Rik Renard

@kwharrison13 Nice! Was this co-written with Anduril (e.g. with interviews)? Or based on public info?

Today, we’re launching The Anduril Thesis, a 300-page book 2 years in the making. Of 500+ companies we’ve covered, Anduril could be the most important of all. Because if it mission is successful, it could single-handedly deter a catastrophic global conflict. Here's the story:

@operationdanish Would love that video

I just tried Agent Mode with ChatGPT for Clinicians. This is unbelievable. I might make a video of this… wild.

It is outright journalistic malpractice to run this headline about a study run on models from 2022 and 2024. Scaring the public about AI in this way is a professional and moral failure.

@ben_ippolito @Peterson_HTI Can you send the link by any chance?

Sounds like AI deployment in health care is going well. @Peterson_HTI reporting higher billing intensity, more denials in response, back and forth bot wars...

@cturitzin @ColtonOrtolf Exactly So wondering what their acquisition channel(s) will be

@rikrenard @ColtonOrtolf Yeah and with the reimbursement of ACCESS, companies won't be able to afford paid here.

Cue the largest ad spend in digital health history as all these businesses seek to acquire Medicare patients. I have a feeling AARP is gonna have some new partners.

Basically the experience of interacting with US healthcare specialists. Your results are on MyChart. We'll message you on Spruce. Just log into MyPatientPortal. It's right there on FollowMyHealth. Just create an account on myEHR.

@slotkinjr @eringriffith @nytimes Louder for the people (tech bros) in the back 🫶

I really did not want to be writing this morning. But this issue is too important. It’s been said that the last thing the weather person should do before going on the air is look out the window. The _day before_ @eringriffith profiled Medvi in @nytimes as the AI company of the future, the FDA approved Lilly’s new oral medication: orforglipron. *Not tirzepatide.* In fact, it’s not even a peptide. It’s the first non-peptide, small-molecule oral GLP-1 receptor agonist. Lilly owns tirzepatide. They invented it. If you could put tirzepatide in a pill, Lilly would do it. They would desperately want to. Instead, they spent millions and nearly eight years licensing a completely different kind of molecule, because oral tirzepatide is a biological impossibility. Tirzepatide is a 39-amino-acid, 4,813-dalton peptide. Your gut does not distinguish it from a piece of chicken. SNAC, the absorption enhancer that barely gets oral semaglutide to 1% bioavailability, is compound-specific. It failed with liraglutide, another GLP-1 peptide, and has no demonstrated mechanism for tirzepatide. There is no published human study of oral tirzepatide. There is no plausible mechanism. Medvi sells it starting at $279 a month. A RICO class action against its supply chain partners has already called the product modern-day snake oil. Lilly’s own strategy is the best witness. We can hear the lawyers now: “So doctor, what was your assumption on why Lilly was not pursuing oral tirzepatide despite that in not doing so they would instead pursue an entire entirely different type of molecule and possibly create market confusion with their new entrant?” The Times profile actually described an accountability architecture whose impact in part is that no single entity owns the patient and process. Medvi handles marketing. CareValidate provides the clinical workflow. OpenLoop provides prescribers and pharmacy fulfillment. The marketing layer can say the doctors make the decisions. The doctor platform can say the brand controls the messaging. The prescribers say the pharmacy fills what’s ordered. Everyone can point at everyone else. That structure explains a lot of the financials. Medvi reported a 16.2% net margin. Hims, with 2,442 employees selling the same drug categories, reported 5.5%. The 10.7-point spread represents in part everything Medvi may not pay for: extensive clinical oversight, advanced adverse event monitoring, satisfactory regulatory compliance, sound quality systems. The Times says they verified Medvi’s revenue. They did not seem to verify or note many other aspects. Six weeks before the profile ran, the FDA had issued Warning Letter #721455 for misbranding compounded GLP-1s. OpenLoop had disclosed a data breach: a threat actor claimed access to 1.6 million patient records, and multiple class actions were filed. The company’s ad network included fabricated physician personas, “Professor Albust Dongledore,” “Dr. Tuckr Carlzyn MD,” running over 5,000 Meta ads alongside a website disclaimer that these individuals “may be actors or AI portraying doctors.” The Times told the story of a man who used AI to build a billion-dollar company alone. The article was really a transcript of a Silicon Valley fever dream. A byproduct of regulatory lag and consumer desperation A billion dollars in pharmaceutical transactions running through an organization with no one seeming to care if a product can survive contact with the human stomach better than a chicken nugget.

@slotkinjr @DrParikhMBA @eringriffith @nytimes @NYTHealth I wonder if the article was sponsored by VCs…

@DrParikhMBA @eringriffith @nytimes @NYTHealth We keep seeing this burning desire to write tech stories that actually need to be health stories. Different kind of reporting. We’ve seen this movie before.

This article may or may not be factually accurate, but this site allowed me to say I was born on February 31st, gladly told me I had a 94% chance of hitting my goal weight of 200lbs when starting from 7' 11" and 350lbs, and helpfully warned me before I told it anything that would dq me. If these numbers are true (and I'm skeptical they are) it's more a story about how much money you can make selling drugs if you don't care about the health of the people you give them to than it is about vibe coding.

Big day for healthcare AI: today Utah announced the launch of AI prescription renewals. How many times have you wasted time making appointments and paid copays for a simple Rx fill? Win for patients and doctors. Naturally, the feckless AMA took the opportunity to stoke fears. Dr. John Whyte, AMA CEO: “While AI has limitless opportunity to transform medicine for the better, without physician input it also poses serious risks to patients and physicians alike.” Wait until he sees what happens in actual clinical practice. The right bar is not "perfect" - this is a fig leaf used to conceal crass cartel self-interest. The right standard is the care people can access in the real world, which is highly imperfect. “The AI is actually better than doctors at doing this,” said Dr. Adam Oskowitz, UCSF prof and Doctronic cofounder. “When you go see a doctor, it’s not going to do all the checks that the AI is doing.” I agree.

@nikunj Would love to try!

Ok in just a few hours, I have converted my Claude Skill into an entire Mac App that can be used by anyone.. > Sign in with Google (mail + cal) > Give it disk access > Voila! Right now it's using my own API keys, but will transition to BYOK. The future is truly wild💃

Everyone knows about serious problems in American healthcare: $1.8T in federal spending, burned-out doctors, endless phone trees, incomprehensible bills. No-one has a viable plan to fix this mess. And rather than helping, our policies have effectively banned AI from medicine. We have made our very best hope for relief illegal. I spent the past few months talking with policy makers in DC, state secretaries of health, and the technology community about this problem. I spoke with doctors about their experiences and ordinary Americans about their challenges with the healthcare system. I also spoke with investors about the barriers to investing in healthcare AI that makes life better for patients and doctors instead of pouring more dollars into up-coding tools. From these conversations I synthesized a set of policy reforms at the federal and state levels that will not only legalize healthcare AI, but also attract resources to the space and get the very best innovators focused on what is an existential problem for the United States.

🎥 I don't know if my followers, many of whom I'm honored to call my friends, need any Thanksgiving presents. But here it is. @AlexKoshykov and I just launched a new YouTube series, "Digital Health Vitals," together with two other musketeers of digital health, @BenSchwartz_MD and @rikrenard. 🩺 🔥 In Episode 1 (youtube.com/watch?v=ov69KP…), we dug into what we thought were the hottest topics of the month: 1. @hippocraticai raised $126M ($404M total) without any real progress in technology. Is there actually a future for AI agents in healthcare 🤖❓ 2. A recent @Nature article shows that while GPT-5 has made progress reducing hallucinations, it still fails in more than half of difficult clinical scenarios. Is there any use for LLMs in medicine beyond AI scribes? 🧠📉 nature.com/articles/s4159… 3. Suicides by ChatGPT. @OpenAI published a report saying they improved ChatGPT's mental-health responses with help from 170 experts and cut "undesired responses" by 65–80%. But is this real progress, or just patching things up after multiple suicides linked to ChatGPT? 4. @CMSGov is at it again. CY-2026 Physician Fee Schedule and the –2.5% efficiency adjustment. When will this sht end? 😒 5. @HeyEpic cuts ties with @AbridgeHQ. Is it Abridge's loss? Don't be so sure. 👀 🔗 Episode 1 is live: youtube.com/watch?v=ov69KP… Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! 🦃 I hope you can get off social media and spend time with your family and friends. ❤️

@chrissyfarr 👋

I’d like to find 1/2 more freelancers for Second Opinion. We are starting to ramp up, and it’s been fantastic to feature more voices. I’m looking for someone who can write as well as a journalist, but also is willing to have a first person voice & has opinions of their own.

@nikunj What tool are you using to write these excellent pieces? 👀

In today's 996 chest-thumping culture, don't forget about the quiet ones keeping your company together..

What in the world is going on with ambient AI? For some AI hot takes brought to you by Rik Renard, Product Lead at @swordhealth and yours truly, check out: boardroom.hospitalogy.com/library/ae9ffd…