23andMe appointed three new independent directors to its board, the company announced Tuesday, one month after all seven of its previous directors abruptly resigned.

The new board members are Andre Fernandez, the former chief financial officer of WeWork; Jim Frankola, the former CFO of the enterprise cloud company Cloudera; and Mark Jensen, a tech advisor and former managing partner at Deloitte, according to a release. The only other board member is 23andMe’s co-founder and CEO Anne Wojcicki. 

Fernandez, Frankola and Jensen will all serve on the board’s audit committee and compensation committee, the company said. Jensen will act as the lead independent director and chair of the compensation committee, while Fernandez will chair the audit committee.

“I am excited to welcome these three experienced directors to the 23andMe Board, and looking forward to working with them,” Wojcicki said in the release.

23andMe’s previous independent directors announced their resignation in a letter to Wojcicki in September, writing that they disagreed with her about the “strategic direction for the company.”

The genetic-testing company, once valued at $6 billion, has struggled since it went public in 2021 through a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. Shares were hovering below $1 until 23andMe announced a 1-for-20 reverse stock split of the Company’s Class A and Class B common stock earlier this month.

The company’s stock was trading around $5 on Tuesday morning.

To help 23andMe explore potential paths forward, the previous independent directors on the company’s board formed a special committee in late March. Wojcicki submitted a proposal to take the company private in July, but it was rejected by the special committee, in part because it lacked committed financing and did not provide a premium to the closing price of 40 cents per share at the time.

The directors gave Wojcicki the opportunity to submit a more suitable revised proposal, but they did not receive one, according to the September letter.

“We believe that it is in the best interests of the Company’s shareholders that we resign from the Board rather than have a protracted and distracting difference of view with you as to the direction of the Company,” they wrote.

In the weeks following the board members’ departures, Wojcicki has repeatedly said she remains committed to taking the company private.

Oracle unveiled a brand-new electronic health record on Tuesday, its most significant health-care product update since acquiring the medical records giant Cerner for $28 billion in 2022. 

An electronic health record, or an EHR, is a digital version of a patient’s medical history that’s updated by doctors and nurses over time. EHR software can be complex and cumbersome for clinicians to use, but it’s become an integral component of the modern U.S. health-care system.   

Oracle’s latest EHR is equipped with cloud and artificial intelligence capabilities that will make it easier to navigate and set up, the company said. There are no menus or drop-down screens, and doctors can pull up the information they need by asking questions with their voices. Ideally, this will allow doctors to spend less time searching through records and more time caring for patients, Oracle said. 

“It’s not just a scribe. It’s not an assistant. It’s almost like having your own resident,” Seema Verma, executive vice president and general manager of Oracle Health and Life Sciences, told CNBC in an interview. 

Oracle’s new offering could help boost its position within the fiercely competitive EHR market, where it has struggled to maintain its footing in recent years. In 2023, Oracle saw its largest net hospital loss on record while market leader Epic Systems, Oracle’s top rival, was the only company that saw a net increase in acute care market share, according to a report from KLAS Research.

Cerner contributed $5.9 billion to Oracle’s total revenue in fiscal 2023. Epic generated $4.9 billion in revenue last year. 

The new EHR has been in the works since Oracle acquired Cerner, but it was not built on top of Cerner’s existing infrastructure, Verma said. That means current Cerner customers will have to decide whether to migrate to the separate system.

“Just think about crumbling infrastructure in a house, you’re not going to put new things on top of it,” she said. “That was the conclusion that we came to when we looked at the Cerner technology, so what we’re introducing to the market is something that’s brand new.”

Suhas Uliyar, Oracle’s senior vice president for product management in clinical and health-care AI, walked CNBC through a virtual demo of the new EHR. He showcased what it might look like for a doctor to get up to speed, respond to messages and fill prescriptions ahead of a day packed full of patient visits.  

The EHR is browser based, and physicians will see a search bar and a chronological list of their appointments when they open it. The interface is very simple. A doctor can click on the microphone in the search bar and ask questions like, “How many openings do I have for today?” or “How many new patients do I have on schedule for today?” The doctor will then get an AI-generated answer within seconds. 

If a doctor clicks on a patient, they’ll open their chart, where they can find AI summaries as well as more detailed explanations of their medical history. The physician can see what’s changed since the patient’s last visit, whether they’re taking any new medication and other details like lab results, clinical documentation, past treatments, risk factors, messages, allergies and vitals. 

Additionally, the doctor can click the microphone and ask patient-specific questions like “Has she ever complained about panic attacks or shortness of breath?,” “Has he had a CT screening for lung cancer, and are his vaccinations up to date?” or “Which antibiotics have you treated her urinary tract infection with?”

“It’s going through the entire history, all the records, and it gives me a very specific answer,” Uliyar said. “I didn’t have to go scroll through 15 different documents and find that.” 

The voice-activated questions can build on one another, and the EHR’s AI will start to learn the doctor’s habits, like the types of medications they prescribe and refill often. Even when Uliyar stumbled over his words or didn’t phrase a question exactly right, the system still pulled up the information he was looking for.   

If a doctor wants to go into more detail or double-check an AI-generated answer within the new EHR, they can always click on the citation and look through the original record that’s referenced, Uliyar said. And answers that include content like medication dosage information or other evidence-based recommendations will link to validated databases, he added.  

While Oracle has been developing its new EHR, the company has also been rolling out features to existing Cerner customers to try and improve their experience with the product. Uliyar said many of these features, including Oracle Health Clinical AI Agent (formerly called Oracle Clinical Digital Assistant), are already embedded within the new EHR. 

Oracle announced the general availability of Clinical AI Agent in June, and it aims to automate much of the documentation that doctors are responsible for. 

Physicians can access the Clinical AI Agent through an app on their phone, and they hit a button to record their visits with patients. Once they stop recording, Oracle’s AI automatically generates a clinical note based on the appointment, so the doctors no longer need to write it themselves. 

Around 70 customers are already using the Clinical AI Agent, Uliyar said. The company is currently building a similar tool for nurses. 

Since the Clinical AI Agent is already embedded within the new EHR, customers will not have to worry about integrating it. The tool will also remain available as a stand-alone product that’s EHR agnostic, Uliyar said. 

The early adopter program for Oracle’s new EHR begins next year, and Oracle said it will work with customers to determine the customizations they need. The company has been moving its health-care customers to the cloud, so that should make the EHR implementation process much easier, Verma said.

“We see it as very disruptive to the market,” she said. “Our EHR is going to solve a lot of long-standing problems that we’ve had in health care.”

Oracle on Monday announced it intends to join a new federally-backed medical network that will make it easier for clinics, hospitals and insurance companies to share patients’ data.

The network, called the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement, or TEFCA, launched in December. Oracle, which acquired the medical records giant Cerner for $28 billion in 2022, is the latest major vendor to support TEFCA, joining its chief rival Epic Systems.

Oracle needs to be approved to join TEFCA, but its interest in doing so helps to bolster the nascent network’s credibility. It also suggests that TEFCA may succeed in ushering in a new standard for data-sharing practices across the health-care industry.

Sharing medical records between different hospitals, clinics and health-care organizations is a notoriously complex process. Health-care data is stored in a variety of formats across dozens of different vendors, making it difficult for doctors and other providers to easily access all the relevant data about their patients.

“This is just a natural next step,” Seema Verma, executive vice president and general manager of Oracle Health and Life Sciences, told CNBC in an interview. “We are not into information blocking. We don’t have that reputation.”

Oracle’s competitor, Epic, has long been accused of dragging its feet around interoperability efforts, and Oracle has not been afraid to call the company out. In a May blog post, Ken Glueck, executive vice president at Oracle, wrote, “Everyone in the industry understands that Epic’s CEO Judy Faulkner is the single biggest obstacle to EHR [electronic health record] interoperability.”

Epic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Several companies and organizations have previously tried to streamline health-care information exchange, but TEFCA was designed to help bring all of these players together on a national scale. The network’s ultimate goal is to finally standardize the legal and technical requirements for sharing patients’ data.

The main groups that participate in health-data exchanges through TEFCA are called qualified health information networks, or QHINs. These networks volunteer to take part – they are not paid – and they have to go through a two-step approval process to ensure that they are eligible and have the necessary technical infrastructure. 

Oracle said Monday that it will begin the process to become a QHIN. Seven QHINs, including Epic, are live within TEFCA now.

Shares of Dexcom fell 9% in extended trading on Thursday after the company released third-quarter results that beat analysts’ expectations but showed a decline in U.S. revenue year over year.

Here’s what the company reported compared with what Wall Street was expecting, based on a survey of analysts by LSEG:

• Earnings per share: 45 cents adjusted vs. 43 cents expected
• Revenue: $994 million vs. $990 million expected

The company’s revenue increased 2% to $994.2 million from $975 million a year earlier. Dexcom’s U.S. revenue declined 2% from $713.6 million the prior year. The company reported net income of $134.6 million, or 34 cents per share, up from $120.7 million, or 29 cents per share, in the same period last year.

Dexcom offers a suite of tools such as continuous glucose monitors, or CGMs, for patients who have been diagnosed with diabetes. In August, it launched its first over-the-counter product called Stelo, which is intended for adults who do not take insulin.

The company maintained its full fiscal-year guidance and expects revenue of $4 billion to $4.05 billion. Last quarter, Dexcom lowered its guidance from the $4.20 billion to $4.35 billion it forecast in the first quarter.

This lowered guidance and a revenue miss caused Dexcom shares to tumble more than 40% following the release of its second-quarter results in July. The company’s CEO Kevin Sayer attributed the challenges to a restructuring of the company’s sales team, fewer new customers than expected and lower revenue per user.

Sayer said in a call with investors Thursday that these problems improved during the third quarter.

The company also announced Teri Lawver, Dexcom’s chief commercial officer, will retire at the end of the year. Lawver will stay on as an advisor through early next year, and Sayer will lead the commercial organization as Dexcom searches for a replacement.

GE HealthCare on Monday announced a new artificial intelligence application it said will save time for doctors who diagnose and treat cancer.

CareIntellect for Oncology, as the tool is called, will help oncologists get up to speed on a patient’s history and disease progression by quickly showing them the data they need, the company said. GE HealthCare wants to spare oncologists the headache of digging through records so they can focus on caring for their patients, the company said.   

Health-care data is notoriously difficult to analyze, and as much as 97% of the data produced by hospitals goes unused, according to a Deloitte report. That information is stored across numerous vendors and file formats such as images, lab test results, clinical notes and device readings, which can be extremely taxing for doctors to sort through. 

“It’s very time-consuming, very frustrating for these clinicians,”  Dr. Taha Kass-Hout, GE HealthCare’s global chief science and technology officer, told CNBC in an interview.

CareIntellect for Oncology will be able to summarize clinical reports and identify when patients are deviating from their treatment plans, Kass-Hout said. The system can flag when a patient misses a lab test, for instance, so that their doctor can determine the best next steps. 

“For cancer patients, the treatment journey can last years and involve numerous doctor visits,” he said.

CareIntellect for Oncology can also help identify relevant clinical trials that patients might be eligible for, saving oncologists hours of work, said Chelsea Vane, vice president of digital products at GE HealthCare. That process has traditionally required doctors to scroll through a database of available trials, memorize inclusion and exclusion criteria and dig through patient records to determine a good fit, Vane told CNBC.

“What we’ve done is remove that,” she said.

The purpose of the new app is to save oncologists time and effort, but if doctors want to dive into more detail, CareIntellect for Oncology allows them to view the original record that’s referenced, the company said.

GE HealthCare is planning to make CareIntellect for Oncology widely available to U.S. customers in 2025, and it will initially be optimized for prostate and breast cancers. Health organizations such as Tampa General Hospital are already evaluating it, the company said. Since the tool is cloud-based, it will drive recurring revenue for GE HealthCare, Kass-Hout said. 

The company is planning to introduce additional apps under the CareIntellect brand in the future, Kass-Hout said. The oncology tool is the first offering, and health-care organizations will be able to easily pick and choose the apps that they want to enable, he added.  

GE HealthCare is also hoping to integrate its CareIntellect products with some of the other early stage AI initiatives it teased on Monday.   

The company highlighted five new AI products that it is developing, including a collaborative team of AI agents, a tool to predict an aggressive type of breast cancer recurrence, and a tool to flag suspicious mammography scans to radiologists more quickly. 

GE HealthCare decided to preview the new tools to give customers an idea of the problems it’s trying to solve, Kass-Hout said. The company will solicit feedback from health-care organizations and work with regulators as necessary, he said. 

For instance, GE HealthCare is exploring how a group of AI agents can work together as a team to support doctors through its tool called Health Companion.

The agents in Health Companion will be trained as experts in specific domains, such as radiology, pathology or genomics, and offer insights based on their expertise, Kass-Hout said. The agents could identify whether a specific symptom is a side effect of treatment or a sign of disease progression, for example, and suggest next steps, he added. 

Ideally, the tool will give doctors the same kind of support they’d expect from working with a multidisciplinary team, Kass-Hout said. But while consulting a panel of experts can take days or weeks, Health Companion would be available immediately. 

“At the moment, it’s an early concept,” he said. “Our aim is to elevate the standard of care and get ahead of the overburden of clinicians trying to take care of their patient.”

WATCH: The Pulse of AI in Health Care

Nvidia, Google, Microsoft and dozens of other tech companies are descending on Las Vegas next week to showcase artificial intelligence tools they say will save doctors and nurses valuable time. 

Sunday marks the official start of a health-care technology conference called HLTH, which is expected to draw more than 12,000 industry leaders this year. CNBC will be on the ground. Based on the speaking agenda and announcements leading up to the conference, AI tools to conquer administrative burdens will be the star of this year’s show. 

Doctors and nurses are responsible for mountains of documentation as they work to keep up with patient records, interface with insurance companies and comply with regulators. Often, these tasks are painstakingly manual, in part because health data is siloed and stored across multiple vendors and formats. 

The daunting administrative workload is a major cause of burnout in the industry, and it’s part of the reason a nationwide shortage of 100,000 health-care workers is expected by 2028, according to consulting firm Mercer. Tech companies, eager to carve out a piece of a market that could top $6.8 trillion in spending by the decade’s end, argue that their generative AI tools can help.

Google, for instance, said it’s working to expand its health-care customer base by tackling administrative burden with AI.

On Thursday, the company announced the general availability of Vertex AI Search for Healthcare, which it introduced in a trial capacity during HLTH last year. Vertex AI Search for Healthcare allows developers to build tools to help doctors quickly search for information across disparate medical records, Google said. New features within Google’s Healthcare Data Engine, which helps organizations build the platforms they need to support generative AI, are also now available, the company said.

Google on Thursday released the results of a survey that said clinicians spend nearly 28 hours a week on administrative tasks. In the survey, 80% of providers said this clerical work takes away from their time with patients, and 91% said they feel positive about using AI to streamline these tasks. 

Similarly, Microsoft on Oct. 11 announced its collection of tools that aim to lessen clinicians’ administrative workload, including medical imaging models, a health-care agent service and an automated documentation solution for nurses, most of which are still in the early stages of development. 

Microsoft already offers an automated documentation tool for doctors through its subsidiary, Nuance Communications, which it acquired in a $16 billion deal in 2021. The tool, called DAX Copilot, uses AI to transcribe doctors’ visits with patients and turn them into clinical notes and summaries. Ideally, this means doctors don’t have to spend time typing out these notes themselves. 

Nurses and doctors complete different types of documentation during their shifts, so Microsoft said it’s building a separate tool for nurses that’s best suited to their workflows. 

AI scribe tools such as DAX Copilot have exploded in popularity this year, and Nuance’s competitors, such as Abridge, which has reportedly raised more than $460 million, and Suki, which has raised $165 million, will also be at the HLTH conference. 

Dr. Shiv Rao, the founder and CEO of Abridge, told CNBC in March that the rate at which the health-care industry has adopted this new form of clinical documentation feels “historic.” Abridge received a coveted investment from Nvidia’s venture capital arm that same month. 

Nvidia is also gearing up to address doctor and nurse workloads at HLTH. 

Kimberly Powell, the company’s vice president of health care, is delivering a keynote Monday that will explain how using generative AI will help health-care professionals “dedicate more time to patient care,” according to the conference’s website.

Nvidia’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, are used to create and deploy the models that power OpenAI’s ChatGPT and similar applications. As a result, Nvidia has been one of the primary beneficiaries of the AI boom. Nvidia shares are up more than 150% year to date, and the stock tripled last year. 

The company has been making steady inroads into the health-care sector in recent years, and it offers a range of AI tools across medical devices, drug discovery, genomics and medical imaging. Nvidia also announced expanded partnerships with companies such as Johnson & Johnson and GE HealthCare in March. 

While the health-care sector has historically been slow to adopt new technology, the buzz around administrative AI tools has been undeniable since ChatGPT exploded onto the scene two years ago. 

Even so, many health systems are still in the early stages of evaluating tools and vendors, and they’ll be making the rounds on the HLTH exhibition floor. Tech companies will have to prove they have the chops to tackle one of health care’s most complex problems. 

After two weeks of wearing the Oura Ring 4, the smart ring gave me a better understanding of how my sleep, stress and exercise influence how I feel in my day-to-day life. 

The Oura Ring 4 began shipping to customers and became available in retail stores on Tuesday, and it’s an impressive option for those looking for a sleek and comfortable way to learn more about their bodies and make healthier choices. 

The smart ring offers more accurate sensors, a more comfortable design and longer battery life than its predecessor. The gadget is available in 12 sizes and six colors, including a new black finish, and it costs $349, although users have to pay a $5.99 a month, or $69.99 a year, subscription to use all of the accompanying app’s features. 

On the whole, the Oura Ring 4 is comfortable to wear and its app is easy to navigate. The ring was a bit more clunky and scratched more easily than I’d prefer, but after two weeks of testing it, the Oura Ring 4 did provide me useful information about my health. 

Getting set up

I had never worn an Oura Ring before, so the entire experience was new to me. 

The first order of business was choosing a color and determining my ring size, which I did by using the company’s sizing kit. Oura recommends customers new and old should get sized since the fit can change from one generation to the next. The kits are available online, and in-store sizing is available at retailers such as Target and Best Buy, the company said.

Silver jewelry has always been my preferred style, so I picked the silver Oura Ring 4 to match my accessories. 

Getting sized proved more difficult. I did my sizing in person with the Oura team, but I misjudged it slightly. The ring I’ve been wearing is a little big, so there are sometimes gaps between my finger and the hardware. I never felt like my ring was going to fall off, but I would size down if I were to do it again.

The ring was delivered to my apartment in a small box that included a charger and some basic instructions about how to clean and wear it. 

I charged the ring as I downloaded the Oura app and filled it out with biographical information such as my birthday, height and weight. Pairing the hoop with my iPhone was incredibly easy, and once the battery was topped off, it was time to slip the ring on. 

What’s good

As someone who has never liked the look of smartwatches, I was excited to try out the Oura Ring 4 and use it to track my sleep. The wearable was so comfortable, I often forgot I had it on.

That’s at least in part due to the device’s new sensors, which are significantly smaller than those of its predecessor. The third-generation Oura has sensors that are raised and feel like little bumps, while those on the Ring 4 are basically flat, giving it a smooth interior like any other ring. 

I purposely wore the ring on my right index finger. I still write a lot of my stories by hand (old school, I know), so I wanted to see if it would bother me while holding a pen or pencil. It didn’t. The ring is also designed to be worn 24/7 and is water resistant, and it didn’t give me any trouble when I washed my hands or showered with it.

Another highlight was the Oura app. The company began rolling out a redesign of the app to all its users earlier this month, and I thought the layout of the app was very intuitive. Data from the smart rings is presented in three tabs called Today, Vitals and My Health. 

The Today tab highlights information based on the time of day, and it includes shortcuts where I could quickly view the latest readings for things such as my sleep, activity, heart rate, stress or my readiness for the day. These at-a-glance metrics are easy to digest and helpful to look at when I had a quick minute throughout the day.   

I also enjoyed looking at my reading at a more granular level in the Vitals tab. There’s a lot to learn and decipher. Oura shows you nearly 20 different data points about your sleep alone. Even so, the company does a nice job breaking down all of these concepts in simple language. I wasn’t familiar with the term latency, for example, but the app taught me that it’s the amount of time it takes to fall asleep. 

The My Health tab gives users access to longer-term insights such as heart health, sleep health and resilience, a metric that measures your ability to recover from stress over time. These metrics are calibrated once Oura has recorded several weeks’ worth of data, so I was unable to explore this feature in depth for this review. 

Before the review, I was concerned about whether Oura’s metrics would negatively affect my mood. For instance, if Oura tells me that I slept poorly, would I feel less prepared to take on my day?

I was pleasantly surprised by how the company approached this framing. I never felt like I was being reprimanded for getting a bad night’s sleep, feeling stressed or missing a workout. Instead, Oura gave me tips about small changes I could make to feel better throughout the day, such as taking a few minutes for a break or meditation. 

I also liked that the exercise goal in the app varied based on my readings. If there was a day where I was particularly tired or stressed, Oura lowered my activity goal. This helped me feel a sense of accomplishment even when I wasn’t at my very best.