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

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Hospitals

Maia Anderson

Healthcare Brew delivers the latest news and trends in healthcare.

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One of the most expensive problems facing the healthcare industry is drug shortages. They cost US hospitals roughly $900 million and 20 million hours of labor annually, according to a June 2025 survey from healthcare services firm Vizient.

A Florida-based nonprofit, Angels for Change, is trying to solve that problem.

Laura Bray, a former business professor, founded the organization in 2019 after being told that a life-saving medicine her young daughter undergoing cancer treatment needed was unavailable. Though she was eventually able to get it, Bray made it her goal to help prevent other families from going through a similar scenario.

“Our mission is to end drug shortages through advocacy, awareness, and a resilient supply chain,” Bray told Healthcare Brew. “Nobody was prioritizing it because of lack of awareness, and nobody was providing solutions like they were in every other supply chain, so we have to build that solution.”

In April, the Government Accountability Office 

 a report stating drug shortages are “a serious public health problem” and recommended the Department of Health and Human Services collaborate with other federal agencies to mitigate the issue.

Angels for Change is funded by various grassroots efforts, including an annual gala, grants, and donations, as well as partnerships with healthcare companies including Pfizer, Fresenius Kabi, and McKesson.

Angels for Change comprises four employees, including Bray, plus volunteers. Since 2022, the nonprofit has worked on more than 100 drug shortages—including for insulin, growth hormone, and the chemotherapy drug carboplatin—and has helped patients access more than 750,000 medicines, according to the organization’s 2024 impact report.

Angels for Change operates a “drug shortage hotline,” which anyone can contact for assistance navigating shortages.

The nonprofit typically hears from about 10 patients per week, Bray said, though it varies. For instance, in late 2024 when 

 wiped out a Baxter manufacturing plant that made IV fluids and caused a 

, Angels for Change received 60 to 100 calls every day at that time, Bray said, adding that they respond to everyone.

By the time a patient calls, Bray is usually already aware of the shortage, she said. But “if they’re the first one to notify me, the very first thing I do is I tell them that they deserve better, and I also validate that this is real,” she added.

Angels for Change staff and volunteers at a red table with pill bottles and pamphlets explaining their mission

Sometimes the process of getting a patient connected to their medication takes just minutes while others can take hours, Bray said. When a shortage is more complex, she spends time educating the patient on the circumstances of the shortage and gives them steps they can take to ensure they’re still getting treatment.

For instance, sometimes only one dosage or formulation of a drug is in short supply, so Bray advises the patient to ask their doctor if they can switch to an available option.

“There might be a shortage, but that doesn’t mean there’s an outage, and that is a big difference,” she said. “I’m showing them where they can find real-time, government-approved data that they can share with their physicians and pharmacists to advocate for themselves.”

The nonprofit has been successful at getting patients back on treatment 98% of the time, according to Bray.

In addition to helping patients access medicines already in low supply, Angels for Change tries to prevent shortages from happening in the first place.

Marta Wosińska, a senior fellow in economic studies at Brookings Center on Health Policy, told Healthcare Brew that much of the work Angels for Change does centers on building buffer inventory of critical medicines in case a supply chain disruption occurs and setting up systems to allocate medicines to patients who need them most.

“I think that’s a niche place that Laura has been very effective in getting industry to collaborate on,” Wosińska said.

Hospitals reach out to Angels for Change to alert them of a supply disruption, and the organization works with various stakeholders to try to mitigate the problem before a shortage reaches patients, according to Bray. The nonprofit works on about three disruptions in an average week, she said.

Angels for Change also runs two programs, called Project Protect and Project GOLD (Generic Oncology Lifesaving Drugs), focused on tackling some of the biggest challenges in the drug supply chain.

Project Protect provides grants to US-based manufacturers to help them build flexible capacities related to drugs vulnerable to shortage, according to Bray. That way, when a shortage does happen, the manufacturer can start producing those drugs onshore and get them to hospitals, she said. The organization has so far given out 13 such grants totaling $434,599.

Project GOLD works with manufacturers to create buffer stock of medicines. So far, three drug companies (Cencora, McKesson, and Fresenius Kabi) have created additional supplies of six oncology drugs via the project, according to Bray, who said she hopes this kind of proactive work will put her drug shortage hotline “out of business.”

“One of the six [oncology drugs] has gone short, and so far there’s been zero interruptions during this shortage and zero patient impact because we were able to engage, and we had additional time and flexibility for that medicine,” she said.

Employees and volunteers from Angels for Change

How nonprofit Angels for Change is working to end drug shortages 

After her daughter was unable to find a life-saving drug, founder Laura Bray made it her mission to mend the pharmaceutical supply chain. 

How a nonprofit is working to end drug shortages 

illustrated headshot of caroline catherman, healthcare brew reporter

Caroline Catherman

Hoping to switch jobs soon? You may have fewer options than you think.

Healthcare went on a hiring spree after the Covid-19 pandemic began. Today, there are still more healthcare job openings than pre-pandemic, but the number of job postings is decreasing, according to a new report from the job listing and hiring platform Indeed.

, which analyzes Q2 2025 job postings through July 11, found nursing had the largest decline: Job postings are down 10% YoY, though still up 15.1% compared to Feb. 1, 2020.

The trend isn’t exclusive to healthcare, either. Many industries have slowed or plan to 

, Daniel Culbertson, senior economist with the Indeed Hiring Lab and the report’s author, told us.

“Healthcare was generally thought of as recession-proof, or downturn-proof, before the pandemic. But the pandemic taught us that healthcare can be impacted just like the rest of the labor market, and so it’s probably better thought of as recession-resistant,” Culbertson said.

The downturn in nursing openings in particular is likely due in part to more healthcare facilities bringing nurses back in-house for full-time employment rather than relying on temporary staffing prone to frequent turnover, like 

 in journal Health Affairs found the nation’s total number of registered nurses fell by more than 100,000 in 2021—the largest single-year drop in four decades. 

 left the healthcare workforce overall that year, sending employers on a temporary hiring spree.

While the recent decline in postings could be a sign of “the overall labor market slowdown,” it’s likely also “healthcare returning to its long-term [pre-pandemic] trend,” Culbertson said.

Job postings also declined for personal care and home health positions by 8.8% and medical technicians by 8.4%.

It’s not necessarily bad news for healthcare professionals looking for a new employer, though.

Demand for healthcare workers is still high. There were 1.5+ million healthcare and social assistance job openings in May 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Though that’s the lowest since 2021, it’s 25.5%higher than the 1.2+ million from the same month in 2019, before the pandemic began.

And not all healthcare roles are seeing openings shrink.

For instance, there was a 3.7% increase in postings for physicians and surgeons and a 2% increase in postings within the 

 through July 11, according to Indeed’s report.

In a hospital conference room, a medical team listens attentively as a new hire discusses their qualifications

Healthcare job openings decline

Attention job seekers: Time to stop procrastinating and turn in those applications, pronto!

Cassie McGrath

 of using AI in the clinic, like cybersecurity risks and a 

 published Aug. 12 in the Lancet found another possible issue: clinicians losing their skills.

The research was conducted by hospital and academic researchers affiliated with institutions in Poland, Spain, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Japan, and the UK from Sept. 8, 2021, through March 9, 2022. It looked into how well endoscopists who “regularly used AI” performed colonoscopies when the technology was and was not available to them.

Researchers conducted the observational study of 1,443 patients at four endoscopy centers in Poland that began using AI tools to help detect polyps. They evaluated the quality of colonoscopies three months before and three months after implementing AI.

They found that when using AI tools, clinicians had lower adenoma detection rates (ADR), or a way to measure colonoscopy quality by detecting polyps, compared to when they performed the procedures without AI.

The study also found that the ADR of standard colonoscopy dropped from 28.4% (or 226 of 795 participants) before AI was in place to 22.4% (145 of 648 participants) after AI usage.

“Continuous exposure to AI might reduce the ADR of standard non-AI assisted colonoscopy, suggesting a negative effect on endoscopist behavior,” the researchers wrote.

This research coincides with other studies, including 

 that suggests AI usage weakens critical thinking skills.

Digitized looking pill capsule with small brains inside

Study: AI may weaken clinical skills 

The research aligns with other studies that suggest AI weakens critical thinking. 

 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.

Healthcare execs talk AI errors and how to address them

Everybody makes mistakes; everybody has those days. 

Artificial intelligence (AI) is now commonplace in healthcare. Robust rules for the tech? Not so much, according to a new report.

About 88% of 233 health system executives said their system uses AI in some form, but only 18% have a mature 

 and full AI strategy, according to an Aug. 12 

 from the professional membership organization Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA) and Eliciting Insights, a healthcare strategy and market research company.

“I think a lot of organizations need to step back and say, ‘Oh, wait, we have 10 departments doing work with AI,’” Richard Gundling, HFMA’s SVP of professional practice, told Healthcare Brew. “We need an overall governance structure now, so each department is using it the same way, the same oversights are done.”

Responses from 115 of the sampled healthcare system executives suggest the most common use of AI is for 

 and clinical notetaking, with 42% using it for this purpose. Coding is the second most common, at 28%, followed by clinical documentation improvement, denial prediction, and 

The good news: Though most surveyed healthcare orgs don’t have a comprehensive strategy, the report shows nearly three-quarters of CFO respondents said they are at least in the early stages of developing an AI governance structure—a set of rules and regulations around how departments should use AI.

But how should they go about creating one?

, AI could hurt rather than help the organization. There have been instances of AI 

 in the journal npj Digital Medicine suggests large language learning models may recommend “inferior” psychiatric treatments when told a patient’s race.

One important step in creating these guardrails is to make sure all departments are represented in crafting AI strategy, including financial executives, clinical leaders, and human resources professionals, Gundling said.

The most common duty of governance groups is to determine a data policy for AI, according to the report. The groups are also often used to identify and vet AI vendors.

There’s a growing number of resources to help groups create a governance structure.

The American Medical Association released an AI governance toolkit April 29 with an eight-step module highlighting steps such as designating an executive to be accountable for AI’s outcomes and establishing a vendor evaluation policy.

Other groups like the public-private Coalition for Health AI—a collaboration between providers, tech companies, and other health organizations—have 

 a robust AI implementation and assessment process to ensure AI is developed safely and companies 

.“Even if you feel like you’re behind the curve, you can still catch up,” Gundling said.

A medical cross made out of binary code held behind yellow and black safety guardrails.

Health systems are adopting AI faster than they’re adopting safeguards

While 88% of health systems are using AI, only 18% have mature governance.

 since the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term, and some health center leaders say fewer patients are coming in for routine care.

The day after Trump took office, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) 

 preventing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from arresting people in “sensitive” areas, including hospitals and health centers.

Of 511 lawfully present immigrants in the US 

 surveyed this spring, about 9% said they had avoided seeking healthcare since the start of the new administration.

Healthcare Brew spoke with health centers in 

 about the effects they’re seeing from increasing immigration arrests as well as steps they’re taking to ensure patients continue receiving care.

The Southern California city has been a prime target of the administration’s immigration enforcement actions, with the 

 “hundreds” of National Guard soldiers there in June following protests over immigration raids.

Despite being a sanctuary city—meaning it has policies to limit its cooperation with immigration officials—ICE has made 4,163 arrests in LA since June, according to DHS data reported by 

Louise McCarthy, president and CEO of the Community Clinic Association of Los Angeles County, which represents more than 450 clinics that treat a combined 2 million patients per year, told us the 

 (CHCs) have seen an “uneven impact” as far as no-show rates and cancellations.

“It’s notable that people of all immigration statuses, including people who are citizens, are living in fear because of the sense that the streets are not safe for people to go out, to go to school, to go to their jobs, to get healthcare,” McCarthy said.

The clinics are spreading the word that they offer telehealth services for things like prescription refills and other care that doesn’t require an in-person visit, according to McCarthy.

“We just want to make sure that people get care,” she said.

From January through July, ICE issued 6,025 arrest requests in New York City, according to a July 23 statement from DHS.

At Community Healthcare Network, which comprises 14 CHCs in the city, President and CEO Robert Hayes told Healthcare Brew the centers are focused on spreading the message that they don’t turn anyone away based on immigration status. In fact, the health centers, which see about 65,000 patients annually, “do not and have never asked people what their immigration status is,” he said.

, the network has deployed mobile health programs and been “very proactive” in offering patients the option for telehealth when appropriate, Hayes added.

“We’re trying to do everything possible to get the message to people that it is reasonably safe to come in, that it is completely unsafe to ignore your healthcare needs, and to really push things like vaccines for kids and other fundamental principles of primary healthcare,” he said.

Though Chicago is also a sanctuary city, Cook County, Illinois, had 113,959 pending deportation cases as of March, the second highest number in the country behind Miami-Dade County, Florida, 

Laura Starr, director of external affairs at CommunityHealth, which runs four CHCs in the city and sees about 4,200 patients per year, told Healthcare Brew the organization saw fewer patients coming to appointments “almost immediately after the inauguration in January.”

“Those first couple of weeks, almost 40% of our primary care appointments were no-shows,” Starr said. “A lot of people were not picking up their prescriptions from our pharmacy. We just, in general, had a pretty empty health center.”

By mid-February, the health centers were nearly back to “normal appointment adherence rates,” she said, except at the location in the Little Village neighborhood, which has a high concentration of Mexican immigrants.

All CommunityHealth staff has been trained in the Know Your Rights 

, which informs people of their legal rights when met with law or immigration enforcement, and they regularly conduct drills, Starr added.

ICE arrested more than 10,818 people in Florida from the start of Trump’s second term through July, according to data from the Deportation Data Project, 

Amy Halstead, CEO of Rural Health Network of Monroe County, Florida, located in Key West, told us fewer patients are coming in for care. The clinic sees about 7,500 visits per year for both medical and dental care.

“Where we’ve seen the biggest decrease in this area has been with pregnant women,” Halstead said, noting there’s only one hospital the clinic’s patients can access for labor and delivery in Key West. “The fact that the hospital numbers are down—and all the surrounding practices aren’t seeing as many pregnant women—is telling us that it’s probably an indication of people leaving the area.”

In addition to offering telehealth, the health center has a mobile unit it takes directly into communities to make sure patients can access care.

She said it has also trained staff on what to do if immigration officials enter a clinic.

“We haven’t actually had anybody come on-site yet. We’ve seen [immigration officials] around our clinic but not actually physically walking into our clinic,” Halstead said.

Medical humanitarian aid concept. Cross made by crowd of people on white background, vector illustration in flat style

How health centers are responding to spikes in immigration arrests 

Clinic leaders in immigration enforcement hot spots are seeing fewer patients coming in. 

Ken Bertini, pet medication compounding specialist at Sear’s Pharmacy in Oak Park just outside Chicago, has worked in retail pharmacy since 1965. He spent most of his career at Segreti Pharmacy, also in Oak Park, but moved to Sears after Segreti closed this January due to rising rents.

When he was starting out, Bertini wrote labels on a typewriter. Now, he not only uses a computer for that work but also took up new skills to stay strong in the evolving industry, including compounding, or making tailored medications for patients and pets.

“There’s not too many pharmacists around as long as I’ve been around,” Bertini said. “I remember way back when—when things were profitable, things were fun in the pharmacy—but now it’s very stressful. You don’t turn out numbers, you’re not going to survive.”

The pharmacy industry has grown significantly in recent years, up from about 

 last year showed 1 in 3 retail pharmacies closed between 2010 and 2021, suggesting there’s increasing pressure to compete with the big names like CVS, Walmart, and Walgreens.

Healthcare Brew spoke with Bertini and Jim Schniepp, clinical pharmacy specialist at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago and pharmacist for 40 years, about how the industry has changed.

Both pharmacists began their careers before digital tools like electronic health records existed.

While retail pharmacists focus more on dispensing medications to patients in settings where they can also buy household items like toilet paper or over-the-counter meds, hospital pharmacists provide treatments for patients in hospitals.

Bertini said “technology is probably the biggest change for pharmacists” and computerization made it easier to store data, track a patient’s medication usage, and remind them of refills. When someone orders potassium, for example, Schniepp said he can pull up a patient’s labs and look for more information about the order.

Tech is everywhere in pharmacy settings (like all of healthcare) these days. Between 2003 and 2016, the amount of hospitals with computer prescriber systems grew from 2.5% to 95.6%, according to a 2018 

. And tools like barcode scanners that can digitally verify the safety and accuracy of a drug have grown in use from 5.7% in 2002 to 61.7% by 2017.

“You know in real time more of what’s going on,” Schniepp said.

Rush also uses Pyxis machines that automatically dispense medications now, he added, compared to having to use floor stock and medication carts before.

Schniepp said the problem is if technology fails—like 

 during a cardiac arrest—because pharmacies are extremely reliant upon it. (Though one could argue that’s the case for just about every industry.)

Technology, Bertini said, also changed the roles of pharmacists, who went from putting pills in bottles to receiving doctoral-level education (PharmDs, or doctors of pharmacy), which takes roughly four to six years to complete. However, the industry is still facing 

, and only 13,323 new pharmacists graduated in 2022, down from 14,223 the year prior, according to the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy.

When Schniepp was fresh out of school, he said his job was mostly distributive and much less clinical. But in the last 20 years, he said the staff has grown “exponentially” and pharmacists are now assigned to different departments like ICU, pediatrics, and surgery.

“The skill level of the pharmacist has increased. Almost all of our pharmacists have done residencies,” he said.

Now, compared to when he first started, pharmacists also approve all medications, compared to that being solely a doctor’s purview in 2000. He and other hospital pharmacists speak with providers about what patients should take and which meds need to be changed to better their care.

“It’s not like I’m in the basement filling drugs,” Schniepp said. “In fact, I don’t see drugs very often, which people are surprised to hear.”

One of the downsides of technology, Bertini said, is it has increased the control of payers and 

Payers and PBMs now have control over “what we could dispense, how much we could dispense, to whom we could dispense, how much they were going to reimburse us for it,” he said. Before PBMs’ rise in influence, there were more direct relationships between drug manufacturers and pharmacies, and pharmacies made more money this way.

Though competition with corporations like CVS and Walgreens has grown over the years—CVS went from operating 5,471 stores in 2005 to 9,135 stores in 2024, for instance—the big competition, he said, is not with other pharmacy chains. It’s with the PBMs.

“We actually are losing money,” Bertini said, due to low reimbursement rates for medications, which make up a significant portion of pharmacies’ revenues. “How can you survive? You can’t.”

On top of that, corporate pharmacy jobs have become “very stressful,” he said.

“[Pharmacists are] not getting enough time, enough information, and…it’s not the pharmacists’ fault. The corporates don’t put the pharmacists that they hire in a position to do [vaccinations and additional tasks]. They have quotas,” he said.

In the early days of his career, Bertini said there was an independent pharmacy on every corner. What were once competitive relationships with other independent pharmacies has turned into collaborative ones. Now, there are 

But at the end of the day, Bertini said, the “personal contact” provided by independent stores remains important and strong.

“If you read the reviews about this store, people just love it—they don’t want to go anywhere else. There are chains all over the place,” he said, “but when you give people personal service, that’s really what they need and that’s what they like.”