- This is Naomi Diaz
with the Becker's Digital Health Podcast.
Here's your daily industry news briefing
for today, April 1st.
First, Walgreens Own Village MD plans to exit the state
of Nevada where it has six village medical clinics.
A spokesperson for a Village MD told Becker's it decided
to leave the Las Vegas market after careful consideration
and analysis in the email.
The spokesperson said, we are committed to helping our teams
during this transition
and we are working diligently to care for our patients.
During this transition, patients can find new providers
by contacting, contacting their insurance companies
or if they're on Medicare visiting medicare.gov.
The spokesperson said patients can also continue
to request prescription refills through April 30th
and obtain medical records via the Village MD website.
Village MD has also exited Florida and Illinois
and sold several of its Rhode Island locations in recent
months as part of majority owner Walgreens plans
to cut $1 billion in cost this year.
Walgreens recently posted a $5.8 billion second quarter loss
driven by the devaluation of Village md.
Second UnitedHealth Group has confirmed
that data has been compromised due
to the February 21st cyber attack on its
subsidiary change Healthcare.
In a March 27th update on its website, UnitedHealth stated
that it is working with a vendor
to begin analyzing the types of data
that could have been compromised as a result
of the breach on Change Healthcare.
The website reads quote, to be clear,
we are still determining the content of the data
that was taken by the threat actor,
including any PI slash ppi.
This is taking time
because change healthcare's own systems were impacted
by the event and difficult to access.
UnitedHealth said it has no evidence that any
of the compromised data has been published on the web,
but that it will be offering to do the notification work
for customers where permitted if their data
has been compromised.
Third, the venture capital arm
of Northwell Health is backing a startup
that is developing a conversational artificial intelligence
platform that mimics human speech.
Northwell Holdings participated in a $50 million series B
funding round March 27th for Hume ai, which was founded
by a formal Google researcher
to provide near human level conversation.
With ai, Northwell has already invested several million
dollars in the emotionally intelligent voice interface.
Health systems are increasingly using conversational AI bots
to talk on the phone with patients
for appointment scheduling
and care management,
like seeing whether they're taking prescribed medications
and the platforms are beginning
to sound more like living, breathing people.
Human ai, for instance,
is trained using a so-called empathetic
- Large language model to know when to start
and stop speaking and learn from the rhythms
of human speech such as ums
and AHS to keep becoming more lifelike.
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