Is Your Healthcare Organization Ready to Implement AI? Presented by Nordic

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Featured Story   A CRISPR Biotech Joins the Public Markets The deal Scribe Therapeutics is newest public biotech company, pricing its upsized offering of more than 8.5 million shares at $15 each, which was the top of its projected price range. Scribe's IPO raised $128.7 million to support a pipeline led by a therapy in early clinical development for treating high cholesterol. The therapy Lead program STX-1150 comes from a proprietary Scribe technology that enables a therapy to make marks on a gene that change its expression. These marks aren’t permanent and can be reversed. But the effects are intended to be durable. STX-1150 is designed to repress expression of PCSK9, a gene that codes for a protein that leads to high cholesterol levels. The company expects to report preliminary Phase 1 data in early 2027. Why this matters Genetic medicines R&D initially focused on rare diseases. Scribe’s scientists aim to bring genetic medicines to common ones. Cardiometabolic disorders represent a large market of millions of patients who take chronic therapies. Scribe believes its therapies have the potential to offer better and more durable effects with less frequent dosing. Soundbite “While current genetic medicines are largely limited to rare disorders, we are engineering our technologies for use in common diseases affecting millions,” Scribe said in its IPO filing. “By targeting prevalent diseases with significant unmet need and high clinical burden, we aim to usher in a new era of broadly scalable, transformative, and preventative genetic medicines.” —By Frank Vinluan Sponsored   Is Your Healthcare Organization Ready to Implement AI? Presented by Nordic There is an abundance of enthusiasm for the potential of AI applications to transform healthcare. But even when a pilot succeeds, the challenging task of advancing the technology to implementation varies at each institution. This report from Nordic, highlights the findings of its AI readiness survey, produced in collaboration with Modern Healthcare. Download it today! Top Stories   Who Broke the Healthcare System? Broken healthcare It’s often said that the healthcare system is broken, from the outdated use of fax machines to perverse incentives. But who broke the healthcare system? At MedCity News’ Bullseye event in Chicago, Editor-in-Chief Arundhati Parmar posed this question to two health insurance CEOs. The response “We did,” replied Sachin Jain, CEO of SCAN Health Plan, referring to all of those who work inside of healthcare. He added that healthcare stakeholders have normalized the abnormal. “I think we've come to accept things that we would not want for our loved ones. When they apply to other people, we're kind of okay with it because all of us have access to a back door,” he said. “When any one of us has a challenge or a problem with the healthcare system, we pick up the phone, we call the person that we know might be able to make it work, and then we're like, ‘Okay, thank god I know the CEO of this or the president of that.’ But the reality is, most people who are SCAN members are actually subject to a system that is far from optimal, and I think we have to do some serious work to try to fix it.” The CEO of Ascendiun, Paul Markovich, echoed this. Ascendiun is a nonprofit and parent company of Blue Shield of California, Blue Shield Promise Health Plan, Altais and Stellarus. “It's our own damn fault collectively, and I think that's why we're trying to focus a lot of our energy on the system. … One of the reasons I work at a health plan and a nonprofit health plan is because I think what the health plans can do is create a better system,” he said. “We tend to control the rules of how people get paid, what are the administrative burdens? Are we using a fax machine, or are we figuring out another way to connect digitally? We have the biggest influence, I think, in trying to shift the system to getting much better results from people day to day than what we're seeing now.” — By Marissa Plescia Healthcare Investors Are Rewriting the ROI Playbook from Cost-Cutting to Cash Flow The skinny Healthcare has weathered tech-driven capital waves before, like the dot-com boom or the dawn of DNA sequencing — but this one is different, according to a panel of investors. During a session Thursday at MedCity News’ Bullseye event in Chicago, these investors laid out why AI is the first healthcare tech wave that is succeeding at actually generating new revenue instead of just cutting costs. Jo Natauri, founder and managing partner at Invidia Capital Management, said that shift marks a break from prior healthcare tech cycles. Over the past two decades, digitization and technology were sold to healthcare almost entirely on the promise of cost reduction, she explained. Generating more moolah Shubra Jain — who left her position as head of healthcare at Tarsadia Investments last year to become Hippocratic AI’s chief business officer — offered a real-world example. A health system used Hippocratic’s AI platform to call 1,700 patients who had a lung nodule flagged on an X-ray but never returned for follow-up scans, which resulted in 250 patients coming back. This generated enough downstream revenue that the health system's $10,000 investment returned roughly 100 times over, Jain said. Acceleration Amy Raimundo, managing director at Kaiser Permanente Ventures, said this kind of ROI potential is exactly what is speeding up AI adoption across the industry. "I think the bigger the ROI, the faster people move," she remarked. "If it is more subtle, it becomes a long-term cycle." Another panelist — Carter Prince, a partner at CVS Health Ventures — added that AI’s relative accessibility is opening up entirely new customer segments. Because AI tools are typically easier to adopt than past generations of health IT tools, smaller practices that never previously invested in these solutions are now buying in, he stated. Prince pointed to his brother-in-law, an orthopedic surgeon in a small private practice in Cincinnati, who recently began piloting one of CVS Health Ventures' portfolio companies. "It's so easy for them to bring it on board," Prince said, noting that this ease of adoption expands the addressable market for healthcare AI companies beyond large health systems. — By Katie Adams Why Pharma Companies Should Look To Social Media For Better Patient Insight What we don’t know Between EHR, claims, imaging, genomic sequencing, and wearables data, across providers, payers, and pharmaceuticals, it’s impossible to truly measure how much data there is in healthcare. And yet, there is a need for more. These previously mentioned data sets are exceptional at mapping out the clinical story of healthcare, especially answering the questions of who, what, where, and when something happened. Where healthcare experiences a data deficit is answering the more human-level questions, like why and how. Why did adherence drop? Why did a patient switch therapies? How did a patient feel months after starting a new treatment plan? These answers are commonly shared across social platforms – upwards of 63% of surveyed Facebook users posted at least one health-related post over the past year. Unsolicited realities When data is aggregated from public forums like social media channels, a more complete picture emerges. This data provides context and truly answers the whys and hows of healthcare. On social media, patients are more inclined to voice unsolicited realities. Context is added to complex subjects such as treatment burden, societal stigmas, financial struggles, and logistical difficulties. It can paint a clearer picture of why a patient chooses to skip chemotherapy treatments or puts off their annual exam. When clinicians are informed that a patient is struggling with side effects or simply can’t find parking at the hospital, they can help the patient overcome these challenges. Structured chaos Pharmaceutical companies can’t simply turn Facebook posts and TikTok videos into usable data. Social media listening must be conducted using a highly structured, protocol-driven methodology. Using natural language processing and large language models, companies can extract clinically meaningful data from raw text and ultimately categorize concepts such as treatment burden and emotional distress. When paired with conventional data, pharmaceutical companies can better triangulate the patient story. — By MedCity Influencer Rohit Marwah Video   Video: What did UHC CEO say in unprecedented meeting with reporters? Debunked: UnitedHealthcare invited reporters and influencers to their Minnesota HQ. Why? Hear the exchange between MedCity editor and the UnitedHealthcare CEO.

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