Healthcare AI News 8/16/23

News

Abridge, whose app turns doctor-patient conversations into transcripts and visit summaries, becomes the first member of Epic’s Partners and Pals integration program. The company also announced that Emory Healthcare will deploy its solution.

Piction Health launches a dermatology virtual clinic in Massachusetts in which patients complete an online intake questionnaire, attach at least three pictures of their area of concern, and then receive a dermatologist’s evaluation – supported by AI image analysis and comparison to its own image database — within two days. The company says that two-thirds of patients receive a treatment plan without an in-person visit. The service is available for patients in New Hampshire, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Florida and is covered by some insurances or costs $80 otherwise.

Business

Morgan Stanley lists four areas in which it expects AI to create significant investment opportunities:

• Drug discovery, manufacturing, and physician-patient engagement.
• Earlier detection of disease, more efficient patient access, claims processing, supply chain management, and helping patients use their insurance and prescription benefits effectively.
• Support for advanced diagnostics that combine EHR, genomic, and imaging data to gain disease insight and to personalize treatment.
• Enhance monitoring by analyzing data streams from medical devices such as sensor-equipped implants, continuous glucose monitoring, and cardiac monitoring.

Research

Vanderbilt University Medical Center researchers develop an NLP algorithm that analyzes EHR data to identify patients who need lung cancer screening, improving existing methods that look only at EHR smoking flags. The team found that nearly half of the documented smokers are missing discrete EHR data related to pack years and quit dates, but the NLP analysis of clinical notes delivered 96% accuracy.

Taiwan’s National Cheng Kung University creates AI-powered software to detect age-related muscle loss (sarcopenia) from CT scans. The government has approved the software for sale to other hospitals, although the creators suggest that hospitals perform screening of cancer patients for free since they already have their CT images. Sarcopenia, which increase fall and fracture risk in older patients and those undergoing chemotherapy, can be improved through diet and rehabilitation if caught early.

Carnegie Mellon University is using AI, ML, and NLP to analyze YouTube videos that offer patients information on conditions or treatments for accuracy, comprehension level, trustworthiness, and delivery of actionable guidance. They hope to create filters that give doctors a short list of videos that can be reviewed and then prescribed as needed.

Newly developed, AI-powered “smart socks” will allow people with dementia to live at home, where the wearable tracks heart rate, sweat levels, and motion to determine when the wearer is in distress. The socks look like real socks, are machine washable, and do not require charging.

Other

In Canada, a report warns that successful use of healthcare AI will be limited by the healthcare system’s reliance on fax machines, handwritten notes, scanned files, and paper recordkeeping.

Veterinary chain Banfield Pet Hospital offers customers a free AI-powered device – developed by Whistle Health, which like Banfield, is owned by candy and dog food maker Mars — that attaches to a dog’s collar to track caloric intake, scratching that could indicate skin problems, and other health data, with an app that allows chatting with a veterinarian. An enhanced version allows tracking the pet’s location.

An AI expert notes that AI-created influencers – realistic, computer-generated characters – will increase mental health issues and suicides among followers who can’t function in the real, imperfect world. He says that mental health was already threatened by the false perfection of Photoshopping and plastic surgery. An AI-generated influencer who portrays a young woman from Finland has thousands of followers on TikTok and Instagram, while another influencer created an AI-powered “virtual girlfriend” version of herself using ChatGPT that she expects to generate $60 million per year in subscriptions from an audience that is 98% male.

Contacts

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