Healthcare AI News 12/4/24

News

Non-profit healthcare safety group ECRI names AI as its top healthcare technology hazard for 2025. Organization President and CEO Marcus Schabacker, MD, PhD said in the list’s announcement, “Balancing innovation in AI with privacy and safety will be one of the most difficult, and most defining, endeavors of modern medicine.”

Withings and the government of France launch Project DEEP, which will use AI and non-invasive medical device innovation to detect and prevent cardiometabolic diseases, with a $23 million investment.

Business

AI and precision medicine technology vendor Tempus will work with Northwestern Medicine to explore the use of AI in clinical care and research. Their first project involves cardiology, where the health system has deployed the company’s algorithm that helps physicians identify patients who may have a one-year risk of atrial fibrillation / flutter. The Tempus ECG-AF algorithm received FDA’s 510(k) clearance in June 2024.

Spectral AI completes its analysis of burn center images that will be used to train its AI-powered DeepView System for predicting wound healing outcomes.

Research

New York University Langone Health analyzes use of its private instance of ChatGPT by its employees, of whom 1,000 applied for access in a six-month period. Clinical and research users represented half of those requests, with the most common uses being writing, editing, summarizing, analyzing data, searching for new information, and generating ideas. Examples include creating teaching materials, drafting email responses, generating job descriptions, assessing clinical reasoning documentation, and translating SQL queries. Some users reported that they struggled to create prompts and saw occasional hallucinations.

Other

Politico reports that leading house Republications want HHS to end participation in non-government AI oversight groups, specifically the Coalition for Health AI. The lawmakers said in a letter to HHS that they are concerned about having ASTP’s Micky Tripathi serve as a CHAI board observer, stating that, “help us understand how putting the organization directly in control of market entry for innovative technologies does not represent a significant conflict of interest.”

A Brookings Institution report says that use of AI in healthcare could reduce the annual US budget deficit by 20% while expanding access. The analysts, who point out that every US industry except healthcare has improved productivity in the past 50 years, say that AI could help by automating appointment scheduling, patient flow management, and preliminary data analysis. They also predict that AI could improve preventative care and disease detection.

A developer creates They See Your Photos, which allows anyone to upload a photo to see the private information Google can glean from it. I sent it a HIMSS conference photo that it analyzed well, including a note that “many people are looking down at their mobile devices.”

Contacts

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