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Tuesday, 4 August 2026 |
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sponsored by
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Beyond the prescription: Eliminating barriers to care
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| For many patients, the hardest part of care begins after a therapy decision is made. Delays, handoffs and fragmented processes create barriers that stand between patient need and patient outcome. ZS examines how biopharma can create "zero distance to the patient" by redesigning care delivery, reducing friction and removing the coordination burden patients often carry themselves. |
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A year after the summer of scribes |
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| Last summer, ambient scribing startups — which use AI to listen to conversations between doctors and patients and turn them into clinical notes — took center stage in health tech. Abridge nabbed a $300 million Series E, while Nabla and Ambience raised $70 million and $243 million, respectively, in Series C funding. OpenEvidence, which added a scribing tool in August
2025, scored $210 million. |
| It was clear that scribing, which had already become table stakes, was just the start for those companies. The bigger ambition was to be the tool physicians turned to for everything, from documentation and coding to clinical decision support. |
| But one year later, those startups look very similar. |
| What used to be one company’s edge has quickly become common. OpenEvidence built its medical search tool on exclusive partnerships with top journals, but rivals now have their own versions. Abridge gets access to the same journals through Wolters Kluwer’s UpToDate, while Australian scribing startup Heidi works with Elsevier in the US to power its own search tool, which it named Heidi Evidence. |
| The same pattern has played out again and again across the category. Scribing companies have made it a priority to connect directly into major health record systems, automatically generate medical codes and give compliance and billing suggestions. |
| There are some exceptions. Nabla, for instance, is betting on a technology called a world model to track what happens in exam rooms beyond what’s spoken verbally. |
| Now, the race has become less about differentiating from each other and more about grabbing as much market share as possible in the form of health system contracts. |
| When the functions of these scribing companies begin to look the same, perhaps what their funding rounds actually bought was time to attract and lock in customers before the market decides on its winners. |
| - Ngai |
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Doing time |
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The owner of a peptide company, Paradigm Peptides, was sentenced to nearly six years in prison last week and must pay more than $5 million for illegally importing and selling unapproved peptide products online. The owner was accused of falsely marketing its products as being approved by the FDA, made in the US and tested for quality. According to the US Justice Department, the products were not tested and many contained testosterone instead of a compound designed to mimic it. |
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This week in health Тech |
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People are switching to paying with insurance instead of cash so fast that Teladoc's consumer mental health business, BetterHelp, doesn't have enough in-network therapists to keep up, the telehealth giant said in its second quarter earnings call. While the shift to an insurance-based model is part of the company's long-term turnaround plan, its inability to meet demand from those customers led to a 12% decrease in BetterHelp's revenue year-over-year to $213 million. |
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Worldwide made. Thanks for reading.
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