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

Healthcare Tech

Nicole Ortiz

Healthcare Brew delivers the latest news and trends in healthcare.

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Occasionally, we schedule our rounds with Healthcare Brew readers. Want to be featured in an upcoming edition?

Dominique Wells, chief operating officer at Conduit Health Partners, a nurse-led organization that connects patients with health systems, began her career “with a mop and a bucket” as a hospital housekeeper, moved into various nursing roles, and eventually found herself in the C-suite.

Each of her roles, she told us, gave her “a deeper sense of empathy for the people who keep our system running.”

We spoke with Wells about her unique journey to the C-suite and the parts of her job that bring her the most joy.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How would you describe your specific job to someone who doesn’t work in healthcare?

I think a great analogy for my current position is that of mission control. While I may be powered differently than a spaceship, I have to speak the language of healthcare and navigate the evolving technology and regulatory landscape to make sure the mothership does not crash land. Central to all this activity is ensuring that our team of 200+ nurses who work remotely nationwide—along with sales, marketing, and administrative staff—is operating as a tight unit.

What’s the most fulfilling aspect of your job?

I have a deep passion for helping people. In my current role, I am able to combine my informatics background with my nursing experience to support nurses working at the top of their license.

Navigating healthcare today is challenging for everyone, and we’ve all experienced loved ones getting caught up in the complexities and, at times, falling through the cracks. I love that our nurses are there to fill in critical gaps and provide the comfort and reassurance that people desperately need when they are facing uncertainty. Nurses form the foundation of optimal care delivery, and I’m acutely focused on bringing nursing back to the center of the patient journey.

What healthcare trend are you most optimistic about?

, but for me, the concept of agentic nursing is particularly intriguing. I know a lot of people in nursing are worried about how AI is going to impact the profession, especially the human side of it. But I see agentic nursing as an opportunity to get nurses back to the bedside and in front of patients. If AI can address a lot of the administrative and documentation overload that nurses are currently burdened with, these professionals will be free to excel at what they were trained to do: care for patients.

What healthcare trend are you least optimistic about?

, healthcare has an incredible opportunity to continue building on the momentum we saw during the pandemic. That period sparked a surge of 

 and a strong commitment to improving care through innovation. Stakeholders showed a willingness to take risks, explore new ideas, and embrace change—all of which led to meaningful progress.

Tell us one new or old health tech product or platform that’s made your life easier.

This answer will probably get mixed reviews, but EHRs [

] have transformed the way healthcare is delivered. They have evolved over the years and seen their share of issues, but I remember the days of 

. Clinicians could spend half their day hunting down patient records—time that could have been spent more proactively getting ahead of patient care issues.

EHRs have provided the foundation for us to advance key industry initiatives in a way that would not have been possible before, ultimately impacting more lives for the better.

Cutout of a Conduit Health Partners's Dominique Wells placed inside an abstract shape.

How this CCO is trying to take nursing ‘back to the center of the patient journey’

Conduit Health Partners’s Dominique Wells talks AI, EHRs, and more.

Dani Bowie, SVP of workforce AI at travel nursing agency Aya Healthcare, began her career as a nurse and has moved into “helping hospitals run more efficiently.” With Aya specifically, she’s in a role where she taps into how AI and predictive analytics can ensure nurses are scheduled “in ways that support their well-being and help hospitals manage labor costs,” she said.

We spoke with Bowie about how her work has evolved and how the tech she works with factors in.

What’s the best change you’ve made or seen at a place you’ve worked?

 remains one of the most complex challenges for hospitals and health systems. Where efficiency and automation are lacking, and resources are misaligned, that’s where technology can make the largest impact: by transforming scheduling. What previously took hospital nurse leaders hours and days can now take less than five minutes with the right technology.

What’s the biggest misconception people might have about your job?

, there are a lot of misconceptions about AI in healthcare. AI isn’t intended to replace clinicians but rather enhance their work and help them practice to the top of their licensure. The tools we’re developing are built to save nurse managers hours per week of manual effort—that kind of time savings is invaluable.

As a former health system executive, seeing the technology I designed and created implemented in hospitals across the country is so rewarding. It’s ensuring nurses like me are caring for patients at the bedside rather than being 

, staring at a computer screen covered in sticky notes, buried deep in spreadsheets until they’re cross-eyed.

I’m really optimistic about how technology will 

 streamline processes, better utilize their resources, and improve alignment between previously siloed units. Technology is helping frontline leaders get away from mundane and tedious work so they can focus on what’s most important: patient care.

How this healthcare exec is helping make health systems more efficient with AI

Dani Bowie oversees how Aya Healthcare implements the tech, with hopes of reducing burnout.

Maia Anderson

The healthcare industry has seen an increasing number of 

 in recent years, and time is running out for Congress to renew legislation that experts say is key to detecting threats before an attack takes place.

Deemed the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015, or CISA, the legislation makes it possible for organizations that scan for cyber threats to share information about potential bad actors before a cyberattack occurs and without potential legal liability. But the act is set to expire on Sept. 30, and experts told Healthcare Brew that without it, the healthcare system would be more vulnerable. 

“When information is not shared, it gives an upper hand to the attackers because they go undetected,” Mike Nelson, VP of digital trust at cybersecurity firm DigiCert, said. “The unfortunate result is that, as less information is shared, attacks will certainly go up.”

Before the legislation was passed, if an organization detected a threat for a potential cyberattack, it might have been hesitant to share that information for fear of legal liability, according to George Pappas, CEO of healthcare cybersecurity compliance company Intraprise Health.

“You’re really asking parties to share [information] before they have a solution,” he said.

What CISA did was remove that liability component so organizations were protected when sharing information about potential bad actors.

“Information sharing around cybersecurity is a critical aspect of protection,” Nelson said. “For example, if one hospital gets hit from ransomware, they can rapidly share how they were attacked, the details of that attack, and it can arm the rest of the industry to say, ‘Hey, we can now prevent that.’”

If CISA is allowed to lapse at the end of September, hospitals and healthcare organizations at large will likely see more successful cyberattacks “because organizations would be less prepared to respond to those attacks,” Jon Moore, chief risk officer and SVP of consulting services at healthcare cybersecurity company Clearwater Security, said.

Cyberattacks are already a huge problem in healthcare. The industry had the most cyber threats last year among all critical infrastructure industries, according to the FBI’s 2024 Internet Crime Report, which listed a total of 444 ransomware and data breach incidents in healthcare. The same year, the Change Healthcare cyberattack 

Without CISA, organizations will likely return to sharing less information on potential cyber threats because their legal teams will advise caution without the protections the act offers, Nelson said.

Two senators—Mike Rounds, a Republican from South Dakota, and Gary Peters, a Democrat from Michigan—introduced a bill in April to extend CISA by another 10 years. 

In a press release announcing the bill, Rounds said allowing CISA to lapse could “significantly weaken” cybersecurity ecosystems, “removing vital liability protections and hampering defensive operations across both the defense industrial base and critical infrastructure sectors.”

No progress has been made on advancing the bill, but 

 reported on Aug. 19 the House Homeland Security Committee confirmed plans to mark up the bill when Congress comes back from its August recess.

Since CISA was passed, the healthcare industry has seen “tremendous improvement” in keeping organizations protected from cyber threats, Nelson said, adding, “I just hope that progress continues.”

Red folders in the shape of a hospital cross with a mouse pointer

How hospitals may be affected if 10-year-old CISA cybersecurity law is allowed to lapse

Congress has until the end of September to renew the law, which allows organizations to share information about potential cyber threats.

How hospitals may be affected if a 10-year-old cybersecurity law is allowed to lapse

illustrated headshot of caroline catherman, healthcare brew reporter

Caroline Catherman

The number of FDA-cleared artificial intelligence-enabled medical devices has 

 in 2023 to 1,247 as of Aug. 28, according to the federal agency’s 

And healthcare systems are getting on board. In a 

, about 88% of 233 health system executives said their system uses AI.

Though only a small percentage have been recalled, 60 AI-enabled devices racked up 182 recorded recall events as of November 2024, according to an Aug. 22 JAMA 

Throughout these recalls, there was a consistent thread: Publicly traded companies’ devices (about 92%) were recalled more frequently than private companies’ devices (53%).

“That was really something we were surprised by because we were thinking public companies probably have better risk management,” Tinglong Dai, Bernard T. Ferrari professor at the Johns Hopkins University Carey Business School and one of the paper’s authors, told Healthcare Brew.

The paper theorizes public companies could feel pressure from investors to put out devices as quickly as possible, perhaps not giving them time for more thorough research.

“Investors, they want to see year after year you have new AI devices cleared by the FDA, you have AI devices being rolled out among healthcare providers, so the pressure itself might have contributed to the recalls,” Dai said. 

There were several main reasons for the recalls—a designation that ranges from a quick software update to total market removal—with 109 recalled due to diagnostic or measurement errors, 44 for a functionality delay, 14 for physical hazards, and 13 for biochemical hazards.

“If you have a misdiagnosis, obviously the entire healthcare delivery could be subject to risk because wrong diagnosis means that you could also have the wrong treatment,” Dai said.

The research letter identified another pattern, too. The majority (40% from the private companies, 78% from established public companies, and 97% from smaller public companies) of the recalled devices weren’t clinically validated before they were approved.

 are given the greenlight through the FDA’s 510(k) pathway, which clears a device if it proves it is “substantially equivalent” to a previously cleared device. Clinical data is not normally required to get an OK via a 510(k), as opposed to other clearance processes.

This is something health systems and providers should keep in mind when deciding 

“From the user’s perspective, I think it’s extremely important to understand…the difference between reported performance and real-world performance,” he said.

Even AI programs with strong premarket clinical data “frequently” perform worse in diverse real-world clinical settings, according to a March 2025 

This is one of the reasons the American Medical Association uses the term “augmented intelligence” rather than “artificial intelligence,” according to the organization’s website. AMA 

 says that AI is not supposed to call the shots or operate without oversight by a human healthcare professional.

A Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson told Healthcare Brew the agency “is not able to confirm” the numbers cited in the JAMA study, but “remains committed to ensuring patients have access to safe and effective medical devices, including those enabled with AI.”

In addition to general device software validation and safety requirements, the agency released 

 in January specifically for AI-enabled devices, like what data and documentation is needed to show safety and effectiveness.

Tinglong Dai’s title has been clarified.

Pill capsule with tech system inside, slightly open, and a honeycomb-like web in the background

Over 90% of recalled AI-enabled medical devices were from public companies

Though only a few AI-enabled devices have been recalled, patterns are emerging.

Cassie McGrath

Welcome back to AI 411, a monthly roundup of artificial intelligence (AI) announcements from across the healthcare industry.

 its new suite of AI tools, including integrating an ambient scribe into the electronic health record (EHR) giant’s platform. (We spoke with other AI note-taking platform startups to see how they’re feeling about the news.)

Here’s the rundown of health-related AI updates from around the industry in August.

 Smart hospital company Artisight announced Aug. 28 it can now autonomously document operating room activity into EHRs. The tool could 

 on clinicians and also prompt staff to do things like scrub up when a patient enters the room. Similar tools from the company are already used in patient rooms at health systems like York, Pennsylvania-based WellSpan and Chicago-based Northwestern Medicine.

, or CHAI, a nonprofit dedicated to responsible AI use, and the National Association of Community Health Centers (NACHC), which represents community health centers (CHCs) serving nearly 34 million patients, announced a new partnership Aug. 14. Through policy, education, research, and integration support, the pair said in a release they hope to ensure CHCs and patients “are prioritized and positioned to benefit” from AI in healthcare.

On Aug. 20, EliseAI, which automates healthcare and housing systems like multistep scheduling and prior authorizations, announced a $250 million fundraiser. The Series E round was led by venture capitalist (VC) firm Andreessen Horowitz and had participation from other VCs, including Bessemer Venture Partners, Sapphire Ventures, and Navitas Capital. Funds will be used to hire more staff, according to a release. The company’s valuation has doubled to $2.2 billion since last August, 

Mental health company Grow Therapy announced a new AI feature on Aug. 19. Called “between-session reflections,” it provides a space for clients to write about their thoughts and feelings between appointments. The reflections are organized into themes they can access privately, and they can choose what they'd like to share with their provider.

Infrastructure software company Medallion, which uses AI to automate the back office of healthcare, announced $43 million in new funding on Aug. 18, bringing its total funding to $130 million. The round was led by VC Acrew Capital, and had participation from other firms, such as Washington Harbour Partners, Sequoia Capital, GV, Spark Capital, and NFDG. Among other things, the company is using the funding to launch CredAlliance, a tool designed to speed up and reduce administrative burden around the credentialing process for health insurance companies, according to a release.

On Aug. 13, EHR provider Oracle Health announced a “next-generation” platform, which includes implementing an AI agent to be an “intelligent clinical assistant” in the software, according to the company’s website. The tool automatically drafts clinical documentation, enables voice search, and provides patient summaries to help clinicians prepare their workflows.

assortment of various medical devices around a teal healthcare symbol

AI 411: August 2025

Your monthly roundup of AI announcements is here.

It’s been more than five years since the arrival of Covid-19, which has led to the deaths of 1.2 million in the US and 7+ million around the world, according to the 

Readers may also remember another crisis that emerged alongside the pandemic: pediatric mental health.

From March to October 2020, emergency department mental health visits rose about 24% among children ages 5–11 and around 31% among ages 12–17 from the year prior, 

. Suicide attempts also rose nearly 51% among teenage girls in 2021 compared to 2019, the 

At that time, there weren’t enough providers to meet the increased need, an issue the industry has reckoned with 

 leading up to the pandemic. As a result, many young patients ended up 

 in the ER to be admitted to inpatient care.

To help address this need for care, several new behavioral health startups popped up during the pandemic. While not all of them made it—like 

—others, like InStride Health and Brightline, are still going strong.

“It was very clear that what was in existence at the time was not sufficient to meet the needs of kids and families,” InStride Health co-founder and Chief Medical Officer Mona Potter told Healthcare Brew.

Christine Crawford, associate medical director at the National Alliance on Mental Illness, told us there was a youth mental health crisis before 2020, but the pandemic made it worse.

“The system was already quite fragile—and fragmented—prior to the pandemic,” she said. But due to social distancing practices and a loss of social activities, there was a “worsening of mental health symptoms.”

Naomi Allen co-founded California-based Brightline, which provides in-person and online appointments, in 2019. She already had 10 years of experience in executive leadership for new digital health companies, including Castlight Health and Livongo, helping adults with care navigation and chronic disease management.

But Allen pivoted to pediatric mental health when one of her children was in need.

“We just really struggled as a family to navigate the healthcare system,” she said. “We paid cash for everything. Most of our clinicians were out of network…and we sat on a waitlist for nine months.”

The idea was to establish physical clinics for in-person appointments with therapists and psychiatrists, supplemented with a digital platform for caregivers to help them do everything from scheduling appointments to following along to see how the child was progressing.

Brightline was getting ready to open its first clinic in Q1 2020 when the pandemic hit, so it shifted to online only. 

Across the country, another startup—InStride Health—emerged in 2021 for similar reasons. It was built out of McLean Hospital, a psychiatric facility in Massachusetts associated with Mass General Brigham.

Potter originally thought she would only work in academic medicine for her whole career, where she was developing “cutting-edge” treatments, like the McLean Anxiety Mastery Program (MAMP). This specialized treatment program launched in 2014 to treat kids with severe anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder using cognitive behavior therapy and group meetings.

Yet lingering were inquiries from families who needed help for their children but faced a four- to six-month wait list “at all times” due to limited participant capacities in academic medicine.

So Potter took MAMP out of academia and built the fully virtual InStride Health, which allowed her team to negotiate directly with insurance companies and design a technology platform.

That shift to telehealth was one of the pandemic’s long-standing impacts on healthcare. It forced providers to move from in-person to virtual care “in one day,” Potter said, creating a “natural experiment” for her team to collect data and evaluate its effectiveness.

From March to June 2019, only 0.3% of all medical treatments for working-age individuals were conducted via telehealth, but in the first three months of the pandemic in 2020, that portion shot up to 23.6%—a 766% increase, according to a 

In October 2020, Brightline also launched a Covid-19 behavioral health indicator, a 30-question survey, to help parents understand the impact of the pandemic on their child’s mental health, Allen said.

“We felt this immense need for moving with speed because we knew we were out in front and that families had a tremendous amount of need,” she said.

Brightline now has 550 employer customers across six states. It also launched in-person care, with one clinic in Brooklyn and two more under development in Manhattan and Long Island. By next year, Allen said she expects to have eight to 10 additional sites, but did not specify where.

InStride is fully active in 10 states, and Potter said the goal is to expand it to all 50. In 2025, the company enrolled 2,500 new patients.

Both companies also addressed out-of-pocket payment challenges patients previously faced, making sure their services are covered under some commercial plans.

Speaking of challenges, upcoming Trump administration 

 for LGBTQ+ youth are presenting additional hurdles to care, Allen said, as the 

Still, Allen said greater awareness in schools and among the public has made a difference. In 2022, KFF 

 of US residents think there is a mental health crisis in the country.

“If there is any silver lining coming out of Covid, it’s that the child and youth mental health crisis that existed already is certainly much more the national dialogue,” she said.

Close up of African-American psychologist taking notes on clipboard in therapy session for children

Pediatric mental health startups launched during Covid. Here’s where they stand now 

Brightline and InStride offered a new kind of care for kids. 

 artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots as therapists.

 shows testimonies from users who swear by ChatGPT as a confidant, and several companies have designed chatbots specifically for this purpose. But there are also tales of AI 

As use of AI grows, regulators are struggling to keep up. Mental health experts told us AI can potentially fill gaps amid a 

 for new patients in a 2024 survey. But providers caution against relying on AI too heavily.

“There’s a mental health, global crisis,” Russell Fulmer, a licensed professional counselor and associate professor at Kansas State University, said. “AI can be a piece of that puzzle to help, and it will continue to gain ground and probably help us with things like diagnosis. But I don’t see it replacing [practitioners] because of that human connection that is needed.”

Clinicians hold varied perspectives about AI for therapy, Vaile Wright, American Psychological Association (APA) senior director for healthcare innovation, told us.

“There is a group of individuals who recognize that it’s very human to turn to ChatGPT for emotional support,” Wright said. “There’s a group of individuals that just think AI has absolutely no place in this space at all. These can be, in some ways, overlapping groups.”

Olivia Uwamahoro Williams, a licensed professional counselor and clinical assistant professor at the department of School Psychology and Counselor Education at William & Mary, said she sees chatbots as a tool. For example, they could be used to help “triage” people who call chronically 

But she doesn’t think chatbots can replicate the 

—an honest, empathetic connection between a therapist and client—which 

 suggests can be crucial to therapy’s effectiveness.

Uwamahoro and Fulmer worked in a group formed by the American Counseling Association to draft a number of recommendations. The group urges avoiding overreliance on the tech, advocates for further research, and says AI should be a tool, not a replacement, for human care.

 on the use of AI therapists, but plans to start soon.

Separately, Brown University is set to lead a research institute focused on AI assistance in behavioral health, backed by $20 million from the US National Science Foundation, the university announced July 29.

For now, APA is urging federal regulators to put out guidelines and require apps to have safety measures like crisis support. One of the biggest concerns is making sure users understand what these apps can and can’t do and risks associated with using them, Wright added.

One newer app—a chatbot called Ash—was created by 

Backed by $93 million in funding, the company unveiled Ash on July 22 after 18 months of development with 50,000 beta users.

Ash is different from other AI offerings because it’s trained on its own large language model that includes “hundreds of thousands of hours” of clinical conversations and a vast array of therapeutic approaches, Daniel Reid Cahn, co-founder and CEO of Ash, told us.

Unlike other AI chatbots, it’s also not designed to tell people 

, agree with them, or be their friend, Cahn added.

Ash is advertised on the company’s website as a nonjudgmental tool that will “challenge” users and remember conversations, during which the AI will ask constructive questions and offer users insights.

The app primarily targets people without clinical-level mental disorders, but it can identify and flag people in crisis or experiencing delusions for the app’s team of clinicians to review, founding clinical lead and clinical psychologist Derrick Hull said. Unlike a therapist, it won’t try to evaluate or recommend treatment.

“We don’t believe that the relationship will be exactly the same as the relationship that people would form with the human therapist. Nor should it be exactly the same,” Hull said.

Fulmer said the directors and advisors at Ash “appeal to clinical expertise,” but one thing that makes him wary is the lack of peer-reviewed research.

Cahn said that’s coming, but it’s a long process. Early results have him feeling confident, though, he added.

In addition, Ash, like similar apps, advertises “AI built for therapy” and “AI-powered mental health support,” but in the terms and conditions, the company says the tool “is not a healthcare provider or a provider of mental health services and does not engage in the practice of medicine.” Instead it gives users an opportunity to “self-help.”

“Are they a tool that actually treats mental illness?” Wright said, speaking generally about AI therapy apps. “They’ll say in the fine print, no, but that’s how they’re marketing themselves. And if that’s the case, then they really ought to be regulated by the FDA, and they’re not. They’re in the direct-to-consumer wellness space.”

Hull said the app makes clear what it can and can’t do.

“The nuances of healthcare are lengthy and complicated. We save a lot of that for the in-app experience. So if there are expectations that people have of Ash that Ash cannot and should not meet, there’s signposting throughout and baked into Ash’s behavior,” he said.

Psychologist AI humanoid robot talking with a sad depressed patient, artificial intelligence and psychology concept