Healthcare AI News 2/12/25

News

Nine hospitals in the UK are using AI to prioritize high-risk patients who are stuck in the NHS’s 7.5 million-long waiting list. The C2-Ai system has flagged 1,000 patients who are at risk of deterioration during their wait to be seen, which reduced surgery-related complications and shortened inpatient stays by four days. 

Mass General Brigham and IBM partner through the IBM Sustainability Accelerator to develop an AI tool that will predict extreme heat events, identify at-risk patients, and send warnings to those who are at risk. Previous research indicates that heat event days will cause 235,000 ED visits, 56,000 hospital admissions, and $1 billion in costs, much of that in urban areas. 

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman predicts in a blog post that AI will soon reach human-level problem-solving ability (AGI), a transformation that will be comparable to the invention of the transistor. Key points:

• AI intelligence scales predictably with investment since it correlates with the log of resources used.
• AI costs drop 10x every 12 months, far outpacing Moore’s law.
• Exponential AI investment will persist due to its super-exponential socioeconomic value.
• AI agents will handle most tasks of mid-level professionals but won’t generate big ideas, will require human oversight, and will still fail in some areas.
• AGI’s greatest impact will likely be in science.

Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD urges the FDA not to classify AI as a medical device if it simply synthesizes and presents information, warning that excessive regulation could hinder AI integration into EHRs and limit its ability to generate clinical insights. He emphasizes that AI is most effective when it is embedded in physician workflows with access to EHR data.

Business

Australia-based Harrison.ai, which offers AI diagnostic solutions for radiology and pathology imaging, raises a $112 million Series C funding round. The company will use the proceeds to expand its US operations.

Cedars-Sinai nurses are piloting an AI tool that was developed by Aiva Health, which was developed through the hospital’s accelerator program. Nurses dictate into the nurse assistant app, which then populates Epic fields upon their approval.

Research

An American Medical Association survey finds that two-thirds of physicians recognize the benefit of AI. Use of AI in practice doubled in one year to 66%, while 57% see administrative burden as its biggest opportunity.

Other

A student-run media site profiles how Brown University Health physicians are using AI, including simplifying the language of surgical consent forms and using OpenAI’s Voice Engine to provide patients who have lost their voice with a text-to-speech tool that sounds like them.

Harvard Medical School psychiatrist and bioethics professor Rebecca Brendel, MD, JD ponders whether AI should be used in end-of-life decision-making, raising these issues:

• Clinicians will respect the wishes of a patient as long as they are competent to make decisions and don’t want something that is medically contraindicated.
• AI might help after the initial diagnosis if decisions will be made between treatment and palliation.
• It might also help in situations where patients are incapacitated, have few relationships, and have avoided treatment.
• It’s not enough to decide from the odds of survival alone since people who have experienced a sudden tragedy wouldn’t necessarily have the same wishes as someone who has battled a chronic illness over time.
• Decisions of high consequence should always be made by humans.
• Information asymmetry has always caused healthcare professionals to be held in high esteem, but AI might outperform humans in some aspects, which would shift professional emphasis to how they use information and interact with patients.

Contacts

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