Get the latest news in health technology, digital health and health AI with this weekly overview. News for the week from May 4th to May 8th.
Tether unveils medical AI that runs on mobile phones and wearables
Tether on Thursday announced QVAC MedPsy, 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 computing requirements and reliance on remote cloud infrastructure.
Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said in a statement that the announcement focused on “improving efficiency at the model level” rather than “increasing size,” adding that the 1.7 billion parameter model “outperformed larger systems” during testing.
“This combination is important because it directly reduces compute requirements, latency, and cost,” Ardoino says. “This allows models to run locally on standard hardware, rather than relying on remote infrastructure. In healthcare, this completely changes the constraints. Medical inference can be performed where the data already resides, within hospital systems or on devices, without moving sensitive information through the cloud or awaiting external processing.”
Elation Health integrates new cardiovascular risk criteria
Elation Health announced Thursday that it has been licensed to incorporate the American Heart Association’s Predicting Risk of Cardiovascular Disease Events (PREVENT) risk calculator into an AI-powered clinical decision support tool.
Elation’s Clinical Insights platform, powered by Anthropic’s Claude for Healthcare, performed more than 2,000 tests to ensure implementation matched management guidelines.
The American Heart Association and American College of Cardiology released updated cholesterol and lipid management guidelines in March, making the PREVENT calculator a primary prevention test for atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD).
“Primary care clinicians are on the front lines of prevention. Medical advances are fast, and as new clinical guidelines are released, we need technology that can respond quickly. We are leading the market by setting new standards for modern primary care technology,” Kaina Fung, CEO and co-founder of Elation Health, said in a statement. “Independent practices often don’t have the resources to quickly adopt new standards. We integrated PREVENT in a matter of days, so we didn’t have to wait. This is more than just software that supports physicians’ work; it’s a platform that supports clinical excellence in parallel. When physicians have access to the best tools, they can provide better care to their patients.”
Perplexity, VisualDx Partner Brings Medical Imaging to AI
Perplexity and VisualDx on Tuesday announced a partnership that will allow Perplexity users to view clinician-verified medical images when asking health questions.
Users will also be able to compare similar-looking conditions, explore diagnostic differences, better understand visual conditions, and refer to VisualDx for a “deeper look” at differential diagnoses, testing options, treatment options, and more, they said.
“Medicine is visual,” VisualDx CEO and co-founder Art Papier, MD, said in a statement. “Many diagnostics rely on pattern recognition and comparison. By integrating VisualDx with Perplexity, we are helping ensure that AI health information reflects real clinical thinking, supported by trusted images, visual evidence, and transparency.”
The partnership marks VisualDx’s entry into Perplexity’s Premium Health Sources, which includes other organizations such as the American Heart Association, BMJ, and New England Medical Journal.
Medaptas launches a “command center” that operates 24/7 for hospital medical care
Medaptus on Tuesday announced the launch of Medaptus Command, a hospital operations platform aimed at coordinating the workflow of healthcare programs.
The platform has five functions: ingest, allocation, distribution, reconciliation, and analysis. That functionality is built into existing electronic health records (EHRs), according to the announcement.
“Hospital medicine has become more than a tool for managing health care,” Malachi Charbonneau, CEO of Medaptas, said in a statement. “Command synchronizes ingestion, allocation, distribution, reconciliation, and analysis, giving leaders real-time visibility and efficiency so they can run their jobs more effectively.”
