Seven meetings between now and March, the health tech news that will follow us into every hallway, and where I will be talking AI.
Saint Paul: the Twin Cities Foot & Ankle Conference
The Minnesota Podiatric Medical Association brings its three-day scientific meeting back to the Saint Paul RiverCentre November 12 through 14, with 20 CECH on the table. It draws more than 200 podiatric physicians and surgeons from Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa and the Dakotas, with hands-on workshops and labs alongside the lectures.
This is my home meeting, and I will be on the program again talking about AI. Last year the question in the room was whether to use it at all. This year the question is how to supervise it. I will walk through the framework I teach: delegate the work, verify what comes back, disclose that you used it, and own the result. It is the same way we have always run residents and staff.
Two details worth knowing. MPMA membership includes complimentary attendance, and students register free. A student shadowing in your clinic this fall has no reason to miss it.
The regional meeting is where you meet the people you will refer to and take call with for the next twenty years, and that has always been worth the drive.
The rest of the season
AAPPM Annual Conference, Fort Lauderdale, Nov 12–14
The American Academy of Podiatric Practice Management meets the same weekend as Saint Paul, which forces a choice. AAPPM is built for the business side: coding, staffing, operations, and the people who run the front desk. If next year’s fee schedule lands the way it was proposed, the practices that bring their office manager will hear about it first.
Desert Foot, Phoenix, Dec 9–12
Desert Foot is the limb salvage and wound care meeting, and this year it carries extra weight. Medicare moved most skin substitutes to a flat rate this January, and the graft is no longer the business. Debridement, offloading, perfusion and a patient who shows up every week are the treatment, and that is the conversation this meeting was built for.
NY27, New York, Jan 21–24
New York is the volume meeting: a two-floor exhibit hall at the Marriott Marquis and a program that has long opened with a coding day. NY27 lands three weeks after the 2027 rules take effect, which makes it the first big room where podiatry sees real claims under the new fee schedule.
FPMA SAM, Orlando, Jan 27–31
The Florida Podiatric Medical Association’s Science and Management Symposium pairs clinical lectures with practice management in a single week. It is a strong pick for a partner and an associate who want to split the tracks and compare notes on the flight home.
Midwest Foot & Ankle Conference, Chicago, Mar 4–7
The meeting formerly known as the Midwest Podiatry Conference is a partnership of eleven APMA state components, and it sits one week before ACFAS. For Midwest podiatrists who can only take one trip this spring, it is the closer, cheaper one with the people you already refer to.
Orlando: ACFAS 2027
The season ends where it always does for foot and ankle surgeons. The American College of Foot and Ankle Surgeons holds its 85th Annual Scientific Conference at the Orange County Convention Center, with pre-conference programs Thursday, March 11, and the main meeting Friday through Monday, March 12 to 15.
Nearly 2,300 surgeons came to Las Vegas for ACFAS 2026, and the College bills the meeting as the largest foot and ankle gathering in the world. It is where the surgical side of this profession sets its standard: the techniques we argue about, the fixation we trust, the data we will cite for the next five years.
Orlando will feel different from Las Vegas. The 2027 fee schedule will be ten weeks old, AI will be a bigger part of the conversation than it was a year ago, and every surgeon in the building will be doing the math on the same-day visit. None of that makes the meeting less important. It makes the hallway more important.
I will be in Orlando representing Sky Surgical and talking about AI, picking up where Saint Paul leaves off.
Health tech this week
Most of these first crossed my desk in Second Opinion, the health tech newsletter from Christina Farr and Ruth Reader. I went to the primary sources for each one.
The AMA wants AI liability shared
The AMA’s Center for Digital Health and AI published an issue brief on liability for clinical AI. Its core idea is that a physician should be accountable only for what they can reasonably detect and act on. A doctor who only sees a triage list cannot be blamed for a patient the algorithm quietly pushed down it. The brief calls for strong protection when a physician relies on a tool with proven performance that was responsibly implemented. It puts responsibility for design, validation and warnings on developers, and responsibility for selection, local validation and monitoring on the health systems that deploy them. It also says physicians should not be penalized for declining AI whose validation or place in the standard of care is still uncertain.
This is the Own step in the framework I teach, written in policy language. We sign the chart, so we need tools that show their work and contracts that do not quietly hand us the vendor’s risk.
HHS drops the AI model card
ONC finalized HTI-5, its deregulatory rule for certified health IT. It removes 14 of the program’s 60 certification criteria, well short of the 34 it proposed. Privacy and security criteria survived after pushback from hospital and health information groups. The AI transparency requirement did not. Certified EHRs no longer have to provide model cards describing how their predictive tools were trained, tested and validated.
That moves the Disclose step back to us. If your EHR flags a patient as high risk, the vendor is no longer required to show you what is behind the flag. Ask anyway, and put the answer in the contract.
Six peptides move to the compounding pharmacy
HHS will stop enforcing the FDA’s restrictions on compounding six wellness peptides: BPC-157, TB-500, KPV, Epitalon, MOTS-c and Semax. The interim policy still requires a patient-specific prescription, testing for purity and contaminants, and adverse event reporting. An FDA advisory panel backed the six in July against the conclusion of agency scientists, with three of the votes at 8 to 6. None of the six is FDA-approved for safety or efficacy.
BPC-157 and TB-500 are marketed online for tendon and soft-tissue recovery, which puts them squarely in our exam rooms. Easier access to a compounded product is not evidence that it heals an Achilles. Patients deserve that distinction from us before they hear the opposite from a clinic down the street.
Employers hand workers cash instead of coverage
Second Opinion reports that a small but growing number of employers are dropping group health plans and giving workers money to buy their own on the ACA marketplace. Workers already pay an average of $7,471 a year toward family premiums, up 9 percent from 2025. More patients will arrive with narrow networks and high deductibles, and that changes when they schedule an elective reconstruction.
Epic and the startups
STAT published a deep dive on how Epic’s footprint inside health systems disadvantages startups trying to sell into them. For independent groups, this matters more than it seems. The tools we can add to our own workflow increasingly depend on what the EHR vendor allows to connect.
The market
Vera Health, a clinical search tool that ranks the medical evidence before it generates an answer, raised a $28.5 million Series A led by Threshold Ventures, bringing total funding to $32 million. Second Opinion reports more than 800,000 clinicians across 190 countries use it. Investors are paying for AI that shows its sources, which is the right bet.
Oura and UC San Diego Health launched a trial in about 260 adults with overweight or obesity who are starting a GLP-1 drug or having bariatric surgery. One group’s treatment will be guided by ring data on sleep, heart rate and activity, and the other’s will not, with outcomes measured at 52 weeks. Our patients on GLP-1s are losing weight fast, and that changes how their feet are loaded. A ring that tracks activity may eventually tell us who is moving enough to protect muscle as they lose.
Kivo Health raised a $10 million Series A for at-home virtual pulmonary rehabilitation for seniors with COPD. Home-based rehab for a chronic disease is a model worth watching for diabetic foot prevention, where the work also happens between visits.
Two of the week’s bigger checks went to things people wear on their faces. Camino Partners put $62 million into Intake Breathing, which makes a magnetic nasal dilator, and Ozlo raised a $22 million Series B for its sleep earbuds. Consumer money is flowing to simple wearables with a clear daily habit. The foot has plenty of wearables in research and very few with a business behind them yet.
The podiatrists who follow the rules and the money behind their tools as closely as they follow technique will be the ones setting the agenda in every one of those hallways.