Healthcare AI News 12/18/24

News

The House Task Force on Artificial Intelligence publishes its findings and recommendations, which include:

• Challenges include data availability and quality, incomplete or inaccurate responses, non-individualized recommendations, lack of decision transparency, data privacy, interoperability with existing systems, liability for AI-contributed errors, biased decision making, and deployment for financial gain rather than patient care.
• AI can help improve the percentage of drugs that are eventually approved by FDA by streamlining study design, finding study patients, and answering patient questions.
• AI can assist radiologists by performing first-pass image screening, cleaning up images, and applying consistent interpretation criteria across all patients and locations.
• Clinical decision support can be tailored to an individual patient’s symptoms and medical history and can compare their data to the medical literature or a “patients like this one” model.
• AI can use population health data to predict response to initiatives among population groups.
• Physician burnout can be reduced by deploying AI-assisted clinical documentation.
• AI can reduce the administrative burden of the prior authorization process.
• CMS will need to evaluate Medicare payment for algorithms and other AI tools.
• AI has potential in medical management, but could create unnecessary denials.
• Innovation will require standardization of EHR-specific data formats to be applicable to broader populations and for AI training.
• HIPAA may require updating to meet the challenges of provider AI deployment.

Principal Deputy ASTP/National Coordinator Steven Posnack, MS, MHS says that healthcare AI should not be strictly regulated since it is constantly changing and because risk tolerance varies by setting, such as back office support versus patient care versus research.

A technology reporter shares five weeks of her Apple Health information with ChatGPT and finds that with no prompting, it analyzes trends and makes personalized suggestions for improvement, weaving seemingly unrelated statistics into a fitness journey story.

OpenAI makes the ChatGPT search function available to free users (it was previously available only to paying users) and adds voice-integrated search.

ASTP publishes a downloadable inventory of HHS AI use cases, documenting 66% more than a year ago.

Business

Company insiders say that most of the work of EvenUp — which calculates the value of a personal injury case by analyzing customer medical records and case files — is performed by humans rather than the AI that the company touts to investors. Former employees of the startup, which is valued at $1 billion, say that the AI system misses injuries, hallucinates medical conditions, and is not reliable in analyzing doctor visits, leading managers to tell employees not to use it.

Other

Google Cloud’s healthcare solutions director Aashima Gupta, MS predicts the short-term use of AI to be focused on routine tasks such as appointment scheduling and processing forms, clinical documentation, communication, claims processing, marketing outreach, and use of AI agents for member and provider communications. She expects longer-term AI uses to include enhanced access, enhanced imaging screening and early detection, use of AI as a health concierge, multilingual support, medication reminders, and care navigation advice.

The UK’s National Health Service is using AI to identify patients who are at risk for high usage of emergency services, who are then offered coaching and in-home support.

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Healthcare AI News 12/11/24

News

OpenAI launches AI-driven video generator Sora, then disables it when it is overloaded from heavy traffic. It can generate video from text instructions and existing media, but only up to a final length of 20 seconds. The company also releases its Canvas feature to all ChatGPT users, which allows users to work on writing and coding projects with increase editing capability.

Google announces Willow, a new quantum chip that performs a benchmark computation in under five minutes versus the 10 septillion years that is required by the fastest supercomputers.

Business

Corewell Health chooses Abridge for ambient clinical documentation, with a rollout to 4,000 physicians planned.

Research

A Washington State University sociologist finds that rural clinics aren’t ready to use AI to optimize proactive text messages to patients. An AI-polished lung screening message drew fewer responses than the traditional one and more than 50% of all sent messages bounced back as undeliverable, raising the question of how the clinic could contact its patients in an emergency. The local hospital also noted that the area has a high population of Hispanics, which raised its own messaging challenges.

Other

Corpus Christi Medical Center Chief of Surgery Michael Ewing, MD credits his use of MedQuill’s newly launched SurgeOn Scribe – which he helped create — to saving an hour of clinic time each day. 

Joe Raetano, the VA’s AI architect, says that the organization is using AI to extract social determinants of health from clinical notes and to manage patient data via an agentic chatbot.

In England, a woman credits AI with saving her life after her lung cancer was diagnosed by Royal Surry NHS Foundation Trust using AI imaging triage tool Annalise.ai.

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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.”

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Healthcare AI News 11/20/24

News

Microsoft enhances Microsoft 365 Copilot with task automation, new agents for Teams meetings and employee self-service, and a Copilot Control System for IT management.

Samsung rolls out One UI 6 Watch features to older models, which adds AI-powered tools such as health recommendations, sleep analysis, and sleep apnea detection.

Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Department of Biomedical Informatics and InterSystems will work together on biomedical informatics and AI research. VUMC-DBMI will develop FHIR and interoperability training coursework that includes hands-on labs that will use InterSystems products.

BrightHeart earns FDA 510 (k) clearance for its AI-powered analysis of fetal heart ultrasounds.

Washington University School of Medicine and BJC Health System launch the Center for Health AI, which will focus on using AI to personalize patient care.

The National Institutes of Health develops an AI algorithm called TrialGPT that matches patients to clinical trials for which they are eligible.

Business

Stepful – whose AI platform delivers training to working adults for medical jobs such as medical assistant, pharmacy technician, and surgical technician – raises $32 million in a Series B funding round. The company expects to train 30,000 students this year in programs that can be completed in as little as four months for $2,500. It matches its students to one of its 8,000 partner clinics and hospitals for hands-on training.

Research

Cedars-Sinai investigators develop an AI-powered process to automate the classification of patients by the severity of their cancer, which could help get them into clinical trials faster.

Other

The New York Times runs an article titled “Elon Musk Asked People to Upload Their Health Data. X Users Obliged.” Experts warn that posting images to any AI tool is not protected by HIPAA, also noting that X’s terms of service allows the company to share data with related companies.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk responds to a small study in which doctors who used ChatGPT to diagnose test patients using only their case histories performed only slightly better than those who didn’t use it, but ChatGPT by itself outperformed the doctors. Experts say that nobody really knows how doctors think, especially when they use their personal experience or intuition to diagnose patients.

A user of Google’s Gemini AI chatbot posts screenshots a session where it went off the rail when asked a question about households.

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Healthcare AI News 11/13/24

News

Google launches Learn About, a conversational AI learning companion that helps users learn about any topic.

Inovalon founder and CEO Keith Dunleavy, MD donates $6 million to his alma mater, Harvard Medical School, to expand education in AI in healthcare. 

Business

AI-powered doc-in-the-box manufacturer Forward, which said at the November 2023 launch of its CarePod that it hoped to deploy 3,200 of the machines in the next year, shuts down. The company had raised $650 million in funding. Former employees said key problems were lack of patient interest, skeptical commercial building landlords, blood draw technology failures that forced the company to stop offering lab tests, and machines that left patients stuck inside. Forward managed to install just five of the devices, which cost $1 million each to build. My analysis of the original announcement wasn’t optimistic.

Maverick Medical AI launches CodePilot, which offers real-time medical coding and MIPS/MACRA compliance notifications. 

Apple is preparing to launch its first AI hardware device, an Echo-like wall mounted smart display for homes that will allow users to control apps, use FaceTime as an intercom, play music, and eventually to operate a robotic arm.

Research

Johns Hopkins researchers train a robot by showing it videos of surgical procedures, after which the da Vinci Surgical System robot performed as well as a human doctor in manipulating a needle, lifting tissue, and suturing. The imitation learning involved videos that were recorded on cameras that were attached to da Vinci robots all over the world. The robot even learned behaviors that weren’t contained in the videos, such as picking up a dropped needle.

Researchers use AI-analyzed computer vision to predict neurological changes in NICU babies.

Other

A UCSD hospital neurology ICU nurse who is also the nursing union rep says that he is terrified by “the creep of AI in our hospitals.” He observes:

• A billionaire Qualcomm executive funded the hospital’s new construction, a technical connection that he speculates as to why “they dive headfirst into this AI thing.”
• The hospital replaced an Epic patient acuity application with an AI-based one that he says “felt like magic, but not in a good way” because it eliminated nurse involvement and didn’t explain its logic.
• He says that ambient documentation is like mass surveillance that will be used to “track nurses” as was done with RFID tracking tags.
• He concludes that the real goal of applying AI isn’t patient safety, but to increase nurse efficiency and make them “operators of the machines.”

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Healthcare AI News 11/6/24

News

Adventist Health Rideout uses Viz.ai to reduce the time that is required to transfer suspected stroke patients to a hospital that offers specialty care from 202 minutes to 109. The system analyzes the CT scan and alerts the care team if it detects a potential stroke. The data is preliminary, as the hospital has used the technology on just 10 patients since it launched in May 2024.

OpenAI adds web searching capability to ChatGPT. It also collects up-to-date search results from news and data providers and displays them in visual categories such as weather, news, and maps. Results include source links. Unlike Google’s search results, it does not display promoted links, advertisements, or sources that are of questionable quality.

OpenNotes and Abridge partner to research the effectiveness of patient visit summaries that are generated from ambient listening by having those patients evaluate them.

Business

Aignostics, which applies AI to digital pathology to support precision medicine, raises $34 million in a Series B funding round. Mayo Clinic participated in the round and will work with the company to develop foundation models and biopharma product offerings.

Snoop Dog-backed cannabis biotech Oxford Cannabinoid Technologies collaborates with Oxford University to use AI drug discovery to develop non-addictive, cannabinoid-based pain medications. The company also announced that its shares will be de-listed because they have lost 97% of their value, leaving it with a market cap of $3 million.

France-based insurance startup Alan, which allows customers to ask questions to doctors via a chat interface and receive an answer back in 15 minutes, adds a virtual assistant to the feature. The virtual assistant, which is called Mo, rephrases the question and then asks if the person would rather interact with a doctor or Mo. Conversations with Mo are checked within 15 minutes by a doctor who can correct its recommendations. The company says it will enhance the tool to provide personalized guidance based on context and the user’s health history.

Research

The National Cancer Institute awards Pieces Technologies a $2 million grant to develop a conversational AI agent that will allow cancer patients the ability to ask questions about their care. The system, which will also collect social determinants of health information, will be co-developed by MetroHealth.

Penn State researchers find that patients are more satisfied with using a medical AI chatbot if the system remembers their social information and makes small talk about their job and hobbies. 

Other

Nvidia’s healthcare VP says that the next wave of AI will turn medical devices into robots. Kimberly Powell predicts that “This physical AI thing is coming where your whole hospital is going to turn into an AI.”

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Healthcare AI News 10/23/24

News

Amazon One Medical launches AI tools for its 1Life proprietary EHR – ambient documentation, a summarized medical history, draft responses to patient messages, and workflow routing.

Anthropic releases a beta developer version of Claude’s API that adds “computer use” capability, in which developers can program interaction with a user’s computer such as looking at a screen, moving the cursor, clicking buttons, and typing text.

Google Cloud announces GA of Vertex AI Search for Healthcare along with new features of its Healthcare Data Engine.

GE HealthCare announces CareIntellect for Oncology, which summarizes clinical reports, flags deviations from a patient’s treatment plan, and identifies relevant clinical trials.

The Coalition for Health AI (CHAI) publishes draft frameworks of how it will certify independent quality assurance labs and standardize their test results into what it compares to a nutrition label for AI product performance and safety.

Aidoc and Nvidia will co-develop a framework for integrating AI into clinical workflows.

Business

Ozarks Healthcare will integrate Avo’s AI clinical decision support with its Meditech EHR. The tools include scribing, chart summary and care guide, and the ability for clinicians to ask clinical questions about the patient’s information and relevant medical evidence.

Zoom will integrate Suki’s ambient documentation into Zoom Workplace for Clinicians, a recently announced paid offering.

Atropos Health announces GA of ChatRWD, an AI co-pilot that generates real-world evidence to answer clinical questions.

Tennr, which offers AI-powered healthcare document processing, raises $37 million in Series B funding.

AI-driven patient preference and informed consent system vendor HealthEx raises $14 million in seed and Series A funding.

Artera announces new AI co-pilots to its Harmony patient communications platform: Staff (translation, predictive text for patient inquiries, message shortening, and conversation summaries that can be saved to the EHR) and Insights (no-show reports).

HCA Healthcare selects Commure to develop and deploy ambient AI. Commure closed its $139 million acquisition of ambient documentation technology vendor Augmedix in July 2024.

Research

Researchers develop a system of AI-powered GoPro cameras that detects when the wrong drug syringe or vial is being used to prepare a patient’s doses, which the authors note could prevent serious medication errors in ORs, ICUs, and EDs.

Other

Harvard Medical School adds a required month-long AI course for students in its MD/PhD translational medicine program and engineering program that it offers with MIT.

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Healthcare AI News 10/16/24

News

Patient engagement startup Parakeet Health launches its generative AI voice platform for health system contact centers and raises $3 million in seed funding.

Luma Health announces AI products for healthcare call centers: a fax processing tool and a patient-facing voice AI concierge.

Business

MIT News profiles alumni-founded Ambience Healthcare, which offers an ambient documentation solution that is being used in 40 large institutions.

Johnson & Johnson lists six ways it is using AI:

• Creating and analyzing videos of surgeries to create “highlight reels” for training, collaboration, and support.
• Create 3D maps for surgical procedures.
• Analyze de-identified EHR data to identify disease targets and drugs.
• Support clinical trial recruitment.
• Analyze genomic and clinical data from diagnostic tests to target treatments and identify candidates for clinical trials.
• Predict drug supply and demand to optimize distribution of products where they are needed most.

Research

A retrospective cohort study of Yale New Haven Health System medical-surgical inpatients finds that the accuracy of six AI-powered early warning tools for patient deterioration varies widely. ECARTv5 and the National Early Warning score were the top performers, while Epic’s Deterioration Index had the lowest positive predictive value. The authors recommend that health systems verify how the tools work and oversee their use.

Other

Angela Elena Olazaran Laureano, a 17-year-old student in rural Mexico, is chosen from 11,000 nominations to win a $100,000 student prize for her work developing an AI-powered virtual medical assistant that provides basic diagnosis for 21 conditions and warns users if they are likely to be contagious. She was previously part of robotics team that won the national Home Care Challenge. She will use the award to create a STEM classroom in her home town.

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Healthcare AI News 10/9/24

News

WVU Medicine implements an AI-powered search system that allows employees to search for content that is contained in internal documents, such as clinical protocols, how-to guides, and tip sheets. It plans to eventually offer searching across all of its sites as well as across all Epic-using hospitals.

A newly signed California bill requires providers to include a specifically formatted disclaimer when AI was used in patient-facing clinical communication that has not been reviewed by a licensed provider. The communication must also contain instructions for the patient to contact an appropriate person.

HHS Assistant Technology for Technology Policy and AI leader Micky Tripathi, PhD, MPP says that HHS is looking at ways to create AI models using its vast data stores, but he cautions that its data is inherently biased since it excludes people who don’t have insurance or who don’t seek care from providers.

Wyoming’s Medicaid program approves coverage of Canvas DX, an online tool that assesses autism using family-provided information and videos. Families can use the tool instead of trying to find one of the few state clinicians that can administer the ADOS test.

The American College of Radiology will participate in the FDA’s program to boost innovation in breakthrough devices. FDA has expanded the program for its cardiology device origins to include neurology, ophthalmology, and radiology.

Business

The authors of a literature review on AI in healthcare suggest that its public health impact will be limited by the “politics of avoidance,” where the US health system’s treatment-focused model ignores broader social determinants of health. They express concern that the hype around AI may overshadow more effective, evidence-based interventions like using community health workers and implementing harm reduction programs, which address root causes rather than just offering suggestions for treating symptoms.

Research

A test of GPT-4’s ability to provide clinical recommendations for ED visits – including admission status, radiology requests, and antibiotic prescriptions – finds that it performs poorly compared to medical residents. Its recommendations were often overly cautious and called for medically unnecessary admissions and orders.

A review of AI-powered, FDA-approved medical devices finds that most did not include race or ethnicity, socioeconomic data, and the ages of study participants in their submitted approval documentation. The authors conclude that the lack of consistency and data transparency may exacerbate health disparities

Other

Drug maker Eli Lilly and Company names Thomas Fuchs, DrSc as its inaugural chief AI officer, where he will be tasked with leading the company’s AI initiatives in drug discovery, clinical trials, and manufacturing. He was previously chair of the AI program at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Mayo Clinic will use a $25 million donation to provide funding and work time for its clinicians to purse AI-related projects.

Four high-profile cancer centers use $40 million in tech company funding to form the Cancer AI Alliance, which will study their collective patient data to find clinical insights.

US Army researchers develop SeptiBurnAlert, which uses AI to analyze the blood samples of burn patients to detect sepsis-related components. The system predicts risk within the first 24 hours of hospitalization with high accuracy. The team has applied for a patent and hopes to bring the product to the commercial market in three years, pending FDA approval. They are also working with companies that want to product a handheld device.

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Healthcare AI News 10/2/24

News

Microsoft releases a major enhancement to Copilot that adds conversational capabilities, a virtual news presenter that will read headlines, webpage history recall, and the ability to answer questions about the text and images on a browser page.

FDA will hold the first meeting of its Digital Health Advisory Committee on November 20-21, which will address lifecycle considerations for AI-enabled medical devices. The session will be available via webcast with no registration required.

Business

Claimable launches an AI-powered appeals platform to provide documentation to help patients protest health insurer medication coverage denials for 60 major treatments. The service costs $39.95 per appeal and the company submits appeals via fax and first class mail. It claims that 80% of its appeals are accepted and most cases are resolved in less than 10 days.

WellSpan Health uses Hippocratic AI to develop an AI-powered conversational agent that contacts patients by telephone to close gaps in care.

GE HealthCare closes its $51 million cash acquisition of the ultrasound AI business of Intelligent Ultrasound Group.

Research

Clinicians compare the usefulness of OpenAI’s o1-preview, which features enhanced reasoning, to ChatGPT GPT-4 for medical AI:

• The new version can perform advanced, step by step reasoning. The effect on diagnostic accuracy has not yet been studied.
• o1-preview is slower.
• GPT-4 is good for patient communication and medical advice, while the new version is better at complex reasoning, genetic analysis, and research. The value of those changes for specific medical specialties has not yet been studied.
• GPT-4 is more prone to hallucinate.
• GPT-4 is better at human-like conversation.
• While transparency is limited with both versions, the new version provides chain of thought for double checking.
• GPT-4 is trained to provide information that is broad but not deep, while o1-preview applies PhD-level reasoning in physics, chemistry, and biology.

A ChatGPT review of 725 websites of clinics that promote “complementary” and “alternative” medicine finds that 97% contain false or misleading claims, including some that relate to cancer treatment.

Other

A woman is told by the ED doctor who sent her home that her face pain and drooping was not concerning gets a second (and correct) opinion from ChatGPT, which advised her to seek immediate medical attention for what was possible Bell’s palsy. She want back to the ED, where the doctor agreed with the diagnosis and started treatment immediately.

A study of LinkedIn and Glassdoor job postings that mention AI finds that Mount Sinai Health System is #6.

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Healthcare AI News 9/25/24

News

The New York Times covers physician use of Epic’s In Basket Art to create draft responses to patient questions that have been submitted using MyChart. Some major health systems decided not to use the technology over concerns that doctors would approve responses without reviewing them, while others thought that patients would recognize the message as AI generated and devalue it. An Epic study found that doctors are sending unedited responses to one-third of messages. Duke Health Chief Health Information Officer Eric Poon, MD, MPH says that Epic’s product creates drafts that are still “moderate in quality,” which keeps doctors vigilant in looking for mistakes, but ponders whether they will let their guard down as the AI gets smarter. A Duke colleague adds that it tried to get Epic’s product to stop giving clinical advice, but “we couldn’t take out its instinct to try to be helpful.”

OpenAI will roll out Advanced Voice to paying subscribers of ChatGPT this week. The enhancement adds speedier conversational responses, the ability to pause when interrupted, and additional voices. However, it reportedly does not support web search, custom GPTs, images, or unlimited use.

Google Cloud releases upgraded versions of its Gemini 1.5 chat-based AI assistant that it says are twice as fast at half the cost, with the capability of handling 1,000-page PDFs and hour-long videos. The company says that its Cloud and DeepMind divisions are developing new AI products and models and that developers are starting to use Gemini to create their own chatbots and voice assistants. Google has added the standalone Gemini app to Google Workspace.

The Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI) will work with the Consumer Technology Association to create standards for post-market market surveillance of non-prescription health devices  and for evaluating and assessing AI/ML products.

Business

London-based Noki.ai announces an ambient AI medical companion that can transcribe visit conversions, automate scheduling, manage forms, verify insurance, display a patient dashboard, and exchange data in FHIR format. Monthly pricing ranges from free to $299 based on functionality and usage limits.

Ferrum Health, which offers a secure platform for health systems to deploy AI, raises $16 million in a Series A funding round. Co-founder and CEO Pelu Tran founded Augmedix in 2012, which at that time hoped to commercialize the use of Google Glass for medical documentation. He dropped out of Stanford’s medical school weeks before graduating to work on Augmedix full time, then left the company in 2018 and started Ferrum.

Healthcare AI call agent developer Hippocratic AI adds $17 million to its Series A funding round that was led by Nvidia’s venture arm, increasing its total raised to $137 million.

Research

A study finds that real-time screening of medical claims using AI can reduce healthcare fraud, waste, and abuse by allowing questionable charges to be reviewed before payment instead of after. Tests found that such screening reduced claim payments by 1.2%. 

Researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital use AI to improve the accuracy of results from the PREVENT cardiac risk calculator by calibrating it to local populations. The authors conclude that the black box nature of AI applications can be tailored while preserving their functionality.

Other

Singapore’s health minister says that general practitioners will use AI for assessing health risks, prescribing drugs, and recommending lifestyle changes, which will eventually be powered by mandatory use of its national EHR program. Ong Ye Kung told conference attendees that, “We have medical records, we have genome data, we have lifestyle data, we have socioeconomic data, and the technology is already available. We can train very sophisticated, high parameters, AI models to identify risk factors and to predictive preventive care.” He says that Singapore’s biggest health challenge is the “buffet syndrome,” where patients are overtreated because their insurance pays.

AAMC News profiles David Fajgenbaum, MD, MBA, who as a medical student in 2010 was dying of organ failure but was saved by experimental chemotherapy. The Penn Medicine professor created Every Cure, which uses AI to score 3,000 approved drugs for their possible use in treating other conditions, which gets them into the hands of patients quickly and inexpensively. That organization was awarded $48 million in federal funding earlier this year.

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Healthcare AI News 9/18/24

News

An 18-month study by Toronto’s St. Michael’s Hospital finds that its use of the Chartwatch AI system that predicts patient deterioration was associated with a 26% drop in unexpected deaths. The system was developed with startup Signal 1.

Duke Health will partner with SAS to apply analytics, AI, and machine learning to healthcare operations.

A survey of 1,000 UK-based family doctors finds that one-fifth are already using AI in their clinical practice despite a lack of official guidance or work policies. About one-fourth of respondents report using AI to generate after-visit documentation, reviewing possible diagnoses, and suggesting treatments.

Business

Precision medicine technology vendor Tempus AI announces the beta launch of Olivia, an AI-enabled app that organizes the user’s personal health information.

Healthcare AI startup Evidium chooses Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to develop and train its AI models.

The director of professional services of virtual care solution provider OnCall Health by Qualifacts describes how a self-developed ChatGPT-powered form builder tool is saving the cost of at least one FTE. The tool, which took one afternoon to develop, allows customers to create their own forms that ChatGPT then turns into JSON code that the company’s platform can read.

Research

Oregon Health & Science University researchers determine that large language models outperform up to 75% of students on a test from an introductory course in biomedical and health informatics. The LLM outperformed students in answering questions quickly and with proper grammar and spelling. The authors express concern that such assessments could be gamed, especially for online courses whose exams are taken without in-person proctoring.

Other

Yale New Haven Health says that it has 50 AI projects underway and is already using it to predict patient outcomes, offer guidance for therapy selection, automate documentation, and prioritize radiology cases.

Oracle Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison calls for “omnipresent AI cameras” that maintain civil order by making people aware that they are being watched. Ellison says we’re already partly there with ever-present security cameras, police body cameras, and video technology running on doorbells and vehicle dashboards. He also says that high-speed police chases are unnecessary when autonomous drones could follow a car anywhere. He didn’t mention whether that concept could apply to the products of Oracle Health.

I ran across a weird but cool AI app called SocialAI. It’s like a private version of Twitter, except that you will instantly gain thousands of adoring followers that are actually AI bots of whatever type you choose – thinkers, trolls, jokesters, etc. – that will dutifully and realistically interact to whatever you post. It is compelling, entertaining, and perhaps useful for people who are stressed, lonely, creatively blocked, or reflective. My first post was “I’m bored – tell me something motivating” and the responses were realistic and generally useful, especially for folks whose primary social interaction is via keyboard. Imagine (positively and negatively) if the bots were programmed to support someone who has a significant medical condition or who is fretting over an impending medical decision. I posted that I was stressed at work and the responses were empathetic and actionable.

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Healthcare AI News 9/11/24

News

Apple announces Apple Intelligence, which will add AI capabilities to the latest models of IPhones, MacBooks, and IPads with the launch of IOS 18 later this month. It will include:

• Writing tools that can rewrite text, proofread, summarize, and suggest content for an email reply.
• A new version of Siri that supports voice and typing.
• Photo tools for removing unwanted objects, searching by content, and creating user-defined memory movies.
• Phone call recording and transcription.
• Coming later will be Visual Intelligence (searching by taking photo), an emoji generator, custom image creation, and connections to ChatGPT and third-party apps.

Apple adds sleep apnea detection for the Apple Watch using a new Breathing Disturbances metric and AI analysis.

OpenAI will reportedly release its Strawberry reasoning-focused AI as part of ChatGPT within two weeks. The system “thinks” for up to 10-20 seconds before responding to provide better responses. 

Business

Japan’s drug and medical device agency approves IRhythm’s Zio AI-interpreted, 14-day cardiac monitoring patch that patients mail in to the company for analysis and reporting to their physician as an alternative to the Holter monitor.

Salesforce announces out-of-the-box AI services for 15 industries, including patient services and benefits verification for healthcare.

Philips will significantly expand its health technology work in India, especially that related to AI. The company’s innovation campus in Bengaluru houses 5,000 employees who focus on generative AI solutions for healthcare.

Drug maker Gilead Sciences contracts with Genesis Therapeutics to use its molecular AI platform to discover therapies. Gilead will pay Genesis $35 million upfront for three potential drugs, with additional payments for meeting development, regulatory, and commercial milestones. Genesis, which has raised $280 million in funding, is led by 32-year-old co-founder and CEO Evan Feinberg, PhD.

Research

Researchers from MIT, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Harvard Medical School develop ScribblePrompt, which segments biomedical images from human annotations.

Other

Hippocratic AI and healthcare education firm Adtalem Global Education will develop clinician AI training modules that will emphasize the learning needs of nurses.

A survey of UK doctors finds that nearly 90% are worried that patients who use generative AI for medical inquiries will receive misinformation. More than half are enthusiastic for using AI to provide diagnostic and treatment options to doctors themselves, while 83% think that government or medical associations should oversee AI’s use in healthcare.

Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center, which established a dedicated AI center in 2019, has developed 20 AI-powered diagnostic and treatment applications. The applications automate tasks such as summarizing medical literature and monitoring patient progress, which it says has reduced bed wait times from 32 hours to six.

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Healthcare AI News 9/4/24

News

A legal advisor recommends that doctors not use AI to respond to patient complaints. She says that AI’s responses may use country-specific laws (most likely from the US), generate misleading statements, and ask for confidential information that could breach privacy laws. She also notes that patients may find AI’s wording to be insincere or indicative that their complaint didn’t warrant a human response.

Business

Aidoc adds seven AI solutions for the European health market. Four of them address notification and triage of vessel occlusion, aortic dissection, vertebral compression fractures, and malpositioned endotracheal tube. The others involve quantitative assessments for midline shift, coronary artery calcification, and abdominal aortic measurement.

Imaging-based real world evidence vendor Segmed raises $10.4 million in a Series A funding round, with Advocate Health being among the investors. The company will use the proceeds to expand its use of AI.

Samsung acquires France-based fetal ultrasound AI software vendor Sonio, whose product is FDA 510(k) cleared in the US, for $92 million.

Research

A study finds that AI models can guess a patient’s self-reported race based on technical aspects of radiology images, which could perpetuate diagnosis bias. The authors note that setting a score threshold for the relevant factors can mitigate some of the bias.

Other

Digital transformation leader David Bray, PhD, MSPH says that it’s imperative that AI-generated outputs be labeled consistently to avoid “AI self-cannibalization,” which occurs when AI models are recursively trained on data that was created by previous AI work. He believes that HL-7 standards could be expanded to provide healthcare data provenance to create a traceable, transparent AI ecosystem and to support interoperability.

Actor Tom Hanks warns fans that online ads for “miracle cures and wonder drugs” are using AI-generate images of him, for which he didn’t consent.

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Healthcare AI News 8/28/24

News

Medscape launches a free AI scribe for US physicians that can summarize a patient visit in SOAP, H&P, or POMR format.

Researchers find that about only about half of the 500 AI-powered medical devices that have been approved by FDA were validated on real patient data, raising concerns about their clinical effectiveness and the FDA’s review standards. Three-fourths of the authorizations involved radiology products.

Business

MUSC Health rolls out an Epic-integrated AI agent from SoundHound AI that can answer patient questions and manage appointments. SoundHound acquired Amelia AI, which sells conversational AI agents to multiple verticals outside of healthcare and had raised nearly $200 million, for $80 million three weeks ago. SoundHound went public via a SPAC merger in 2021 at a $2.1 billion valuation, now down to $1.7 billion.

Human Longevity, Inc., which uses AI to identify the early stages of age-related conditions for paying members of its 100+ longevity program, raises $40 million in a Series B funding round.

Other

Google’s API-accessible HeAR AI model (Health Acoustic Representations), which was trained on 100 million cough sounds, serves as the foundation of an India-based company’s tool that assesses lung health and detects tuberculosis.

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Healthcare AI News 8/21/24

News

Epic R&D SVP Seth Hain, MS gives UGM attendees an idea of how the company is thinking about AI use cases. His example was an AI-initiated outreach call to a recovering wrist surgery patient that asks them to rate their pain, instructs them to move their hand in front of their phone’s camera, and then analyzes their range of motion to compare with similar patients in Cosmos to show them their relative progress. Epic also noted that 65 sites are live on Look Alikes, which taps into its Cosmos database to help diagnose rare conditions.

Singapore’s National University Health System is using an AI platform that it developed on Amazon Web Services to draft documents and summarize patient data, which it says has reduced the time required for administrative tasks by 40%. It is working on event-driven models that could perform tasks automatically, such as automatically drafting a discharge letter when a patient is going home.

Business

PayZen, which allows providers to offer their patients AI-powered installment payment plans, raises a $32 million Series B funding round that also includes a $200 million debt facility.

Research

Researchers find that AI analysis of facial expressions from images and video streams can predict health deterioration in patients who are unable to communicate, with an accuracy of 99.8%. Other potential uses include a “health monitoring mirror” for home use and a pre-visit analysis tool for telehealth encounters.

A machine learning model can predict autism spectrum disorder in children under 2 years old by using 28 data points from their medical histories and background. Current methods diagnose the condition at a median of 5 years old, providing an opportunity for earlier intervention. Date elements include sex, gestational age, problems with eating, birth complications or defects, growth and neurological conditions, household education and income, and ages at which the child first sat up, walked, and fed themselves.

Researchers apply AI to traditional Chinese medicine practices of identifying medical conditions by tongue color with 98% accuracy in a small study. Practitioners believe that the color, shape, and thickness of the tongue can reveal health conditions such as diabetes, cancer, stroke, anemia, COVID-19, asthma, and vascular and gastrointestinal issues.

Other

St. Catherine University analyzes LinkedIn job postings to determine which US cities have the highest demand for AI talent. The top five, with the number of AI jobs per 1,000 healthcare listings:

• Durham, NC (29)
• Colorado Springs, CO (28)
• Provo, UT (14)
• Ogden, UT (13)
• McAllen, TX (12)

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Healthcare AI News 8/14/24

News

Google launches the Pixel Watch 3, whose health-related features include workout biometrics, cardiac tracking, planning and guiding tools for runners, and loss-of-pulse detection that can contact emergency services. The watch costs $350 for the Bluetooth/WiFi version in 41 mm size.

Google also announces Gemini Live, which offers conversational AI for hands-free conversations and integration with apps. It will be available via the Gemini app on Android or as a tab on the Google app for IOS.

Microsoft announces enhancements to Nuance Dragon Ambient EXperience (DAX) Copilot that include the ability to generate referral letters, summaries of evidence, after-visit summaries, and encounter summaries. It also provides user coaching for areas where additional verbalizing would create more complete notes.  

Business

Medical device and equipment manufacturer Stryker will acquire Care.ai to offer customers smart hospital solutions that address nursing shortages, staff retention, and workplace safety. The technology will be integrated with Stryker’s Vocera system, which it acquired for $3 billion in January 2022.

Elise.ai, which sells AI assistants and customer relationship technology to property management companies, raises $75 million in a Series D funding round that values the company at $1 billion. Its Health AI business automates patient conversations and manages appointment scheduling and patient payment.

Amazon describes how its AI work is helping transform healthcare:

• Improving health visits via its HealthScribe ambient documentation service.
• A collaboration with EvolutionaryScale to enable researchers to design new proteins.
• More efficient prescription filling and better customer service in Amazon Pharmacy.
• Using AWS Textract intelligent document processing in Amazon Pharmacy to extract and structure information from digital and paper prescriptions, which allows order processing that is up to 90% faster.
• Partnering with health systems, insurers, and life sciences companies to uncover patient insights while ensuring privacy and security.

Research

Amazon describes the technical underpinnings of its Bedrock service that extracts unstructured data from standardized form entries, using healthcare as an example.

Other

Researchers postulate that clinicians, specifically radiologists, and AI do not make up a synergistic team, as humans rely on their knowledge and environment but AI learns from its own correlations and is not limited by context. They say that AI development is outpacing the understanding of its clinical value and the challenges that are involved in its integration.

Tests of open-source, locally hosted LLMs such as Meta Llama 3 matched the performance of ChatGPT and Claude in answering radiology board exam questions, raising the possibility of healthcare use without the expense and privacy concerns of hosted LLMs.

The minister of health of the Netherlands believes that AI can help solve staff shortages, as tightened immigration laws rule out bringing in workers from other countries.

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