The FDA just funded a jury of AI judges for radiology reports. 🧠 Not one AI. A panel of them. Cross-examining each other. Last week, the FDA awarded Cognita Imaging a $1.29 million research contract to build what they call an "LLMs-as-a-jury" evaluation framework for autonomous, generative AI radiology reports. According to HIT Consultant, the 18-month contract was funded under the FDA's Broad Agency Announcement program for advanced research and development in regulatory science. Here is why this matters to anyone building in this space. 🔹 Traditional human reader studies evaluate only a few hundred cases. 🔹 They miss rare edge cases, subtle equipment discrepancies, and regional workflow variations. 🔹 Cognita's framework will be stress-tested across approximately 1 million patient ...

Texas hospitals were bleeding $27 million a day. That just ended. 🏥 On September 17, Governor Greg Abbott announced that nearly $12 billion in Medicaid funding would be restored to Texas hospitals, ending a near year-long standoff with the federal government. This wasn't a minor bureaucratic dispute. According to KERA News, this was the first time CMS had stopped supplemental Medicaid funding to Texas hospitals since that funding began in 2014. Let that land for a second. The halt started September 1, the beginning of Texas's new fiscal year. Hospitals across the state, including rural clinics, nursing facilities, behavioral health providers, and emergency rooms, were operating under that $27 million per day drain. What actually caused this? 🔹 Texas raises ...

Everyone is calling multi-cancer blood tests a breakthrough. They are missing the real story. 🔬 The hype is real. But so is the gap it exposes. According to Duke Today, we currently have early screening tests for exactly five types of cancer: breast, colorectal, prostate, cervical, and lung. And every single one of those tests screens for only one cancer at a time. That is the baseline we have been working from. Now MCED tests, multi-cancer early detection, change the math entirely. 🔹 A single tube of blood can screen for up to 50 cancers. 🔹 The test detects cancer cells floating in the blood. 🔹 A positive result can identify the mutation within the DNA and the site of ...

Congress just told insurers: AI cannot deny your care alone. 🔥 The Doctors Not AI Act lands at exactly the right moment. On September 1, 2026, Rep. Greg Landsman of Ohio introduced H.R. 10210, the Doctors Not AI Act. Two Democrats. Two Republicans. Bipartisan from day one, with Reps. Buddy Carter, Kim Schrier, and Tom Barrett as original cosponsors. Referred to three House committees: Energy and Commerce, Ways and Means, and Education and Workforce. That is a serious bill with serious reach. Here is what it would actually do. 🔹 Bar AI systems from issuing or dictating any adverse benefit determination involving clinical judgment. 🔹 Require a licensed health professional to independently review each patient's circumstances before a medical-necessity denial ...

A doctor writes a prescription. The real nightmare starts after. Insurance approval. Prior authorization. Copay assistance paperwork. Specialty pharmacy routing. Most patients never even see this maze. They just wonder why their medication hasn't arrived. Forus is building the infrastructure to make that maze disappear. According to AlleyWatch, the New York-based AI company just closed a $150 million Series C round led by Bain Capital Ventures, reaching a $3 billion valuation. That valuation tripled in roughly four months. The round included Thrive Capital, General Catalyst, Accel, Redpoint, BoxGroup, Pear VC, Vast Ventures, and SV Angel. Total funding now exceeds $300 million. Founder Sahir Jaggi started this company in 2023. Let that sink in for a moment. Three years old. $300 ...

More radiation on top of immunotherapy should help. It didn't. 🎯 The LONESTAR trial just changed how we should think about local consolidative therapy in metastatic NSCLC. For years, the logic seemed airtight. Debulk residual tumor with radiation or surgery after immunotherapy induction, and systemic disease control should follow. It worked in chemo settings. It felt like a natural extension. But according to News-Medical, results presented at the IASLC 2026 World Conference on Lung Cancer told a different story. The LONESTAR framework forces you to ask six questions before adding LCT to dual checkpoint blockade. 1. What induction regimen was used? LONESTAR studied nivolumab plus ipilimumab as the induction backbone. The negative result applies specifically to dual checkpoint blockade, not ...

40,000 Boston residents could lose Medicaid by January 2027. 🚨 And the city is not waiting around to find out what happens next. According to Boston.gov, Mayor Michelle Wu and the Boston Public Health Commission are awarding $3.3 million to 10 community health centers right now, ahead of the surge. The funding comes from the city's last year of American Rescue Plan Act money. Ten centers will each receive $300,000, with an additional $300,000 going to the Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers. The math here is brutal and predictable. MassHealth projects that new federal work and education requirements alone will put around 40,000 Boston residents at risk of losing coverage starting in January 2027. About 40% of those individuals ...

That stat stopped me cold when I read it this week. 🛑 According to xtelligent Healthtech Analytics, a new study published in PLOS Digital Health evaluated all 1,357 AI and machine learning-enabled medical devices cleared by the FDA through December 5, 2025. Here is what the researchers found: 🔹 Only 34 devices (2.5%) were linked to registered prospective trials 🔹 Only 12 (0.9%) posted results from those trials 🔹 Only 12 (0.9%) progressed to peer-reviewed publication 🔹 Only 3 devices (0.2%) were evaluated for patient-centered outcomes like mortality, morbidity, or readmissions And the radiology-specific number is the one I cannot stop thinking about. Radiology accounts for 78% of cleared devices. But only 1% of those devices were linked to prospective ...

Everyone called WISeR a Medicare efficiency win. The records say otherwise. 🚨 This week the Electronic Frontier Foundation dropped approximately 1,000 pages of internal CMS documents showing what is actually happening inside Medicare's AI prior authorization experiment. The findings are damning. According to EFF, the documents show that WISeR, the Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction model, has resulted in widespread delays and denials of care, operational chaos, and reports of patient harm. Let that sink in. This is not advocacy spin. These are CMS's own contracts, internal status reports, and provider complaints, obtained through federal litigation. Here is what the fetched records reveal: 🔹 CMS launched WISeR in January 2026, subjecting seniors in six states to AI-driven prior authorization decisions ...