Healthcare AI News 1/3/24

News

Microsoft rolls out the Copilot app, which was formerly known as Bing Chat, for Android and IOS. It provides subscription-free access to OpenAI’s GPT-4 and the DALL-E3 image generator.

Humetrix announces a cloud-based international health communicator platform that presents clinicians with a patient’s medical records that it has translated into the clinician’s own language.

VideaHealth receives FDA 510(k) clearance for an AI-powered diagnostic tool for dental diseases, which will also be distributed by Henry Schein One to its dental software users.

In the Netherlands, the CMIO of University Medical Centre Groningen urges the EU to avoid overregulating AI since “it might be the only chance to have some level of healthcare shortly for older people.” The hospital is using AI tools to create draft responses to patient emails and to summarize the information in Epic for rounding,

Business

Bain & Company believes that investment in healthcare-related generative AI is just starting and expects the technology to drive productivity gains, offer a better provider and patient experience, and improve outcomes. It says that companies that were built around AI are raising significant investments, but also that the private equity owners of mature companies are adding AI to improve their products or businesses, which may pose a disruptive threat to some portfolio companies. The highest-risk business are those that provide services for content generation, administrative processes, call centers, and text writing and summarization.

Health insurance brokers are using AI to simplify the process of shopping for ACA marketplace and Medicare Advantage plans. The tools collect an individual’s information, make predictions about their health needs, and then score available plans based on income, prescriptions, and preferred doctors. They can also benefit users by eliminating the incentive for brokers to push the highest-commission plan.

WellSpan Health touts the use of AI in its six hospitals, which includes Artisight virtual sitting and nursing technology, Aidoc for image review, and DAX for ambient documentation.

Research

Dartmouth medical educators develop AI Patient Actor, a ChatGPT virtual patient that medical students can interview while reviewing their vital signs and lab results. The app provides individualized feedback that the student can use to try again. The researchers expect the tool to provide a stress-free environment for students to practice their clinical interaction before moving on to clinical settings or working with actors who pose as standardized patients.

Other

A Toronto newspaper profiles ChartWatch, an AI-driven early warning system for patient deterioration that was developed by St. Michael’s Hospital. The hospital says that use of the risk scores, which are calculated hourly, was associated with a 26% mortality reduction among non-palliative patients in its general medicine unit. The hospital is spending $4 million annually to test AI solutions, about 50 so far. It has also developed solutions to help assign nurses to ED roles, display wait times in the ED, and summarize the medical records of patients with multiple sclerosis that span years. The reports note that Health Canada has approved only AI-powered software in which the algorithms are locked, which requires applying for a license amendment if the algorithms can learn or can be changed.

UCSD Health’s newly named chief AI officer Karandeep Singh, MD, MMSc says that the best near-term use of AI in healthcare involves “keyboard liberation” in drafting patient message replies, summarizing chart documentation, and creating document from ambient conversations. He predicts that AI-powered decision-making “is very far away.”

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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