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.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

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.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

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.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

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.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

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.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

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.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

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)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

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.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

Healthcare AI News 8/7/24

News

CHIME publishes a report of 10 principles, with detailed recommendations for each, that will ensure the ethical and effective implementation of AI in healthcare.

Amazon’s One Medical team is reportedly considering developing an AI agent called DoctorAI that would optimize clinician tasks, make product and service recommendations, and manage customer service requests.

In England, NHS trusts are using patient engagement prediction software from Deep Medical to identify patients who are likely to no-show or cancel their appointments with short notice. Volunteers reach out to the patients who are identified by the system three weeks ahead of time to see if they need assistance – such as with transport, translation, or parking fees – and to reschedule their appointments in the event of conflicts. NHS England says that patients don’t show up for 6.4% of its 125 million outpatient appoints each year at a cost of nearly $2 billion.

FDA announces the members of its newly formed Digital Health Advisory Committee, which will hold its first meeting in November to discuss total product life cycle considerations for AI-enabled devices.

Switzerland-based Sonova introduces the first hearing aid that uses real-time AI to improve speech clarify from background noise.

Business

CMS approves separate Medicare payment for Annalise.ai’s obstructive hydrocephalus portion of its critical care platform. The company says the solution, which triages non-contrast brain CT scans, is the only radiology triage device that can be billed for additional hospital payment.

Research

Researchers find that ChatGPT isn’t good at diagnosing patient conditions. It incorrectly analyzed half of a set of the 150 case challenges it was given, where it struggled with interpreting lab values and imaging results and failed to use complete information that was relevant to the diagnosis. They found that it works well as an educational tool, did a good job with differential diagnosis, and accurately suggested next diagnostic steps.

Other

In England, nine hospital trusts are using Ufonia’s Dora conversational clinical assistant to call patients three weeks after their cataract surgery and alert clinicians if they need further care. Two-thirds patients who undergo cataract surgery, which is performed 500,000 times per year, do not require an in-person appointment. The company is a spin-off of Oxford Unversity.

A pain patient’s op-ed piece expresses skepticism about AI in healthcare:

• Hospitals could have already solved the same patient problems if they really wanted to.
• The real motivation for health systems to use AI is to make more money rather than to lower patient bills.
• AI-drafted responses and emails to patients are easy to spot, and many of the initial patient emails were generated because of inefficient policies, such as requiring patients who have incurable conditions to contact their doctor every month to have their pain medication refill approved.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

Healthcare AI News 7/31/24

News

OpenAI launches user testing of SearchGPT, which returns attributed web links from trusted publishers and can answer follow-up questions.

OpenAI begins rollout of Advanced Voice Mode for ChatGPT, which can conduct natural conversations, allows the user to interrupt, and tailors its responses based on speech cues about the user’s emotions.

Business

Bloomberg reviews Google’s healthcare projects – which include high-profile failures – and its work with HCA to use AI for nurse handoffs and ED physician documentation.

Cleveland Clinic hires Ben Shahshahani, PhD (SiriusXM) as its first chief AI officer.

Writer Inc. launches Palmyra-Med-70b, a large language model that the company’s benchmarks indicate is the most accurate available. Palmyra-Med named Vizient, CirrusMD, and Medisolv as Palmyra-Med users.

Research

Study participants trust medical advice less if AI was involved in its creation — even if they know that humans have reviewed the AI draft — and are less likely to follow any advice in which AI played a part.

Researchers find that AI can predict chronic pain in breast cancer patients, which could support early identification and personalized management.

Other

Doctors at University of Vermont Health Network are saving three hours per day in using Abridge for ambient documentation.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

Healthcare AI News 7/24/24

News

Mayo Clinic will implement an ambient nursing documentation system from Abridge that integrates with Epic’s nursing workflows. Mayo, which is participating in the technology’s development, hopes to have nurses using the tool by the end of the year.

OpenAI creates compliance and administrative tools for enterprise users of ChatGPT who work in heavily regulated industries such as healthcare, legal services, and finance. The API sends time-stamped user records to EDiscovery and Data Loss Prevention service providers to support archiving, audit trails, data redaction and retention, and policy enforcement. A key use case is HIPAA compliance related to detecting and deleting protected health information. The company will also roll out a system this week that syncs employee directories with ChatGPT to provision and de-provision user accounts.

Sound Health announces Sonu, a $299, FDA-authorized, AI-powered wearable that analyzes the user’s sinuses and delivers acoustic waves that stimulate nasal vasoconstriction to treat rhinitis congestion.

Business

Drug design technology vendor Insilico Medicine announces DORA, an AI-powered system for researchers that summarizes relevant published literature and then uses the researcher’s hypothesis to create a draft article with citations.

Drug maker Takeda will use AI models from Nference to identify patients who could benefit from advanced interventions for inflammatory bowel disease.

Microsoft will collaborate with Mass General Brigham and UW Health to develop Azure-powered medical imaging models that will extend Nuance’s imaging copilot applications.

B. Well Connected Health adds configurable AI architecture to its FHIR-based platform to support network access, health data summaries and queries, and a consumer cost-saving recommendations engine.

Meta announces the open source Llama 3.1, which it says is being used for drug discovery, personalized medicine, clinical trials administration, and creating voice and vision ambient medical documentation.

Research

Researchers raise concerns about using AI in medical publishing:

• Real-world validity and clinical relevance needs to be improved and measured.
• The “publish or perish” model may tempt researchers into writing low-quality and misleading articles that are already common in some environments, countries, and settings.
• AI-created programming might increase errors when used by less-expert people.
• AI can generate plausible but incorrect medical articles.
• Future scientists may be hampered by homogenized articles, an increased number of published papers, and validity issues.

Other

HHS creates new positions for CTO, chief artificial intelligence officer, and chief data officer.

Hospitalist and AI-powered oxygen therapy platform company CEO Julio La Torre, MD, MBA says that output from always-on vital signs monitors is an untapped resource. He says that monitoring could make rounding and intermittent data capture obsolete and provide value to researchers. He notes challenges – data collection and standards, the need for robust security, developing the hospital infrastructure to integrate monitor data with existing systems, and developing a sustainable business model.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

Healthcare AI News 7/17/24

News

Huma Therapeutics Limited announces Huma Cloud Platform, a no-code system for configuring regulated disease management tools that includes pre-built modules, device connectivity, cloud hosting, APIs, and a marketplace. The company built the system for its own products and will offer it as a software development kit. The London-based company, which has raised $250 million in funding, was founded by Dan Vahdat, who left his Johns Hopkins bioengineering PhD program in 2011 to start the company.

The VA will issue sole source bids to Abridge and Nuance to conduct ambient scribe pilot projects to transcribe clinical encounters and generate chart notes. The companies recently won a VA tech sprint for those functions. The VA will solicit feedback from other companies that believe they can meet its requirements.

The University of Alabama at Birmingham will launch a master’s in AI degree program next year that will teach students how to ethically integrate AI into healthcare software. It seeks applicants with a background in medicine, statistics, computer science, math, or biomedical engineering, also expressing a preference for healthcare professionals who have a programming background. Proficiency in the Python programming language is also required.

BBC reports that hospitals in England will use AI to improve patient flow, prepare radiology reports, and support rapid ED assessment. Patient records will be reviewed each morning to make sure that treatment is on track and that planned discharge dates are appropriate.

Family medicine physicians at University of Kansas Medical Center find that ChatGPT version 3.5 can produce summaries of peer-reviewed journal articles that are 70% shorter than the abstracts as posted, but with high quality, accuracy, and lack of bias. They documented ChatGPT hallucinations in four of 140 summaries. The tool fell short in being able to determine if a given article is relevant to primary care.

Business

Israel-based AI-powered disease modeling company CytoReason raises $80 million in a private funding round, with investors that include Nvidia and drug maker Pfizer. The company will open an office in Cambridge, MA later this year.

A law journal article says that the US patient system is not prepared to protect the AI-based technology innovation of companies. Companies struggle to disclose enough information about how their AI system works to earn an enforceable patent, especially if they cannot disclose the training data that was used. The authors also note that medical imaging analysis models are often built via trial and error, making those methods just as important as the training data.  

Research

Healthcare experts who were convened by Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered AI say that HIPAA as well as the FDA’s regulatory authority are too outdated to apply to rapid AI development. Specific recommendations:

• Streamline FDA market approval for AI-enhanced diagnostic capability, moving the emphasis to post-market surveillance; sharing test and performance data with providers to help them assess product safety; and creating finer-grained risk categories for medical devices.
• Participants were divided on the issue of requiring clinical AI tools to place a human in the loop, with some warning that such a requirement would create more busywork for doctors and make them feel less clinically empowered. Some said the model should be similar to that of laboratory testing, where devices are overseen by physicians, undergo regular quality checks, and send out-of-range values to humans for review. Participants were also mixed on requiring that patients be informed when AI is used in any stage of their treatment, although many felt that AI-created emails that are sent under a provider’s name should indicate that AI played a role.
• About half of participants said that chatbot-type AI tools should be regulated using medical professional licensure as a model, while a nearly equal number favored a medical device-like approach.

Pharmacy residents in the Netherlands test ChatGPT’s ability to respond to the clinical pharmacy questions of practitioners and patients. They conclude that it should not be used by hospital pharmacists due to poor reproducibility and a significant portion of answers that were incomplete or partly or completely wrong.

Other

A Phillips survey of 3,000 healthcare leaders in 14 countries includes questions about automation and AI. Snips:

• Nine out of 10 leaders see the potential of automation to support staff, reduce administrative tasks, and allow staff to work at their highest skill level, but two-thirds of them believe that healthcare professionals are skeptical and worry about inadequate AI and losing their skills due to overreliance on technology.
• Nearly all participants say that their organizations experience data integration challenges that hamper their ability to provide timely, high-quality care. They most often cited the time required to look up results, inefficiency, limited coordination among providers and departments, repeat tests, and risk of errors.
• More than half say that their organizations will invest in AI in the next three years, while 29% say they have already done so.
• Nine out of 10 leaders expressed concern about AI data bias.

People management software vendor Lattice cancels its week-old plans to create employee records for AI bots. The CEO had said that digital workers would, like their human counterparts, be assigned onboarding tasks, goals, performance metrics, IT system access, and a manager.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

Healthcare AI News 7/10/24

News

OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman and Thrive Global founder and CEO Arianna Huffington announce that their companies will co-develop an AI-powered, hyper-personalized app for behavior change, which they say can be a “miracle drug” for preventing disease and optimizing health. Thrive AI Health will learn preferences and patterns related to sleep, food, movement, stress, and social connection and will be trained on the user’s biometric, lab, and other medical data. Some of the new company’s concepts are already being used by Thrive Global, which sells its product to employers.

Health wearables vendor Oura releases the AI-powered Oura Advisor, which it calls a personal wellness coach, for testing with its devices. Users can choose the chatbot’s communication style, notification preferences, and the training goals that it emphasizes.

A radiation oncologist creates prior authorization requests by telling ChatGPT the type of letter that he needs and the types of clinical studies that he could cite to support his request. He then tells ChatGPT to make the resulting letter four times longer because “if you’re going to put all kinds of barriers up for my patients, them when I fire back, I’m going to make it very time consuming.” A rehab medicine physician uses Doximity GPT, a HIPAA-compliant version of the chatbot, to analyze EHR data and coverage details to create a detailed request, which is says has boosted his coverage approval rate from 10% to 90%. The article notes that some Epic users are testing its new AI-powered PA functionality.

Business

South Korea-based AIRS Medical, whose FDA-cleared SwiftMR speeds up MRI scanning time by up to 50%, raises $20 million in a Series C funding round.

Amazon Web Services uses a large language model to design marketing content for disease awareness that it says balances accuracy and audience engagement. The company says that the AI assistant reduces creation time from weeks to hours and gives subject matter experts more control with its ability to create automatic revisions based on user instructions and comments. It also highlights any problems with required rules or regulations.

Research

Researchers survey oncologists about their possible use of AI, with these conclusions:

• They will use AI to make clinical decisions only if they as frontline practitioners can understand its logic.
• Most oncologists think that they should protect patients from biased AI tools, but few of them believe that they can recognize that bias.
• More than 90% of oncologists believe that AI developers should be held accountable if their products are involved in medical or legal problems, about double the number who believe that doctors and hospitals should share accountability.
• A medical oncologist predicts that AI tools will be used in three areas: making treatment decisions using a broader set of data, improving tumor characterization from images, and matching patients with clinical trials.

Boston researchers apply an AI model to demographic data, health history, exam results, neurological tests, and MRI scans to identify 10 distinct causes of dementia to support differential diagnosis.

Scientists at Dana-Farber Cancer Center and Weill Cornell Medicine develop digital pathology AI tools that can answer pathologist questions and compile results. They trained a private, secure Dana-Farber version of ChatGPT on 10,000 pages of recent digital pathology developments, which allows researchers to create detailed, summarized results quickly. They also developed a tool to allow pathologists who don’t program in the Python programming language to use the PathML computational pathology analysis tool.

Other

A philanthropy magazine profiles the $20 million donation to Mayo Clinic for AI work by Dwight Diercks, an engineering SVP and employee #22 at Nvidia, who grew up on a family farm in rural Minnesota. The focus of his donation is early cancer diagnosis.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

Healthcare AI News 7/3/24

News

The American College of Radiology launches an AI quality assurance program for radiology facilities that covers governance, algorithm documentation, security and compliance adherence, documenting use cases, and monitoring algorithm performance.

Mayo Clinic receives a $20 million gift to fund AI projects as well as Mayo Clinic Platform. The donors are Nvidia SVP of Software Engineering Dwight Diercks and his wife Dian.

Business

PicnicHealth, which gives patients and life sciences companies access to medical records, announces an LLM that collects a patient’s medical records from all providers. The company says it product connects to 100% of US care sites, enabling patients to collect all their records and for life sciences companies to conduct observational studies. CEO Noga Leviner had no healthcare background when she co-founded the company in 2014.

Research

An MIT study finds that medical imaging AI models often use demographic shortcuts that cause them to issue biased predictions. The authors say that models may work when first trained (locally optimal), but may not maintain fairness in new environments (globally optimal). They caution that models can predict demographic information from images – such as race, sex, and age – and then use that and other data to make correlations that have no clinical basis.

Other

Anesthesiologist, informaticist, and AMA immediate past president Jesse Ehrenfeld, MD, MPH says that the AI in healthcare hype curve is peaking, but he notes that a recent survey of doctors found that 38% are using AI in their practices, almost all of it for back-end office tasks. He says that it was a mistake to design, develop, and deploy EHRs without enough physician involvement, and that same error could be repeated with AI development. He explains, “I see this with entrepreneurial companies, where there’s a physician who might be involved, but it’s an afterthought. They’re not really driving the development of the solution. That’s a problem.”

Rep. David Schweikert (R-AZ) introduces legislation that would require Medicare to pay for AI-powered remote devices. He previous introduced bills that would allow AI to prescribe as a practitioner and to amend the Social Security act to pay for telehealth consultations such as AI-monitored wearables. 

I read about this Google search error and replicated it: searching for “114/74 blood pressure” brings up an AI Overview that says that this is an elevated reading. I repeated the test on Google Gemini as well as ChatGPT and both correctly indicated that the BP is normal. Interestingly, the AI Overview was correct when searching for 113/73 and 115/74, incorrect for 114/71, but when I searched for 114/75, it correctly said that’s normal but added “along with a pulse of 89 beats per minute” for some reason.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

Healthcare AI News 6/26/24

News

The Coalition for Health AI publishes a draft framework for the responsible use of AI in healthcare and solicits public comment. CHAI also posted a draft document of Assurance Reporting Checklists for self-reporting and self-review for assuring that AI solutions meet criteria in five areas: (1) usefulness, usability, and efficacy; (2) fairness, equity, and bias management; (3) safety; (4) transparency and intelligibility; and (5) privacy and security.

In Japan, SoftBank Group founder Masayoshi Son will make a rare public appearance in a Thursday panel discussion on bringing AI to healthcare in his country. The investment group took a significant position in Tempus AI just before its recent IPO and has signed an agreement to set up similar services in Japan.

Business

Wolters Kluwer Health will add AI-powered adaptive learning to its nursing education products.

Oracle announces GA of Clinical Digital Assistant ambient documentation and voice command system for ambulatory clinics that use its EHR.

Solventum, formerly 3M Health Care, announces an AI-driven payment denials prediction solution.

Real-world data vendor Atropos Health expands its Evidence Network to 300 million patients with the addition of two new partners. The company’s products can generate publication-grade, AI-powered observational studies from clinical questions with a two-day turnaround.

Shares in AI-enabled precision medicine vendor Tempus AI have lost one-third of their value since the company’s June 14 IPO. The company’s $8 billion pre-IPO valuation in 2022 is at $4.5 billion. Shares rose Wednesday on news that FDA has cleared sale of its atrial fibrillation detection algorithm for 12-lead ECGs.

Research

NIH awards Cleveland Clinic and other organizations a $2.8 million grant to study the use of AI to analyze MRIs to determine how rectal tumors are responding to therapy. Researchers hope to develop radiomic signatures using radiology and pathology images to identify dying tumors that have responded to therapy, which would allow those patients to avoid unnecessary further surgeries and complications.

Other

Stanford Medicine develops Nuclei.io, which helps pathologists diagnose endometritis and metastatic colon cancer with higher speed and accuracy than pathologists alone. The AI system observes individual pathologist behavior – such as image clicking and enlarging —  to learn what they are looking for and which cells are important.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

Healthcare AI News 6/19/24

News

Republican lawmakers criticize the FDA’s partnership with the Coalition for Health AI for testing healthcare AI products, raising concerns that CHAI’s members include Microsoft and Google as well as large health systems that are incubating their own AI-related businesses.

The state of California seeks bids for an AI system to translate health and social services documents and websites as a first draft for human review.

The American Society of Nuclear Cardiology joins the AMA’s effort to prohibit the use of AI by insurance companies to deny coverage based on medical necessity. AMA’s policy would require prior authorization requests to be reviewed by a physician who is trained in the same specialty as the requestor.

Business

Cancer genetic testing vendor Color Health is working with OpenAI to use GPT-4o to identify recommended tests and to create detailed workup plans for human review. The company expects to generate personalized care plans for 200,000 patients through the second half of 2024. 

Cognizant launches its first set of healthcare solutions that use Google Cloud’s AI technology, including workflows for appeals resolution, contract management, marketing content, and health plan shopping.

Patient-centered communications technology vendor CipherHealth announces AI summarization capability for its rounding toolkit.

Sweden-based startup Tandem Health raises a $9.5 million seed funding round with investors that included OpenAI and Deepmind. The company, which was founded less than a year ago and has 50 providers using its system in Sweden, provides a clinician copilot that can transcribe visits and create medical notes. It is looking for partners to help it expand in Europe.

Research

San Diego State University researchers develop an AI robot called Pepper that can detect emotions from live video analysis, allowing it to detect mental health issues and to provide insights to clinicians. The device, which was funded with a $5 million grant, is being reviewed by local hospitals.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

Healthcare AI News 6/12/24

News

Apple announces its long-awaited Apple Intelligence capability, which will be released in beta in IOS18 in September. It will work only on newer Apple hardware such as the IPhone 15 and IPads/Macs that are outfitted with the M1 chip. Its Siri voice assistant will use on-device AI to answer most questions, Apple-hosted LLMs for more complex questions, and OpenAI – with the user’s permission – to respond to more detailed questions. Planned features include a conversational Siri, word-based photo search, automatic photo editing, the ability to proofread and summarize documents, and the ability to summarize call audio.

The American College of Radiology asks members to weigh in on the request that was made to CMS by AI diagnostic software vendor Cleerly, which wants CMS to pay for its FDA-cleared CAD detection. The company says that using its $1,500 CT AI test reduced costs by avoiding invasive coronary angiography. Cleerly says that AI-enabled CCTA is better at diagnosing CAD than the traditional stress test.

Tampa General Hospital rolls out Nuance DAX Copilot to 500 of its affiliated physicians for ambient documentation.

UMass Memorial Medical Center uses Mednition’s Kate AI product for triaging ED patients.

University Hospitals deploys Aidoc’s AI platform across 13 hospitals and several outpatient locations. The company offers 17 FDA-cleared algorithms for triage, quantification, and care coordination.

Business

CCS launches PropheSee, an AI-powered predictive model that improves continuous glucose monitoring device adherence rates by up to 50%, saving an estimated $2,200 per patient per year.

Research

Researchers develop a publicly released trustworthiness benchmark for medical large vision language model that assesses trustworthiness, fairness, safety, privacy, and robustness.

Harvard-based pediatric physicians find that Google Translate and ChatGPT 4.0 perform expert-level translation of patient instructions to Spanish and Portuguese, but fall short of professional translations for Haitian Creole.

ChatGPT can generate expert-quality radiologic reports that are easier for patients to understand. The study authors note that it would be nearly impossible to expect radiologists to create patient-centered radiology reports at the required middle school reading level.

Researchers in China find that AI can accurately detect coronary artery disease using non-invasive facial temperature images. 

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.