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Hinge Q2, Microdosing GLP-1s, and the Generalist-Specialist Paradox of Medical AI
August 7, 2025
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Together with
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“Health tech is becoming a relationship business (maybe it always has been?). The question isn’t ‘can your model outperform GPT-5?’… It’s ‘can you sit in the trenches and drive adoption Monday morning?’”
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Duke Orthopedic Surgery Executive Director of AI Dr. Christian Pean
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Technological advances have ushered in an era where many AI models outperform specialists on specific tasks, but AI still lags far behind experts in less controlled settings.
That’s the Generalist-Specialist Paradox of Medical AI laid out in a recent NEJM AI editorial, which paints a picture of a world where AI might soon start redrawing the boundaries of medical specialties as they exist today.
- AI is already delivering great results on well-defined tasks like interpreting EEGs or CT scans, but it’s still consistently struggling on generalist tasks with less clear boundaries.
- If that trend continues, the article argues that tasks that used to be in the hands of specialists will be at the fingertips of primary care (just as tasks that used to belong to primary care will now belong to patients).
LLMs don’t care what specialty a case belongs to. They can ingest the full clinical context across visit notes, labs, and imaging to come up with the most probable diagnosis.
- Breyer Capital Partner Dr. Morgan Cheatham recently made the case that this feature of AI could lead to the collapse of traditional medical specialties as we know them.
- “Some domains will converge. Others will splinter into new subspecialties defined not by organ systems, but by data fluency, workflow design, or model supervision.”
Not so fast. There’s no doubt that AI will reshape roles, but that doesn’t mean that specialists are about to start offloading everything onto generalists.
- High-quality care requires more than following AI-friendly guidelines, and specialists incorporate judgment earned through years of experience to deliver effective treatments. LLMs are also still a ways away from replacing anyone’s hip.
- Primary care providers also aren’t exactly sitting around looking for extra work, and it’s far-fetched to think that they can start taking on specialty care for their ever-growing patient panels.
The Takeaway
AI might be great at well-defined tasks like many seen in specialty care, but we’re still a ways away from having primary care physicians replacing cardiologists.
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Ambient AI Insights From Leading Pediatric Health Systems
Pediatric care delivery is vastly different from adult healthcare, yet healthcare technology often designs for adults and asks pediatric clinicians to make it work for them. With specialized note types and product enhancements, the Abridge ambient AI platform is designed for pediatrics. Read insights from 8 leading pediatric health systems to learn how Abridge’s leading ambient AI platform scales for their unique needs. Download the report.
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Navina Ranks #1 Best in KLAS for Clinician Digital Workflow
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- Hinge Soars on the Public Markets: Life’s good for newly-minted public companies that are actually operating in the black. Hinge shares are up nearly 25% after the virtual MSK platform reported its first quarterly results since the big IPO, with investors loving to see Q2 revenue climb 55% year-over-year to $139M. The strong performance was driven by increased eligible lives from new and existing clients, as well as better than expected enrollment yields. Better yet, Hinge posted a $581M quarterly loss, which would have looked more like a $10M profit if it didn’t include $591M of stock-based expenses related to the IPO.
- Microdosing GLP-1s: Noom unveiled the first solution to provide members with personalized microdoses of the world’s hottest drug class, the Noom Microdose GLP-1Rx Program. The program pairs GLP-1 microdoses with behavior change and coaching support for $199 per month, and members are able to access clinicians for continuous monitoring or prescription adjustments. Noom defines a microdose of GLP-1 as a fraction – 25% or less – of the typically prescribed maintenance dose.
- The Meteoric Rise of Medicare Advantage: An article in Health Affairs traced Medicare’s transformation from having 80% of beneficiaries in traditional Medicare circa 2006 to a majority now selecting MA. The authors dive into upcoding, favorable selection, and flaws in the MA quality bonus program – concluding that reform is needed given that enrollment trends will only accelerate as the disparity between benefits and enrollee costs widens, “fueled by rising overpayments from favorable selection and upcoding.”
- MGB and CVS Partner on Primary Care: Mass General Brigham is joining forces with CVS Health to expand primary care access in Massachusetts. The Boston Globe reported that the duo is looking to offer adult primary care at 37 CVS MinuteClinics, although the collaboration was sparse on specifics. Plans filed with the state’s Health Policy Commission showed that 80 NPs and PAs employed by CVS would oversee care for 1,500 patients, and that the clinics would join MGB’s provider network to support referrals to the system’s hospitals and specialists for follow-up care.
- Doximity Physician Compensation Report: Doximity’s Physician Compensation Report showed that salaries for doctors in the U.S. climbed 3.7% in 2024, a slightly lower increase than the 5.9% reported the year prior. Neurosurgeons kept the throne with a $749k average salary, while pediatric endocrinologists ranked last at $230k. The report found that average compensation for men rose 5.7% – vs. just 1.7% for women – widening the gender gap to 26%. Disparities also persisted between docs caring for adults versus pediatric patients, with the salary gap exceeding 80% in some specialties despite similar levels of training and clinical complexity.
- Kyruus Reaches AI Search: Kyruus Health is expanding its Reach solution to integrate directly with AI-powered search experiences like ChatGPT, Bing, and Google AI Overviews – allowing health systems to continue getting in front of patients as AI transforms how they find care. Reach now covers over 90% of U.S. search traffic through strategic integrations, and early adopters like Intermountain Health have reportedly seen a 42% increase in appointments booked via Reach’s integration with Google Reserve within the first two months of implementation.
- b.well Growth Funding: FHIR-based digital health platform b.well Connected Health secured $20M of growth funding from Trinity Capital to accelerate growth across key markets. b.well unifies data, solutions, and services in one place to enable personalized consumer experiences, giving customers ranging from payors to retail pharmacies the ability to identify gaps in care and deliver proactive health recommendations.
- Remote Assessments for Cognitive Decline: Current diagnostic guidelines for mild cognitive impairment rely on time-consuming evaluations, but results presented at AAIC show that remote testing could significantly accelerate early detection. Researchers administered Linus Health’s iPad-based rDAC test to patients identified as having MCI (n=42), dementia (15), or no cognitive impairment (24) based on a traditional 3-hour assessment and interview. rDAC was able to successfully identify emerging cognitive decline by combining traditional neuropsychological outcome measures with acoustic features such as speech motor function and timing.
- Google Debuts SensorLM: Google took the lid off its SensorLM family of foundation models that connects wearable device signals to natural language analysis. SensorLM interprets data from wearables to produce insights into how daily activities impact physical health, and was reportedly trained on 60M hours of multimodal sensory data from 104k Fitbit or Pixel Watch users. The model can also “automatically generate descriptive text captions by calculating statistics, identifying trends, and describing events from the sensor data itself.”
- At-Home Heart Failure Detection: OMRON Healthcare announced the results of a three-month study with Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine showing that home-monitored vital signs detected early heart failure risks in 33% of participants (7 of 21 patients). Patients used OMRON’s smart blood pressure monitors and body composition devices that automatically synced data with healthcare providers via mobile app. This remote monitoring enabled early medical intervention, with over 90% of participants continuing daily measurements and 86% reporting high satisfaction with the integrated approach.
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Ambient AI – From Helicopter to Hospital
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Elevate 2025: Medallion’s Virtual Conference Returns September 17
Now in its fourth year, Medallion’s annual conference is back – bringing together healthcare leaders to explore this year’s theme: Elevate the present. Reframe the future of healthcare. Hear from industry voices like Tom Lawry, author of Hacking Healthcare, UPMC Chief Medical Information Officer Robert Bart, and many more. Reserve your spot now.
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- Next Generation Ambient Technology and Agents: The ambient AI transformation is already sweeping across health systems, reducing administrative burdens and improving patient outcomes. So, what’s next? Tune into this on-demand session to learn how systems like Carle Health and Denver Health are leveraging Nabla to eliminate Pajama Time and build a future where agentic AI unlocks true workforce sustainability.
- Scale Remote Patient Monitoring With BPM Pro 2: BPM Pro 2 is the next generation cellular blood pressure monitors, empowering care teams to scale remote patient monitoring and streamline operations. Discover why leading providers are choosing BPM Pro 2 to collect highly precise measurements and enrich data with Patient Insights from their daily lives.
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