Healthcare AI News 12/20/23

News

OpenAI posts a guide to GPT prompt engineering, explaining six strategies with examples:

• Write clear instructions. 
• Provide reference text.
• Split complex tasks into subtasks.
• Give the model time to think.
• Use external tools.
• Test changes systematically.

Dictionary.com names the AI-related usage of “hallucinate” as its word of the year for 2023, the same year it was added to the dictionary.

Business

Healthcare ambient AI company Nabla announces that 10% of its clinician users were taking advantage of its recently released Spanish translation capability within its first four months, with especially high adoption among psychiatrists, psychologists, and psychotherapists. Two of the company’s three co-founders are former Facebook AI research engineers.

Healthcare payment integrity company Trend Health Partners acquires Advent Health Partners, which uses AI to assemble and present medical records for denials management, utilization management, bill reviews, and DRG reviews.

High-profile investor Vinod Khosla tells conference attendees that AI will impact healthcare by nudging patients to perform preventive health activities. He also says that clinicians practice “crude medicine” by using the same medications on every patient despite their unique genetic characteristics, predicting that medicines will be tailored to individual patients.

Healthcare AI vendor John Snow Labs deploys a medical chatbot using its own large language model running Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The model provides detailed answers with citations to its research sources, serving as a personal research assistant to the latest biomedical literature or personal document repositories.

Research

A small study finds that AI can accurately screen people for autism spectrum disorder, and possibly determine its level of severity, from photos of their eyes.

Other

Eric Topol, MD of Scripps Research Translational Institute says that with cancer screening, “we’ve got this all wrong” because only 12 to 14% of cancers are being diagnosed via mass screening at a cost of tens or hundreds of billions of dollars each year. He adds that false positives create patient anxiety and it’s “so dumb” that the screening is based on age and misses major cancers among younger people. He says that AI can define individual risk by analyzing clinical notes, test results, and polygenic risk scores.

HHS’s use of AI ranks it #4 among federal government agencies, with projects that include:

• Generating clinical study reports using Phase I and II study data.
• Providing first responders with an app that tell them how many Medicare beneficiaries in a given area use electricity-dependent medical devices.
• NIH’s use of an AI tool to rank incoming grant applications to highlight those that address high-priority topics.
• CDC’s use of AI for surveillance testing.
• According to a GAO report, HHS is using an AI chatbot to provide automated email responses for physical security questions.

Bill Gates recaps 2023 by saying that it was the first time he used AI for serious work and “not just to mess around and create parody song lyrics for my friends,” predicting that AI will be used by a significant part of the US population within 24 months. He expects that in healthcare, AI will accelerate discovery of new drugs, predict antibiotic resistance and recommend optimal therapy, serve as a co-pilot for managing high-risk pregnancies, assess risk for HIV, and creating a voice-powered standardized patient record in Pakistan.

Mass General Brigham asks its experts for their 2024 predictions, many of which involved AI:

• Personalizing treatment plans, surgical precision, and post-operative monitoring in neurosurgery.
• Integrating AI into radiology practices.
• Using AI Improvements that allow efficient updating for safety and effectiveness.
• Using AI chatbots for initial patient triage.
• Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet acquiring key health AI players as the overall market consolidates.
• Deploying AI-inspired robots to support home caregivers for people with spinal cord injury.
• Using digital twins.

Contacts

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