As the year comes to a close, STAT caught up with leaders from four of the most significant privately-held digital health companies: Omada Health, Transcarent, Hinge Health, and Maven Clinic. Two of them raised “mega rounds” totaling over $100 million each in 2024 and the other two are rumored to be on their way to public offerings next year.

We asked leaders at these emerging digital health companies to reflect on the year that passed, and the year ahead for their businesses as well as the broader health care system.

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The top First Opinion essays of 2024 show these stories as well as others, including a few hits (human cloning, “Cali sober,” and autism) hanging on from 2023 and one from 2020. The No. 1 story surprised me a bit, but it’s something that, I suspect, a lot of people about to undergo colonoscopies wonder about.

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With Donald Trump taking office and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. poised to assume the nation’s top health role, it seems the agency is on the precipice of a big shake-up. Kennedy has floated loosening regulation on raw milk, more harshly scrutinizing the safety of vaccines, and cracking down on ultra-processed foods and additives. 

It’s unclear whether any of that will come to pass. Kennedy needs Senate confirmation to become secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. FDA commissioner nominee Marty Makary also needs Senate confirmation, and it’s not clear how he and Kennedy will work together or what they may prioritize.

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It’s a sudden turnabout for Pfizer, which had indicated it would bring the experimental treatment to regulators, albeit not one that is likely to have a significant impact on the pharma giant or patients. Another gene therapy for the rare bleeding disorder was approved last year but has mustered little interest, largely because standard-of-care is already high and gene therapies aren’t yet curative. 

Sangamo’s leadership, though, had been depending on the treatment to help save the beleaguered biotech. According to the deal Sangamo inked in 2017, Pfizer still owed the California-based biotech $220 million in milestones.

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Maybank, a widely respected health equity advocate, led the organization to reckon with its own racist past. The AMA excluded Black physicians from membership for more than a century and paid scant attention to racist practices of one of its own presidents, J. Marion Sims. In a 2021 report that Maybank oversaw, the AMA admitted to a long litany of troubling actions, including that Sims tested surgical procedures on Black women without anesthesia and that AMA policies wanted to ban “irregular-bred pretenders,” as they termed Native American doctors, from practicing medicine. 

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So what changed this year?

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The new research analyzed paperwork submitted for FDA approval to market a device for 767 oximeters that had been approved between 1978-2024 and had accessible information about performance testing. The authors found references to skin tone, pigmentation, or race  in 4% of the documents submitted before the FDA made its suggestion to diversify skin tone testing in 2013. That number rose to only 25% of submissions after the guidance was released — a number the authors said was still far too low and shows how little has been done to fix a problem — poorer performance on darker skinned patients — known for decades. 

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Axsome, which is based in New York, announced Monday that its drug AXS-05 met the primary endpoint of one trial testing the therapy for agitation caused by Alzheimer’s, but failed to show statistical significance in another. 

The drug delayed time to agitation episode relapse in one study, called ACCORD-2. But in the second trial, ADVANCE-2, the group of people taking AXS-05 didn’t show a meaningful change in their agitation scores, measured using a scoring system called the Cohen-Mansfield Agitation Inventory. Participants taking the drug showed a 13.8-point reduction in their agitation scores, compared to 12.6 points in the placebo group. 

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RFK Jr. is Trump’s pick for the nation’s top health role, running the Department of Health and Human Services. His movement’s goal of keeping people healthy might seem to be at odds with anticipated Republican policies that would result in higher uninsured rates. 

Some Republicans, on the other hand, say higher rates of health insurance have not made people healthier, and people wouldn’t need insurance as often if they were to adopt healthier lifestyles.

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The CBO should be commended for conducting this comprehensive analysis. But we are the first to admit that there’s still a long way to go before this change happens. Medicare, by statute, is still prohibited from paying for the use of obesity medications — a policy that is discriminatory and a reflection of the stigmatization of obesity. The popular focus on the costs of obesity medications to Medicare distracts from the need to treat obesity like every other chronic disease.   

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While drug deaths trended steadily upward under President Donald Trump, they skyrocketed during Covid-19 and in the early years of the Biden administration, reaching an annual peak of roughly 110,000 in 2023. Though overdose mortality has since begun to decline, the toxic, fentanyl-driven illicit drug supply is still killing Americans at astonishing rates. 

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The causes he espoused are diseases whose names most of us barely know. Onchocerciasis, or river blindness. Schistosomiasis, a disease caused by parasitic worms. Trachoma, which also causes blindness. Lymphatic filariasis, a parasitic disease that attacks the lymphatic system, leading to grossly swollen limbs or elephantiasis. And Guinea worm.

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The lawsuit doesn’t just highlight the billing games that occur behind the scenes within America’s health care system. It also is one of the most detailed to date showing how the federal arbitration system, created by the No Surprises Act in 2022, has resulted in administrative hassles, legal bickering, and big paydays for providers and attorneys — all of which are ultimately funded by consumers.

Aetna is accusing Radiology Partners of wide-ranging fraud in which its radiologists inappropriately piggybacked off an important practice’s “lucrative” contract to bill for tens of millions of dollars they should have never received. And then after Aetna terminated that practice’s contract, Radiology Partners illegally flooded the arbitration process with thousands of out-of-network claims that should have been billed under other existing in-network contracts, the lawsuit alleges.

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In the survey from NORC at the University of Chicago, about 8 in 10 U.S. adults said the person who committed the killing has “a great deal” or “a moderate amount” of responsibility for the Dec. 4 shooting of Brian Thompson.

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The March for Science, echoed in similar rallies across the country, pushed back on Trump’sstatements denying climate change and his administration’s plan to slash billions of dollars from the National Institutes of Health, the federal government’s largest funder of medical research.

Today, as Trump assembles his team to return to the White House, scientists on the front lines are worried anew. Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is a vocal critic of vaccines and mainstream medicine who has vowed to replace 600 employees at the NIH. He has called for devoting half of the NIH’s research budget to “preventive, alternative, and holistic approaches to health,” and away from infectious diseases at a time when the COVID virus continues to mutate, bird flu is spreading to people and animals, and mpox appears to have evolved into a more dangerous form.

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Donald Trump’s second term in office is shaping up to be even more consequential than the former president’s first term. Longtime vaccine critic Robert F. Kennedy Jr., — who popularized the debunked claim that vaccines cause autism — is poised to lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Republicans want to slash Medicaid, the main vehicle for people with disabilities to receive long-term care. Reducing the federal dollars flowing into state coffers will force health officials and politicians to make tough decisions regarding their residents’ health care. 

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Upon learning of Siri’s petition, “all I could see in my mind’s eye was the incredible suffering that polio has caused,” said Aparna Nair, a historian of public health and disability at the University of Toronto Scarborough. She thought of a family member who’d told her the story of “standing next to her son helpless while he cried receiving therapy for polio. He still has something of a limp.”

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As her palliative medicine doctor, my role was to treat Teresa’s pain as she endured the burdens of her cancer treatment. Only her prescription morphine gave her the relief she needed to function and enjoy some small pleasures, like walking her dog in the park. But one day, her pharmacy didn’t have her morphine in stock, nor did five other neighborhood pharmacies that she went to. I called another three pharmacies before finding one with a two-week supply available — but it was a 40-minute drive from her home.

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Many responded, sharing thoughts about policies, the high cost of health care, and much more. Below, you can find a selection of answers.

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What the killing of a health insurance executive revealed

As a rule, we don’t cover criminal justice. But the targeted killing of Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, unleashed a concerted backlash, as we’ve tried to explain. Our long-running coverage of the nation’s largest health insurer might shed some light on the subject: Last year, STAT’s Bob Herman and Casey Ross investigated UnitedHealth Group’s use of an unregulated algorithm to deny claims. This year, STAT published a multi-part series (reported by Herman, Ross, Tara Bannow, and Lizzy Lawrence) on how UnitedHealth became Health Care’s Colossus, squeezing profits out of patients, pressuring physicians, and pursuing questionable diagnoses.

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