Hundreds of millions seek health guidance from AI chatbots, but consumer tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT Health aren’t medical devices and carry limited legal protections; even with enterprise versions promising HIPAA-aligned safeguards, terms can change and misinformation remains possible, so guard your diagnoses, lab results, and other private data when chatting with these tools.
2025 marked a turning point for health tech as six IPOs added $36.6B and Health Tech 2.0 firms posted profitable growth, narrowing the trust gap with cloud peers. The report introduces the Health AI X Factor — four pillars (continuous velocity, durable revenue, AI productivity, and platform expansion) — to explain why a subset of Health AI companies can command premium valuations by scaling faster and more durably than prior generations. Seven 2026 predictions cover payer-provider AI adoption, clinician-in-the-loop clinical AI, CMS experiments with AI payment codes, cash-pay AI adoption, a budding health AI data infrastructure, AI-native value-based care, and the rise of digital CROs that could reshape pharma R&D.Private markets show stronger deal sizes and AI-driven funding shifts, suggesting a lasting, if not bubble-like, transformation toward AI-enabled healthcare growth and infrastructure.
Apple is preparing iOS 27 with three major AI features: a visual redesign of Siri, an AI-powered web search tool, and a health management AI agent integrated into a revamped Health app, signaling significant updates to Apple’s AI strategy.