Health insurance scams are surging during open enrollment as the FTC warns 25 companies about misleading ads promoting plans that may barely cover medical bills.

Gemini for healthcare is in preview now, with some big-name partners already on board. Google Cloud has officially announced Gemini for healthcare, bringing agentic AI to the sector. In a press release, Google said that the new initiative aims to unify the disparate clinical, operational, and administrative systems central to healthcare delivery and health plan operations. So rather than scraping the web to diagnose or advise treatments to medical professionals at the point of care, it sounds like Gemini will be used primarily to improve workflow efficiency. The healthcare-focused assistant is built on top of the universal Gemini agent, and connects to third-party systems to gather information from health records, billing platforms and official guidelines.

Democrats maintain a firm grip on California. But they face mounting pressure to balance the state budget, usher in more government efficiency, build homes and solve affordability, figure out wildfire liability and regulate AI.

AI is becoming part of everyday decision-making in many organisations. In healthcare, it can help professionals analyse large amounts of information, identify patterns and assess complex cases. But introducing AI does more than add a new tool. It can also change what people pay attention to, how they understand a problem and how a decision is reached. This is what Bijona wanted to understand in her doctoral research.

Tech and finance are setting the pace on AI adoption. TripleTen research shows which skills will reach healthcare, education, and retail next. The current narrative around artificial intelligence in the workplace is largely driven by Silicon Valley. But treating the tech sector as an island misses the actual trends in technology adoption-tech is just the first industry in line. As generative AI and automation tools mature, the shifts currently reshaping software engineering and product management will inevitably filter into healthcare, education, retail, and manufacturing. The variation in adoption rates today isn't a sign that non-tech industries are falling behind, but rather a reflection of the different speeds at which industries absorb new workflows.

The nursing job crisis is raising an uncomfortable question: What happens when hospitals trade nurses for A.I.? Become a member to share 10 free articles a month. Become a member to share 10 free articles a month. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Imagine, for a moment, that you are a nurse. A cancer patient on your ward asks for pain medicine, and it's easy enough to get it ready: Just go to the locked narcotics cabinet, punch in a code, draw the drug up into a syringe, and give it to them.

Democratic Socialists of America push public ownership, a 32-hour workweek, universal healthcare, free college and wealth taxes as DSA-backed candidates gain in 2026 primaries.

Healthcare AI's next test is integration While advanced AI excels at processing clinical data, healthcare's true test lies in overcoming deeply fragmented administrative workflows. The entrance of major AI companies into healthcare is a meaningful and welcome development, accelerating the technical foundation available to the industry. Their models are increasingly capable of processing long clinical records, interpreting complex terminology, comparing documentation against evidence and generating coherent summaries from large volumes of information. For clinicians, operators, and administrative teams who spend significant time searching through fragmented data, these advances are helping reduce cognitive burden and make high-value information easier to access. But healthcare leaders should not confuse model capability with operational capability. Healthcare's administrative challenges are caused by fragmented information, fragmented workflows, and fragmented accountability, not a lack of information.

The UK needs new regulations for AI products used in the NHS and other healthcare settings, says Britain's industry watchdog. The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), which regulates all medical devices and licenses treatment drugs in the UK, has published 44 recommendations to update its policies as the use of AI in the sector rises. The technology will soon be routinely used within the NHS, MHRA chief Lawrence Tallon told the BBC. What I would expect is that patients will... increasingly see AI as part of the way that normal NHS healthcare is delivered, he said. That should happen in a way that they can maintain their trust and their confidence in what's happening.

AI-assisted modernization can reduce the time and complexity of transforming legacy systems while creating a foundation for faster innovation, says Asifa Sherazi, CIO of health insurance at Bupa and Sanjeev Tripathi, senior VP, region head of BFSI, healthcare, and public sector at Infosys. For years, legacy technology has been a problem companies knew they needed to solve, but one they often struggled to tackle. The cost, complexity, and risk of replacing business-critical systems could make modernization feel like a disruption to manage instead of an opportunity to pursue. But with the rise in customer expectations and the changes AI brought to the economics of software development, that calculation is changing. Bupa's modernization of its My Bupa mobile application offers a case study in what becomes possible when a legacy migration is treated as a business transformation rather than a technology rewrite. Bupa CIO of health insurance Asifa Sherazi describes the risks of waiting for legacy systems to become an emergency: "The end-of-life technology is a risk that compounds quietly, and then arrives all at once." For Bupa, moving its application from Xamarin to native Swift and Kotlin improved the app rating from 3.7 to 4.7, while the user-perceived crash rate fell by nearly 24 percentage points on Android and eight points on iOS. "What they'll notice is that when they need us, often at a stressful moment, it just simply works," Sherazi says. Sanjeev Tripathi, senior vice president and region head of BFSI, healthcare, and public sector for Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia at Infosys, contends that AI is helping change the equation. "The emergence of AI is fundamentally shifting the economics of modernization," he says, reducing the effort, risk, and time traditionally associated with these programs. At Bupa, combining AI-assisted reverse engineering with forward engineering helped deliver the transformation in approximately 60% less time than would have been possible in the pre-AI era.