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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Will Peischel

Healthcare Brew delivers the latest news and trends in healthcare.

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Arrows going up and down in front of accounting spreadsheets.

VC funding in women’s health ‘on the uprise’ in 2023

You can’t say the same for healthcare investments on the whole.

Maia Anderson

A 2D animation of a hospital with a bunch of pharma pills and dollar bill signs coming out of the top of it

Private equity is scooping up hospitals, leading to concerns over care quality 

Experts, including government officials, expressed concerns that the private equity business model is not compatible with quality healthcare. 

Private equity firms are increasingly buying up hospitals, report finds 

Volume speaker sign with increasing stacks of money coming out of it.

Investors ‘optimistic’ about healthcare deal activity in 2024 

Private equity firms have a record amount of money, and they’re ready to invest it. 

A small potted plant denoting healthcare startups

Startups

Nicole Ortiz

 is a tried-and-true tradition in the TV and marketing worlds. Healthcare? Not so much.

But that hasn’t stopped point-of-care digital health company PatientPoint from participating in the annual event the last two years.

Typically, upfronts include a presentation from major media networks and then a commercial commitment component from companies interested in advertising with that media company’s programming, Kasha Cacy, chief media officer at full-service agency Known, told Healthcare Brew. Often these presentations are full of glitz and glam, 

At traditional upfront presentations, the goal is to lock in Q4 TV inventory, get a competitive price advantage, and find advertisers for popular programming like live sports and events. “Those three factors tend not to be as strongly at play in a healthcare space as they are in electronics or some of the other spaces,” Cacy said.

, a healthcare influencer known as “Dr. Mike” and a family practice provider who’s known for being outspoken online in an effort to debunk misinformation, to the stage. The company’s presentation also featured a conversation about marketing channels with the Point of Care Marketing Association (POCMA) and media agency IPG Mediabrands Health, as well as a panel by marketing research and tech company Circana.

Though when it came to the commercial engagement element of an upfront, “what it seems like PatientPoint was doing was the first [presentation] part,” Cacy said.

PatientPoint is featured on waiting room and exam room screens at more than 30,000 locations, according to the company, and its main advertisers are major pharma companies. So entering into a marketing event where advertisers try to catch the eye of companies that use a screen to reach audiences (or patients, in this case) doesn’t feel like a total stretch, Cacy said.

That reach PatientPoint offers advertisers as well as its “behavior-changing content” that’s sponsored by pharma companies and pharmacies is what makes tapping into upfronts such an enticing opportunity, Chief Marketing Officer Kyle Barich told us.

“The most important thing for us to do is to be where our customers are and where their concerns are,” he said. “All of these [advertising] folks are looking for new ways of getting quality audiences. They need to target audiences, need to get outcomes. So they’re going to upfronts to try to find new ways of doing that.”

Plus, point-of-care—which is defined as when a patient interacts with providers for care, according to POCMA—is a growing segment in healthcare, and PatientPoint is one of its major players. An April 

 from POCMA showed point-of-care revenue for 17 of its members has grown 171% since 2019, reaching $803+ million in 2023.

So, with a company like PatientPoint finding value in upfronts, could we see more healthcare companies flocking to make presentations in years to come?

Cacy said it’s still a “very specific category,” where it makes most sense for Big Pharma companies looking to advertise on screens.

“If I look at what PatientPoint did, I think it was less of an upfront and more of what I would describe as an innovation day, like, ‘here’s what our product road map is, here’s what our new products are,” she said. “That doesn’t specifically scream upfront to me.”

Though that doesn’t discourage Barich, who’s planning to make next year’s upfront presentation “bigger and better.”

“It’s Disney and Amazon and YouTube—and now PatientPoint,” he said.

Mashup of a woman with a microphone on the left, a doctor pointing to an x-ray on the top right, and people clapping on the bottom right

This healthcare company takes part in marketing upfronts. Is it working?

PatientPoint is using the TV industry’s favorite pitch forum—upfronts week—as a marketing tool. 

Cassie McGrath

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

This month, the FDA announced the launch of a large language model (LLM) AI tool named Elsa. In a 

 on its website, the FDA said that Elsa is designed to “summarize adverse events to support safety profile assessments, perform faster label comparisons, and generate code to help develop databases for nonclinical applications.” It marks the agency’s first step in its AI journey.

But that wasn’t the only news this June. Here’s your roundup of health-related AI updates from around the industry.

 On June 11, the AMA adopted a new policy calling for “explainable clinical AI tools” that give users clear information about the safety and efficacy of the product. In other words, the AMA is asking AI tool companies to provide clear explanations of how their tools work so clinicians can make the best decisions when using them.

Cigna announced on June 12 the release of several new digital tools, including an AI virtual assistant that can chat with patients about insurance and care options on the company’s app. Soon, the company said in a release, the tool will include new provider matching technology that connects patients with clinicians based on insurance and needs.

Digital musculoskeletal clinic Hinge Health announced on June 17 the release of HingeSelect, a provider network powered by AI and designed to connect patients to in-person care at low prices.

Software company LeanTaas announced its new AI-powered tool iQueue for Surgical Clinics on June 10, which will use AI modules to help coordinate surgeries from the administrative side to the operating room, including case-building, patient outreach, insurance authorizations, scheduling.

AI assistant company Nabla, known for its ambient scribe, announced a $70 million Series C funding round on June 17. Fundraising was led by HV Capital, with additional investment by venture capital firms Highland Europe, DST Global, Cathay Innovation, and Tony Fadell's Build Collective. The company has so far raised $120 million, and new money will go toward product development and expansion.

On June 2, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and biotech Recursion announced the release of Boltz-2, an open source AI that helps pharmaceuticals design small molecule drugs by predicting if they will work effectively on patients.

The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and HealthEx. 

MD Anderson and tech company HealthEx announced on June 9 a strategic collaboration to develop AI tools that can support the patient consent process and make it easier for patients to control how their data is used.

Mental health company Wysa announced on June 11 the launch of Wysa Gateway, a chatbot that uses AI to facilitate conversations between therapy providers and health plans.

Healthcare Brew monthly series on AI Startups

AI 411: June 2025

Your monthly roundup of AI announcements is here.

illustrated headshot of caroline catherman, healthcare brew reporter

Caroline Catherman

 becomes increasingly popular, more and more patients are coming to a harsh realization: It’s not cheap.

A single cycle including medications can cost anywhere from $10,000 to $15,000 according to drug discount company GoodRx, plus between $300 to $1,000 a year for storage. In most circumstances, it’s also not covered by insurance.

Enter Cofertility. The 2022 startup offers a unique trade: freeze your eggs for free when you donate half to a family who wouldn’t otherwise be able to conceive.

Lauren Makler—who previously worked at Uber and founded Uber Health—co-founded Cofertility with entrepreneur Halle Tecco after looking into egg donation for herself several years ago. After Makler conceived a daughter unassisted in 2021, she said she built the service she would have wanted if she had gone the egg donation route.

“I really wanted to do something about access, and then at the same time, I felt intended parents deserved more options and deserved options that felt more in alignment with the way they wanted to grow their family,” she said.

 The startup finished its nearly $7.3 million Series A 

 in April, and though she declined to give exact numbers, Makler said the program has matched intended parents with donors “well into the quadruple digits.”There are some caveats, however. Not everyone who’s interested in what the company calls the “split” program qualifies. Makler said Cofertility limits participation in the program to criteria recommended by the FDA and the 

American Society for Reproductive Medicine

, such as limiting egg donors to ages to 21–34 and barring people with certain genetic conditions. All donors must also have an anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH) level above 2.0, which is associated with successful retrievals.

Those who don’t qualify for the split program can still freeze their eggs through the startup, Makler said. A single cycle and 10 years of storage with Cofertility costs about $16,000 for patients in New York City, compared to an industry average of $17,773 for a single cycle and five years of storage in the same location, according to 

Cofertility also prioritizes transparency in egg donation. The majority of Cofertility’s egg donors and recipients so far have chosen to disclose their identities, meet each other, and exchange contact information, Makler said, though a small number still choose not to.

 around egg donation is this idea that you could be walking down the street someday and see someone who looks like you and wonder if that’s the child born from the donation. And with a disclosed donation, that fear entirely evaporates,” Makler said.

She made it clear that donors who don’t exchange info aren’t promised complete anonymity, because, let’s face it—with 

, there’s no way to guarantee your biological kid won’t do a DNA swab and find you one day through a random cousin.

 Colleen Denny, a New York-based ob-gyn, told Healthcare Brew she thinks it’s a promising concept but what really defines the quality of models like this is whether they’re transparent with their donors about what happens if things don’t go according to plan, who pays in the case of multiple cycles or medical complications, and what the realistic chances of conceiving with egg donation are.

“You really want to understand what it means to ‘split your eggs,’” she said.

Nearly 40,000 people froze their eggs in 2023, according to 

 from the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology. But there’s 

 pregnancy will be possible through this route. Only about half of in vitro fertilization cycles resulted in successful births in 2023.

“A lot of people think that if they freeze three eggs, they’re going to have three babies in the future, and that’s just not how egg freezing works,” Denny said. “This is something of a backup plan, but not a guarantee.”

Makler said Cofertility makes this and other technicalities clear in legal agreements that donors sign with the business and with their egg donation recipients.

For instance, intended parents get to keep the extra egg if an odd number of eggs are retrieved.

The agreements also state that intended parents—not the donor—will pay a premium for temporary health insurance for the donor and front the bill for unexpected medical costs up to a previously agreed-upon amount.

For recipients, Cofertility also offers a 

Correction 06/13/2025: The headline of this story has been corrected to reflect Cofertility is making egg freezing free, not donation.

Headshot of Cofertility founder Lauren Makler

Meet Cofertility, the startup making egg freezing free—for some

If you thought grocery store eggs were getting expensive…

More than 20 hospital systems around the US have venture arms that invest in healthcare companies either founded internally by clinicians or externally by experts in the industry.

 is to build products the hospital needs, and hopefully bring in some ROI to uplift finances.

In 2013, New York-based Northwell Health launched Northwell Holdings, which has since used internal funds to spin out a joint company creation platform with Aegis Ventures called Ascertain in 2023 and robotics company Clarapath in 2021.

Richard Mulry, president and CEO of Northwell Holdings, spoke with Healthcare Brew about how the venture arm chooses its investments, the benefits it brings to the health system, and his thoughts on the future of healthcare innovation.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What sort of companies do you invest in? And are they often internal or external to the health system?

The answer is both. We have over 100,000 employees now, so invention can happen across the enterprise. Some of it’s from our clinical faculty, and others are from our team members. Some of our physicians have developed intellectual property around medical devices, sometimes around therapeutics. They present those through a normal tech transfer process, and then we would try to see if there’s a way that we can either help them bring that solution to market or if there’s a way that we can assign that IP over to them and help seed or fund the company, and then allow the company to proceed out into the market with us as an equity shareholder.

We do invest in outside companies. We probably receive over 2,000 inquiries a year from outside startups that want to receive some form of investment, but also the partnership that Northwell offers.

Lastly, we’ve really started to foray into creating our own companies. We have all of this expertise; we wanted to make sure that we were not only investing in but creating solutions.

How do you decide what companies you invest in? And how many companies do you invest in?

For every 300 companies we look at, we may invest in one. We’ll do a first-pass evaluation with our subject-matter experts. For instance, is this really disruptive? Do we think that it meets a need? Does it do something better or faster? And does it represent an opportunity to have financial return? So if it meets those criteria, it will go into a deeper diligence [process].

How does the venture arm support hospital finances?

One example is preauthorization, and when patients are in transitions of care—so a patient’s going to leave the hospital and go to a nursing home, for example—[Ascertain] took that process down from 150 clicks to almost six clicks. It saves a lot of time on that end, so our team can spend more time either working the exceptions of what criteria they still need to fulfill in order to get that transition to occur, or they spend more time with the patient’s families.

Not only does it help with efficiency, meaning we’d have to hire far fewer employees to do that than we would if we just scaled it linearly through a manual process. Also, it’s a better patient experience, and it’s a better provider experience.

What innovations are you excited about in the healthcare industry generally?

 because we feel that that’s a very, very important area to develop—both on the administrative and clinical sides—that can make vast differences in the way that we can deliver services. We’re also seeing great need in the market and great advancement in 

. There’s a company [we invested in], for example, called Cognixion that helps translate basically brain waves into speech for patients that might be suffering from a speech impediment because of ALS, stroke, or for another reason.

Healthcare Brew Q&A series featuring Richard Mulry.

How Northwell Holdings operates, according to its CEO

Hospitals are spinning out startups, bringing in new tech and ROI. 

As state and federal governments turn away from longheld dental care norms, experts are arguing it’s more crucial than ever for private industry to fill the gap.

For years, dentists have contended with issues like a lack of payer 

 for routine dental services and widescale provider shortages. Medicare’s website states it doesn’t cover dental services in most cases. In 2024, Medicaid reimbursed an average per state of 66.6% of private insurance rates for kids and 49.8% for adults, according to the American Dental Association (ADA).

 in public drinking water. The CDC’s Division of Oral Health, which collected data and supported things like free school dental sealant programs, was one of several departments gutted on April 1, according to the ADA.

“We’re in a very volatile environment, let me just call it that,” ADA President Brett Kessler told Healthcare Brew. “The Trump administration is trying to decentralize a lot of the things that the US government would take care of. And so it’s cutting things…but he also knows that we’re America, and we’ll find creative ways to pick up the pieces.”

Kessler has high hopes this toothache can be addressed.

The ADA’s Forsyth Institute, the organization’s research and innovation hub, is focusing on finding funding “that can happen through the private industry, can happen through nongovernment foundations,” Kessler said. 

 in technology, driven by the private sector, that will make dental care more accessible in the coming years, he added. About 57 million in the US lived in a dental professional shortage area in 2024, according to the CDC.

“Technology—in the private sector, especially—is going to drive increases in efficacy, meaning better care and efficiency at a cheaper cost,” he said.

One example: startup digital dental care platform Grin aims to provide a private sector solution with quick virtual mouth scanning via an accessory that attaches to a smart phone. Investors include CareQuest Innovation Partners as well as venture capital companies Triventures and SpringRock Ventures.

So far, Grin has done 1.5 million+ patient scans and has about 3,000 physicians using its platform worldwide.

The scan—which doesn’t need to be done by a dentist—can be sent to a provider who can review it at their convenience, CEO and founder Adam Schulhof told Healthcare Brew.

The company even has augmented artificial intelligence trained on patient scan data that flags early signs of conditions like gingival inflammation and plaque buildup, Schulhof said. (The findings are double-checked by one of Grin’s clinically trained experts before being shared with patients, he emphasized.)

. Schulhof said technology like this can be vital in rural areas with too few dental professionals to see everyone. In 2024, about 67% of dental health professional shortage areas were in rural communities, according to the CDC.

“Think about the opportunity where every single child, for example, starting in kindergarten, gets scanned,” he said. “Now, we can at least triage the patient population.”

He’s hopeful the federal government will see value in tech like this and support it.

Case studies on Grin’s website suggest the tech helps providers see more patients quicker, increasing their revenue. One practice, Richter Orthodontics in Greely, Colorado, was reportedly able to cut down in-person visits for things like aligners from every eight weeks to every 12 weeks by using Grin, saving the office an estimated 875 visits and $174,000 a year.

Some of Grin’s services are also accessible through Medicaid.

“The private sector’s got to build the technology, but now is really when the public sector has to actually start embracing that technology,” Schulhof said.

Mechanical arm and fix teeth, 3d rendering. Digital drawing.

Startups

This healthcare company takes part in marketing upfronts. Is it working?

AI 411: June 2025

Meet Cofertility, the startup making egg freezing free—for some

How Northwell Holdings operates, according to its CEO

Dentists hope technology, private industry can fill care gaps

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