Healthcare AI News 5/15/24

News

OpenAI releases GPT-4o (the “o” stands for “omni”):

• All users, including those who use the free plan, will have access to the new version.
• Users can carry on voice conversations with ChatGPT with faster responses and can interrupt it when it is talking.
• The system can perform real-time language translation.
• It can interpret photos, screen shots, and other documents in real time.
• It can return real-time information from the web.

Google announces enhancements related to Gemini AI:

• Addition of 1.5 Flash, which is optimized for speed and efficiency with a lighter weight than 1.5 Pro.
• Adding audio understanding to Gemini 1.5 Pro.
• Extending Project Astra, the next generation of AI assistants that can understand real-time video and conduct conversations about what it sees, which can be extended to phones or glasses.
• Adding Gemini-powered AI Overviews to results from Google Search.
• Enhancing Google Photos with Ask Photos, which can find photos in response to user queries.
• Enhancing Gmail with generation of summaries and replies, complex search and the ability to analyze attachments.

Google launches AlphaFold3, which offers a 50% improvement in analyzing and predicting molecules for biology-related research and drug discovery.

Business

CLEW Medical’s learning models for predicting patient deterioration receive FDA’s 510(k) clearance

An Amazon Web Services blog post describes how Japan’s Fujita Health University used Amazon Bedrock’s managed AI service to generate discharge summaries, which it says reduced time requirements by 90 minutes to about 1 minute per patient.

An interesting Forbes article features digital health Investor Glen Tullman:

• He says that telehealth is dead, declaring that “all of the virtual care we’re doing now is going to move to chat.”
• His latest venture Transcarent – which has reached a $2.2 billion valuation for its chat-based primary care services —  is creating an AI chatbot that can answer a patient’s questions about their health plan, such as those that are related to deductibles and in-network doctors.
• Tullman says that Transcarent’s $100 million acquisition of 98point6 in 2023 gave it 1 million doctor-patient chat conversations that it is using for AI validation and testing.
• He says that Teladoc Health – onto which he unloaded Livongo for $18.5 billion in 2020 – saw its market cap shrink to around $2 billion because of poor leadership and the high cost of conducting video visits.

Sift Healthcare raises a $20 million Series B funding round to expand its AI tools that tie clinical information to financial outcomes to predict “adverse payment outcomes” and calculate patient responsibility upfront.

SmarterDx, which uses AI to audit and review medical claims, raises $50 million in a Series B funding round.

Other

A Wall Street Journal report on how professionals are using AI profiles a Mass General primary care doctor who says that ambient documentation is “incredibly accurate,” never requires major editing of the notes it creates, and allows her to interact with patients rather than typing.

America in a nutshell: a researcher finds that ChatGPT creates more compelling GoFundMe pitches for donations from strangers to cover catastrophic medical expenses. He notes, however, that sometimes AI creates stories and images that are too polished, which turns off potential donors. A research team used ChatGPT to rewrite the stories of 900 medical crowd-funding projects, where it added emotion and direct calls-to-action to move people to open their wallets.

Contacts

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