Paul Sonnier
Ocean Springs, Mississippi, United States
32K followers
500+ connections
32K followers
500+ connections
About
I've spent nearly two decades shaping how industries and stakeholders around the world…
Articles by Paul
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A Brief History of my Digital Health Group
A Brief History of my Digital Health Group
With the Digital Health group on LinkedIn closing in on 74,000 members— and nearly 18,000 of my connections being…
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The Fourth Wave: Digital Health Newsletter for June 23, 2020
The Fourth Wave: Digital Health Newsletter for June 23, 2020
ASTRO STUDIOS JOINS PA CONSULTING I'm incredibly excited that San Francisco-based product design and brand strategy…
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Definition of Digital Health, Etymology & Plurality of the Term
Definition of Digital Health, Etymology & Plurality of the Term
Definition of Digital Health Simply put, Digital Health is the convergence of the digital and genomic revolutions with…
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Sustainable innovation and transformation: A prescription for success in the fourth wave
Sustainable innovation and transformation: A prescription for success in the fourth wave
The following is an excerpt from my recent Fourth Wave: Digital Health Newsletter, which can be read in full here…
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Introduction to my book, The Fourth Wave: Digital Health
Introduction to my book, The Fourth Wave: Digital Health
The following is an excerpt from my book, The Fourth Wave: Digital Health, which is available at Amazon.com in both…
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32K followers
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Paul Sonnier reacted on thisAn independent Stanford-Harvard study tested clinical AI for patient safety — and purpose-built medical tools beat the frontier models. ARISE, a clinical AI research team led by physician researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine and Harvard Medical School, just published NOHARM (Numerous Options Harm Assessment for Risk in Medicine), one of the most comprehensive independent evaluations of clinical AI safety yet. Worth flagging: the writeup I'm sharing is from Doximity's own blog, and Doximity is an interested party — its tool placed first — but the study itself is independent. Built by 50+ researchers and 29 board-certified physicians, NOHARM ran 1,100 physician-written scenarios across 10 specialties and asked a sharper question than most benchmarks: not whether a model knew the answer, but whether its advice could harm a patient. The standout finding — the most serious failures came from advice the AI left out, not advice it got wrong. Specialized medical systems beat general models like GPT-5.6 and Claude Fable 5. Doximity Ask topped the ranking, ahead of OpenEvidence. Louis-Antoine Mullie, MD, Doximity's Head of Medical AI, framed it as validation of building AI specifically for medicine, not adapting general tools. Source: "Doximity Outranks OpenEvidence, Frontier Models in Independent Stanford-Harvard Study of Clinical AI Safety", Mullie in Doximity Blog — https://lnkd.in/eT6uctby #DigitalHealth #FourthWave #AI — Interested in the convergence of the digital revolution with health, healthcare, living and society? Join my 117,000+ member Digital Health LinkedIn group, which I founded in 2009 and through which I initiated global usage of the term ‘digital health’ in 2012: https://lnkd.in/gauPanU Learn how BlockHaven is giving individuals a living, lifelong health model they truly own through HealthMemory™ — and how, together with our partners, we're enabling collective health intelligence through the Health Intelligence Network™: https://www.blockhaven.ai
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Paul Sonnier reacted on thisNot the news we wanted: Eternal raised $13M to reinvent healthcare for athletes, and is now shutting down. Fitt Insider reports that Eternal, the high-performance health platform, has told members it will cease operations and close its San Francisco and New York clinics at the end of this month. Founded in 2025 by Alex Mather — co-founder of The Athletic and an early member of Strava's product team — the company paired assessments like DEXA scans and VO2 max testing with physician-led care and ongoing coaching for active people. After expanding from clinics into digital care and AI coaching, Eternal explored several paths before deciding to wind down. "We were not able to build a sustainable business to support our long-term vision," CEO Alex Mather wrote in his email to members. Demand for proactive, performance-based care is clearly growing — but building the infrastructure to deliver it is complex and capital-intensive. The bigger takeaway: preventative and longevity-focused healthcare is entering a new phase, where a sustainable business model matters as much as strong clinical outcomes. Source: "Eternal Shuts Down Its High-Performance Health Platform" in Fitt Insider — https://lnkd.in/eUazrntN #DigitalHealth #FourthWave #Longevity — Interested in the convergence of the digital revolution with health, healthcare, living and society? Join my 117,000+ member Digital Health LinkedIn group, which I founded in 2009 and through which I initiated global usage of the term 'digital health' in 2012: https://lnkd.in/gauPanU Learn how BlockHaven is giving individuals a living, lifelong health model they truly own through HealthMemory™ — and how, together with our partners, we're enabling collective health intelligence through the Health Intelligence Network™: https://www.blockhaven.ai
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Paul Sonnier reacted on thisSkin sensors 500 times thinner than a human hair can now read your brain and eye signals — and no one can see them. A new study in Science Advances describes ultrathin, stretchable electrodes that sit on the face and are effectively invisible, both to the eye and to the touch. Researchers at the Institute of Industrial Science at the University of Tokyo built them to solve a subtle but real problem: conventional facial electrodes change how people look and behave. Scientists call these "appearance artifacts" — the self-consciousness and altered behavior that come simply from wearing a visible device, which can distort the very signals being measured. The device pairs an elastic film about 200 nanometers thick — 400 to 500 times thinner than a hair — with transparent conductive nanowires, so it matches the look and feel of skin instead of adding a glossy patch. It still captured eye movement, facial muscle activity, and brain signals, and its low-impedance contact actually improved signal quality over traditional gel electrodes. In tests, neither wearers nor observers could reliably spot it, across a range of skin tones. "People should be able to wear sensors without feeling watched, judged, or uncomfortable," said Naoji Matsuhisa, senior author and professor at the University of Tokyo, framing a shift where devices adapt to people rather than the other way around. Source: "Reduction of appearance artifacts in wearable on-skin electronics", Matsuhisa et al. in AAAS, Science Advances — https://lnkd.in/emxHvNKA #DigitalHealth #FourthWave #Wearables — Interested in the convergence of the digital revolution with health, healthcare, living and society? Join my 117,000+ member Digital Health LinkedIn group, which I founded in 2009 and through which I initiated global usage of the term 'digital health' in 2012: https://lnkd.in/gauPanU Learn how BlockHaven is giving individuals a living, lifelong health model they truly own through HealthMemory™ — and how, together with our partners, we're enabling collective health intelligence through the Health Intelligence Network™: https://www.blockhaven.ai
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Paul Sonnier reacted on thisSpoiler alert: it’s 🍎 Only one major fitness wearable encrypts your health data so the company itself can't read it. A new report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) reviewed ten of the most popular consumer health wearables — Apple, Google (which owns Fitbit), Garmin, Oura, Whoop, Polar, Suunto, Coros, Amazfit, and Hume — and asked two questions: does the company publish transparency reports about government data requests, and does it offer end-to-end encryption so it can't read your data itself? The findings aren't reassuring. Only Apple and Google publish transparency reports; Oura added a user-notification promise in June 2026 and says it's weighing a report too. On encryption, Apple stands alone — its Watch is the only popular wearable that end-to-end encrypts Health app data by default. Not Google, not Garmin, not Oura. "Health data is some of the most personal data we produce," writes report author Thorin Klosowski, noting most makers lag on basic privacy. With roughly 40% of Americans wearing one of these devices — and heart rate, sleep, and location data increasingly turning up in law enforcement cases — EFF argues an end-to-end encryption option and routine transparency reports should be the baseline, not the exception. Source: "Most Smart Watches, Rings, and Bands Lack Basic Transparency Reports and Key Privacy Features", Klosowski in Electronic Frontier Foundation, Deeplinks Blog — https://lnkd.in/eHXf8ZMW #DigitalHealth #FourthWave #Privacy — Interested in the convergence of the digital revolution with health, healthcare, living and society? Join my 117,000+ member Digital Health LinkedIn group, which I founded in 2009 and through which I initiated global usage of the term ‘digital health’ in 2012: https://lnkd.in/gauPanU Learn how BlockHaven is giving individuals a living, lifelong health model they truly own through HealthMemory™ — and how, together with our partners, we're enabling collective health intelligence through the Health Intelligence Network™: https://www.blockhaven.ai
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Paul Sonnier shared thisHospitals are outspending insurers roughly 20-to-1 on AI — and it may be fueling a billing arms race rather than lowering what anyone pays. On the KFF podcast "The Business of Health with Chip Kahn," host Charles "Chip" Kahn III — a Visiting Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) — talks with Caroline Pearson, executive director of the Peterson Health Technology Institute (PHTI), about what happens as AI moves into health care's back office. The pattern she describes is a standoff: providers use AI to code, bill, and capture more revenue, while insurers use it to review, deny, and push rates back down. Often the care itself hasn't changed — the same visit that once captured 80% of its billable value now captures 100%, and insurers respond with across-the-board downcoding. Pearson's worry is that layering AI onto already adversarial processes just makes them run faster and cheaper on both sides, without bending national spending at all. "The addition of this administrative AI is really supercharging the parts of the health care system that we hate the most," said Pearson, whose institute independently rates whether health tech delivers. Kahn keeps the focus on who gets squeezed: "It is the patient that will or won't receive certain services," he noted of the two sides fighting over the dollar. Whether AI becomes the deflationary force it could be or just a costlier fight over the same dollar, she argues, comes down to incentives and policy. Source: "The AI Arms Race in Administrative Health Care", Kahn in KFF's The Business of Health with Chip Kahn (via American Enterprise Institute) — https://lnkd.in/e56AaUWU #DigitalHealth #FourthWave #AI — Interested in the convergence of the digital revolution with health, healthcare, living and society? Join my Digital Health LinkedIn group — over 100,000 members strong since I founded it in 2009 and initiated global usage of the term ‘digital health’ in 2012: https://lnkd.in/gauPanU — and feel free to follow me here on LinkedIn too. Learn how BlockHaven is giving individuals a living, lifelong health model they truly own through HealthMemory™ — and how, together with our partners, we're enabling collective health intelligence through the Health Intelligence Network™: https://www.blockhaven.ai https://lnkd.in/eE-QjGga
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Paul Sonnier reacted on thisHospitals are outspending insurers roughly 20-to-1 on AI — and it may be fueling a billing arms race rather than lowering what anyone pays. On the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) podcast "The Business of Health with Chip Kahn," host Charles "Chip" Kahn III — a Visiting Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) — talks with Caroline Pearson, executive director of the Peterson Health Technology Institute (PHTI), about what happens as AI moves into health care's back office. The pattern she describes is a standoff: providers use AI to code, bill, and capture more revenue, while insurers use it to review, deny, and push rates back down. Often the care itself hasn't changed — the same visit that once captured 80% of its billable value now captures 100%, and insurers respond with across-the-board downcoding. Pearson's worry is that layering AI onto already adversarial processes just makes them run faster and cheaper on both sides, without bending national spending at all. "The addition of this administrative AI is really supercharging the parts of the health care system that we hate the most," said Pearson, whose institute independently rates whether health tech delivers. Kahn keeps the focus on who gets squeezed: "It is the patient that will or won't receive certain services," he noted of the two sides fighting over the dollar. Whether AI becomes the deflationary force it could be or just a costlier fight over the same dollar, she argues, comes down to incentives and policy. Watch: https://lnkd.in/eyFJjSFD Source: "The AI Arms Race in Administrative Health Care", Kahn in KFF's The Business of Health with Chip Kahn — https://lnkd.in/e56AaUWU #DigitalHealth #FourthWave #AI — Interested in the convergence of the digital revolution with health, healthcare, living and society? Join my Digital Health LinkedIn group — over 100,000 members strong since I founded it in 2009 and initiated global usage of the term ‘digital health’ in 2012: https://lnkd.in/gauPanU — and feel free to follow me here on LinkedIn too. Learn how BlockHaven is giving individuals a living, lifelong health model they truly own through HealthMemory™ — and how, together with our partners, we're enabling collective health intelligence through the Health Intelligence Network™: https://www.blockhaven.ai https://lnkd.in/eE-QjGga
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Paul Sonnier reacted on thisDaniel Ek's digital health body-scanning startup just raised $700 million — and it's about to open in the U.S. A new report in TechCrunch details how Neko Health, the preventive body-scanning company co-founded by Spotify's Daniel Ek and Hjalmar Nilsonne, has raised a $700 million Series C led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and O.G. Venture Partners. That comes on top of the $260 million the company raised just 18 months ago. Neko's pitch is early detection at scale. Its proprietary full-body scan, paired with bloodwork and now body-composition data, is meant to catch problems before symptoms appear — and it can fold in a person's Apple Health data to give clinicians real-world context. More than 100,000 people have already been scanned across the company's U.K. and Sweden clinics, with another 350,000-plus on the waitlist. A New York location is next. For at least one customer, the payoff was immediate. Calm co-founder Alex Tew said a Neko scan flagged a malignant mole on his back that he had removed right away: "I'm grateful to Neko for helping me discover this — I'm not sure how I would have otherwise." Preventive scanning is getting crowded — Midjourney is reportedly building its own body scanner too — but Neko now has both the capital and the customer stories to lead the category. Source: "Daniel Ek's body-scanning startup Neko Health raises another $700M", Bort in TechCrunch — https://lnkd.in/eCGWQZTr #DigitalHealth #FourthWave #HealthTech #Longevity — Interested in the convergence of the digital revolution with health, healthcare, living and society? Join my 117,000+ member Digital Health LinkedIn group, which I founded in 2009 and through which I initiated global usage of the term 'digital health' in 2012: https://lnkd.in/gauPanU Learn how BlockHaven is giving individuals a living, lifelong health model they truly own through HealthMemory™ — and how, together with our partners, we're enabling collective health intelligence through the Health Intelligence Network™: https://www.blockhaven.ai.
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Paul Sonnier reacted on thisThe EU just exempted smart glasses and other wearables from its removable-battery law — clearing Meta's biggest hurdle to the European market. A new report in POLITICO details how the European Commission has adopted a delegated act exempting wearable devices — smartwatches, fitness trackers, wireless earbuds and smart glasses — from an EU rule, due in February 2027, that would have required batteries consumers can remove and replace themselves. The change is a big unlock for Meta, whose display-equipped Ray-Ban glasses use a sealed battery that couldn't meet the rule without redesigning the frame. It also follows pressure from Washington: in March, US Ambassador to the EU Andrew Puzder criticized the rules for blocking a "jointly developed" US-European product. The Commission insists it "has not given in to anyone's pressure," noting the exemption process began back in 2025. Consumer advocates aren't convinced. Exemptions "should remain genuine exceptions based on clear technical and safety evidence, not industry pressure," said Cláudio Texeira, head of digital policy at BEUC, Europe's largest consumer group, who warned of a dangerous precedent. Worth noting: the batteries must still be swappable by professionals, so it's end-user removal that was waived, not repairability. And the thornier issue is untouched — smart glasses stay under privacy scrutiny in Europe, with a regulators' report due this summer, even as the category just got easier to sell. Source: "EU relaxes rules for smart glasses after US pressure" in POLITICO — https://lnkd.in/eW4_efRi #DigitalHealth #FourthWave #Wearables — Interested in the convergence of the digital revolution with health, healthcare, living and society? Join my 117,000+ member Digital Health LinkedIn group, which I founded in 2009 and through which I initiated global usage of the term 'digital health' in 2012: https://lnkd.in/gauPanU Learn how BlockHaven is giving individuals a living, lifelong health model they truly own through HealthMemory™ — and how, together with our partners, we're enabling collective health intelligence through the Health Intelligence Network™: https://www.blockhaven.ai. Reach out if you're interested in becoming a partner.
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Paul Sonnier reacted on thisThe FDA is opening its doors to health data the FTC already ruled illegal to collect. A new op-ed on Bill of Health, the blog of Harvard Law School's Petrie-Flom Center, flags a contradiction sitting inside the federal government. In 2024, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) banned data brokers like X-Mode Social, Gravy Analytics, and Mobilewalla for selling location data precise enough to track people to reproductive health clinics and addiction treatment centers. Yet in December 2025, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) began accepting "real-world evidence" — data drawn from records, apps, and wearables — for some device reviews without patient-level identifiers, opening the door to those same commercial databases. Legal scholar Gary Hsuanyu Liu calls this "epistemic laundering": data is stripped of names, scrambled, and pooled by aggregators until its origins vanish, then sold to drug and device makers as regulatory-grade evidence. "When the FDA accepts the end product, the government transforms surveillance into science and contraband into evidence," writes Liu, who holds a J.S.D. from Washington University School of Law. His proposed fix borrows from criminal law's "fruit of the poisonous tree" rule — evidence built on collection the FTC has found unlawful shouldn't count toward approval, with the burden on sponsors to prove lawful sourcing. Clean evidence, he argues, isn't a barrier to innovation; it's health infrastructure. Source: "When Surveillance Becomes Science: The Data the FDA Should Not Trust", Liu in Bill of Health, Petrie-Flom Center at Harvard Law School — https://lnkd.in/eaMAd4T6 #DigitalHealth #FourthWave #DataPrivacy — Interested in the convergence of the digital revolution with health, healthcare, living and society? Join my 117,000+ member Digital Health LinkedIn group, which I founded in 2009 and through which I initiated global usage of the term 'digital health' in 2012: https://lnkd.in/gauPanU Learn how BlockHaven is giving individuals a living, lifelong health model they truly own through HealthMemory™ — and how, together with our partners, we're enabling collective health intelligence through the Health Intelligence Network™: https://www.blockhaven.ai. Reach out if you're interested in becoming a partner.
Paul Sonnier replied to a comment
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Paige G. Thank you, Paige. Your point about more research, more collaboration, and a conversation that holds both the biology and the lived experience reflects a mission I'm proud to amplify. Turning a personal story like yours into funded science and board-level advocacy is how change actually happens, and I'm guessing it will help far more people than we realize. Grateful you're part of this community, and looking forward to supporting the work ahead.
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Paul Sonnier liked thisPaul Sonnier liked thisOof. Close to half of those long posts on here that sound like they’re written by AI are in fact written by AI.
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Paul Sonnier liked thisPaul Sonnier liked thisToday, ARISE — a clinical AI research group led by physician researchers at Stanford and Harvard — published NOHARM V2, one of the most comprehensive independent evaluations of clinical AI safety to date. Most medical AI benchmarks measure knowledge: can a model answer exam-style questions correctly? NOHARM asks a harder and more clinically relevant question: when an AI system approaches a real patient scenario, could its recommendations cause harm? The evaluation spans 1,100 physician-derived clinical scenarios across 10 specialties, developed by more than 50 researchers including 29 board-certified physicians. Doximity Ask performed strongly across the board: • In real-world product testing, Doximity Ask V6.1 scored 75.8% — ahead of ChatGPT Health (68.4%) and OpenEvidence (60.8%). • In automated API tests, Doximity Ask V6.1 reached 84.5% — ahead of OpenEvidence (80.0%), GPT-5.6 Sol (75.9%), and Claude Fable 5 (65.0%). (Note that the two categories used slightly different scoring metrics — unweighted F1 versus severity-weighted F1, respectively.) Congratulations to AMBOSS, who topped the API results at 86.1%. Their performance reinforces the study's clearest signal: clinically specialized AI systems consistently outperformed frontier general-purpose models. Healthcare deserves AI built for medicine from the ground up — the fact that several teams are now demonstrating this is good for the entire field. No benchmark is a finish line. Every system in this study, ours included, has measurable gaps. The right response is to measure them, make them visible, and keep improving — which is what the 11,000+ physicians in our PeerCheck™ program help us do every day. To the ARISE researchers: thank you for raising the bar on how clinical AI is evaluated. Independent, safety-focused evaluation benefits physicians, health systems, and ultimately patients. Read our blog: https://lnkd.in/eFdFvgCr Read the paper: Wu et al. 2026. First, do NOHARM: a medical safety benchmark and randomized study of physician and AI teaming on clinical consultations. arXiv:2512.01241. https://lnkd.in/ePx29PJHFirst, do NOHARM: a medical safety benchmark and randomized study of physician and AI teaming on clinical consultationsFirst, do NOHARM: a medical safety benchmark and randomized study of physician and AI teaming on clinical consultations
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