Healthcare · Data & AI
Articles in this selection, newest first. Change the filters, or clear them to see every article.
20 articles · Healthcare · Data & AI
Articles
Week of 14 September 2026
Hospital device data rights arrive one purchase order at a time
From September 12, 2026, the EU Data Act required new connected products to give users their data by design, but only for equipment marketed from then. Hospitals replace scanners slowly, so tenders carry the new right while older equipment runs on requests.
Week of 6 July 2026
Medicaid’s frailty test asks for a code and proof of impairment, and clinicians hold both
CMS’s June 2026 rule tied Medicaid’s “medically frail” exemption from work requirements to a coded diagnosis from the past year plus evidence the condition limits work. Suddenly, medical coding, doctors’ paperwork and data sharing help decide who keeps their coverage.
Week of 5 January 2026
FDA’s decision support revision handed hospitals a classification question
Headlines called FDA’s January 2026 revisions deregulation. The reality was subtler: the agency chose not to police more decision support software, which left hospitals, not regulators, deciding which category each tool falls in, and checking that it stays there.
Week of 8 December 2025
Why the AI preemption order barely reached health care’s own AI rules
December 2025’s executive order aimed federal pressure at broad state AI laws. But most AI rules health systems actually follow sit in licensing, insurance and privacy law, where preemption arguments are weakest. The order’s real risk ran through vendors.
Week of 15 September 2025
Approval is easy, monitoring is hard: the Joint Commission’s AI guidance and the work after go-live
In September 2025, the Joint Commission and the Coalition for Health AI issued guidance that looked like a governance checklist. Most of its weight fell after go-live, on monitoring and safety reporting that depend on vendor contract terms few hospitals had negotiated.
Week of 2 June 2025
Once FDA read with AI, sponsors’ inconsistencies got cheaper to find
FDA gave its reviewers Elsa, an AI assistant for searching and comparing documents, and the inconsistencies in drug submissions became cheaper to find. Sponsors need consistent dossiers, a fast way to correct misreadings, and proof their own AI works.
Week of 17 March 2025
23andMe’s bankruptcy turned a privacy policy into a term of sale
Once 23andMe filed for Chapter 11, its privacy promises stopped being fine print and became a condition that courts, states and bidders had to put a price on. Anyone holding or sharing health-related data should write contracts with that ending in mind.
Week of 6 January 2025
Under FDA’s change-control model, the AI device a hospital validates will not stay the one it runs
FDA’s January 2025 draft on AI devices, read with its December change-control guidance, assumes the software keeps changing after a hospital buys it. Three kinds of change follow: pre-approved updates, updates needing fresh review, and shifts in the hospital itself.
Week of 9 September 2024
Why o1’s reasoning summaries added work for clinical AI committees
OpenAI’s o1 explained its reasoning just as federal rules on clinical algorithm transparency were taking hold. A fluent explanation answers the clinician’s question, not the vendor’s or the regulator’s, so health systems still had to supply two other kinds of transparency themselves.
Week of 11 December 2023
For hospitals, HTI-1’s model cards covered only the EHR vendor’s own algorithms
In December 2023, a federal health IT rule made electronic record vendors explain the predictive tools they supply. For models a hospital built itself or bought elsewhere, the record system only had to hold the information, and the hospital had to produce it.
Week of 2 October 2023
Fourteen thousand accounts, 6.9 million people: the 23andMe ratio every health data platform should measure
Attackers walked into a sliver of 23andMe accounts and, through a feature that connects relatives, reached data on millions. Health systems run portals, proxy access and research platforms with the same arithmetic: weak sign-in, generous sharing, and data whose protections change hands.
Week of 17 April 2023
HIPAA’s reproductive health proposal asked records to know what they hold
OCR’s April 2023 proposal turned on why information was requested, not what it was. Yet it, and the state laws that followed, assumed a health system could find sensitive details in a record and keep them labeled. Few could.
Week of 20 March 2023
A chatbot’s history sidebar is a records system with someone else’s retention policy
OpenAI’s March 2023 bug was small as breaches go, but it showed health systems that every staff conversation with an AI assistant is stored data held by a vendor. HIPAA’s familiar questions follow: what goes in, how long it stays, who sees it.
Week of 3 October 2022
Five principles, three committees: the AI blueprint inside a hospital
In 2022 the White House published five principles for fair, safe AI. They sounded new, but hospitals already practiced most of them under other names. Extending trusted clinical committees to algorithms worked better than building a separate AI bureaucracy.
Week of 20 June 2022
Dobbs moved health privacy risk outside the medical record
After the Supreme Court’s abortion decision, attention went first to medical records, where HIPAA already set rules. The bigger exposure for health systems lay at their own digital edges, and in consumer data they never held but patients assumed was protected.
Week of 12 April 2021
Microsoft and Nuance: the recording is the asset to govern
Microsoft’s April 2021 deal for Nuance put software that listens to doctor visits inside a giant cloud platform. For health systems, the decisions that mattered concerned the recording itself, who checks the draft note, and the contract governing both.
Week of 26 October 2020
Price transparency files: mandated, massive and hard to read
A 2020 rule forced health plans to publish the prices they negotiate, but not to make them usable. Whether the files were worth anything came down to three problems the rule left to plans, employers and intermediaries: sheer volume, unclear meaning and accountability.
Week of 31 August 2020
Blackbaud’s breach exposed patient data that fundraising never needed
The Blackbaud ransomware attack reached hospitals through their fundraising foundations. It revealed donor databases holding more patient information, for longer, than fundraising needed, and showed why keeping less data is the one safeguard that still works after the others fail.
Week of 6 July 2020
Why hospital COVID reporting turned out to be infrastructure
In July 2020, HHS told hospitals to stop sending COVID-19 capacity data to the CDC and use a new HHS route instead. The switch revealed reporting as real infrastructure, and hospitals still counting by hand paid for every change.
Week of 9 March 2020
Interoperability rules sent patient data beyond HIPAA’s reach
Two federal rules issued on March 9, 2020, banned information blocking and required standard data connections for patients. Together they let patients send their records into apps HIPAA does not cover, leaving health systems to govern data flows they could no longer refuse.