Health Law Advisor

In April 2026, a complaint alleging “one of the most egregious examples of piracy in the medical technology industry” landed on the docket of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas.

The 180-page patent infringement lawsuit by Heartflow, Inc.—a California-based medical company that advances coronary care through artificial intelligence (AI)-powered three-dimensional models of a patient’s heart—alleges that a former Heartflow consultant founded a rival company, Cleerly, Inc., using Heartflow’s “revolutionary cardiovascular diagnostic technology, trade secrets, and confidential business information” while still bound by contractual obligations.

“By this action, Heartflow seeks to protect the extraordinary investment—measured in hundreds of millions of dollars, decades of research protected by hundreds of patents, and the contributions of countless scientists, engineers, and physicians—that created the world’s first AI-powered, non-invasive cardiac diagnostic platform, as recognized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS),” the Heartflow complaint states.

Cleerly issued a statement on April 17, calling the filing a “lawsuit to limit competition.”

“We strongly disagree with the allegations and will vigorously defend against these baseless claims,” Cleerly wrote. The company’s answer is due July 8, 2026.

We discuss this patent infringement case in further detail below.

On March 12, 2026, Microsoft officially launched Copilot Health — a dedicated, secure space within its Copilot AI platform designed to aggregate a user’s health records, wearable data, and lab results into a single, personalized health profile. While the product has drawn considerable excitement in the health-tech space, it also raises significant legal considerations for individual adopters and their healthcare providers.

In early 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court (the “Court”) agreed to hear a case at the heart of pharmaceutical intellectual property that could have significant implications for the manufacturers of both patented and generic drugs. Oral argument is scheduled for Wednesday, April 29.

Following CES2026, OpenAI and Anthropic announced consumer-facing generative AI products for health care. OpenAI launched ChatGPT Health on January 7, 2026, and Anthropic followed with Claude for Healthcare on January 11, 2026. Both products allow users to connect their medical records and wellness data directly to these AI chatbots, marking a significant change from theoretical benchmark performance to deployment of consumer health applications.

Imagine this scenario: a longtime patient at an ENT practice decides to leave the traffic and sprawl of a major metropolitan area for a more idyllic, rural existence elsewhere in the state. Accustomed to the familiar, top-ranked brands of excellent hospitals, however, the patient is unsure of what to expect in the new location in terms of quality of care. Fortunately, posters on the walls in the old and new locations, online websites, and postcards in the mail—with the same familiar names and logos—immediately reassure the patient that the health professionals in this new location are not only as good as those back home but are affiliated with them.

In today's competitive health care landscape, hospitals are increasingly exploring innovative ways to expand their market presence and generate additional revenue streams. One particularly effective strategy is brand licensing to urgent care facilities. Becker’s Health IT, in fact, has reported on Monigle’s rankings of the 30 most trusted health system brands for 2024 and the 25 “most human” health system brands for 2025. This post explores key opportunities, challenges, and best practices for hospital administrators considering brand licensing programs.

As we noted in our previous blog post, HealthBench, an open-source benchmark developed by OpenAI, measures model performance across realistic health care conversations, providing a comprehensive assessment of both capabilities and safety guardrails that better align with the way physicians actually practice medicine. In this post, we discuss the legal and regulatory questions HealthBench addresses, the tool’s practical applications within the health care industry, and its significance in shaping the future of artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine.

The Evolution of Health Care AI Benchmarking

Artificial Intelligence (AI) foundation models have demonstrated impressive performance on medical knowledge tests in recent years, with developers proudly announcing their systems had “passed” or even “outperformed” physicians on standardized medical licensing exams. Headlines touted AI systems achieving scores of 90% or higher on the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) and similar assessments. However, these multiple-choice evaluations presented a fundamentally misleading picture of AI readiness for health care applications. As we previously noted in our analysis of AI/ML growth in medicine, a significant gap remains between theoretical capabilities demonstrated in controlled environments and practical deployment in clinical settings.

These early benchmarks—predominantly structured as multiple-choice exams or narrow clinical questions—failed to capture how physicians actually practice medicine. Real-world medical practice involves nuanced conversations, contextual decision-making, appropriate hedging in the face of uncertainty, and patient-specific considerations that extend far beyond selecting the correct answer from a predefined list. The gap between benchmark performance and clinical reality remains largely unexamined.

Those in the tech world and in medicine alike see potential in the use of AI chatbots to support mental health—especially when human support is unavailable, or therapy is unwanted. Others, however, see the risks—especially when chatbots designed for entertainment purposes can disguise themselves as therapists.

So far, some lawmakers agree with the latter. In April, U.S. Senators Peter Welch (D-Vt.) and Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) sent letters to the CEOs of three leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot companies asking them to outline, in writing, the steps they are taking to ensure that the human interactions with these AI tools “are not compromising the mental health and safety of minors and their loved ones.”

The concern was real: in October 2024, a Florida parent filed a wrongful death lawsuit in federal district court, alleging that her son committed suicide with a family member’s gun after interacting with an AI chatbot that enabled users to interact with “conversational AI agents, or ‘characters.’” The boy’s mental health allegedly declined to the point where his primary relationships “were with the AI bots which Defendants worked hard to convince him were real people.”