Healthcare AI Guy Weekly | 9/23

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Highlights if you’ve only got 2 minutes…

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OpenAI reveals how millions use AI

New research from OpenAI breaks down how people are using generative AI. For ChatGPT, the most common activities are:

• 28.3% practical guidance (tutoring, brainstorming, advice, health/self-care)

• 28.1% writing-related

• 21.3% seeking information (search replacement)

• 7.5% technical help (coding, data, math)

• 6% image creation or analysis

ChatGPT has quickly become a massive part of daily life, with nearly 700 million weekly users and around 2.5 billion messages sent each day. While most use is still personal, the report shows that professionals are leaning on it heavily for writing, decision support, and information gathering. In healthcare, the patterns stand out. Clinicians mainly use ChatGPT to handle documentation, polish patient-facing communication, and double-check decisions. They are more likely than other workers to “ask” the model questions rather than just push tasks onto it, and these interactions tend to score higher on quality and satisfaction. Education is another bright spot: tutoring and teaching make up about 10% of overall usage, which aligns with medical training and patient education. Together, the data points to a steady shift toward ChatGPT (& then can be extrapolated to other AI tools) as a daily copilot in healthcare work. (link)(tweet)

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Stanford tests AI agents in the clinic

Stanford researchers just introduced MedAgentBench, a benchmark built to test whether AI agents can actually handle routine clinical tasks inside an electronic health record. Instead of only generating text, the agents were asked to complete 300 tasks in a simulated EHR with more than 700,000 records, from pulling patient data to ordering medications.

The top performer, Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet v2, succeeded about 70% of the time, with GPT-4o close behind at 64%. That’s far from perfect, but it suggests these tools could soon take on basic “housekeeping” work like data entry and test ordering. Researchers stress that validation and safeguards are essential before deployment, but see MedAgentBench as an early step toward AI acting as a teammate that helps relieve clinicians of routine burdens and frees them for patient care. (link)(tweet)

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TIME’s top healthtech companies

TIME and Statista just released their list of the world’s top health tech companies of 2025, spotlighting the organizations making the biggest impact on how care is delivered. Companies were evaluated on financial performance, reputation, and online engagement, then grouped by category. Not surprisingly, AI and data analytics companies dominated, reflecting how health data is being used to improve diagnostics, treatment matching, and outcomes. Qure AI stood out for its imaging analysis tools that help catch diseases like cancer and TB early. Fewer leaders emerged in prevention, a field that is vital but still under-incentivized. In diagnostics, startups like Fedo, which reads vitals from selfies, and Canary Speech, which detects conditions through voice patterns, are gaining attention. Meanwhile, wearables and telehealth continue to expand patients’ ability to monitor and manage their own health. (link)

Tools & Partnerships 🔧

Latest on business, consumer, and clinical healthcare AI tools and partnerships…

TOOLS

• AI predicts risk for 1,000+ diseases decades ahead: European researchers unveiled Delphi-2M, an AI model trained on millions of records that forecasts individual risk across 1,258 conditions up to 20 years out. (link)

• Mayo builds AI for virtual heart failure trials: Mayo Clinic trained an AI model on 59K heart failure patients to simulate clinical trials and predict which existing drugs might be effective, showing high accuracy when validated against real RCT results. (link)

• Doximity GPT rolls out Pathway-powered upgrade: Just 7 weeks after acquiring Pathway, Doximity has fully integrated its AI model and clinical corpus, enabling instant, peer-reviewed answers to 3,200+ drug queries, free access to 2,000+ journals, and new smart tools for structured outputs, dictation, and HIPAA-secure messaging. (link)

• AI designs first functional viruses from scratch: Stanford and Arc Institute researchers trained an AI model on 2M viruses to generate new ones, 16 of 302 AI-designed genomes successfully infected and killed bacteria in lab tests, some outperforming natural viruses. (link)

• SonderMind launches AI Notes with compliance guarantee: SonderMind’s new AI Notes tool cuts documentation time by 80%, saving providers 90 minutes/day. Unlike rivals, SonderMind assumes compliance responsibility and guarantees claims are submission-ready. (link)

• Mayo nurses co-develop EHR-integrated AI assistant: Mayo Clinic launched a Nurse Virtual Assistant built with frontline nurse input to streamline workflows. The tool summarizes key patient info and links to IV protocols, guidelines, and clinical policies—now live across 9,600+ inpatient and ED nurses. (link)

• Meditech adds chatbots and ambient AI to Expanse EHR: At its customer event, Meditech rolled out AI updates, including a patient-facing MyHealth assistant and Commure’s ambient scribe integration in Expanse Now. Back-office AI agents are also in development. (link)

• URAC launches AI accreditation for healthcare: URAC introduced a new accreditation program for both AI developers and healthcare orgs using AI. It assesses risk, governance, and oversight to promote safer, more accountable AI adoption. (link)

PARTNERSHIPS

• Yale New Haven + Keck Medicine + Hartford HealthCare + Aegis Ventures: The three health systems joined Aegis Ventures’ digital consortium to co-develop and scale health tech solutions targeting shared operational and clinical challenges. (link)

• Elevance Health + OpenAI: Elevance Health is partnering with OpenAI to offer employees AI training and certification programs, covering skills from prompt engineering to advanced AI-enabled work. (link)

• WellSky + Google Cloud: WellSky expanded its AI collaboration with Google Cloud, integrating Gemini multimodal models to power AI-first workflows and a nationwide intelligence network for care coordination. (link)

• Sutter Health + Hyro: Sutter deployed Hyro’s AI agents for call and message handling, giving patients 24/7 self-service for scheduling, prescriptions, and billing across 13M visits annually. (link)

• Ardent Health + Ambience Healthcare: Nashville-based Ardent Health will roll out Ambience’s ambient AI platform enterprise-wide after a successful pilot across 17 specialties. The tech cut charting time 45%, reduced cognitive load, and achieved 90% utilization. (link)

• Providence + Northwestern + Medline: Providence and Northwestern Medicine are co-developing Mpower, an AI-powered “digital control tower” for hospital supply chains with Medline. Built on Microsoft Azure AI, the tool will pilot at both systems to streamline inventory and provide predictive insights. (link)

Deal Desk 💸 

Spotlight on latest capital raises, M&A, and investments…

FUNDING

• Lila Sciences, an AI-powered biotech, raised $235M in Series A funding. Braidwell and Collective Global led with others joining. (link)

• Imagine Pediatrics, a pediatric care platform, raised a $67M Series B to expand its AI-enabled platform into 12 states by 2026. The round included existing investors Oak HC/FT, Optum Ventures, and Rubicon Founders, with new participation from the Autism Impact Fund and others. (link)

• Conceivable Life Sciences, a New York-based developer of automated IVF labs, raised $50M in Series A funding. Advance Venture Partners led, joined by Artis Ventures, Stride, and ACME. (link)

• Sevaro Health, a provider of virtual neurology services, raised $39M in Series B funding led by Valtruis and Intermountain Ventures. (link)

• Salt AI, a Culver City, Calif.-based life sciences workflow platform, raised $10M. Morpheus Ventures led, joined by Struck Capital, Marbruck Investments and CoreWeave. (link)

• Synthesize Bio, a Seattle-based AI genomics startup, raised $10M in seed funding. Madrona led, joined by Sahsen Ventures, AI2 Incubator, Inner Loop Capital, and Point Field Partners. (link)

• Trially, a Kansas City-based clinical trial recruitment platform, raised a $4.7M seed. Flyover Capital led, and Alpaca, Atria, Blu Ventures, Looking Glass Capital, Redbud, The Council, and Gaingels participated. (link)

• Nolla Health, building an AI personal doctor for everyone, raised a $4.5M seed round led by General Catalyst. (link)

MERGERS & ACQUISTIONS

• Innovaccer + Story Health: Innovaccer has acquired Story Health to expand into AI-powered specialty care team augmentation, with former Verily co-founder joining to advance clinical workflow automation. (link)

• Adonis + Caduceus: Adonis acquired CaduceusHealth to strengthen its AI-driven revenue cycle management platform, combining denial prevention and efficiency tools with Caduceus’ large-scale, U.S.-based RCM staffing, coding, and analytics. (link)

• GE Healthcare + icometrix: GE Healthcare, the imaging hardware company, announced its intent to acquire icometrix, an AI brain imaging analysis vendor. (link)

Other Relevant News 🔍

News, podcasts, blogs, tweets, resources, etc…

• FDA panel to review AI mental health devices (link)

• Health systems weigh Epic’s expanding AI portfolio (link)

• Most recalled AI products came from public companies (link)

• 5 concerns raised during House hearing on health AI (link)

• How AI is democratizing medical expertise (link)

Visuals of the Week 📸

Funny memes, cool pics, and interesting data from around the web…