OpenEvidence joins Johns Hopkins on medical training; EHR vendors' AI disclosures fall short; Agilent buys Proscia; Suki raises $90 million
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Johns Hopkins Medicine and OpenEvidence said Tuesday they will redesign medical education and build clinical AI tools together, a day after Northwestern Medicine opened OpenEvidence inside its Epic record to nurses and pharmacists.
All 35 electronic health record developers reviewed in a study published Wednesday in npj Digital Medicine were certified as meeting federal AI transparency requirements, although their public risk disclosures were inconsistent and often incomplete, the authors said. Agilent Technologies agreed to buy the digital pathology software company Proscia for up to $270 million, and the ambient documentation company Suki raised $90 million.
Separately, authors in NEJM AI said Medicare's repeal of the breakthrough-device route to new technology add-on payments will likely disadvantage independent AI developers, and researchers reported retrieving 1,000 stored conversations from a patient chatbot without logging in.
THE DETAILS
- FYIDeployment Oct 13, 2026Johns Hopkins Medicine and OpenEvidence announced a collaboration Oct. 13 to redesign medical education around pathophysiology, evidence-based medicine and clinical reasoning and to build AI that combines published evidence, a patient's history and Johns Hopkins practices to support care decisions. The two said they are still early in defining specific tools and plan to evaluate effects on clinical decisions, quality and patient outcomes; OpenEvidence Chief Executive Daniel Nadler called it at minimum a research, development and product collaboration and did not disclose terms, Fierce Healthcare reported. Northwestern Medicine said Oct. 12 that OpenEvidence now launches from its Epic record with hospital sign-in and that nurses, pharmacists and other clinical staff have access for the first time; its release described no evaluation plan. OpenEvidence had 1.12 million verified U.S. clinician users as of September, according to Fierce Healthcare.
- FYIEvidence Oct 14, 2026Researchers at Georgetown University School of Medicine and MedStar Health's National Center for Human Factors in Healthcare reviewed the public disclosures that electronic health record developers must make under federal transparency requirements for AI-enabled predictive decision support tools, covering risk analysis, risk mitigation, governance and eight other attributes. Across 35 developers, reporting was inconsistent and often incomplete and varied widely in structure and detail, yet all were certified as meeting the requirements, the authors reported Oct. 14. They called for standardized reporting and more rigorous certification review. The paper is an early-access version; Raj Ratwani of MedStar Health is the corresponding author.Source: npj Digital Medicine
- FYIMoney Oct 13, 2026Agilent Technologies said Oct. 13 it will pay $240 million in cash at closing for Proscia, plus up to $30 million tied to performance milestones, according to Investing.com and CAP Today. Proscia's Concentriq platform links slide scanners, laboratory information systems and image-analysis and AI tools; its Concentriq AP-Dx product is cleared by the Food and Drug Administration as an aid to pathologists reading scanned surgical slides for primary diagnosis, while the AI applications in its portfolio are offered for research use only, the company says. Proscia reported trailing 12-month revenue above $18 million and counts 16 of the 20 largest drug companies as customers. Agilent President and CEO Padraig McDonnell said digital pathology is quickly becoming the foundation for pathology data generation, and the deal is expected to close early in Agilent's 2027 fiscal year.
- FYIMoney Oct 13, 2026Suki, which sells ambient AI documentation to more than 450 health care organizations and embeds it in more than 30 partners' products, said Oct. 13 it raised a $90 million Series E from new investors Healthier Capital, Crosslink Capital and Hercules Capital and existing backers including Venrock and Flare Capital Partners. The company said revenue doubled in 2025 and patient encounters supported by Suki grew more than 190% year over year in 2026; it did not disclose a valuation. "Clinical documentation was never the destination. It was the entry point," Chief Executive Punit Soni said, and the company said it will build AI agents for health systems and health technology companies. The round brings Suki's total funding to $250 million, according to HIStalk.
- WatchRegulation Sept 8, 2026
The final rule ends the pathway after fiscal 2029 applications; devices designated by Sept. 30, 2026, need authorization by May 1, 2028.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' final inpatient payment rule for fiscal 2027, released July 31, repeals the alternative pathway that lets devices in the Food and Drug Administration's Breakthrough Devices Program, and certain antimicrobials, qualify for new technology add-on payments without showing substantial clinical improvement. CMS had proposed ending it starting with fiscal 2028 applications; the final rule keeps it open for fiscal 2028 and 2029 applications from products designated by Sept. 30, 2026, and authorized by May 1, 2028. The repeal will most likely disadvantage independent AI developers against electronic health record vendors, which already supply most AI deployed in U.S. hospitals, by raising the cost of proving clinical benefit and lengthening development, Dr. Andrew Wong of the University of Utah and three co-authors said in NEJM AI. AI devices have averaged one or two new add-on payment approvals a year since 2020, the authors said. They called for coordinated action by CMS and the FDA, including regulatory sandboxes for outside developers, a lower evidence bar for AI paired with review while payments run, and FDA performance standards for AI built into health record systems. - FYIDeployment Oct 12, 2026Intermountain Health, a 34-hospital system based in Salt Lake City, said about 75% of its radiologists actively use Smart Impression, a Microsoft generative AI feature in its PowerScribe reporting software that drafts the impression section for the radiologist to review and finalize, Becker's Hospital Review reported Oct. 12, citing a Microsoft customer story. Most of the system's radiology enterprise has had access for about six months, and some subspecialties use it more heavily. Dr. Kenneth Nowers, medical director of imaging operations, said the tool "really decreases cognitive burden of these tasks, and it improves the report quality" and pointed to the lack of complaints after deployment as a sign of success; no turnaround or accuracy figures were reported. The system is evaluating Microsoft's Dragon Copilot for radiology, where Nowers said summaries of prior reports would likely have the most immediate effect.Source: Becker's Hospital Review
- FYIIncident Aug 17, 2026Alfredo Madrid-García, an independent researcher in Madrid, and two colleagues at the Technical University of Madrid retrieved the system prompt, configuration, knowledge base and 1,000 most recent stored conversations of a publicly accessible patient education chatbot during a security assessment, they reported in NEJM AI. They used a web browser, its developer tools and the consumer AI assistant Claude Opus 4.6; the assistant, asked for help with what they framed as debugging, refused none of their prompts and sped the work, but the browser tools alone were enough, the authors said. The chatbot's published description said it stored no personal information or chat histories, yet the live system kept full questions, answers and time stamps on an endpoint open without authentication, according to the authors, who did not name the chatbot, its disease area or its developers. It was taken offline within hours of their confidential disclosure to the developers, they said. The authors called for independent security testing of patient-facing AI before launch, including with AI tools, and for checks that its data handling matches public claims.Source: NEJM AI
- FYIMoney Oct 13, 2026Character Technologies, which runs the Character.AI companion chatbot platform, said Oct. 13 it filed a voluntary Chapter 11 case in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware to sell substantially all its assets, with Disney Worldwide Services as the stalking-horse bidder offering $20 million for a nonexclusive license to some of its intellectual property and claims. Chief Executive Colin Adams cited "significant legal, regulatory, and operational headwinds," and the company said it will keep the platform running during a sale expected to close in late November or early December and wind it down if no buyer keeps it running. In May, Pennsylvania's Department of State sued the company, alleging that characters on the platform claimed to be licensed medical professionals, including psychiatrists, and that one gave an invalid Pennsylvania license number, which the state called the unauthorized practice of medicine. The company's announcement named no lawsuit.
- FYIDeployment Oct 12, 2026Function, a $365-a-year membership offering more than 160 lab tests including ApoB, lipoprotein(a), fasting insulin and hs-CRP, said Oct. 12 that U.S. members will be able to move their results into the Google Health app beside data from Fitbit and Pixel Watch devices, starting this fall. Google Health Coach, an AI product, can use the lab results and personal health records to give tailored wellness guidance, and Function's own software interprets each result, the companies said. Google states that Health is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, prevent or monitor any disease and that the coach's answers may be inaccurate or incomplete; the announcement reported no validation data.Source: Function and Google Health