Healthcare AI News 3/6/24

News

UPMC physicians develop a AI-powered smartphone app that can diagnosis acute otitis media by analyzing video from a phone-connected otoscope.

Pediatric clinicians at Mass General Brigham create a series of 45 instructional smartphone videos for clinicians, then use ChatGPT to create Spanish language versions that they distributed to nurses in Guatemala and Colombia.

The Coalition for Health AI names co-founder Brian Anderson, MD as CEO and co-founder John Halamka, MD, MS as board chair. The company added federal leaders to its board and will work with the government to develop quality and safety standards.

The American Medical Association’s house of delegates defines AI as “augmented intelligence” rather than “artificial intelligence” to focus on AI’s role of enhancing human intelligence rather than replacing it.

Business

UMass Memorial Health will use Google Cloud to build patient care and research tools.

Health and human services software vendor Healthy Together acquires Kinsa Health, which offers AI-powered epidemiological prediction models using consumer smart thermometers as well as healthcare demand forecasting. Kinsa had shut down several months ago after 12 years, with founder and CEO Inder Singh expressing hope that he could find a new home for the company’s work.

Machinify launches an AI-powered healthcare claims system that includes apps for prior authorization approval, claims auditing, and claims review and correction. Founder and CO Prasanna Ganesan, PhD was a co-founder of digital video store Vudu, which was acquired by Walmart in 2010 and then in 2020 by Fandango, which now brands it as Fandango At Home.

Research

The federal government awards Philadelphia-based non-profit Every Cure a $48 million grant to use AI to find new uses for existing drugs. Penn medical school professor and immunologist David Fajgenbaum, MD, MBA, MSc co-founded the organization after saving his own life by finding a “repurposed” drug, a process he described in his book.

Other

Attorneys list potential areas of liability exposure for using healthcare-related AI, urging providers to avoid Practice Fusion type kickback situations by vetting the product’s explainability and the governance and privacy practices of its vendor:

• Payers using AI to manage prior authorization while denying legitimate claims or improperly influencing the process.
• Using AI to analyze medical images that could raise questions about how the system were trained, whether their vendors are paid for the volume and value of the resulting referrals, and kickback implications of AI systems that are tied to specific treatments.
• Possible clinical studies fraud in which AI could be tweaked to overstate drug efficacy.

Open Notes launches OpenNotes Lab, which will advocate and study the use of AI to enhance trust and communication between patients and their care teams. The company is interesting in partnering with vendors, health systems, patient advocacy groups, professional associations, and regulatory agencies.

Contacts

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