A longtime shortage of a type of sterile intravenous saline is now resolved, the FDA announced Friday. Sodium chloride 0.9% injection products have been in shortage since 2018. The shortage was exacerbated when Hurricane Helene flooded a Baxter manufacturing plant in Marion, N.C. last fall what was responsible for 60% of the IV fluid in the country. The IV fluid market is made up of primarily four manufacturers: Baxter International, which makes about 60%; B. Braun Medical, which makes about 23%; along with ICU Medical and Fresenius Kabi.
Medtech firm Heartflow was valued at $2.27 billion on Friday, with its shares surging 47.4% in the Nasdaq debut, as the IPO market gathers momentum and outrides tariff worries. The shares opened at $28 and went as high as $31.5, signaling robust investor appetite for companies leveraging artificial intelligence for healthcare. Heartflow sold about 16.67 million shares at $19 each in its IPO on Thursday, raising $316.7 million.
Doximity is diving deeper into artificial intelligence, announcing on Thursday the acquisition of startup Pathway Medical for $63 million. Pathway has built an AI-powered clinical reference tool that doctors can use to ask questions about guidelines, drugs and trials. Pathway's answers are synthesized from medical literature, and Doximity said the Montreal-based startup has one of the largest structured datasets in medicine.
Insight Health Systems is on track to reopen one of two shuttered Warren hospitals in the next few weeks, officials announced at a public meeting this week. "We lost over $30 million dollars over this transaction," Insight CEO Dr. Jawad Shah said. "We signed up for this, we are going to make the hospital work." Services at the two Insight hospitals — Insight Hospital & Medical Center Trumbull and Insight Rehabilitation Hospital Hillside — ended in March, seven months after Insight obtained the properties from Steward Health System through bankruptcy proceedings. Insight officials said Steward Health, which ran billing for the two hospitals, withheld funds—making continued operation impossible. A letter to staff announced furloughs, but said the hospital closures would be temporary, and were projected to last no more than six months.
Epic, the company that manages electronic health records for nearly half of U.S. hospitals, is expected to announce new technology this month that automatically transcribes doctors’ notes during patient visits, according to two doctors, a health industry group representative and a venture capitalist with knowledge of the announcement, granted anonymity to discuss the news.