The Healthcare Technology Report

Edwards Lifesciences has secured FDA clearance for its Ecliptis left atrial appendage exclusion system, marking the company’s official entry into the competitive surgical stroke-prevention market. Applied during cardiac surgery procedures, the implantable clip closes off the left atrial appendage to prevent pooled blood from forming clots in patients with atrial fibrillation. The regulatory greenlight directly positions the structural heart giant against AtriCure and Medtronic, which currently dominate the surgical exclusion market. Read the full article on The Healthcare Technology Report.

Pearl Health, a startup using AI to help providers manage the cost and care of Medicare patients, has raised $110 million after reaching profitability in 2025. The financing is split between a $50 million equity investment led by Andreessen Horowitz and a $60 million credit facility led by Trinity Capital. Viking Global Investors, AlleyCorp, and Ulysses Capital also participated. Read the full article on The Healthcare Technology Report.

The Unsung Infrastructure of Medicine: How Agiliti’s Tom Leonard Keeps Hospitals Patient Ready In a hospital, most people notice the doctors and nurses first. They don’t pay much mind to the beds, IV pumps, ventilators, support surfaces, or service teams working behind the scenes. They just assume the equipment will be there, clean, working, and ready when a patient needs it. Tom Leonard has spent much of his career in the part of healthcare that makes that assumption possible. Leonard graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy with an engineering degree and later earned an MBA from Cornell. He built his early experience in operations at Picis before moving into general management roles at McKesson and CareFusion, where he eventually ran the company’s Medical Systems segment. In April 2015, he became Chief Executive Officer of Agiliti, then still known as Universal Hospital Services, and joined the company’s board. He led Agiliti for eight years, stepped away in March 2023 to become an executive partner at THL Partners, and returned to the CEO role that October. Upon his return, Leonard said Agiliti had “long served a critical role in our nation’s healthcare system.” The work behind that role is simple to describe and unforgiving to get wrong. Hospitals need the right equipment ready before the patient does. Agiliti now serves more than 10,000 customers nationwide through more than 130 service centers, a specialized delivery fleet of more than 1,700 vehicles, and more than 275 mobile service labs. Its teams support clinicians from the emergency room to the operating room, handling the devices, logistics, service, and clinical engineering work that can determine whether care is ready when it needs to be. Recent launches show what that looks like at the bedside. In April 2026, Agiliti introduced Capillaire, a low-profile alternating pressure overlay designed for surgical, perioperative, and emergency care settings, where patients may not be able to reposition for hours. In June, the company became the exclusive U.S. provider of the Total Lift Bed, an ICU bed that can help move critically ill patients from lying down to standing without leaving the bed. One product is meant for the patient who cannot move during a long procedure. The other is built for the patient who needs to move earlier in the ICU. Both point to the same idea: hospital equipment matters most when it prevents a problem clinicians should not have to chase later. Agiliti calls that being “patient ready.” Under Leonard, it means making sure the bed, device, service team, or support surface is ready before the moment turns urgent. In a hospital, that kind of work is easy to miss. It is also the work that gives clinicians more time for the person in front of them.

Healthcare AI company Innovaccer has signed a multiyear agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS) aimed at helping health systems and insurers move AI projects out of testing and into daily use. The deal combines Innovaccer’s healthcare data and AI software with AWS infrastructure, while allowing customers to purchase Innovaccer products through the AWS Marketplace using money they have already committed to spend with Amazon. Innovaccer will use Amazon Bedrock to access and develop AI models, along with AWS HealthLake to work with health data stored in the industry-standard FHIR format. Read the full article on The Healthcare Technology Report.

Engitix Therapeutics's Giuseppe Mazza is Looking Beyond the Cell Giuseppe Mazza can trace his path into biotech back to a single year as an undergraduate student in Florence. Two papers landed around the same time: one on induced pluripotent stem cells, the other on an early decellularized rat heart. Together, they made the future of tissue engineering look almost easy. “You could create organs [at] scale,” he remembers thinking. “You can decellularize organs, iPS cell expansion, that’s it. Done. Easy.” Two decades later, Mazza knows better. But the excitement from those papers was enough to send him into a field he never really left. The next turn came at UCL, in Professor Massimo Pinzani’s liver fibrosis lab. Mazza calls what happened there “serendipity”: his regenerative medicine background met Pinzani’s work in fibrosis. Out of that lab came the extracellular matrix research behind Engitix, the company Mazza co-founded with Pinzani in 2016 and has led as Chief Executive Officer ever since. “While people see the disease from the cells, we see the disease beyond the cells,” Mazza said. Engitix studies the extracellular matrix, the structural environment around cells that plays a major role in fibrosis, solid tumors, and other diseases. Decellularization remains, in his words, the company’s original “methodological baby,” though the platform has expanded into high-content imaging of collagen fiber formation and spatial proteomics. Mazza did not make the jump from postdoctoral fellow to CEO by himself. He credits a small group of mentors he sought out and, by his own account, wore down with questions. Pinzani shaped both his science and his temperament. “I come from [the] south of Italy. I could have been very emotional sometimes, passionate. So I learned a lot.” His lead investor, Mike Platt, helped him learn the business side of running a life sciences company. The field may be catching up. ECM-related research has grown sharply over the past 25 years, and Mazza expects that interest to keep rising as the industry looks past genes and proteins alone. Cells still matter, of course. Mazza just built his company around the world holding them together.

Glooko’s Mike Alvarez Wants Diabetes Tech to Speak the Same Language Mike Alvarez knows exactly how the giants of the medical device world think. Before he ever ran a company of his own, he spent over two decades climbing the ranks at industry titans like St. Jude Medical, Novo Nordisk, and Medtronic. He lived the day-to-day grind—from managing local sales territories to spearheading national strategies, watching massive market share battles won or lost over a single product feature. But after a successful stint running Qardio, a lean remote-monitoring startup, Alvarez stepped into his current role as President and CEO of Glooko in September 2024. He took the helm of a company trying to solve one of healthcare's most frustrating problems: getting different medical devices to actually talk to one another. To explain how Glooko works, Alvarez has used a couple of clever consumer analogies. "Think of Apple CarPlay," Alvarez has said, describing the clinic-facing side of the platform. "You can also think of it as MS-DOS, which is the machinery behind the scenes that helps the data flow." In other words, Glooko is the invisible plumbing. It takes data from different insulin pumps, continuous glucose monitors (CGMs), and blood sugar meters, and translates it all into one clean interface that doctors and patients can actually use. Managing that invisible plumbing is a massive technical challenge, made even more complex by a shifting global regulatory landscape. Glooko operates in more than 30 countries, and Alvarez is quick to point out that the old industry assumption—that Europe is an easier market to clear than the U.S.—is officially dead. "The EU in some ways is actually harder to get products approved than it is in the U.S. at this time," he said. He singles out Germany as a country that has gotten far ahead on patient data protection, adding that navigating that landscape successfully requires legal, regulatory, and technical teams that can genuinely speak each other's languages rather than working in silos. Alvarez also draws a line between companies built around data from the start and device manufacturers trying to add software after the fact. "Companies that manufacture products that are trying to get into the digital play are having a bigger challenge," he said. His advice is simple enough: build what you are best at, and partner where someone else is better. For Glooko, that leaves plenty of work in the middle. Diabetes care already has the pumps, sensors, meters, and data. Alvarez is focused on the part patients and clinicians should not have to think about so much: getting all of it to speak the same language.

Ollin Biosciences has completed an oversubscribed $330 million Series B round to fund global Phase 3 clinical trials for its next-generation eye disease therapy. Co-led by TCGX and ARCH Venture Partners, the financing drew backing from a16z Bio+Health, Blackstone Multi-Asset Investing, and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. The capital will bankroll registrational trials for the company's leading bispecific antibody, OLN324, targeting diabetic macular edema and wet age-related macular degeneration. Read the full article on The Healthcare Technology Report.

Multi-Specialty Virtual Care: AmplifyMD’s Meena Mallipeddi Watch the full video here: https://lnkd.in/ghEtH7Zj Listen to the full episode here: Apple Podcasts (https://lnkd.in/gcG3gSB2); also available on Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

ScienceSoft’s Nick Kurayev Is Playing the Long Game Nick Kurayev joined ScienceSoft in 1997 as a department manager with a physics background, running a team that modeled physical effects in 3D. Two years later, the company made him CEO. The physicist took charge of the business, including its eventual push into one of the most demanding sectors in software: healthcare. The first change under his leadership came in the early 2000s, when ScienceSoft moved away from niche AI products toward custom software development. Healthcare clients in particular wanted more than a generic tool. They wanted solutions built around specific clinical and operational problems, with a partner willing to stay accountable rather than hand off finished code. Kurayev called the timing "a durable opportunity". The second shift, in 2015, folded IT consulting directly into delivery rather than spinning up a separate practice. That mattered most in healthcare, where strategy documents and working software often diverge and the resulting gap creates compliance and patient-safety risk. Architects, consultants, and engineers now stay accountable from planning through launch on programs handling HIPAA-regulated data. Kurayev has been wary of becoming "a mile wide and an inch deep," so ScienceSoft has largely stayed anchored in regulated industries, with healthcare alongside banking and insurance. The sales cycles are slower and the compliance demands are tighter, but the expertise compounds over time.ScienceSoft's healthcare work now spans HIPAA-compliant platforms, clinical data systems, and an award-winning mobile banking app built with similar security discipline. About 62% of ScienceSoft's revenue now comes from clients who stay more than two years, a number he says reflects "competence, delivery credibility, and strategic relevance" more than "how many logos you can list on the website". That may also explain his cautious tone on AI. Kurayev insists on proof before adoption, starting every client engagement with the business case rather than the technology. “We’ll do it with the same pragmatic approach: clear business cases, regulatory awareness, and a focus on production-grade solutions,” he said. No logos for the sake of logos. No AI for the sake of AI. Which, for a company that started with niche AI products nearly three decades ago, is a pretty telling place to end up.

OCuSOFT Inc.’s Cynthia Barratt Marks 40 Years of Making Eye Care Easier Cynthia Barratt studied journalism, not medicine, at the University of Texas at Austin. It was that outsider's eye—perhaps the journalist's knack for spotting a glaring problem everyone else was ignoring—that led her into ophthalmology.  In the 1980s, if you had irritated, itchy eyelids, doctors had exactly one recommendation: dilute some baby shampoo and apply it with a Q-Tip. It was messy and patients hated doing it, so most of them simply didn't. There, Barratt saw an open goal. In June 1986, she and Nat G. Adkins Jr. founded a research and funding company called CYNACON, then spun out OCuSOFT as a separate corporation to bring an actual product to market. The two entities soon merged into what is now OCuSOFT. A year later, in 1987, the company launched OCuSOFT Lid Scrub, the first commercially available eyelid cleanser, replacing the shampoo-and-Q-Tip routine with something patients would actually use. That first product opened a category OCuSOFT has kept expanding for four decades. The company followed with the first leave-on eyelid cleanser, an allergy-specific formulation, a soothing platinum version, a tea tree oil variant, the first topical anesthetic gel in the space, and the first supplement shown to enhance the results of Botox injections. Major pharmaceutical companies have entered the eyelid care category and exited it since 1987. OCuSOFT, under Barratt, has stayed the doctor-recommended standard. "What I find rewarding is the positive patient feedback we routinely receive and the thanks for the products that improve their quality of life," Barratt said. She has run OCuSOFT continuously since founding it, serving as president and CEO for 36 years before moving into her current role as CEO and Co-Founder in 2022. Across that span, she has built a sales organization so deeply trusted that eye care professionals still turn to OCuSOFT as their preferred distributor of ophthalmic supplies, not just its own branded products. This year, OCuSOFT marks its 40th anniversary the same way it began: by expanding its lineup to address underserved eye care needs. The company’s latest launch is a preservative-free, multi-dose formulation for patients managing dry eye over the long term. Four decades later, Barratt’s founding philosophy still holds water: the best products are the ones patients don't mind using.