Healthcare AI today: AI succeeds Hippocrates, Amazon looms large, 2026 predictions begin

News and views you ought to know about:

• The largest healthcare system in the Middle East is partnering with Nvidia to decode the human genome. If successful, the AI-heavy project will translate almost the entire language of heredity into actionable information. The upshot will be medical science on steroids. So to speak. 
   
  • The provider network is the Israeli one anchored by Sheba Medical Center. Over the weekend, the CEO of Sheba’s Tel Hashomer Hospital called the advance of AI in healthcare “the greatest [medical] revolution since Hippocrates.” 
     
  • Prof. Yitshak Kreiss made the remarks in a lecture. “Sheba has a dream of decoding the human genome,” he stated flat out. “We have enough people and we have all the intellectual resources required, but we don’t have the budget. Mapping the entire genome is very expensive. We therefore decided to do it together with Nvidia.”
     
  • Seeking buy-in from healthcare workers and other stakeholders in the Israeli health system, Kreiss sounded a note of inspiration. “There are tens of thousands of doctors and researchers here,” he said. “There are data, there are infrastructures that are among the most advanced in the world, patients, daring, chutzpa, the surrounding Israeli ecosystem with a startup mentality. And there are also connections to the world. If we take all this and use it in the right way, we’ll succeed in generating economic growth, in creating jobs. … We’re expanding and growing, and it doesn’t stop.”
     
    • More coverage here. 
       
• Moneyed American innovators are boldly bullish on AI in healthcare too. Take Amazon, for example. The company that once bragged about its status as “earth’s biggest bookstore” is now, of course, a dominant and deep-pocketed force on the frontlines of AI development and deployment across all sectors of the global economy. This week its little side business Amazon Web Services announced it will invest “up to” $50B to build out AI and supercomputing capabilities for—note well—U.S. government customers alone. An assortment of Amazon product-and-service lines will “strengthen America’s AI leadership and give federal agencies the secure, scalable infrastructure they need for the next era of innovation.”
   
  • Healthcare is among the sectors AWS wants to help “transform,” the announcement notes. “Amazon’s investment directly supports the priorities outlined in the [Trump] Administration’s AI Action Plan, as well as other advanced computing initiatives deployed on secure, U.S.-based AI and cloud infrastructure.” 
     
  • Amazon’s declaration of intent thus aligns with the Administration’s view that “many of America’s most critical sectors, such as healthcare, are especially slow to adopt due to a variety of factors, including distrust or lack of understanding of the technology, a complex regulatory landscape, and a lack of clear governance and risk mitigation standards. A coordinated Federal effort would be beneficial in establishing a dynamic, ‘try-first’ culture for AI across American industry.”
     
  • AWS CEO Matt Garman says the multibillion-dollar outlay will “fundamentally transform” the ways federal agencies leverage supercomputing. “We’re giving agencies expanded access to advanced AI capabilities that will enable them to accelerate critical missions from cybersecurity to drug discovery,” he explains. “This investment removes the technology barriers that have held government back and further positions America to lead in the AI era.”
     
    • Read the whole thing.
       
• AI scribes struggle to understand English spoken with an accent. Of course they do. In healthcare, though, mistaking words can mean botching care. And the risk is not just with foreign accents. Tests have shown some American modes of speech, maybe most notably some African-American dialects, flummox the digital transcriptionists too. Looking at the situation, Axios’s justice-and-race reporter Russell Contreras warns that AI’s “listening gap” could make speech itself “a new frontier of discrimination.” Absent auditing, accommodation and accent-inclusive data, he adds, “the tools meant to broaden opportunity could instead lock out the very voices they claim to empower.” 
   
• 2026 will be the year AI tests the very heart of healthcare. So predicts a duo of Forrester analysts. For example, they forecast, AI will trigger a public breakup between a provider entity and one or more of its subsidiaries. “Fewer than half of risk management leaders say their third-party risk management process is mature,” note Shannon Germain Farraher and Arielle Trzcinski. “As AI permeates healthcare, we’ll witness a public fallout involving a healthcare megabrand scrambling to repair reputational or financial damage (or both).” Teaser here, full report available here. 
   
• The ‘testing’ is sure to include seeing how far health insurers can go in using AI to review claims. The temptation will remain for overstretched human reviewers to defer to the algorithm even if only for the sake of expedience, says Jennifer Oliva, JD, MBA, of Indiana University in a Q&A posted at TheStreet. “I’ve always been skeptical that the insurers are probably doing this, but several whistleblowers have come forward over the last year or so and said, ‘Yeah, we just click on 200 claims one way or the other and move on.’” Read the rest. 
   
• Research news of note: 
   
  • AI pushes medical schools into new era, but are they prepared? (University of Pennsylvania) 
     
  • AI learns from the tree of life to support rare disease diagnosis (Centre for Genomic Regulation) 
     
  • AI helps cancer patients better understand CT reports (Technical University of Munich) 
     
• From AIin.Healthcare’s sibling outlets:
   
  • Radiology Business: Nvidia CEO discusses AI’s growing prevalence in radiology
     
  • Health Exec: Cigna announces new copay-centric insurance model, backed by AI care coordination
     
  • Radiology Business: Canon gains FDA clearance for new ultrasound processing algorithms ahead of RSNA