Samwise Healthcare IT Newsletter
Thursday, October 1, 2026
Thoreau commits $500 million to Ortet, a new frontier AI lab for healthcare
Investment firm Thoreau has committed $500 million to Ortet, a new frontier artificial intelligence lab for healthcare, Fierce Healthcare reported Sept. 30. Ortet plans a full-stack platform spanning compute and data infrastructure, frontier research and model development, with the aim of building a foundation model centered on the individual patient that connects the biological, clinical, operational and financial dimensions of health. Co-founder and CEO Kyunghyun Cho co-developed the attention mechanism and the Gated Recurrent Unit and previously established Genentech’s frontier research team. The founding team includes AI leaders from Genentech, Meta, Amazon Web Services, Spotify and Facebook. Ortet says it has already secured its initial GPU cluster.
Sources: Fierce Healthcare
Stanford and OpenAI to build a watchdog system for autonomous AI agents in cardiac care
Stanford Medicine researchers are receiving up to $14.9 million from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health to build a monitoring system for autonomous AI agents used in cardiovascular care. The project, called STEWARD, is a three-stage supervisory system that will monitor AI agents deployed in clinical settings and give on-site reports to care teams. Partners include OpenAI, the University of Washington and Tuple Health. The researchers said no systems currently exist for regulatory-grade monitoring of autonomous healthcare AI agents. The award is part of ARPA-H’s four-year, $62.7 million ADVOCATE program, which aims to produce the first FDA-authorized clinical agentic AI system.
Sources: Becker’s Hospital Review
AHA urges Congress to hold AI vendors outside HIPAA to hospital-level security standards
The American Hospital Association is urging Congress to hold AI vendors and other third parties that handle patient information to the same privacy and security standards as HIPAA covered entities and business associates. In a Sept. 30 statement submitted ahead of a Senate subcommittee hearing titled “Rogue AI: Securing the Homeland Against AI Agent Attacks,” the AHA warned that nation-states and criminal hackers are beginning to use AI to identify software vulnerabilities and deploy malware. Citing FBI figures, the association said healthcare experienced 460 reported ransomware attacks in 2025, more than any other critical infrastructure sector. It also backed legislation to strengthen the rural hospital cybersecurity workforce.
Sources: Becker’s Hospital Review
IU Health says vendor security incident exposed Southern Indiana radiology files
Indiana University Health identified unauthorized access to information associated with certain Southern Indiana patients’ radiology files following a security incident at its IT vendor, AME Group. IU Health learned Aug. 4 that the vendor may have been susceptible to a previously unknown software vulnerability affecting services it provided to an isolated IU Health legacy system, according to a Sept. 29 news release. The health system said there was no evidence its network or core systems were affected, its electronic medical record system was not accessed and patient care was not affected. Exposed information may have included names, dates of birth and health plan member identification numbers.
Sources: Becker’s Hospital Review
Bain and KLAS survey finds providers and payers still raising IT spending
Healthcare providers and payers both expect to spend more on technology despite financial pressures, according to a Bain & Company report written with KLAS and based on a survey of 303 U.S. healthcare executives. About 95% of providers and payers ranked software and digital technology among their five leading strategic priorities. Nearly 80% of acute provider organizations expect generative AI either to increase the costs of changing EHR systems or leave those costs unchanged. Among payers, more than 60% report piloting or broadly deploying AI for call center operations. Among respondents that have set a target, the most common is a return of 3 to 3.9 times the initial investment.
Sources: Healthcare IT News
Heidi launches AI agents that complete clinical administrative tasks
AI healthcare startup Heidi has unveiled an upgraded clinical assistant, Heidi II, that moves beyond documenting patient visits to completing administrative tasks. The company says it supports 2.8 million patient visits every week globally, surfacing around 10 million follow-up tasks that until now were handed back to clinicians. The new AI agents can handle referral management, chart preparation, follow-up coordination, population health reviews and patient outreach, while clinicians keep control of final decisions and approvals. Peer-reviewed research content comes from partners including the New England Journal of Medicine, Wiley and Cochrane. Heidi II began rolling out Sept. 29 in English and French.
Sources: Fierce Healthcare
Vendor server outage forces Baptist Health Central Alabama onto downtime procedures
Baptist Health Central Alabama said a third-party vendor’s server outage disrupted its IT systems, according to a Sept. 29 Facebook post. All three of the health system’s hospitals remained open, with clinical teams using downtime procedures to support patient care. Baptist Health said the outage was not the result of a cybersecurity incident and that patient data had not been affected. IT teams were working to restore the affected system. Outpatient appointments scheduled for the week may be rescheduled, and patients will be contacted if their appointments change. The health system directed patients experiencing medical emergencies to its emergency departments and said it would share further updates.
Sources: Becker’s Hospital Review
Kaiser Permanente gives unions half the seats on its AI investment task force
Kaiser Permanente has given labor half the seats on a new AI Task Force with direct decision-making authority over technology investments, under a 2025 agreement with the Alliance of Health Care Unions detailed in a report by MIT Sloan School of Management researchers. The task force includes 10 senior leaders, five from labor and five from Kaiser. The Alliance represents 62,000 nurses, technicians and other healthcare workers. According to the Sept. 28 MIT Sloan article, it is the first comprehensive agreement by a major U.S. healthcare employer and its unions to give workers input at every stage of AI decision-making. More than 3,500 unit-based teams will identify AI opportunities.
Sources: Becker’s Hospital Review
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