Going to ask again about HealWell - they are on an acquisition tear and seem to be very AI-focused. Has…
Healthcare AI News 7/3/24
News
The American College of Radiology launches an AI quality assurance program for radiology facilities that covers governance, algorithm documentation, security and compliance adherence, documenting use cases, and monitoring algorithm performance.
Mayo Clinic receives a $20 million gift to fund AI projects as well as Mayo Clinic Platform. The donors are Nvidia SVP of Software Engineering Dwight Diercks and his wife Dian.
Business
PicnicHealth, which gives patients and life sciences companies access to medical records, announces an LLM that collects a patient’s medical records from all providers. The company says it product connects to 100% of US care sites, enabling patients to collect all their records and for life sciences companies to conduct observational studies. CEO Noga Leviner had no healthcare background when she co-founded the company in 2014.
Research
An MIT study finds that medical imaging AI models often use demographic shortcuts that cause them to issue biased predictions. The authors say that models may work when first trained (locally optimal), but may not maintain fairness in new environments (globally optimal). They caution that models can predict demographic information from images – such as race, sex, and age – and then use that and other data to make correlations that have no clinical basis.
Other
Anesthesiologist, informaticist, and AMA immediate past president Jesse Ehrenfeld, MD, MPH says that the AI in healthcare hype curve is peaking, but he notes that a recent survey of doctors found that 38% are using AI in their practices, almost all of it for back-end office tasks. He says that it was a mistake to design, develop, and deploy EHRs without enough physician involvement, and that same error could be repeated with AI development. He explains, “I see this with entrepreneurial companies, where there’s a physician who might be involved, but it’s an afterthought. They’re not really driving the development of the solution. That’s a problem.”
Rep. David Schweikert (R-AZ) introduces legislation that would require Medicare to pay for AI-powered remote devices. He previous introduced bills that would allow AI to prescribe as a practitioner and to amend the Social Security act to pay for telehealth consultations such as AI-monitored wearables.
I read about this Google search error and replicated it: searching for “114/74 blood pressure” brings up an AI Overview that says that this is an elevated reading. I repeated the test on Google Gemini as well as ChatGPT and both correctly indicated that the BP is normal. Interestingly, the AI Overview was correct when searching for 113/73 and 115/74, incorrect for 114/71, but when I searched for 114/75, it correctly said that’s normal but added “along with a pulse of 89 beats per minute” for some reason.
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RE: He says that it was a mistake to design, develop, and deploy EHRs without enough physician involvement, and that same error could be repeated with AI development
After some 40 years in the HIT/EHR world I’d like a nickle for every time I have heard this lament.
MDs have been involved in health informatics development from day one. Many at large teaching hospitals, for example Warner Slack at UW and Mass Gen. I remember going to a conference in 1975 were a doc was building a multi-phasic health screening tool on a PDP12. Technicon the first order entry system had a bullpen of MDs. And In the 1980’s Health Data Sciences was started by an MD, later acquired by McKesson. Today, all successful EMR firms that venture into clinical apps have one or more MDs on staff.
The problem/challenge I see in applying AI to with clinical apps is the broad number of medical protocols for a given diagnosis that are presented and seem to change every other month. For example: What if an AI tool were available in 1950s and a child presented with tonsilitis? Would the AI’s algorithms, built on the then current medical practice say – ‘take’m out’ or would it somehow come up with a 21st century protocol?
Seems every other medical school has different favored protocols for the same maladies, and as we learn more every day via research, they change. Somedays they even revert back to Grand Ma’s old prescriptions!
And Meditech had input from a Dr. Octo Barnett (spelling?), way WAY back in the late 60’s.
It’s a myth that physicians haven’t been part of EMR builds. Nurses too. It’s probably true that the input has been uneven, but most IT Analysts I know? There are clinical decisions (as coded into the EMR) we simply cannot make and we know it.
Most Physicians are practicing and therefore busy. Most programmers are busy too and most of that time? Having a clinician around is simply wasting their time.
There is another matter. I both like and respect most of the Physicians I have met. But there is a problem that can arise when multiple Docs are consulted… Ask 12 Docs for their opinion on something? You are very likely to get 6 different opinions.
The average IT Analyst is ill-equipped to resolve such differences. One way of doing it is to escalate to a CMO or CMIO.
No, I think there could be something else going on, to result in such a complaint. All parties make low level decisions, sometimes without insight into how those decisions affect the final product. Usually, if the completed product has issues? It’s too late to change course.
The imperative is to get the software into production. There may be mumbled promises that “we’ll fix that problematic workflow later”.