Methodology

What Recent HealthTech is

An independent, source-backed library of the companies and products building healthcare technology. It exists to be studied: to see what is being built, for whom, and on what evidence.

It is not medical advice, not a directory anyone can buy their way into, and not a news publication. Nothing here is sponsored, and no company can pay to be included, to be ranked higher, or to have something removed.

What we include

Companies building healthcare technology, and the products they actually ship. Both are profiled separately, because the distinction matters: a company is an organisation with a strategy, and a product is a thing a clinician or a patient uses.

Coverage is deliberately uneven while the library is young. It is deepest where the industry is most active and where sources are easiest to verify, and thinnest everywhere else. Rather than pad the gaps, the library shows what it has: a category with nothing published under it is listed as something we are tracking, not as an empty page.

How companies and products are selected

By editorial judgement. Anyone can suggest a company through the suggestion form, and every suggestion is read by a person, but being suggested gets nothing published, and there is no payment. Records are chosen because they say something about how healthcare technology is being built.

Before anything is published it must have a clear description, a primary category, a geography, a working website and at least one source. That is enforced by the system, not by memory: a record missing any of them cannot be published at all.

How we use sources

Official and primary sources first: a company’s own site, a regulator, a registry, a peer-reviewed journal. Then reputable independent reporting. A press release is a source for what a company announced, not for whether it worked.

Sources are recorded against the record they support, not gathered at the bottom of the page, so it is possible to see which claim rests on what. Where sources disagree, the disagreement is stated rather than resolved by picking a side.

An empty field is left empty. A guessed one would be a defect, and a plausible guess is the most damaging kind, because it is the one nobody thinks to check.

How records are classified

Every company and product is placed along five dimensions: what it is, what area of medicine it touches, what it is built with, who it is for, and where it operates. Classification is what makes the library comparable rather than merely readable: it is the difference between a list and a map.

The taxonomy is deliberately broad. Narrow, overlapping terms feel precise and behave badly: they scatter related records across near-identical labels and make the collection look thinner than it is. Where a part of the taxonomy has nothing published under it, it is shown as something being tracked rather than as an empty page.

What is not here

No rankings, scores or "best of" lists. Scoring implies a measurement that does not exist, and a league table of healthcare products would be read as clinical guidance by someone who needs the real thing.

No sponsored placements, no advertising, and no paid inclusion of any kind. No user reviews or ratings, which at this scale would say more about who has an audience than about what works.

And nothing that constitutes medical advice. This library describes what companies build; it does not tell anyone what to use, prescribe or buy.

What "last verified" means

The date a person last checked the page against its sources. It is not a promise that nothing has changed since: it is a statement of when we last looked, so you can judge how old the information is.

Healthcare technology moves quickly, and a profile that was accurate a year ago may be describing a product that has been renamed, repositioned or withdrawn. Where a record has not been checked recently, the date says so rather than being quietly hidden.

How we treat what companies say about themselves

A company’s claim about itself is reported as a claim: "Abridge says…", and never as independently established fact. Marketing language is not evidence, and a confident sentence on a homepage is not a study.

Where a claim has been independently verified, that is stated separately, with the source.

Screenshots

Where a pattern shows a screenshot of a product, the image is stored by Recent HealthTech (never loaded from someone else’s server) and its record carries who owns it, the page it was taken from, the day it was captured, and what permits its use: the press-kit terms, the company’s media policy, or the company having supplied it. A label such as “official marketing image” classifies the source; it is not permission on its own. A named person reviews the written permission before a screenshot can be published, and confirms that the image shows demo, synthetic or anonymised content and no identifiable patient information. Every published screenshot is captioned with the owner, the source and the capture date.

A request to correct or remove a screenshot is acted on by removing the image first and asking questions second: a takedown recorded in the workspace takes the image off this site on the next request, with no copy kept anywhere along the way. Such a request is made the way any correction is (through the route set out on the Editorial policy page) and is read by a person.

Photographs

Some product cards show a photograph of the product taken by someone other than its maker and published under a free licence, such as Creative Commons. The licence is what permits its use here. The maker did not supply or approve the photograph, and showing it implies no endorsement. Each is credited on the image with the photographer and the licence, and in full below, with where it was published and what we changed.

A company’s own images, from its press kit or its website, are stored on this site and credited to the company. A company that asks for one to be removed has it removed, through the correction route below.

• A da Vinci Xi surgical system standing in an operating room. Photograph by Alvarogarciamd, CC BY-SA 4.0 (licence). Reduced to 1200 by 900 pixels; the reduced file is shared under the same licence. Where it was published.
• A third-generation Oura Ring standing on its edge, its sensors visible inside the band. Photograph by Tpnkl, CC BY-SA 4.0 (licence). Cropped to 4:3 and saved as JPEG; the cropped file is shared under the same licence. Where it was published.
• A white Withings ScanWatch 2 worn on a wrist. Photograph by Susie Felber, CC0 1.0 (licence). Cropped to the watch and reduced to 1200 by 900 pixels. Where it was published.

The Journal

The Journal is Recent HealthTech’s own analysis (a snapshot of what the library holds, a comparison of how companies describe something, a teardown) written under the byline Recent HealthTech and built from the same records as everything else. An article cites its sources, and it cannot be published without at least one; a number in it cites the source it came from; a company or product it discusses appears as a card that links to that record, and the record links back. Where an article describes what a company does, it is worded as the company’s own description with its source, and Recent’s analysis is labelled as analysis. Nothing in an article implies a finding the cited sources do not support.

A correction to an article is requested the way any correction is: through the corrections route below. An article that is corrected shows the correction; an article that is withdrawn is withdrawn, not silently changed.

Corrections

If something here is wrong it will be fixed. Corrections are welcome from anyone, including the companies profiled, and being profiled gives nobody editorial control over what is written.

What a correction request should contain, and what happens to it, is set out on the Editorial policy page. A report is read by a person, checked against its source, and any change is made through the workspace so the history records who made it; publishing the change is a separate act, as it is for every change.

We work to keep Recent HealthTech accurate and source-backed. If you notice an error, outdated information or a missing source, please contact us. We review corrections and appreciate readers who help improve the record.