📣 Digital Health Download: May 2026

AI is everywhere in healthcare, and May's big question is whether it's actually delivering. The money is flowing, the promises are bold, but some cracks are starting to show.
Steve and Michael break down the month's biggest stories.
We cover:
• Digital health hitting its strongest funding quarter since the pandemic peak, and why deal concentration tells the real story
• How Medvi built a billion-dollar GLP-1 company on fake doctor profiles, fake reviews, and a drug with zero bioavailability
• Why AI in prior authorization and billing may be inflating healthcare costs rather than cutting them
• The peptide craze: what the science says, what regulators have banned, and why Michael is actually taking one
• How AI could collapse today's narrow medical specialties into a "generalist specialist" model
• New research showing Epic's out-of-the-box AI models fall short on real-world clinical benchmarks
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Show notes:
Rock Health Q1 2026 Funding Report (rockhealth.com/insights/q1-2026-funding-overvi…)
NYT Profile of Medvi + Futurism Investigation (futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/new-york-…)
Peterson Health Technology Institute: Administrative AI Report (phti.org/administrative-ai-current-use-and-pot…)
STAT News / Undark: BPC-157 and the Peptide Craze (statnews.com/2026/02/03/bpc-157-peptide-scienc…)
Health Affairs Scholar: Kocher & Wachter on the Generalist-Specialist Model (academic.oup.com/healthaffairsscholar/advance-…)
Springer Nature / Journal of General Internal Medicine: Epic AI Model Meta-Analysis (link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11606-026-1…)
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📍 Connect with us:
Heart of Healthcare website (heartofhealthcarepodcast.com)
LinkedIn (linkedin.com/company/the-heart-of-healthcare-p…)
YouTube (youtube.com/@heartofhealthcarepodcast)

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