business
Hims, Doximity CEOs top digital health earners
CEOs of high-profile health tech companies are starting to pull in large pay checks on par with those of executives at big pharma companies, according to an analysis of 2025 proxy filings by STAT's Bob Herman and Emory Parker. Rather than rely on summary earnings, STAT's methodology leans on actual realized gains, which includes money from exercising vested stock. The analysis includes only public companies.
Andrew Dudum of telehealth company Hims and Hers Health came in fourteenth on the list with $51 million in earnings last year. Other notable health tech CEO payouts include include Doximity's Jeffrey Tangney and Dexcom's Kevin Sayer who each earned $18 million. The list also features leaders from mainstay medical device makers like Boston Scientific, Abbott, Stryker, Medtronic, Redmed, and more. Topping the list was BioNTech's Uğur Şahin, who pulled in $300 million.
Read the full rundown here
Medical devices
A brain implant to translate inner monologue
Brain implant companies like Neuralank have raised hundreds of millions of dollars to give people with paralysis the ability to speak through a computer. A new study shows progress on a related but distinct problem: translating inner speech, or a person's inner monologue as they think about what to say.
As STAT's Rose Broderick reports, unlike "attempted speech," inner speech doesn't activate the muscles involved in talking, so figuring out how to decode it could have advantages for people with movement disorders such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. In a proof-of-concept study, four participants a computer semi-reliably decoded inner speech in real time, achieving up to 74% accuracy, from a 125,000-word vocabulary.
Read more here
Did your company fulfill the White House health tech pledge? CMS will be the judge.
The Trump administration's effort to push health technology forward by securing voluntary commitments from companies has created an incentive to move quickly, as the plan's architects at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services intended. But there are also unintended side effects of creating a race to be first to show progress: Companies are touting that they've signed the pledge and that they've already achieved its goals, even before CMS signs off.
Last week, Health Bank One put out a press release claiming to be the "first app to achieve CMS's vision for healthcare" with its patient health records app. Reached for comment on whether the company indeed meets the agency's criteria for an interoperable, modern patient health record app, a senior HHS official told my colleague Brittany Trang that "companies should be careful not to mislead on the effort. CMS will judge who has met the criteria." (Read more about Health Bank One and similar apps in last Thursday's newsletter.) The agency also clarified a couple more points regarding the pledge:
- CMS will be posting additional names to the lists of companies agreeing to the pledge over the next weeks.
- In the fine print for the pledge, CMS referred to "less mature" criteria that early pledge signees will help CMS develop. The agency clarified that it's an acknowledgement that some of its ambitious and visionary goals are still evolving, and that working groups will work on defining methods of achieving those goals.
- For the AI assistant pledge specifically, the agency said that signing the agreement doesn't require each company to make an identical app. Those signees can do anything from "developing new tools, to enabling others through infrastructure or services, to aligning existing products with the principles outlined. That will be a business decision for each company based on what makes sense to them and their users."
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