Stay up to date on the latest in health tech, digital health and health AI news with this weekly brief. This is news from the week of May 4 to May 8.
Tether launches medical AI that runs on phones, wearables
Tether unveiled QVAC MedPsy Thursday, a new class of language models that can run directly on smartphones, wearables and other devices.
The company says the platform’s focus on efficiency reduces both compute requirements and reliance on remote cloud infrastructure.
Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said in a statement that the launch was focused on “improving efficiency at the model level” instead of “scaling up size,” adding that the 1.7 billion-parameter model “outperformed larger systems” during testing.
“That combination matters because it directly reduces compute requirements, latency and cost,” Ardoino said. “It allows the model to run locally on standard hardware instead of relying on remote infrastructure. In healthcare, that changes the constraints entirely; you can run medical reasoning where the data already exists, inside a hospital system or on a device, without moving sensitive information through the cloud or waiting on external processing.”
Elation Health integrates new cardiovascular risk standard
Elation Health announced Thursday it has licensed the American Heart Association’s Predicting Risk of Cardiovascular Disease Events (PREVENT) risk calculator to be embedded within its AI-powered clinical decision support tool.
Elation’s Clinical Insights platform, powered by Anthropic’s Claude for Healthcare, ran more than 2,000 tests to ensure the implementation matches management guidelines.
The American Heart Association and American College of Cardiology released updated cholesterol and lipid management guidelines in March, which made the PREVENT calculator the primary prevention test for atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD).
“Primary care clinicians are on the front lines of prevention. Medicine moves fast, and when new clinical guidelines come out, they need technology that responds right away. We’re leading the market by setting a new standard for modern primary care technology,” said Kyna Fong, Elation Health CEO and co-founder, in a statement. “Independent practices often don't have the resources to quickly adopt new standards. We integrated PREVENT in days, so they didn’t have to wait. This isn’t just software that supports their work—it’s a platform that supports clinical excellence alongside them. When physicians can access the best tools, they can deliver better care for their patients."
Perplexity, VisualDx partner to bring medical imagery into gen AI
Perplexity and VisualDx announced Tuesday a partnership that will allow Perplexity users to view clinician-validated medical images when asking health questions.
Users will also be able to compare similar-appearing conditions and explore diagnostic differences, better understand visual conditions and browse VisualDx to “go deeper” in differential diagnosis, testing options, treatment options and more, they said.
“Medicine is visual,” said Art Papier, M.D., VisualDx CEO and co-founder, in a statement. “So much of a diagnosis depends on pattern recognition and comparison. By integrating VisualDx into Perplexity, we’re helping ensure that AI health information reflects real clinical thinking that’s supported by trusted imagery, visual evidence, and transparency.”
The partnership marks VisualDx’s entry into Perplexity’s Premium Health Sources, which includes other organizations like the American Heart Association, The BMJ and The New England Journal of Medicine.
Medaptus launches 24/7 operational ‘command center’ for hospital medicine
Medaptus announced Tuesday the launch of Medaptus Command, a hospital operations platform aimed at coordinating medicine program workflows.
The platform has five capabilities: intake, assignment, distribution, reconciliation and analytics. Its capabilities are built into existing electronic health records (EHRs), according to the announcement.
“Hospital medicine has outgrown the tools used to run it," said Malachi Charbonneau, Medaptus' CEO, in a statement. “Command brings intake, assignment, distribution, reconciliation and analytics into sync, giving leaders real-time visibility and the efficiency to run their operations more effectively.”