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Molina cuts 2025 guidance Read in browser
Endpoints News
Tuesday, 8 July 2025
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Oura’s healthcare bet
Wearables aren’t just for wellness and consumer tracking these days. They’re increasingly becoming a part of a bigger conversation in the healthcare system overall.
One of the clearest examples I’ve seen of this is with the Oura smart ring.
Jason Oberfest, Oura’s VP of healthcare, told me that Oura’s healthcare ambitions started with research. Investigators came to Oura wanting to use its ring in studies — especially when the Covid-19 pandemic hit. (Remember that NBA partnership?) Now, Oura is moving into more clinical use of the ring through partnerships with organizations like Maven Clinic and Medicare Advantage plan Essence Healthcare. It raised $200 million last year, partly from Dexcom, which makes continuous glucose monitors.
Ricky Bloomfield, who joined Oura in March as its first chief medical officer, told me that some of the work around predicting Covid-19 based on Oura temperature readings was one of the turning points for the company to think beyond wellness. The idea is, can you make a wearable’s data useful for a clinician when you’re inside their office for an annual visit?  Bloomfield said Oura is working on other detection features, including some that will be regulated by the FDA. (It won’t be the first — Apple Watch and Fitbit have FDA-cleared features, including EKGs and sleep apnea detectors).
To get to a point where an Oura ring might be useful for monitoring a chronic condition, there’s more work to do beyond how wearables have historically been studied. There’s no clear data showing that these devices keep people healthier in the long run, which the medical world would want to see. To try and close that gap, Bloomfield said he’s hiring a director who will be focused on clinical outcomes research. 
“A lot of that general work has been done, but what's missing is more concerted effort on hard clinical outcomes,” Bloomfield said. “That's absolutely necessary for this type of work,” he added.
As a reporter, I’ve tested my fair share of wearables — though not Oura’s ring. But I’ve always found wearables that don’t have a screen, that gather data in the background, as the most compelling. Any time I’ve worn a device with a screen, I’ve been distracted by it. I currently don’t use a wearable.
But if there was more evidence that the data I was gathering might have an impact on my health — say, if my doctor asked me to wear one to measure certain vital signs during pregnancy — I might be persuaded. Bloomfield said that’s starting to happen, as clinicians begin to trust data coming from these devices. AI can help make sense of all the data coming through, and then embedding the data into the clinical workflow is starting to come together as interoperability improves.
Ultimately, that could lead to more people wearing smart rings. 
“If we can prove the value to clinical teams and by extension, clinical outcomes and financial benefit to payers that is huge, and that will get more people to the point where they're able to benefit from a technology like this,” Oberfest said.
- Lydia
Here’s what’s new
Health tech startups raise $6.4B in first half of 2025 in AI frenzy
In­vestors bull­ish on AI have been pour­ing more mon­ey in­to dig­i­tal health star­tups.
Trump's tax cut law expands orphan drug exclusions, could upend 340B program
Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump on Ju­ly 4 signed in­to law his wide-rang­ing tax cuts and rec­on­cil­i­a­tion pack­age, in­clud­ing an ex­pan­sion of or­phan drug pro­tec­tions from Medicare ne­go­ti­a­tions, and near­ly $1 tril­lion in Med­ic­aid cuts that could up­end the op­er­a­tions of hos­pi­tals that pro­vide cheap­er drugs and care un­der the 340B fed­er­al pro­gram.
It’s all healthcare
A post on X by Larry Levitt at KFF notes that the reconciliation package is "the biggest cutback in federal support for health coverage ever."
Larry Levitt at KFF pointed out how big of an impact the “One Big Beautiful Bill” has on healthcare in the US.
This week in health Тech
Molina Healthcare shared its preliminary second-quarter earnings and cut its guidance on Monday, citing “recent market dynamics and off-cycle disclosures from others in the managed health care sector.” Centene last week pulled its guidance for 2025. It attributed its below-expectation earnings to higher medical costs. Molina reports earnings on July 23.
WeightWatchers said it has “renewed financial strength” and relisted on the Nasdaq as it comes out of bankruptcy. The company hired a new chief medical officer, Kim Boyd, and has a new program focused on menopause.
The American Telemedicine Association’s advocacy arm called telehealth provisions in the reconciliation package passed by Congress last week a “policy unicorn.” The “One Big Beautiful Bill,” signed into law on July 4 makes permanent the ability for people with high deductible health plans to have coverage for telehealth appointments before hitting their deductible.
To be sure, the law dramatically cut funding for Medicaid, with nearly 12 million projected to lose their healthcare coverage over the next decade. That will impact the digital health startups working with federally funded health plans — we’ll be watching to see how companies navigate that.

Carrot, known for its fertility care, debuted a metabolic-fertility program. The program, which launches in November, is aimed at providing pre-conception care to reduce IVF cycles, and it includes medications like GLP-1s. 

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