Digital Health Weekly - 30 Mar - 03 Apr, 2026

• The Albanese government has signed a formal AI safety pact with Anthropic, a $550 billion AI giant, to share research on emerging model capabilities and risks with Australia’s AI Safety Institute. 
• Anthropic will provide data from its economic index to the federal government to monitor AI adoption across sectors, including healthcare, and will collaborate with Australian academic institutions. 
• The company is granting $3 million in Claude API credits to four Australian research institutes to advance disease diagnosis and treatment in fields such as clinical genomics and precision medicine. 
• Anthropic is exploring data‑centre investment in Australia, but progress is hampered by an unresolved deadlock over copyright licensing for training data.

• The Yerrabi Yurwang Health Hub in Canberra, which provides culturally appropriate primary healthcare to around 400 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander patients, is set to close due to a lack of funding from the ACT and federal governments. 
• The health hub's closure could put patients' health at risk, particularly Indigenous elders and children under four who are being treated for complex medical conditions, with many patients not having seen a GP in up to five years. 
• The organisation had appealed for funding assistance from both the federal and ACT governments, but was unsuccessful, with the ACT government citing a lack of longer‑term support from the Commonwealth and the federal Indigenous Australians' Health Programme being fully allocated in this financial year. 
• The closure has sparked concerns about systemic racism and the impact on the First Nations community, with Ngunnawal Elder Selina Walker stating that the government's inaction could lead to a death. 

• Medcast launched MedLuma on Tuesday, a clinical‑grade AI‑driven search tool that curates Australian guidelines, evidence, and international literature to help GPs apply new medical knowledge at the point of care. 
• The tool is designed to reduce GPs’ cognitive load, speed up information retrieval, and allow clinicians to claim CPD while working, without replacing the doctor’s judgment. 
• RACGP Digital Health and Innovation Chair Dr Sean Stevens emphasized that AI can be hugely beneficial if integrated responsibly into workflows, but clinicians must retain oversight because AI can hallucinate. 
• MedLuma differentiates itself from broader consumer tools like ChatGPT Health by focusing on medical‑grade, Australian‑specific content for clinicians. 

• Matthew Gallagher, a 41‑year‑old Los Angeles entrepreneur, built Medvi—a telehealth firm that sells GLP‑1 drugs for weight loss—using AI tools and now reports nearly $2 billion in revenue. 
• Founded in September 2024 with $20,000 seed capital, Medvi served about 250,000 customers, generated $401 million in 2025, and is projected to reach $1.8 billion in 2026. 
• The company leverages AI for website creation (ChatGPT, Claude, Grok), marketing (Midjourney, Runway), and customer interaction (ElevenLabs, custom chatbots). 
• Regulators have flagged Medvi for potentially illegal practices, including fake doctor ads and a warning letter received in February, raising compliance concerns. 

• Whoop, a wearable company valued at $14.7 billion and backed by Cristiano Ronaldo and LeBron James, aims to replace routine doctor visits with continuous AI‑driven health monitoring. 
• Its wearable devices capture real‑time biometric data that the AI platform analyses to provide users with daily personalized health insights. 
• The approach seeks to reduce reliance on in‑person consultations by enabling early detection and preventive care through remote monitoring. 
• This strategy aligns with growing digital‑health, AI, and startup trends and could influence the Australian health‑tech ecosystem.

• Researchers at the National University of Singapore have developed a soft metahydrogel sensor with AI processing that captures clinical‑grade ECG and blood pressure during everyday movement, enabling continuous assessment of fatigue and other mental‑health‑related states outside clinical settings. 
• The system integrates two filtering mechanisms within a single hydrogel “metamaterial,” achieving an ECG signal‑to‑noise ratio of 37.36 dB during motion and blood‑pressure deviations as low as 3 mmHg, meeting ISO clinical‑grade requirements and surpassing typical consumer wearables. 
• Combined with machine‑learning models, data from the device supported fatigue‑level classification with 92 % accuracy, compared with 64 % using data collected without the artefact‑mitigating platform. 
• Findings published in Nature Sensors indicate broader potential for neurophysiological and mental‑health monitoring, and the team seeks partners to improve device consistency and scalability.

• A team of researchers at the Carlos Simon Foundation in Valencia, Spain, has successfully kept a human uterus alive outside the body for 24 hours using a device called PUPER, or “Mother,” which mimics the human body’s circulatory and respiratory functions to sustain the organ. 
• The device employs normothermic machine perfusion to deliver nutrients and remove waste, enabling studies of uterine disorders such as endometriosis and fibroids, as well as the early stages of pregnancy. 
• Researchers aim to use the system to investigate embryo implantation by employing stem‑cell‑derived embryo‑like structures, with a long‑term goal of sustaining a full gestation, though maintaining a uterus for up to 28 days remains a major technical challenge. 
• This breakthrough could expand uterus‑transplant options by allowing the use of deceased‑donor organs, potentially offering new pathways to parenthood for individuals lacking a functional uterus.