Healthcare AI News 5/1/24

News

Google highlights the medical capabilities of its unreleased Med-Gemini AI models. The four models can provide text, image, and video outputs and are integrated with web search.

CLEW announces GA of its FDA-cleared, AI-powered system for early detection of patient deterioration. The company introduced its first AI prediction models for virtual ICUs in 2018 and has since expanded to cover all inpatient settings. CLEW’s CEO is industry long-timer Paul Roscoe, who has held leadership roles with Sentillion, The Advisory Board Company, Visionware, and Docent Health.

Several hundred nurses picket Kaiser Permanente San Francisco Medical Center to express their concerns that KP, which promotes itself as a leader in healthcare AI, will use the technology to improve its margins rather than patient care.

HHS OCR and CMS publish a rule that prohibits the use of patient care decision support tools –- their new name for what they previously called “clinical algorithms” – to discriminate based on race, color, national origin, sex, age, or disability. It requires Covered Entities to identify and review their use of any tools that take those factors into account to make sure they do not discriminate. It lists areas such as prior authorization, medical necessity determination, screening, risk prediction, diagnosis, prognosis, clinical decision-making, treatment planning, healthcare operations, and resource allocation in which race or ethnicity inputs might create discrimination.

Business

AI drug developer Xaira Therapeutics launches with $1 billion in capital. The company’s founding CEO is former Stanford University President Marc Tessier-Lavigne, PhD, who left that post in August 2023 when several of the research papers he published while working for Genentech were found to have used manipulated data.

Startup Dionysus Digital Health develops an AI-analyzed genetic test that it says can detect post-partum depression before symptoms appear. DoD has provided a $6 million grant for further study. The company hopes to earn FDA approval for the $250 test and have it covered by health insurance.

Quest Diagnostics will acquire PathAI’s Memphis-based digitized laboratory – the former Poplar Health, which it acquired in July 2021 — and convert it to Quest’s AI and digital R&D and solutions center to support its AmeriPath and Dermpath Diagnostics specialty pathology businesses. PathAI will continue to offer clinical trials services from its biopharma lab, which is a separate business.

Drug maker Moderna launches its own instance of ChatGPT that has been used by 80% of its employees. The company is using advanced analytics, image generation, and a library of 750 self-developed GPTs that help drive automation and productivity.  One of the GPTs evaluates optimal vaccine doses based on standard criteria and principles, supporting its conclusions with rationale, references, and charts that illustrate key findings, all of which are then reviewed by humans. The company identified its top 100 AI users to serve as champions and created an active internal AI forum. Moderna says that 40% of its active users have created GPTs and each user averages 120 ChatGPT Enterprise conversations each week.

Research

Researchers find that using AI to analyze the high-risk ECGs of hospitalized patients was associated with a 31% drop in all-cause mortality, the first randomized clinical trial to show that AI saves lives.

A study finds that ChatGPT-4 performed poorly in evaluating the data of chest pain patients to determine whether they should be admitted. Researchers noted particular concern that the model would give different risk estimates and test ordering recommendations for the same set of patient data that it reviewed more than once.

University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center researchers find that ChatGPT 3.5 can extract pathological classifications from lung cancer pathology reports with 89% accuracy, with most misclassifications being caused by lack of specialized pathology terminology and its faulty interpretation of TNM staging rules (tumor, number of affected nearby lymph nodes, and the presence of metastasis). The test was repeated using ChatGPT 4, which improved the model’s performance by 5% but at a higher cost.

Other

A Colorado attorney is suspended from the bar for one year and is fired by his law firm employer after admitting that he used ChatGPT to create legal documents. He says that he was trying to save his client money by using AI to perform case load research. ChatGPT generated what he says were “seemingly impeccable case law and case citations” that he didn’t double check, and a judge noticed that some of the cases cited were either incorrect or non-existent.

Contacts

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