Healthcare AI News 8/7/24

News

CHIME publishes a report of 10 principles, with detailed recommendations for each, that will ensure the ethical and effective implementation of AI in healthcare.

Amazon’s One Medical team is reportedly considering developing an AI agent called DoctorAI that would optimize clinician tasks, make product and service recommendations, and manage customer service requests.

In England, NHS trusts are using patient engagement prediction software from Deep Medical to identify patients who are likely to no-show or cancel their appointments with short notice. Volunteers reach out to the patients who are identified by the system three weeks ahead of time to see if they need assistance – such as with transport, translation, or parking fees – and to reschedule their appointments in the event of conflicts. NHS England says that patients don’t show up for 6.4% of its 125 million outpatient appoints each year at a cost of nearly $2 billion.

FDA announces the members of its newly formed Digital Health Advisory Committee, which will hold its first meeting in November to discuss total product life cycle considerations for AI-enabled devices.

Switzerland-based Sonova introduces the first hearing aid that uses real-time AI to improve speech clarify from background noise.

Business

CMS approves separate Medicare payment for Annalise.ai’s obstructive hydrocephalus portion of its critical care platform. The company says the solution, which triages non-contrast brain CT scans, is the only radiology triage device that can be billed for additional hospital payment.

Research

Researchers find that ChatGPT isn’t good at diagnosing patient conditions. It incorrectly analyzed half of a set of the 150 case challenges it was given, where it struggled with interpreting lab values and imaging results and failed to use complete information that was relevant to the diagnosis. They found that it works well as an educational tool, did a good job with differential diagnosis, and accurately suggested next diagnostic steps.

Other

In England, nine hospital trusts are using Ufonia’s Dora conversational clinical assistant to call patients three weeks after their cataract surgery and alert clinicians if they need further care. Two-thirds patients who undergo cataract surgery, which is performed 500,000 times per year, do not require an in-person appointment. The company is a spin-off of Oxford Unversity.

A pain patient’s op-ed piece expresses skepticism about AI in healthcare:

• Hospitals could have already solved the same patient problems if they really wanted to.
• The real motivation for health systems to use AI is to make more money rather than to lower patient bills.
• AI-drafted responses and emails to patients are easy to spot, and many of the initial patient emails were generated because of inefficient policies, such as requiring patients who have incurable conditions to contact their doctor every month to have their pain medication refill approved.

Contacts

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