Healthcare AI News 1/24/24

News

WHO publishes recommendations for governments on using AI for public health and medical purposes:

• Give developers access to computing power and paid data sets if they agree to follow ethical principles.
• Use laws and regulations to ensure that health-related use meets ethical obligations and human rights standards.
• Assign a regulatory agency to assess and approve health AI applications.
• Require third-party post-release auditing and impact assessments.
• WHO also recommends that AI developers include potential users and stakeholders in their work, including patients, and design their products to perform well-defined tasks that can improve health system capacity and patient interests.

Amazon is reportedly developing Alexa Plus, a GPT-enhanced version of its voice assistant that will be able to conduct conversations similar to ChatGPT, but with a subscription required to help the company cover the costs of running the AI models. Insiders who are involved with a limited preview say that the new Alexa is good at conducting conversations, but it still gives overly long or incorrect responses and sometimes fails to provide the desired answer. Insiders worry whether consumers will prove willing to pay for a new Alexa version given the market struggles of the current one.

OpenAI signs its first partnership with a university, in which Arizona State University students and faculty will use ChatGPT Enterprise to create personalized AI tutors and to expand their work with prompt engineering.

Google adds experimental AI features to its Chrome browser for tab organization, theme creation, and a “help me write” feature for posting online comments or reviews.

In India, Apollo Cancer Centre in Bangalore launches the country’s first AI-Precision Oncology Centre, which will use AI for diagnosis, risk assessment, development of treatment protocols, identifying patients for targeted therapy and immunotherapy, and patient and family education.

Business

Amazon lists the ways that Amazon Pharmacy is using AI:

• Converting unstructured prescription data into standard categories, such as dose and frequency, to speed up prescription processing by 90%, reduce errors, and to provide clear patient instructions.
• Forecast drug demand to make decisions about which medications to stock and where to store them.
• Provide customers with real-time insurance estimates and look for better pricing within Amazon’s programs such as Prime savings, RxPass, or automatic coupons.
• Help team members answer questions by summarizing internal documentation and knowledge bases.
• Batch refills for efficient filling based on when the prescription is needed.

Research

Cedars-Sinai investigators develop an AI model to predict outcomes for pancreatic cancer patients using biomarkers. Developing the model, called Molecular Twin, also provided new insight into the high predictive value of plasma proteins. They say that their low-resource “parsimonious model” approach, which uses commonly available pathology specimens and clinical data, can impact clinical care and democratize the use of precision medicine for treating cancer.

Other

The business school of Washington University in St. Louis will offer a symposium titled “AI and Innovation in Healthcare” on Thursday. A keynote speaker is Centene CEO Sarah London, MBA, whose background includes healthcare analytics and revenue cycle jobs with R1 RCM, Humedica, and Optum. The event is free for either virtual or in-person attendees.

In India, scammers use AI to impersonate the voice of a woman’s brother-in-law, convincing her to send them a mobile phone payment $400 to pay his daughter’s emergency hospital bill.

Contacts

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