Hey y’all,
Happy Friday! Have anyone else been watching The Pitt? The AI scribe plotline hit close to home for those of us in health tech. Forbes did a good breakdown of what the show nails and what it misses. Link below, with other interesting pieces we’re reading.
This week we're digging into the FY26 health budget (sets the table for what's actually possible this year), Wellstar's latest venture, and the latest out of DC (plus a Unicorn announcement!) The highlight though? Our conversation with our friend Lauren Kahre. She's asking the hard questions about patient trust and governance that most people skip over, and her work at CHAI is worth paying attention to.
Let's get into it.
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Weekly Roundup
FY26 Health Budget: Signals for Health Innovators
Why it matters:
After a year of uncertainty, the FY26 health budget provides clearer footing for the public health, community health, research, and care delivery systems that support health outcomes across the country.
The big picture: Core public health funding largely holds steady
What’s actually changing:
Public health infrastructure: Modest increases for data modernization and capacity
Care delivery: Telehealth and hospital-at-home flexibilities extended, moving from temporary measures to baseline expectations
Policy environment: Fewer restrictive policy riders, giving agencies more flexibility, but limited progress on upstream social drivers
Bottom line:
This budget buys time and (hopefully) stability. Turning that into progress will depend on how well public health, care delivery, and innovation align.
Weekly Roundup
Catalyst by Wellstar launches 2nd Atlanta startup, targeting compliance
Photo by Ronny Sison on Unsplash
Catalyst by Wellstar launched Polysight in December with $1M in preseed funding. This is their second venture studio spinout after vflok.
The problem: Health systems spend $39 billion annually on compliance. Most of it goes to manual tracking and spreadsheets.
What it does: Monitors regulatory updates in real time. Flags what changed, explains what it means, suggests next steps. Only pulls from validated official sources.
CEO Rinku Patel is a pharmacist who previously built KloudScript for specialty pharmacy. Wellstar recruited her through a nationwide search after realizing no existing solution worked.
Wellstar is piloting the platform across 11 hospitals in three states.
Why it matters: Compliance failures hurt patients. Compliance costs hurt budgets. Polysight was built by Wellstar's compliance teams solving their own problem, not by a vendor trying to sell them something.
Weekly Roundup
Other health innovation news
Midi Health Becomes Women's Health Unicorn with $100M Round: Women's health platform Midi Health crossed the billion-dollar threshold with a $100 million Series D, treating 25,000 patients weekly with insurance coverage reaching 45 million women. They're using AI to automate chart analysis and scheduling, betting they can scale specialist care nationally without breaking the model.
HHS Launches $100M STREETS Initiative for Addiction & Homelessness: Secretary Kennedy rolled out $100 million for addiction and homelessness programs that explicitly shift away from harm reduction toward recovery-focused treatment. The funding includes outreach, psychiatric care, and housing with recovery requirements, with faith-based organizations invited to compete.
ICHRA Market Faces Headwinds as ACA Premiums Spike: ICHRAs—where employers give workers a fixed amount to buy individual insurance instead of offering group plans—were picking up steam as a cost control strategy. The problem is the model depends on individual market plans staying affordable, and with enhanced ACA subsidies expired, those premiums are spiking.
FTC Secures Landmark Settlement with Express Scripts: The FTC reached a settlement requiring Express Scripts to stop favoring high-priced drugs, base patient costs on net prices, and accept flat fees instead of rebate-linked compensation. The deal projects $7 billion in insulin savings over a decade and requires moving their Swiss purchasing operation back to the US.
PBM Reforms Signed Into Law, Reshaping Medicare Part D: Trump signed legislation that fundamentally changes how PBMs make money in Medicare Part D. Starting in 2028, PBMs can only charge flat service fees instead of keeping a cut of drug rebates, removing the incentive to favor expensive drugs. They also have to pass through 100% of manufacturer rebates and report drug spending details twice a year.
TrumpRx Launches with GoodRx Under the Hood: The White House launched TrumpRx with discounts on 43 brand-name drugs to help reduce prescription costs for cash-paying customers. The site provides coupons patients take to pharmacies, though people with insurance will likely find their copays cheaper than the cash prices. Worth noting: GoodRx is powering most of the TrumpRx coupons based on the BIN/PCN numbers, with some fertility drugs flowing through CVS Caremark.
Member Spotlight
Lauren Kahre on Patient Trust and AI Governance
Most healthcare AI conversations focus on what the technology can do.
Lauren Kahre asks what patients want from it.
Lauren works on AI policy with the Coalition for Health AI on the policy workgroup. She helped frame recent national research on patient trust and transparency. The numbers tell a clear story: 75% of people use AI in healthcare settings. Only 13% feel comfortable with it.
Patients want accountability. They want human oversight. They want to know who's responsible when something goes wrong.
We sat down with Lauren to talk about what she's learned, where policy is headed, and why the governance conversation matters as much as the technical one.
Other Highlights
What Else We’re Reading
A New York Times piece about Joseph M. Yracheta and the Native BioData Consortium, where Indigenous scientists built a health data server and biobank led by and for Indigenous communities, underscoring how researchers are still figuring out how to sustain meaningful work even as policy shifts unfold.
In this Forbes article, Robert Pearl uses The Pitt’s recent AI storyline as a fun springboard to talk about where generative AI in medicine is hitting the mark and where it’s missing the nuance — a nice reminder that even TV can spark real questions about trust, accuracy, and clinical reality.
Closing Thoughts
If you made it this far, you’re the best. Thanks for reading. We love y’all, have a great weekend!
–Nadine
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