The two not-for-profit health systems announced the merger on Wednesday. Although the deal won’t be finalized for some time, they teased new investments that will bring 39 hospitals and more than 400 primary and specialty care sites under the banner of a new Sutter Health. 

The problem is limited to surgical stapler reloads used by the da Vinci robot, specifically those manufactured by Intuitive Surgical. The FDA said it’s currently investigating why the reloads are leaving incomplete line formations. For now, they need to be pulled from all patient care settings. 

The caper was carried out by a former employee of Nuance Communications, a Microsoft subsidiary. According to court documents, the man used his credentials to access patient data from 1.3 million patients at Geisinger. Police said they found the trove stored on a flash drive in his car.

GuardDog admitted to accessing medical histories from patients stored on Epic’s platform, selling some of them to law firms engaged in unrelated civil litigation. The primary defendant in Epic’s lawsuit, Health Gorilla, maintains it did nothing wrong and accuses Epic of stifling interoperability.

Copilot Health will be able to use information such as medical histories, lab results and data from wearables to answer complicated healthcare questions. Microsoft said patients who use the app can rest assured all data shared with the AI is encrypted and can be deleted at any time.