In a preview before the official announcement at HLTH last week, Microsoft executives and its hospital customers shared use cases of how its suite of AI tools can be used by health systems to improve healthcare delivery and alleviate provider burnout.

This year’s HLTH conference brought a bevy of news announcements — from partnerships to new product features to acquisitions and more. In this list, MedCity News compiled short summaries for 11 of the conference’s most notable announcements.

The FDA’s digital health advisory committee will discuss technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, virtual reality, and digital therapeutics as well as topics like decentralized clinical trials and patient-generated health data. Committee member nominations are due in December.

Flush with cash, Munjal Shah paints a tantalizing picture of healthcare where AI nurses trained to be chronic disease nurse specialists can take care of every chronic disease patient in America. There’s both sincerity and bravado in the vision. Let’s just hope that Shah’s second venture in healthcare won’t fail and be embroiled in lawsuits from angry employees and creditors.

At HLTH 2023, I had dozens of conversations with providers, digital health investors, startup CEOs and other players in the healthcare industry. When I got home, I compiled seven refreshingly honest takes I heard from them while at the conference.

Formed by Baidu founder and CEO Robin Li, BioMap uses artificial intelligence technology to glean insight into proteins to guide biologic drug discovery. The startup is the latest company to join a growing list of Sanofi partners as the pharmaceutical giant continues investing in AI-enabled drug discovery.

The ultimate challenge for the broader adoption of AI in medical imaging remains the same: demonstrating to healthcare institutions that it provides a clear ROI.

Healthcare technology experts have confidence that the industry will put the right guardrails up around LLMs as it continues to develop and deploy these AI tools, they said Sunday during a panel discussion at Engage at HLTH.

The most successful implementations of digital solutions offer value propositions on both sides of the equation — they create value for the patient and family, while also making the clinician’s job easier and more enjoyable by saving time and eliminating ancillary duties.

As we navigate the challenges of drug shortages, especially vital medications like Adderall, it’s crucial to be proactive. Predictive analytics, coupled with a deep understanding of alternative drugs, can guide our path forward.

Iambic Therapeutics brings together software engineers and drug-hunting scientists, all sharing the goal of using artificial intelligence to optimize properties of small molecule drugs. The startup will apply its Series B financing to a cancer drug pipeline that includes two candidates on track for the clinic in 2024.

It’s critical that we address these examples of institutionalized bias and racism in how we approach clinical trials for drugs and devices. While it’s a daunting task, the path forward is surprisingly clear, and AI can be instrumental in the next step of overcoming unconscious biases inherent in clinical trial processes.

Novo Nordisk is paying Valo Health $60 million up front to gain three preclinical cardiovascular disease programs. Milestone payments for those programs and others covered under the artificial intelligence drug discovery pact could reach up to $2.7 billion.

Specific targets were not disclosed, but Merck KGaA is betting the artificial intelligence technologies of Exscientia and BenevolentAI will discover into new drugs for cancer, neurology, and immunology.

The revenue cycle management business is using AI tools to automate cumbersome tasks to help hospitals operate more efficiently. It’s beginning to attract the attention of major healthcare organizations.

By making large amounts of diverse data widely available, healthcare institutions can feel confident about the evaluation, creation, and validation of algorithms as they’re transitioned from ideation to use.

This new report sheds light on how the benefit consultants’ role has changed and details their perspective on the shifting employer healthcare landscape.

By revealing how tumors interact with immune cells, Noetik aims to identify new targets for new cancer drugs. The startup and its artificial intelligence-driven platform are supported by $14 million in seed financing.

The founder and CEO of Unlearn.AI seeks to make clinical trials more efficient and less costly by leveraging its Digital Twin technology. If the company is successful, drugs could potentially be brought to market sooner and in a cost effective manner.

Do some people simply think the A in AI stands for Automation? Most likely the confusion is due to a lack of understanding of what AI truly is, combined with a strong desire to use the term for marketing purposes.

Epic announced that it will integrate Abridge’s clinical documentation tool into its EHR workflow. The startup’s generative AI tool listens to visits and creates a near-instant summary that adheres to physicians’ prototypical note structure.

Biotech startups raised $2.6 billion globally in the second quarter of this year, but that’s down nearly 46% compared to the same period last year, according to a report from Pitchbook. Capital is harder to find, and the report projects an uptick in M&A activity as companies run out of cash.

Flagship Pioneering-founded Alltrna is developing tRNA therapies to address genetic diseases driven by truncated versions of proteins. By addressing an aberrant genetic instruction underpinning many diseases, the startup is developing what it describes as a potential “universal solution.”

Senator Mark Warner (D-Virginia) penned a letter to Google leadership expressing concerns about Med-PaLM 2 — the company’s generative AI tool for healthcare providers that is currently being used by Mayo Clinic and other health systems. The letter requested that Google provide more clarity about its chatbot’s training, accuracy, ethical considerations and deployment in healthcare settings.

UltraSight, based in Israel, recently received a nod from the FDA to market its UltraSight AI Guidance product that can assist medical professionals without sonography experience in acquiring cardiac ultrasound images and allow for more widespread detection of heart diseases.

Allurion Technologies has commercialized a gastric balloon in the form of a pill that patients swallow. But the weight loss platform from the now NYSE-listed company also includes AI-driven software that provides insights about a patient’s progress, technology with the potential for use alongside obesity drugs.

AI can index company narratives relative to strategy, opportunities, and threats, and create benchmarks to watch over time related to sentiment, intensity, and impressions. Ultimately these can be tied back to ROI and stakeholder value that move past typical marketing performance metrics or traditional brand metrics.

A schizophrenia drug candidate from partners Sumitomo Pharma and Otsuka Pharmaceutical failed to outperform a placebo in two Phase 3 studies. The compound is the most advanced program from a psychiatry and neurology collaboration spanning four drugs discovered by an artificial intelligence technology platform.

Nvidia’s investment isn’t just working capital for Recursion Pharmaceuticals’ technology-driven drug discovery research. Recursion says it will get more computing power as well as the possibility of joining forces with Nvidia in research.