A study conducted by KLAS is based on 27 interviews with healthcare leaders in May and June 2026. A full 93% of them said they had deployed AI solutions from vendors.

Many uses of AI are being tested but ambient scribe technology that helps HCPs with note taking remains #1.

We have seen calls for lower overhead for physicians before, and they point to those initiatives reducing burnout. This is echoed here with provider executives looking for more efficiency.

However, notice that they also want higher throughput. If burned out physicians get time back with ambient scribes but are then just thrown more patients the end result may not be less burnout.

Budget is cited as a barrier to implementing AI solutions but ROI is not. It seems like executives are more comfortable with being able to measure AI's return but still are slowed down by other friction points.

The New York Times reviewed MODDEN 26, the mod Klick developed in collaboration with The Derek Sheely Foundation for the Madden '26 NFL game.

This mod puts concussions back ‘in the game’ — degrading play as concussion symptoms mount. You can see gameplay on this YouTube review.

MODDEN 26 is the latest addition to the foundation’s concussion awareness tools, which include concussion awareness kits and Kristen’s memoir 'Very Dark Places.’ 

The NYT reporter’s commentary really highlights the importance of this effort by The Derek Sheely Foundation and the Klick Health team: 

SE Ranking looked at 50,006 commercially-oriented prompts across 20 niches in the United States on July 23 to get a snapshot of how ads are being handled on ChatGPT.

Healthcare is mid-pack with 29% of queries resulting in one or more ads.

SE Ranking didn't compare all categories between Google AI Overviews and the new OpenAI tool but for the ones that it did ChatGPT was ahead in only two categories.

This chart is for ad results that were placed against inconsistent queries. That's not always an error as the algorithms in the back end can make connections for users that aren't obvious from the queries, but it is suspect.

It will be interesting to see if health queries remain high alignment while the ads tool rolls out to more healthcare and pharma categories.

This story from Emarketer kind of misses the point. It highlights that more than half of Gen Z and Millennials learned about GLP-1s through Instagram.

That's obviously true, but if you look at all platforms you will see that YouTube and Facebook are surprisingly strong here. 

We reversed out the 46+ numbers from the data (estimated, assumes no weighting on Emarketer results). This allowed us to see what platforms the older audiences use. 

When looking at just the 18+ results from Emarketer we see that YouTube and Facebook lead the pack.

Absolutely look at platforms by age groups to find your best mix, but don't write off the older ones quite yet.

The National Alliance of Healthcare Purchaser Coalitions (that's a mouthful) studied employer medical costs with focus on four groups: providers, pharmaceuticals, PBMs, and to a lesser extent insurance firms. The organizations involved are largely self-insured.

First, 97% of respondents say that employee retention is a top priority plus 97% also say that health benefits are crucial to that effort.

These values have shifted by less than 10% over four years. 

Even though provider costs are higher, drug prices are considered the top threat facing employers in their health coverage costs. This sentiment has come down over the years but is still high.

This chart repeats the drug and hospital threat data and adds the desire by employers for PBM and Provider (Hospital) regulations.

Here, we see that 88% of employers would support more regulation on PBMs, often seen as  the culprits when it comes to higher drug prices. This report has multiple charts on every page. For readers interested in the opinions of employers when it comes to healthcare costs this is a great report.

Snap announced last week a new ad format specially for pharma. The placement includes the standard CTA (1) and now three new links for pharma (2).

Medable and the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development (CSDD) ran an analysis of AI use in clinical trials and found significant value. The full results will be released in a peer reviewed paper later this year but the company—which sells clinical trial solutions—didn't want to wait.

You can see why, the Tufts data is pretty flattering.

Other findings were:

The creator of Mentalium, a digital health CBT memo tool, wanted to know what kills startups so he could avoid the pitfalls. Turns out he's pretty good at data collection and analysis. We took his source data and created three charts for Wire readers.

When looking at the exit types the research found, the largest group were acquired by another firm.

Only 9% (31) of the exits had both a cash raised and exit value and for these we grouped the values.

Because this data is looking only at failures (and even then some made money) we can't say that self help is inherently worse than other categories of digital health. It's possible that it simply had more startups and more are still active.

Having said that, of the dead companies, 32.5% were self help.

This finding isn't great news for Mentalium, but they published it anyway which you just have to respect. The top types of digital health products that were exited were patient monitoring and CBT followed by teletherapy and coaching all above 10%.

For anyone looking to enter the digital health market this data is for you. Maybe you'll be part of the less than 1% that made over $1 billion in value (not cash).

Samsung's Galaxy Buds earphones are now approved by the FDA to operate as a hearing aid and to also allow users to diagnose their hearing. 

Pharma companies are choosing not to submit to some jurisdictions because the pricing regime is too restrictive. For example, a study by Interpharma in Switzerland found that one-third of new therapies (7 of 22) were not submitted.

The reason given is that because Switzerland is on the "most favored nation" list that US pricing might have to reflect those overseas amounts.

TikTok leads social platforms for on platform sales. This likely is the younger audience on the platform driving the behavior.

Influencers are mainly engaged for brand activities according to this data from Sprout Social Social.