New York City Nurses and Hospitals Strike Update
The largest nurses’ strike in New york City’s history entered its 10th day on Wednesday with no end in sight.
Nearly 15,000 workers are striking at three big hospital systems: new York-Presbyterian, mount Sinai and Montefiore Medical Center. The nurses said that the action was necessary to improve staffing, pay and security. Violence has become an increasing concern, with reports of patients punching and kicking nurses; in November, a gunman threatened to shoot up the Mount Sinai emergency department.
The New York State Nurses Association contract expired on December 31. Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who took office on January 1, stood with the striking nurses, saying that there is “no shortage of wealth in the healthcare industry.”
The strike comes as New York has been hit with a surge in flu cases, driven by a new variant called subclade K, and as President Trump and Republican-majority Congress have slashed federal healthcare subsidies to the state by billions of dollars.
The hospitals affected by the strike remain open,and have been hiring traveling nurses to cover for workers on the picket lines. Kenneth Raske, president of the Greater New York Hospital Association, a trade group that has assisted hospitals in their strike planning, told The New York Times that the three hospitals have cumulatively spent more than $100 million to hire temporary nurses and rent hotels for them.
The most recent similar strike in New York, in 2023, involved 7,000 nurses and lasted for three days. But this time, the two sides appear to be digging in. As of Wednesday, there were no new bargaining sessions scheduled.
Yann LeCun,the chief AI scientist at Meta,has launched a new AI startup focused on healthcare,raising $50 million in seed funding. The company, named Modulus Health, aims to apply AI to medical data to improve diagnosis and treatment. Investors include General Catalyst, Andreessen Horowitz, and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
LeCun believes AI can revolutionize healthcare by analyzing vast amounts of medical data, including images, text, and genomic details. Modulus Health will initially focus on developing AI models for medical imaging analysis,with plans to expand into other areas such as drug discovery and personalized medicine.
The startup’s approach involves creating self-supervised learning models that can learn from unlabeled data, reducing the need for expensive and time-consuming manual annotation. LeCun emphasizes the importance of building AI systems that are robust, reliable, and explainable.
Epic Is Rolling Out New Predictive Tools With ‘Curiosity’
Medical records giant Epic is rolling out new predictive digital tools, called ‘Curiosity,’ trained on more than 100 billion patient medical events.Curiosity is now available to researchers at academic hospitals who already use its ‘Cosmos’ datasets, with the goal of getting some early predictions for real-world use later this year.
“Onc we find predictions that are highly reliable, we will turn it into somthing that every doctor can consume,” Phil Lindemann, Epic’s vice president of data and research told Forbes during the J.P. Morgan Healthcare conference.
The questions it hopes to answer range from the critical (“Can we predict pancreatic cancer?) to the mundane (“What tests should be offered to a patient with an earache?”) with the overarching goal of using data to speed up quality medical care.
Early predictions are likely to be more operational than clinical-yet could still have patient impact, Lindemann said. For example, by predicting patients’ discharge dates, a 600-bed hospital might be able to improve its operational planning, keeping beds filled without overbooking. “It will seem like Epic got smarter,” he said.
Deal of the Week
Zarminali Pediatrics raised $110 million led by Healthier Capital, the VC firm founded by One Medical’s Amir Dan Rubin, to expand its tech-enabled approach to pediatric care. The new cash brings Zarminali’s total funding to $150 million. The company declined to disclose valuation. Danish Qureshi, the company’s CEO, previously cofounded mental health provider LifeStance Health.He started Zarminali after struggling to figure out care for his daughter who had been diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder in 2023. Sanofi agreed to buy Rapt Therapeutics for $2.2 billion to bolster its food allergy treatments.
RFK Jr.’s HHS quietly removed webpages saying that cellphones aren’t dangerous.
Two more drug developers-Agomab and SpyGlass-filed to go public as investor enthusiasm appears to build for biotech IPOs.
A new study found no link between acetaminophen in pregnancy and autism.