News updates

What's happening in AI + healthcare

Hand-curated by AIH editors. Every item carries a link to the primary source so you can read the original.

ARPA-H August 9, 2026 ARPA-H / cardiovascular / agents

ARPA-H selects teams for ADVOCATE, a 39-month program to build FDA-authorized agentic AI for cardiovascular care

ARPA-H launched ADVOCATE (Agentic AI-EnableD CardioVascular CAre TransfOrmation) in January 2026 and selected performer teams in June 2026 following a competitive solicitation. The 39-month, two-phase program targets patients with heart failure and prior myocardial infarction, aiming to create a first-of-its-kind FDA-authorized clinical agentic AI system that autonomously adjusts appointments, medications, diet, and exercise recommendations around the clock. A supervisory agent will monitor clinical AI agents for safety. ARPA-H cited that 46% of U.S. counties lack a cardiologist as motivation.

Read our take → Source: ARPA-H ↗
Fortune August 9, 2026 funding / agents / health-systems

Bunkerhill Health raises $55M total to scale Carebricks agentic AI platform inside health systems

Khosla Ventures led the Series B with Sequoia Capital, Felicis, Optum Ventures, and Y Combinator participating, bringing Bunkerhill's total funding to $55M. The Carebricks platform lets health systems build and deploy their own AI agents across clinical, operational, and administrative domains — including cardiology imaging review, post-discharge follow-up identification, prior authorization navigation, and registry management. Current customers include Cleveland Clinic, UTMB, and Intermountain Health. Revenue grew 20x in the past year.

Read our take → Source: Fortune ↗
BusinessWire August 9, 2026 funding / primary-care / agents

Corner Health raises $32.5M to build AI-powered infrastructure for NP-owned primary care practices

Oak HC/FT led Corner Health's combined Seed and Series A, with First Round Capital, Zigg Capital, Homebrew, Pathlight Ventures, Wischoff Ventures, and Go Global Ventures participating. Corner Health backs nurse practitioners starting and running independent primary care practices, providing billing, insurance credentialing, and its AI product Cora, which automates scheduling, patient communication, lab orders, referrals, and prior authorizations. The company has scaled to more than 70 provider-owned practices and 35,000+ patient visits.

Read our take → Source: BusinessWire ↗
Daily Health AI Chronicle August 9, 2026 regulation / EU / AI-Act

EU AI Act high-risk provisions take effect August 2, 2026 — healthcare AI compliance clock now running

Core obligations under the EU AI Act took effect August 2, 2026 for high-risk AI systems, including medical devices and clinical decision support software deployed in EU member states. Requirements now include mandatory conformity assessments, human oversight mechanisms, transparency documentation, and post-market monitoring. Full compliance for AI-enabled medical devices is required by August 2027, with the European Commission simultaneously releasing guidance establishing EU-level centres of excellence to help member states lacking regulatory evaluation expertise.

Read our take → Source: Daily Health AI Chronicle ↗
Function Health August 9, 2026 funding / preventive-care / biomarkers

Function Health secures $450M growth financing from General Catalyst to scale preventive AI health platform

General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund provided $450M in non-dilutive growth financing to Function Health, just eight months after its $298M Series B, bringing total war chest to $804M. Function's membership platform offers 160+ biomarker lab tests annually for $365/year, plus MRI and CT imaging for cancer and cardiovascular screening across 200+ locations. The company performed more than 100M tests in three years. General Catalyst's CVF is a revenue-based structure: it finances customer acquisition and is repaid from a capped share of the value generated by those customers.

Read our take → Source: Function Health ↗
NPR August 9, 2026 research / clinical-AI / diagnostics

Harvard study in Science: OpenAI's o1 outdiagnoses emergency physicians on real ER cases

Researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School published results in Science showing that OpenAI's o1 model generated the correct diagnosis in 67.1% of real ER cases versus 55.3% and 50% for two attending physicians, and scored 89% on clinical vignette diagnosis versus 34% for human doctors. The study used 76 de-identified cases from Beth Israel's ED, with the AI working from the same messy EHR data available to clinicians, without access to imaging, physical examination findings, or vocal cues.

Read our take → Source: NPR ↗
Hinge Health August 9, 2026 acquisition / digital-health / GI

Hinge Health to acquire Cylinder Health for $105M, expanding AI-powered virtual care into gastrointestinal disease

Hinge Health signed a definitive agreement to acquire Cylinder Health, a virtual GI care provider, for $105M in cash. Cylinder serves nearly 100 enterprise clients and approximately two million covered lives, with distribution partnerships across two of the three largest pharmacy benefit managers. Hinge plans to integrate Cylinder's clinical model into its AI platform to create a single app combining musculoskeletal, pelvic health, migraine, and gastrointestinal care — targeting a GI disease market affecting one in four U.S. adults and accounting for an estimated $135B in annual healthcare spend.

Read our take → Source: Hinge Health ↗
Healio August 9, 2026 FDA / ophthalmology / diabetic-retinopathy

FDA clears iHealthScreen's iPredict-DR for automated diabetic retinopathy screening

iHealthScreen received 510(k) clearance (K253704) for iPredict-DR, an AI-powered software that detects more-than-mild diabetic retinopathy in adults with diabetes from color fundus images captured by an iCare DRSplus camera. The device is designed for use by minimally skilled healthcare workers, making it a point-of-care screening tool that can reach patients in primary care and endocrinology settings without requiring a retina specialist.

Read our take → Source: Healio ↗
OpenEvidence August 9, 2026 research / clinical-AI / benchmarks

Stanford-Harvard NOHARM study: physicians chose OpenEvidence over all other clinical AI chatbots combined

The NOHARM study, run by ARISE (a clinical AI research network led by Stanford and Harvard physicians), evaluated 45 large language models and 4 clinical AI systems with 12,747 expert annotations across 4,249 potential clinical actions. When physicians were free to consult any AI tool, they turned to OpenEvidence more than ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and all other external AI chatbots combined. The study also found that OpenEvidence produced fewer potentially harmful clinical recommendations than general-purpose LLMs.

Read our take → Source: OpenEvidence ↗
BusinessWire August 9, 2026 pharma / drug-discovery / agents

Sanofi and Owkin expand multi-year collaboration to build agentic AI for pharmaceutical R&D

Owkin and Sanofi announced a multi-year collaboration backed by a five-year license for K Pro, Owkin's AI Scientist platform. The partnership extends a €90M collaboration that began in 2021 with oncology target identification. AI agents built under the new program will autonomously perform complex drug research and development tasks — competitive intelligence, patient subgrouping, drug positioning — drawing on K Pro's multimodal patient data fusion capability. Initial focus is oncology and immunology pipelines.

Read our take → Source: BusinessWire ↗
TytoCare August 9, 2026 funding / telehealth / remote-care

TytoCare closes $25M+ growth round and names new CEO to scale AI-first remote examination platform

Insight Partners led the growth round with HOOP, OliveTree, OrbiMed, Qumra Capital, and Qualcomm Ventures participating. TytoCare simultaneously appointed Adam Pellegrini, former CVS Health EVP, as CEO. The company is repositioning from a general telehealth device company toward chronic disease management — specifically congestive heart failure, COPD, post-surgical recovery, and oncology monitoring — pairing its FDA-cleared physical examination hardware with SaMD AI algorithms for lung auscultation, cardiac screening, and dermatological assessment.

Read our take → Source: TytoCare ↗