policy
AMA wades into AI regulation conversation
The American Medical Association on Monday announced a new Center for Digital Health and AI. Among its central mandates is to help shape conversations around regulation.
I spoke to new AMA CEO John Whyte about what the center hopes to accomplish. He addressed the AMA's insistence that AI should be referred to as "augmented intelligence," and he offered his take on the Trump administration's recent attacks on the Coalition for Health AI.
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big tech
Verily's latest pivot
Yet again, Verily has changed tacks — although this time more subtly — as it aims to bring real-world patient data to bear in clinical research. Those worlds collide in Verily Me, the consumer-facing app the company launched on Friday. It'll serve as a care hub for patients enrolled in Lightpath (Verily's cardiometabolic disease management program launching in 2026), while a free version pulls in patient's health records using health information exchanges to offer a limited set of screening recommendations. And it'll be a recruitment funnel for Lifelong, a new real-world research registry that Verily will market to pharma companies and other research customers.
It's still in beta, and subject to the limitations of providers' HIE participation, as chief product officer Myoung Cha emphasized to STAT and to HLTH attendees sharing about early reviews on LinkedIn. For anyone building patient-facing interoperability solutions, missing records and imperfect data mapping aren't going away anytime soon.
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business
Abridge vs. OpenEvidence, round one
New announcements from Abridge and OpenEvidence, two of the most prominent health tech startups to emerge in recent years, highlight how despite different initial offerings, many artificial intelligence companies in health care will just end up competing with each other for physician eyeballs.
On Monday morning, Abridge, best known for its AI scribe that helps doctors automate the writing of clinical notes, announced a new product that will surface "real-time insights, prompts, and pathways" from the widely-used medical resource UpToDate based on things said in a clinical conversation and that are written in the patient's record.
The product is basically Abridge's answer to OpenEvidence's widely used search tool that offers medical professionals neat summaries of clinical evidence in response to questions. Also yesterday morning, news broke that OpenEvidence planned to announce another $200 million in financing to advance its tech. Though a press release never came out, CEO Daniel Nadler confirmed the funding to me.
Abridge has announced $700 million in funding this year; OpenEvidence is at just under $500 million.
The key elements Abridge highlights about its clinical decision support tool seem to be basically distinctions from OpenEvidence. Abridge's tool is integrated directly into clinician workflows, where OpenEvidence is usually run in a in an internet browser or app. Abridge's tool has immediate context from patient conversation and chart, where physicians often cut and paste info from charts into OpenEvidence. Speaking of which, Abridge is adopted within the context of a health system contract with all of the necessary privacy and security checks, whereas OpenEvidence is often used by individual clinicians who really shouldn't be putting patient data into a search box without clearance from above.
In an email Nadler countered the notion that OpenEvidence's software wasn't in workflow. "We are the clinical software that clinicians use everyday," he said, pointing out that 600,000 health care professionals use the product. "We are the default operating system of medical knowledge in the United States today," he added. He also pointed out that the company has a visits feature that delivers "real-time evidence" during clinical visits. Though many clinicians use OpenEvidence of their own accord, the company also works with health systems to sign enterprise-level business associate agreements that would allow it to handle patient data under HIPAA.
So is Abridge trying to use its leverage with hospitals to take OpenEvidence's market? The companies may stay off an immediate collision course owing to their different business models. Abridge contracts directly with health systems whereas OpenEvidence is available at no-cost to physicians and is supported by advertising. No hospital buys Abridge for its decision support, and the companies may well coexist forever if nothing else changes.
But an emerging story here is how all of the big companies in health care AI are suddenly competing with each other. It's not just a war between scribes (Ambience vs. Abridge) and clinical decision support (OpenEvidence vs. Doximity). These companies are all using similar underlying technology and ultimately want to own as much of the clinician experience as possible. So no matter where they started, they're racing to add to their offerings. Scribes are layering in prior-authorization offerings, automated billing code tools, and more. Non-scribe companies are adding automated documentation tools. Private equity is trying to roll up a much of all of this as they can. Only so many can survive.
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