Nurse Practitioners, food as medicine, funded founders, fundraising in 2026.

🇺🇸 Healthcare through a Kentucky lens. It's niche. But neat! 🫡

Author

Andrew Steen
May 26, 2026

"Unofficial" start of summer. 

Nurse Practitioners

Hottest job in healthcare according to this WSJ article.

Nurse Practitioner Is Now the Hottest Job in Healthcare

Employers are clamoring for workers who can do doctor-like work but who are trained faster and can cost them less

www.wsj.com/health/healthcare/nurse-practitioner-is-now-the-hottest-job-in-healthcare-a98e0bc8

Kentucky is a reduced practice state for Nurse Practitioners (NPs) and Advanced Practice Registered Nurses (APRNs).

Remember this?

Nurse Practitioner Entrepreneurship Report 2024

An analysis of the kinds of businesses Nurse Practitioners are founding and where they are founding them.

www.singleaimhealth.com/news/nurse-practitioner-entrepreneurship-report-2024?utm_source=healthtechnerds.beehiiv.com&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=htn-weekly-health-tech-reads-3-17

And this table that includes Louisville?

And, according to Becker’s, the mean annual wage for NPs in Kentucky is $125,010.

Food is—or as—Medicine

This is from a few weeks ago:

Kentucky Becomes First “Food Is Medicine” State, Hospitals Expand Care Through Nutrition and Local Farms - KYHA

Kentucky hospitals are expanding a new model of patient care that treats food as a critical part of medicine, following passage of Senate Joint Resolution 23 earlier this month.

KYHA • Kentucky Hospital Association

Cool, right?

Modern Healthcare coverage of RWJBarnabas Health’s $7 million food-is-medicine hub to take on chronic disease.

Food-as-medicine gets a new test case in Newark

RWJBarnabas' $7 million facility is aimed at reducing chronic disease by helping people prepare and eat healthier food.

www.modernhealthcare.com/providers/mh-rwjbarnabas-health-food-is-medicine-newark/?utm_source=modern-healthcare-alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20260518

Modern Healthcare coverage.

Also of related interest, this Health Affairs article primarily includes authors from Centene.

Using Nutritious Food MA Supplemental Benefits To Fight Chronic Disease

Alice Hm Chen,Michael A. Carson,Amanda P. Green,andHilary Seligman May 11, 2026

www.healthaffairs.org/content/forefront/enabling-efficient-medicare-advantage-spending-using-nutritious-food-supplemental

Centenarians

“In this Review, we explore how centenarians modulate key hallmarks of immune ageing across innate and adaptive immune compartments.”

The long-lived immune system of centenarians - Nature Reviews Immunology

What is unique about the immune system of people who live to extreme old age? Here the authors describe that centenarians may achieve such longevity through several mechanisms, including limiting the pathological effects of inflammageing and immunosenescence, preservation of immune surveillance, sustained gut microbial diversity and maintenance of intestinal barrier integrity.

Nature

🤐 

Where Funded Founders Went To School

It might be nice to write a story about how choice of school need not affect one’s chances of venture-backed startup success. The data, however, indicates quite the opposite.

The dominance of alums from the top-ranked schools should not be understated.

Joanna Glasner for crunchbase

Where Funded Founders Went To School: 2026 Edition

The findings from our annual Crunchbase survey of where recently funded founders attended college or university found that alumni of the most selective U.S. schools secure a disproportionately high share of startup funding rounds.

Crunchbase News • Joanna Glasner

Yeah.

Pair that with this that we shared a while back; “One-third of deals in the venture capital (VC) market involve a founder and investor from the same university.”

Alumni Networks in Venture Capital Financing | Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis | Cambridge Core

Alumni Networks in Venture Capital Financing

Cambridge Core

🫢

 

Healthcare AI startups

AI ate digital health (and the metaverse) like grunge ate hair metal.

This is a great read via Halle Tecco. Two of her students built out a database of healthcare AI startups and interviewed 24 founders [none in KY]. The findings…

AI ate digital health (and what that means for fundraising)

24 healthcare founders reflect on their fundraising experience

Halle Tecco

2) Pick revenue-driving over cost-saving
💯 agree. But I don’t necessarily think that is new for 2026.

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