Healthcare

Healthcare

SAN FRANCISCO Kaiser Permanente affiliates will pay $556 million to settle a lawsuit that alleged the health care giant committed Medicare fraud and pressured doctors to list incorrect diagnoses on medical records to receive higher reimbursements, federal prosecutors said. The deal announced Wednesday came more than four years after the U.S. Department of Justice filed the legal claim in San Francisco that consolidated allegations made in six whistleblower complaints.

The JP Morgan Healthcare Conference is back in town, and while biotech executives are 80% men, a renegade group of women executives took over Union Square in so many pink pantsuits it would have made Mary Tyler Moore proud. If you haven't noticed, the JP Morgan Annual Healthcare Conference is in town again, and the famed big-money biotech conference runs through Thursday. It's considered SF's second largest revenue-generating conference of the year, behind only Dreamforce.

Denise Kvapil has built her career in environments where decisions are immediate, outcomes are measurable, and accountability is non‑negotiable. From emergency departments to senior executive roles, she has led with a singular conviction: results matter more than rhetoric. "I define success by patient outcomes," she says. "If patients do better and teams grow stronger, then the leadership is working." That philosophy has guided her ascent through clinical practice, hospital operations, and executive leadership across complex healthcare systems.

"They were amazing... everybody was so professional and they really did put me at ease."

Thousands of New York City nurses were set to return to the picket lines Tuesday as their strike targeting some of the city's leading hospital systems entered its second day.The walkout, which comes during a severe flu season, involved roughly 15,000 nurses spread out across multiple private hospitals, including NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia, Montefiore Medical Center and Mount Sinai hospital.The affected hospitals have hired droves of temporary nurses to try to fill the labor gap.

Fiona Wilcox, Senior Coroner for Inner West London, issued a Prevention of Future Deaths report to Health Secretary Wes Streeting, in which she said there were not enough beds or nurses to manage demand in A&E in both cases. She warned that while hospitals like St George's had put in place measures to try to manage demand, A&E departments were still exceptionally busy and a risk of further deaths remained.

When my mom was dying, hospice came daily and stayed for about ninety minutes. They answered questions, checked what needed to be checked, and did what good professionals do: They made a brutal situation feel slightly less impossible. And then they left. Ninety minutes go fast when you are watching your mother decline. The rest of the day stretches out in a way that does not feel like time so much as exposure. Every sound becomes a data point.

Hospitals in England are using articificial intelligence to help cut waiting times in emergency departments this winter. The prediction algorithm is trained on historical data including weather trends, school holidays, and rates of flu and Covidto determine how many people are likely to visit A&E. The government said the technology allowed healthcare staff to do the things that they're trained to do, rather than having to be bound down by bureaucratic processes.

2025 saw a welcome surge in healthcare venture funding as investors rushed to back top AI startups. Last December, VCs predicted huge funding rounds for AI scribe startups like Abridge and Ambience Healthcare; indeed, both Abridge and Ambience landed hundreds of millions of dollars in venture funding this year. Investors also said in December 2024 that they anticipated a race for those startups to expand beyond AI health scribing into other product lines, like medical coding and billing.

The healthcare industry continues its digital transformation, driven by the availability of open-source datasets. These datasets provide data scientists, researchers, and medical professionals with valuable insights to improve patient outcomes, streamline operations, and foster innovative treatments. Here are 18 top open-source healthcare datasets that are making a significant impact in healthcare research and can be helpful for those working in AI and data science. This is an updated version of our 2024 blog on open healthcare datasets, with new additions and revised information for 2026.

Even as the Department of Veterans Affairs prepares to resume go-lives of its new Oracle Health electronic health record system in 117 days, House lawmakers remain concerned about the modernization project's total cost and the agency's readiness for simultaneous deployments at medical facilities in the coming months. VA paused most rollouts of the new software in April 2023 to rectify technical issues, patient safety concerns and usability challenges at the sites where the system has been deployed.