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- This is Naomi Diaz

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with the Becker's Digital Health Podcast.

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Here's your daily industry news briefing

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for today, April 1st.

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First, Walgreens Own Village
MD plans to exit the state

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of Nevada where it has six
village medical clinics.

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A spokesperson for a Village
MD told Becker's it decided

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to leave the Las Vegas market
after careful consideration

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and analysis in the email.

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The spokesperson said, we are
committed to helping our teams

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during this transition

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and we are working diligently
to care for our patients.

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During this transition,
patients can find new providers

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by contacting, contacting
their insurance companies

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or if they're on Medicare
visiting medicare.gov.

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The spokesperson said
patients can also continue

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to request prescription
refills through April 30th

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and obtain medical records
via the Village MD website.

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Village MD has also exited
Florida and Illinois

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and sold several of its Rhode
Island locations in recent

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months as part of majority
owner Walgreens plans

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to cut $1 billion in cost this year.

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Walgreens recently posted a
$5.8 billion second quarter loss

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driven by the devaluation of Village md.

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Second UnitedHealth Group has confirmed

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that data has been compromised due

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to the February 21st cyber attack on its

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subsidiary change Healthcare.

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In a March 27th update on its
website, UnitedHealth stated

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that it is working with a vendor

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to begin analyzing the types of data

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that could have been
compromised as a result

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of the breach on Change Healthcare.

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The website reads quote, to be clear,

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we are still determining
the content of the data

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that was taken by the threat actor,

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including any PI slash ppi.

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This is taking time

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because change healthcare's
own systems were impacted

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by the event and difficult to access.

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UnitedHealth said it
has no evidence that any

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of the compromised data has
been published on the web,

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but that it will be offering
to do the notification work

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for customers where
permitted if their data

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has been compromised.

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Third, the venture capital arm

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of Northwell Health is backing a startup

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that is developing a conversational
artificial intelligence

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platform that mimics human speech.

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Northwell Holdings participated
in a $50 million series B

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funding round March 27th for
Hume ai, which was founded

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by a formal Google researcher

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to provide near human level conversation.

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With ai, Northwell has already
invested several million

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dollars in the emotionally
intelligent voice interface.

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Health systems are increasingly
using conversational AI bots

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to talk on the phone with patients

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for appointment scheduling

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and care management,

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like seeing whether they're
taking prescribed medications

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and the platforms are beginning

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to sound more like
living, breathing people.

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Human ai, for instance,

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is trained using a so-called empathetic

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- Large language model
to know when to start

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and stop speaking and
learn from the rhythms

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of human speech such as ums

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and AHS to keep becoming more lifelike.

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If you would like the latest health IT

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and digital health industry news delivered

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