The teenager remains in critical condition in hospital. While there is no evidence the patient infected anyone else — and researchers believe the virus mutated while they were infected — it’s a concerning development in a virus that officials have reassured the public is not an immediate threat.

“By no means is this Day 1 of a pandemic,” one expert told Helen. “But this is exactly the scenario that we fear.” Read more on what this means.

Artificial Intelligence
The market for AI medical scribes
Ambient AI medical scribes are about the easiest — and hottest — way into to health care for AI-based startups. Just take a look at this graphic that lists 35 companies who are (or at one point were) trying to use ambient voice for translating the audio of doctors’ visits into written notes. The area is both well within the text capabilities of AI tools and also doesn’t directly affect patient care — though academics doubt that industry claim — thus making the area unlikely to be burdened by regulations anytime soon (more on that later in this newsletter).

Today Tenet Healthcare, the second-largest for-profit health system in the U.S., announced that it is rolling out Commure’s AI scribe to all of its employed physicians. If Commure doesn’t quite sound familiar to you, you might instead recognize the name Augmedix. Commure acquired longtime ambient medical scribe company Augmedix in October.

The acquisition means that Augmedix’s scribe can now be marketed within a larger portfolio of solutions — Commure also has revenue cycle management, remote patient monitoring, and staff duress products. In fact, Commure CEO Tanay Tandon said the company is giving away its scribe service for free to anyone who uses its RCM solution.

The ambient scribe space reminds Tandon of the electric scooter space from five or six years ago, he said.

“There were like 18 electric scooter companies and VCs were just pouring money into them and all of them died with the exception of two, which was Uber and Lyft,” he said. “If you just offer the electric scooter, you will die because the margin structure long term and the power of bundling is just going to outweigh everything else.”

The trend of packaging scribes with other services was evident in other new additions to the STAT Generative AI Tracker.

Check out the latest additions to the tracker here, and read my story on the AI scribe market, including how Abridge CEO Shiv Rao and Suki CEO Punit Soni see the crowded marketplace evolving.