy and sustainability consultant on the UCI project—the project beat expectations and stretched goals.

Engineers aim to meet the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers’s 90.1 standards, which is an industry guideline for measuring energy use, and the new hospital saw a 43.7% reduction over that number, she said. Further, the builders set out to achieve a minimum 160 energy use intensity (EUI), which measures how energy efficient a building is (a lower number means it’s more energy efficient), and achieved 110 EUI when including the solar panels atop its parking garage.

The hospital is also on its way to a platinum 

, a tiered sustainability certification, which would make it the sixth hospital in the country to receive this designation (the highest possible), she added.

Ultimately, having an all-electric hospital is a solid step in sustainability goals, but if execs aren’t looking to Scope 3 supply chain emissions, then it’s not making as significant of a difference, Tinglong Dai, Bernard T. Ferrari business professor at Johns Hopkins University, told us.

“[Hospitals] may be switching to all-electric operations, but if their suppliers, if their vendors are still creating a lot of emissions, it probably will not matter as much as is advertised,” he said.

 published in Health Affairs, about 82% of emissions were Scope 3, which are those that come from indirect sources like manufacturers and suppliers. Comparatively, only around 7% make up the Scope 1 emissions that come directly from hospital operations.

To take things to the next level, Dai added, hospitals should look at emissions created by utility suppliers, transportation deliveries, where drugs are made, where medical devices come from, software and hardware vendors, and whether they’re using data centers for AI.

Dover said UCI tracks and reports Scope 3 emissions for employees’ commutes, business travel, and waste. Some vendors and suppliers the health system contracts with “prioritize sustainability,” he added, and UCI Health is “collaborating with [suppliers] to identify opportunities to reduce emissions,” such as by reducing packaging waste and cutting transportation-related carbon emissions.

Though, Dai said, moving things around with manufacturers could ultimately hurt a hospital’s bottom line and shift too much of the focus away from its main priority—which is, of course, serving patients.

“A lot of things are really completely outside [a hospital’s] control. Most hospitals have no clue about the sources of supplies,” he said. “If we do not have that kind of transparency, it’s very difficult for us to make any informed decision. But that’s precisely what most hospitals, most health systems, are facing.”

A 3D rendering of a gray modular 6-floor building.

UCI Health’s new all-electric hospital reinforces system’s commitment to sustainability

The facility focuses on reducing its direct carbon emissions by cutting reliance on fossil fuels.

While the federal government has made clear that issues like 

 have been deprioritized, that hasn’t stopped some hospital leaders from continuing to pursue those goals.

In fact, according to the latest sustainability benchmark report from Health Care Without Harm and Practice Greenhealth, the opposite may be true. The health sustainability nonprofit’s annual report found that among almost 493 hospital partners, there’s been a reduction of roughly 185,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases and more than $203 million in annual savings due to sustainability initiatives.

, our partners are still deeply committed to their sustainability strategies,” Sarah Irwin, associate director of sustainability solutions at Practice Greenhealth, told us. “Some of our partners might be doing that in slightly different ways than they did before…but the work is still happening—and in fact, they’re doubling down.”

For Washington-based nonprofit Providence Health, Beth Schenk, chief environmental stewardship officer, told us the health system is approaching sustainability through mitigation, procurement, resilience, and advocacy.

“[We’re] working to address the problems that we can to help move healthcare to a way of operating that’s more compatible with a healthy planet,” she said.

Providence’s 51 hospitals and 1,014 clinics adhere to its WE ACT framework, which focuses on creating sustainable initiatives around waste, energy and water, agriculture and food, chemicals, and transportation. Each facility has been rated on a scorecard annually since 2019 based on data collected from 150+ categories tied to the five themes in the framework.

In 2020, the environmental stewardship team set a goal of becoming more carbon negative by 2030 and cutting between 3%–5% of emissions per facility each year, reaching a 23% cut in its hospitals so far. Schenk confirmed the health system is on track to achieve both goals. This has resulted in $32 million in savings associated with the stewardship programs for 2024 and $40 million for 2023, she added.

Having “accurate, transparent, verifiable data in order to justify and defend different requests for expensive finances, how are we going to measure our progress, etc.” was an important part of committing to these goals, she said.

, Providence has reduced Scopes 1, 2, and 3 carbon emissions—which include emissions an organization directly and indirectly emits—by 18% since 2019 and has saved $15 million annually in conservation efforts. For reference, a 

 of multiple databases found healthcare made up between 15% and 50% of Scopes 1 and 2 emissions and 50% to 75% of Scope 3 emissions—that accounts for between 4% and 5% of all greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.

This also aligns with what Practice Greenhealth found: Among its partners that reported 2024 Scope 1 and 2 emissions, there was an 8.7% decrease overall.

Providence’s post goes on to state that 100 of its facilities run fully on renewable energy and 85% of its hospitals have deactivated “wasteful” nitrous oxide piping. Further, business travel has operated at a 50% reduction since 2019, according to the post.

Reducing plastic use features heavily in the Greenhealth study, too, with almost 50% of its partners saying they’ve made efforts to reduce plastic use in their facilities.

The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, for example, has a partnership with medical reprocessing manufacturer Stryker’s Sustainability Solutions, which reprocesses devices like cables, catheters, and pulse oximeters, saving $1.4 million between July 2023 to July 2024.

According to Ohio State’s Environmental Sustainability Consultant Cecil Okotah, since the program was implemented in 2021, the university has saved close to $4 million and been able to divert almost 60 tons of waste from landfills between 2018 and 2024.

Practice Greenhealth estimated 20%–25% of hospital waste is plastics in 2024, but less than 5% is actually recycled, according to a 

The university also has sustainability initiatives to decrease energy use in its facilities, increase composting and recycling efforts, and implement 

For Practice Greenhealth, the more data it can get from hospital partners the better, as that can serve as a roadmap for other institutions. Especially since partners can be at any stage, from “extremely new” to “fairly mature,” Irwin said.

Hospitals that are newer to sustainability initiatives then get the opportunity to learn from veteran teams and see how they can implement what’s already proven to be effective, she said.

As for one of the areas that needs the most continued attention? Irwin said transportation is where she thinks there’s “more that we can be doing and supporting” since it’s so far-reaching—encompassing everything from daily commutes to the Scope 3 emissions from materials being flown or driven to a facility—and the data tends to come from third-party resources.

For Schenk, moving into a place where more institutions take sustainability “seriously” is an integral next step in implementing industrywide change.

“We’re here for health,” she said. “I think in healthcare we have even more of an obligation to not to cause harm and also to be ready and planning and responding to the harm that is underway.”

Green Heartbeat symbol. Symbolic green heart pulse isolated on white background. World Environment Day and Earth Day Concept. Green ecology Concept.

Health Care Without Harm trend report suggests sustainability is still important to hospital leaders

Despite changes in the federal government, some health systems are committing to sustainability initiatives and reaping cost-savings.

Trend report suggests sustainability is still important to hospital leaders

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Questions?

PSA Airlines partnered with Included Health to simplify healthcare access, giving employees a front door to personalized, high-quality virtual care. In this session, you’ll hear how the partnership boosted engagement, improved outcomes, and delivered measurable business impact.

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The Sky-High Value of High-Quality Healthcare

 are rapidly making their way into healthcare, Adrienne Kline is one researcher leading the way in development.

Head of AI and engineering at Illinois-based Northwestern Medicine’s Center for Artificial Intelligence at the Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute, Kline received $1.4 million in research grants in the last year from tech giants Amazon, Microsoft, and Nvidia to develop new AI technologies for both patients and healthcare administrators.

These companies regularly make investments into AI, with Microsoft pledging in January $80 billion to create AI-enabled data centers to train models and deploy AI and cloud-based applications globally.

With this funding, Kline spearheaded the creation of a medical deidentification tool called PixelGuard, which removes identifying data for safe sharing of sensitive health information. The assistant professor at Northwestern also led the creation of a multimodal cardiac platform, Project Corazon, which reads MRI slices to diagnose cardiac abnormalities.

Kline spoke with Healthcare Brew about how she’s used research grants over the past year and what she’s working on now.

While Kline was finishing her postdoctorate in the department of preventive medicine, private tech companies wanted to recruit her. She ultimately decided to stay in academia, though, because she wanted more autonomy to choose what she would work on, she said.

Since Kline was already on these companies’ radars, they contacted her with grant offers and gave her another way to collaborate on ideas she had. With National Institutes of Health funding cuts issued by the Trump administration (funding is 

 at Northwestern), industry financing provided her an opportunity to continue “really important” research, she said.

“Some of these industry partnerships are a bit of a godsend to continue to get your research pushed through and get your research published,” she said, which ultimately helps researchers try “to make a difference in the world.”

De-indeification tools, like the one she built, aren’t “sexy,” Kline said, but they are essential for protecting data sharing, including within hospitals or between industry partners.

PixelGuard does this for images, she said, meaning healthcare providers can safely share MRI slices externally, like, for example, with a health plan that wants to double-check it for billing purposes.

She worked with Amazon and IT company ScaleCapacity to develop the tool, which took about seven months from “pitch to deployment,” she said. 

Working with Nvidia, Amazon Web Services, and tech company Quantiphi, Kline also led the development of a program, Project Corazon that can read cardiac MRI scans and assess medical images “the way a radiologist would.” In other words, the tool uses AI to assist clinicians in making diagnoses.

Project Corazon is not ready to be used in hospitals yet, Kline said, but with the CDC reporting 6.7 million US residents over 20 as having heart failure, she sees the need to ease the diagnostic process.

After sitting in on a faculty meeting and hearing about scheduling challenges, Kline started drawing up plans for a new operating room scheduling tool.

When completed (she’s aiming for November or December), the tool will review items like surgeons, beds, and room availability as well as emergent patient needs to find the most efficient way to conduct procedures.

“We want high utilization, but we also want to ensure that our emergencies are handled without delay, taking into account people going on vacation or [getting] sick,” she said, “because that really ties back to hospital profit margins.”

Headshot of Northwestern's Adrienne Kline on a small blue cloud with darker blue stars nearby

This Northwestern researcher got $1.4m in grants from Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia. Here’s what she built

Adrienne Kline made de-identification tool PixelGuard and heart diagnoser Project Corazon with private industry research money. 

 using artificial intelligence (AI) as part of their workflows, and while the technology can bring increased efficiency, it can also bring a greater risk of 

 the FDA’s AI tool, Elsa, which was made to accelerate drug and medical device approvals, generated fake research studies in its citations. And in early August, the Verge 

 Google’s healthcare AI model, Med-Gemini, mentioned a nonexistent body part in a 2024 research paper.

 from Mount Sinai health system in New York released on Aug. 2 found AI chatbots are “highly vulnerable” to attacks promoting false medical information.

Given the rising trend of AI use in healthcare, we asked executives from across the industry how leaders should respond when errors occur and what safeguards could be put in place to prevent harm.

Matthew DeCamp, an internal medicine physician and health services researcher at the University of Colorado’s Center for Bioethics and Humanities, told us there’s still “a lot of uncertainty” about who holds responsibility when AI errors occur in healthcare, as it’s not been 

However, the industry can look to existing protocols for sharing responsibility between different stakeholders, such as the AI developer and the end user, he said.

“Even before AI was involved, we found ways to divvy responsibility between, say, the maker of a CT scanner, the health system who purchased it, the radiologists who use it, and the primary care physicians like myself who might read the final report,” DeCamp said. “I think we can be reassured by this, and perhaps take a similar approach.”

Thomas Fuchs, SVP and chief AI officer at pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, told us the priority for healthcare organizations using AI “should always be patient safety and maintaining trust.”

He echoed DeCamp’s sentiment that it’ll take a group effort to mitigate AI errors, adding that the technology developers should “design systems with rigorous validation, transparency, and continuous monitoring.”

Meanwhile, the organizations that use the technology should set up processes to “detect, assess, and respond” to errors quickly and adhere to guidelines like the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s AI Risk Management Framework, Fuchs said, which was designed by the government agency to help manage risks associated with using AI.

Ethan Berke, chief medical officer and SVP of integrated care at virtual care company Teladoc Health, said that in the same way healthcare organizations have systems in place to address other kinds of medical errors, they should create systems to “track, classify, and investigate” any safety threats that may arise from using AI. Then they can use that data to prevent potential future errors.

Teladoc has more than 60 proprietary AI models, Berke said, and the company has created a “rigorous” process to test and evaluate them for “accuracy, bias, and safety” before they’re deployed.

“We all have a responsibility to ensure that AI solutions are reliable, ethical, and secure,” he said. “By investing in patient safety and quality, we’ve been able to build a program that can analyze potential safety events more quickly, address root causes, and catch errors before they even reach the patient.”

A healthcare cross made up of glowing binary code with a warning sign over the top right corner.