Healthcare AI News 4/17/24

News

Kontakt.io raises $47.5 million in a Series C funding round led by Goldman Sachs. Launched in 2013, the multi-vertical company offers patient flow analytics and optimization software and hardware that leverages AI and RTLS technologies.

Business

MemorialCare (CA) selects Abridge’s generative AI software for clinical documentation.

Research

Researchers from University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center, University of Southern California, and Johns Hopkins University use machine learning to develop a risk assessment model for bedsores that increases prediction accuracy to 74%, a 20% increase over current methods.

UMass Chan Medical School and Mitre launch the Health AI Assurance Laboratory, which will work to ensure the safety and efficacy of AI in healthcare through the evaluation of healthcare AI tools.

A Gartner survey of 600 enterprise software engineers finds that 75% say they’ll be using AI code assistants by 2028. Sixty-three percent of organizations are already using the technology in some way.

Wolters Kluwer Health publishes findings from a new survey focused on provider perceptions of AI. A few snippets:

• Eighty percent believe generative AI will improve patient interactions.
• Forty percent say they’re ready to start using generative AI in those interactions.
• Over 50% believe generative AI will save them time when it comes to summarizing patient data from the EHR, or looking up medical literature.
• Despite their enthusiasm for the technology, at least 33% say their organizations don’t have guidelines on how to use it.
• Providers are more enthusiastic about the technology than patients, with the majority of surveyed consumers in a previous study reporting they’d be concerned about using generative AI in a diagnosis.

AI-drafted physician messaging may not reduce response time to patient messages, but it does lessen cognitive burden, according to research out of UC San Diego Health. Lead researcher Ming Tai-Seale, PhD, explains: “Our physicians receive about 200 messages a week. AI could help break ‘writer’s block’ by providing physicians an empathy-infused draft upon which to craft thoughtful responses to patients.”

Other

OSF HealthCare (IL) will pilot personalized customer engagement AI assistants from Brand Engagement Network at several facilities as a part of its continuing education simulation training for its Advanced Practice Provider primary care fellowship participants.

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Healthcare AI News 4/10/24

News

Google opens Gemini 1.5 Pro to developer preview via API, which includes native speech understanding and a file handling API. The system was tested with a 400-page transcript from the Apollo 11 mission, about which it could answer questions and details from conversations and images using up to 1 million tokens.

Meta says it will release its Llama 3 open source LLM within one month, with double the parameter size of Version 2 and about the same as Open AI’s GPT-4.

Business

Bayer and Google Cloud will collaborate on developing AI solutions for radiologists.

Northwestern Medicine and Dell’s AI Innovation Lab create an LLM solution for drafting x-ray reports. They are also working on a predictive model for the EHR.

All of India’s major hospital chains are using AI, with Apollo Hospitals testing it for patient monitoring, cardiovascular disease prediction, symptom checking, radiology workflow, and in-room automation. Apollo says that some of the technologies have earned US FDA clearance.

Research

Researchers document the steps that were involved in Duke University Health System’s design, development, and maintenance of the AI-powered SepsisWatch system. They hope to illustrate the lessons that were learned in developing algorithms, involving stakeholders, and setting up an organizational structure.

Researchers find that an algorithm can predict hospital-acquired pressure injury with 74% accuracy, extending EHR-calculated Braden Scales into an early warning system that could save a 500-bed hospital up to 90,000 labor hours and $18 million in expense each year.

Other

Penn’s medical school names Marylyn Ritchie, PhD, former director of biomedical informatics, its first vice dean of AI and computing. University of Pennsylvania Health System also promotes former radiology chief Mitchell Schnall, MD, PhD to SVP of data and technology solutions, with a focus on AI.

International health leaders list four action areas that should be addressed to fully realize AI’s healthcare potential:

• Identify high-priority data elements that are needed for AI applications and ensure that availability of those elements is reliable.
• Test AI tools to ensure that they are safe and effective within specific patient populations and are free of bias.
• Standardize business processes so that data can be shared between institutions, such as connecting encounter data to outcomes, and explore privacy-preserving data sharing approaches.
• Advocate for paying for value (quality, safety, health, and costs) to align the financial incentives for using AI.

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Healthcare AI News 4/3/24

News

Plastic surgeon Robert Pearl, MD, who was executive director and CEO of The Permanente Medical Group through 2017, predicts that ChatGPT’s eventual ability to remember and use information across multiple chat sessions — its “context window” — will be significant in healthcare. He says that while its current capacity won’t hold an average medical record, generative AI systems are expected to become 30 times more powerful in the next few years, which along with GPTs, will allow records from multiple providers to be consolidated to provide patients with diagnosis and treatment suggestions. He also expects the extended memory to improve patient monitoring with its capability to look back into historical clinical status and to issue real-time alerts when established best practices are not followed.

The World Health Organization launches Sarah, an AI-powered health information avatar for consumers. Sarah replaces a previous WHO non-AI tool called Florence that provided public health information. Sarah is available online.

Epic is developing an AI validation suite to help health systems evaluate and monitor the performance of AI models, both third party and self developed.

OpenAI offers access to ChatGPT 3.5 without requiring registration, although functionality is limited and content safeguards are expanded over the paid version.

A new KLAS report looks at early use of healthcare AI, concluding that:

• ClosedLoop’s predictive modeling leads the market in performance, especially with ACO and health plan users.
• Customers of second-place Epic are expanding beyond clinical use cases into operational and financial areas, with good employee adoption because of integration with EHR workflows. Some customers complained about Epic’s pricing and its subpar ability to incorporate outside data.
• Oracle Health customers were split. Satisfaction was good with the company’s cloud plans and its use of clinical data, but some customers complain that support quality and nickel-and-diming has gotten worse since Oracle acquired Cerner.
• Health Catalyst customers say the product is robust, but half of them believe that the product fails to deliver on its potential because of insufficient training and support.

Business

Amazon ends its Just Walk Out checkout-free experience at its Amazon Fresh grocery stores, which will be replaced by in-cart scanners that customers use themselves. A report by The Information says that while the Just Walk Out system seemed automated and AI powered, 1,000 offshore workers served as low-paid remote cashiers in monitoring shoppers via video camera and manually ringing up items. Social media wags labeled the failed experiment as API – A Person in India. Amazon rolled the system out to hospitals in January 2024 for cashier-less employee purchases, with St. Joseph’s / Candler as its first customer.

Healthcare AI company John Snow Labs releases a no-code solution that allows healthcare domain experts to train, tune, test, and share models without help from data scientists. The company says that creating small, task-specific models can be used to train other models, are cheaper to run, and can operate behind an organization’s firewall. They can also include human-in-the-loop oversight.

FDA grants marketing clearance to the sepsis detection tool of Prenosis, which applies AI to biomarker and EHR clinical data to assess sepsis risk.

Research

Penn researchers find that AI analysis of Facebook postings is three times less likely to accurately predict depression among black American users as compared to white. The model uses prior findings that white people who have higher levels of depression use more first-person singular pronouns — along with words that suggest isolation, self-criticism, worthlessness, anxious-outsider, and despair — but the model performed poorly when analyzing posts from people who are black. The authors note that their study illustrates the need for caution when applying AI in mental health settings.

Other

HFMA notes the “battle of the bots” as hospitals that have been outgunned by payers that used technology to deny or delay payment are implementing AI to beef up revenue cycle management. Examples of provider use of AI:

• Using robotic process automation to ensure that claims are clean and to manage work queues (Luminis Health).
• Reducing RCM headcount by 30 FTEs by using AI bots (Mayo Clinic).
• Reducing authorization-related denials by using bots to notify payers when patients are admitted (Care New England).
• Increasing administrative efficiency by using Copilot for Microsoft 365 and using RPA to save labor in authorization, registration, credentialing, and billing workflows (Corewell Health).

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Healthcare AI News 3/27/24

News

OpenAI files a trademark application for a voice engine and digital voice assistants, possibly signaling that the ChatGPT developer plans to complete with Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa voice assistants.

An official with the Congressional Budget Office says that AI could reduce healthcare costs by identifying patients who could benefit from early treatment, but it could also increase costs by spurring the development of beneficial but expensive technologies or identifying more patients who need treatment.

Business

Amazon will invest another $2.75 billion in generative AI startup Anthropic, which it had already backed with $1.25 billion, valuing the maker of the Claude chatbot at $18 billion.

Healthcare business process technology vendor Sagility acquires BirchAI, which offers AI-powered call center technology.

Tennr, which use AI to extract and route data from faxes, raises $18 million in Series A funding.

The London-based non-profit Institute for Public Policy Research makes a worst-case prediction that AI could eliminate 8 million jobs with no gain in gross domestic product. The authors predict that a Phase 2 of AI implementation in which AI is allowed to execute tasks could affect financial workers, shop owners, and IT managers, while advancing to Phase 3 – where processes are built around AI and people accept interacting with avatars – could transform the work of teachers, doctors, and hospitality workers. They recommends creating policies that protect tasks where human involvement is valued, consider imposing wealth taxes or social security assistance, and raising taxes companies that replace people with AI.

Research

NIH provides funding for Treatment.ai to develop a culturally sensitive AI approach for collecting family medical history. The company says that approaches for collecting medical histories for African-American families are biased because they do not adequately capture information about blended families, non-traditional relationships, and the lack of patient information about the health of relatives.

Researchers find that AI can successfully design new drugs to overcome bacterial resistance.

ChatGPT generates discharge documents for orthopedics case that are comparable in quality to those that are created by junior orthopedic surgeons and orthopedics residents, but 10 times faster. Interestingly, while reviewers found hallucinations in four documents that ChatGPT created, that was fewer than the six that were found in the physician-generated notes.

A West Virginia University School of Pharmacy study will look at using AI to collect patient medication information from clinical and billing systems, including clinician notes, to help with medication reconciliation and to determine the risk of readmission.

Other

The National Bureau of Economics Research publishes a grant-supported book titled “The Economics of Artificial Intelligence: Health Care Challenges” that analyzes barriers – incentives, management, data availability, and regulation – that will impact the efficiency and cost disruptions that are possible in the 20% of the US economy that involves healthcare.

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Healthcare AI News 3/20/24

News

Google lists its recent accomplishments in applying generative AI to healthcare:

• The introduction of MedLM for Chest X-ray to classify images, which is being tested by users.
• Tuning a version of its Gemini model the medical domain to determine its capabilities for advanced reasoning and using high context volumes, which it is testing for analysis of images and genomics information.
• Working with its Fitbit business to develop a personal health LLM that uses data from the Fitbit wearables and app and from Pixel devices.
• Working with a healthcare organization to test the capability of its Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer chatbot for conducting text-based consultations.

Nvidia Healthcare launches 25 healthcare microservices that allow developers to integrate AI into new and existing applications.

CommonSpirit Health launches an internal AI assistant to help its employees generate written content.

Zephyr AI, which offers explainable AI-powered precision medicine solutions, raises $111 million in a Series A funding round.

Toronto-based Pocket Health raises $33 million in Series B funding. The nine-year-old company offers a patient-centric image exchange platform that explains medical terms, detects follow-up recommendations, and suggests questions that the patient should ask their doctor. Patients pay $49 per year for the service. 

Business

Hippocratic AI raises $53 million in a Series A funding round that values the company at $500 million. It also announced that it is performing safety testing of a healthcare staffing marketplace where AI software agents can be “hired” to perform non-diagnostic, patient-facing tasks. The agents, use of which the company says cost less than $9 per hour compared to high nurse salaries, are evaluated in detail and scored by nurses and physicians for bedside manner, the ability to provide patient education, lack of bias, and safety. The company has said that AI will reduce the incremental cost of human-powered access and intervention activities to nearly zero as the only scalable way to address healthcare worker shortages.

Assort Health raises $3.5 million in funding and launches an AI solution for healthcare call centers. The company uses AI and natural language processing to understand a caller’s intent, then uses available data – including that from the EHR – to resolve their inquiries. Common tasks are call routing, patient registration, appointment scheduling, managing appointment cancellations and confirmations, and answering frequently asked questions.

Saudi Arabia will create a $40 billion investment fund for AI, making it the world’s largest AI investor as it moves to diversify its economy.

Nvidia announces an AI-powered humanoid robot system that can understand natural language and learn to move by observing humans.

Microsoft hires the co-founders and most of the employees of Inflection, which had raised $1.3 billion – with Microsoft as the lead investor — to create the “first emotionally intelligent AI” chat tool called Pi that it launched just 10 months ago. Mustafa Suleyman, who was CEO of Inflection and also a co-founder of DeepMind, was announced as CEO of Microsoft’s consumer AI business. The future of Pi was not addressed.

Research

Harvard Medical School and MIT researchers determine that individual radiologists react differently to AI-powered assistance, with some of them showing worse performance and accuracy when assisted by AI. They were surprised to find that radiologist experience didn’t correlated to AI-enabled changes and that AI didn’t help low-performing radiologists improve. The authors recommend further study of how humans interact with AI and that the technology be personalized based on clinician expertise, experience, and decision-making style.

Researchers train AI systems to think carefully before responding to user requests, which improved the reasoning ability of those systems. Users of ChatGPT have reported that the system provides better answers to prompts if they include instructions to think carefully or that offer an imaginary reward for a better answer.

Other

A JAMA op-ed piece questions whether clinician double-checking should be the primary protection against healthcare-related AI harming patients, noting that “humans are terrible at vigilance.” The authors suggest five approaches based on their use in other industries:

1. Let AI assess its own level of certainty and present its results that are color-coded based on its confidence, including a warning if the specific patient is not representative of the population that was used to train the model.
2. Detect clinicians who exhibit automation bias by nearly always accepting AI’s recommendations or suggested text.
3. Use any AI time savings to address clinician burnout instead of raising productivity expectations.
4. Program the AI system to deliver “deliberate shocks,” similar to TSA airport screening systems that randomly add an image of a firearm to keep operators vigilant.
5. Instead of using AI on the front end, program it to work like a spell checker to analyze clinician conclusions and highlight areas that seem to be at odds with its analysis.

A patient who was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes uses ChatGPT to determine that he instead has a rare genetic condition that is treated by daily medication instead of careful diet monitoring and an insulin pump. His endocrinologist says that MODY (maturity-onset diabetes of the young) is often misdiagnosed because of the high prevalence of Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes.

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Healthcare AI News 3/13/24

News

Sixteen large health systems and Microsoft form the Trustworthy and Responsible AI Network (TRAIN), which will share best practices, register the use of AI in clinical settings, provide AI outcomes measurements, and facilitate creation of a federated national AI outcomes registry. The group will work with OCHIN and TruBridge to make sure that all organizations, regardless of resources, can benefit from TRAIN’s work. The recently formed Coalition for Health AI (CHAI) is a partner and says that TRAIN will operationalize its principles in health systems.

Google launches Google Cloud Vertex Search for Healthcare, a set of search-and-answer tools that integrate with its MedLM, Healthcare Data Engine and Cloud Healthcare FHIR APIs. It offers medically-tuned search of EHR data for clinician presentation, configurable cloud APIs, the ability to answer clinician questions while understanding medical terminology, and providing links to source data points to provide transparency.

The government of China is working with private companies to develop a medically focused AI chatbot based on Meta’s Llama 2.0. It is testing an AI assistant model for neurosurgeons at seven hospitals in Beijing. The CARES Copilot 1.0 was trained on medical literature and can process images, audio, text, MRI, ultrasounds, and CT scans.

Microsoft previews healthcare-specific safeguards for Azure AI Health Bot services that integrate with Copilot Studio to allow healthcare organizations to develop their own copilots.

Business

Symplr announces SymplrAI, which will offer healthcare efficiency tools via Amazon Web Services AI/ML.

Peter Thiel-backed Cognition AI unveils Devin, an AI-powered software engineer that can generate, debug, and deploy code for websites and videos from a single command. It has its own command line, code editor, and browser.

Amazon Web Services lists the generative AI solutions that its healthcare customers have created:

• Digital pathology (Philips).
• Phone-based, voice-enabled progress note generation (Pieces Technologies).
• Hospital operations efficiency (Symplr).
• Enterprise imaging (Konica Minolta).

Biotech startup Insilico Medicine describes how it used its AI platform to create a drug candidate for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis that is undergoing Phase II clinical trials. The company says the process took 2.5 years versus the six years that would have been needed without AI. The company used biology AI to discover the drug, then generated the molecule using chemistry AI.

Research

In England, University of Oxford researchers warn clinicians that using ChatGPT and Bard to create care plans could compromise patient privacy or mislead users with incorrect information.

In Israel, Sheba Medical Center researchers develop an AI platform to help mental health professionals diagnose and manage conditions efficiently, concluding that its diagnostic accuracy is comparable to that of experience psychiatrists.

A study finds that large language models can translate discharge summaries into readable, patient-friendly language, which helps providers comply with requirements to give patients immediate access to their discharge notes. However, the authors found examples of key information being omitted, most often history of present illness and procedures, which they attribute to prompt engineering that optimized readability in the form of shorter documents.

Other

CommonSpirit Health EVP/CIO Daniel Barchi, MS says that healthcare’s adoption of AI should follow the Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs in first being applied to technical needs, then moved up the triangle to improve healthcare efficiency and safety. (click graphic to enlarge)

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Healthcare AI News 3/6/24

News

UPMC physicians develop a AI-powered smartphone app that can diagnosis acute otitis media by analyzing video from a phone-connected otoscope.

Pediatric clinicians at Mass General Brigham create a series of 45 instructional smartphone videos for clinicians, then use ChatGPT to create Spanish language versions that they distributed to nurses in Guatemala and Colombia.

The Coalition for Health AI names co-founder Brian Anderson, MD as CEO and co-founder John Halamka, MD, MS as board chair. The company added federal leaders to its board and will work with the government to develop quality and safety standards.

The American Medical Association’s house of delegates defines AI as “augmented intelligence” rather than “artificial intelligence” to focus on AI’s role of enhancing human intelligence rather than replacing it.

Business

UMass Memorial Health will use Google Cloud to build patient care and research tools.

Health and human services software vendor Healthy Together acquires Kinsa Health, which offers AI-powered epidemiological prediction models using consumer smart thermometers as well as healthcare demand forecasting. Kinsa had shut down several months ago after 12 years, with founder and CEO Inder Singh expressing hope that he could find a new home for the company’s work.

Machinify launches an AI-powered healthcare claims system that includes apps for prior authorization approval, claims auditing, and claims review and correction. Founder and CO Prasanna Ganesan, PhD was a co-founder of digital video store Vudu, which was acquired by Walmart in 2010 and then in 2020 by Fandango, which now brands it as Fandango At Home.

Research

The federal government awards Philadelphia-based non-profit Every Cure a $48 million grant to use AI to find new uses for existing drugs. Penn medical school professor and immunologist David Fajgenbaum, MD, MBA, MSc co-founded the organization after saving his own life by finding a “repurposed” drug, a process he described in his book.

Other

Attorneys list potential areas of liability exposure for using healthcare-related AI, urging providers to avoid Practice Fusion type kickback situations by vetting the product’s explainability and the governance and privacy practices of its vendor:

• Payers using AI to manage prior authorization while denying legitimate claims or improperly influencing the process.
• Using AI to analyze medical images that could raise questions about how the system were trained, whether their vendors are paid for the volume and value of the resulting referrals, and kickback implications of AI systems that are tied to specific treatments.
• Possible clinical studies fraud in which AI could be tweaked to overstate drug efficacy.

Open Notes launches OpenNotes Lab, which will advocate and study the use of AI to enhance trust and communication between patients and their care teams. The company is interesting in partnering with vendors, health systems, patient advocacy groups, professional associations, and regulatory agencies.

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Healthcare AI News 2/28/24

News

Hartford HealthCare creates the Center for AI Innovation in Healthcare and launches Holistic Hospital Optimization, a startup company that will help hospitals optimize patient flow and operations.

A survey that was commissioned by Amazon Web Services finds that US healthcare employees and employers expect AI to deliver a 44% improvement in labor productivity, with potential uses in fraud detection, quality assurance, medical imaging review, and improving communication.

Highmark Health will use Epic’s Payer Platform running on Google Cloud to glean insights that can be used to inform consumers of the next best actions. The company says that more than half of its 7 million members are attributed to an Epic-using provider, allowing it to close care gaps automatically.

The VA says that 40 of the 100 AI use cases that it has identified are being used in the field.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai says that the company has taken its Gemini image generation feature offline for further testing after reports that it created offensive and biased results. Critics noted that the tool seemed exhibit liberal bias, such as creating an image of “a founding father of America” as black and Native American men.

Business

AI-powered clinical documentation tools vendor Abridge raises $150 million in a Series C funding round, valuing the six-year-old company at $850 million.

Research

Vanderbilt University Medical Center uses ChatGPT to analyze the medical literature to find existing drugs that could be repurposed for treating Alzheimer’s disease. The results were then applied to VUMC’s patient data and the All of Us Research Program to identify three drugs that may hold promise – losartan, metformin, and simvastatin.

Other

Scientists warn that while it’s possible to recreate a deceased loved one based on their emails and other writings, that could harm mental health, as it would impede the natural grieving process and create dependence on the technology to the exclusion of forming new relationships.

Another lawyer gets in trouble for using ChatGPT, as a law firm partner bills the court for $113,500 at the ChatGPT-recommended rate of $550 per hour. The judge halved the bill, saying that using ChatGPT to calculate the firm’s fee without submitting supporting detail is “utterly and unusually unpersuasive.”  

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Healthcare AI News 2/21/24

News

Tufts Medicine (MA) launches its Virtual-First AI initiative with a new digital assistant available through its MyTuftsMed app. The health system will add on-demand chat capabilities later this year.

Authenticx develops a generative AI tool that summarizes healthcare consumer conversations from multiple sources to offer insights into emerging issues and overall customer experiences.

Business

Fabric raises $60 million in a Series A funding round. The company offers AI-powered healthcare enablement software for virtual and in-person visits. It acquired AI-based virtual assistant business Gyant earlier this month.

UnityAI, an AI-powered hospital bed management software startup, raises $4 million in seed funding.

Automated medical coding and documentation software startup RapidClaims launches with $3.1 million in funding. Beta users say they’ve reduced claim denials related to coding errors by 70%.

ChatGPT developer OpenAI reportedly completes a deal that values it at $80 billion.

ChatGPT users, meanwhile, were left scratching their heads for several hours Tuesday night as the AI tool generated nonsensical responses well into the night.

Research

New research out of UPMC’s Center for Connected Medicine finds that very few health systems have formal policies in place regarding AI, and even fewer have frameworks in place for the use of generative AI. Seventy percent say they plan on adopting AI solutions offered by their EHR vendors, with improving efficiencies, automating repetitive tasks, and bringing more visibility to clinical decision-making noted as top reasons for implementation.

Other

Hartford Healthcare (CT) debuts its Center for AI Innovation. Through collaboration with teams from MIT and the University of Oxford in England, the center will focus on research, innovation, education, and invention. Current projects include using AI to predict length of stay and patient deterioration, as well as to optimize nurse scheduling and surgical efficiency.

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Healthcare AI News 2/14/24

News

DeepScribe announces GA of its new Trust and Safety Suite, a set of solutions designed to give users greater visibility into the safety and reliability of its AI-powered medical scribe software.

Persistent Systems develops AI-powered population health management software that identifies social determinants of health based on EHR data and then recommends personalized care interventions.

CitiusTech develops the Gen AI Quality & Trust framework and support service to help healthcare software developers design, implement, and scale vetted AI solutions across enterprise environments.

Business

Anatomy Financial launches with $7.6 million in funding. The San Francisco-based company has developed AI-powered financial automation software for medical and dental practices, and digital health and healthcare billing companies.

Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles implements Vital’s AI-powered ERAdvisor software as a part of its MyVisit app.

Research

A series of studies presented at the annual meeting of American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons determine that the accuracy of musculoskeletal health information provided by chatbots used by ChatGPT, Google Bard, and BingAI is limited. The chatbots displayed especially significant limitations when asked to provide clinical management suggestions, omitting important steps such as ordering antibiotics before cultures.

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Healthcare AI News 2/7/24

News

Amazon announces Rufus, an AI tool that is trained on the company’s product catalog and on web information to answer customer questions about products, comparisons, and recommendations.

Google will reportedly rename its Bard AI tool to Gemini this week.

Attorneys say that the legal liability frameworks of the US and the EU are not equipped to determine who will be responsible for medical injuries that are caused by black box AI systems.

Business

UC Davis Health chooses Viz.ai to help diagnose strokes from CT scans for quick intervention.

Radiology AI marketplace CARPL raises $6 million in seed funding.

Laguna Health, which uses AI to create personalized care plans that incorporate social, emotional, and cultural factors, raises $15 million in a Series A funding round.

Ambience Health raises $70 million in a Series B funding round that was led by Kleiner Perkins and OpenAI Startup Fund.

Research

Researchers find that their AI model that predicts how well schizophrenia patients will respond to antipsychotic medications performed well, but didn’t work when used in other studies. Experts warn that AI’s ability to advance medicine is limited by the methods that are used to collect, process, store, and analyze data. A co-author of the study predicts that it will be more than 10 years until AI will be able to analyze patient questionnaire results well enough for clinical use in psychiatry.

The VA is using smart rings and AI to collect the health data of veterans who were exposed to open-air burn pits during wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in a study that is being conducted through Northwell Health. Researchers hope to correlate vague symptoms with monitored data and screening questionnaires.

Other

AHIMA launches AI Resource Hub, which will provide health information professionals with information about non-clinical use of AI in healthcare.

A New York lawyer faces disciplinary action for citing non-existent cases in medical malpractice lawsuit documents, as provided by and hallucinated by ChatGPT without being checked by the lawyer.

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Healthcare AI News 1/31/24

News

Oracle announces a generative AI service that supports text generation, text summarization, and LLM-contextualized search results. The company says it will release search, aggregation tools, and prebuilt agent actions across its SaaS applications, including those of Oracle Health.

Apple will reportedly release AI features with IOS 18 in June, reportedly including enhancing Messages to answer questions and auto-complete sentences.

The State of Illinois launches a Google AI-powered portal for families to access behavioral and mental health resources.

In UAE, Emirates Health Services launches an AI-powered virtual nurse that answers patient questions, provides medical advice, and helps with assessment and triage. EHS will also assess patient-reported symptoms to schedule appointments with the correct specialty. EHS is running a long list of AI projects, including those related to diagnosis, treatment, disease prediction, patient monitoring, and speech-powered clinical documentation.

Microsoft and Google warn investors that the arms race to develop AI products will be expensive due to the computing power it requires.

Business

The Justice Department is reportedly issuing subpoenas to drug companies and EHR vendors to determine if AI is being used to influence prescribing in ways that breach anti-kickback and false claims violations

Microsoft and OpenAI are reportedly in talks to invest up to $500 million in AI-powered robot developer Figure AI, which could value the 2022 startup at $2 billion. The latest autonomous model is 5’6” tall, can carry 44 pounds, walks at 1.2 meters per second, and operates for five hours when charged.

Research

Researchers apply AI and sophisticated analytics methods to test the detection of Medicare fraud, noting that traditional auditors only have enough time to look for specific suspicious patterns.

Other

Cleveland Clinic says in its annual meeting that it is piloting AI for answering the questions of patients with chronic disease, creating ambient clinical documentation, predicting patient volume, and creating draft responses to questions that are submitted via Epic’s MyChart.

The hottest job in corporate America is the executive in charge of AI, according to the New York Times. It notes that Mayo Clinic in Arizona has hired its first chief artificial intelligence officer. 

An AAMC story describes the experience of physicians who are using AI to create documentation from recordings of their patient encounters. Eric Poon, MD, MPH (Duke Primary Care) says he is finishing his clinical schedule on time for the first time in his life, also noting that he didn’t realize how his EHR typing was slowing down the visit. Matthew Anderson, MD (Atrium Health) says he has a summarydraft in his hand 15 seconds after the visit ends. However, users say that ambient listening tools aren’t perfect in deciding what parts of the conversation to include or exclude, and some of them report that they spend quite a bit of time editing out extraneous information. They also say that it works well for quick visits, but less so when visits involve multiple medical issues.

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Healthcare AI News 1/24/24

News

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

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

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

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

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

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

Business

Amazon lists the ways that Amazon Pharmacy is using AI:

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

Research

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

Other

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

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

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Healthcare AI News 1/17/24

News

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang tells attendees of the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference that he expects drug design to move nearly completely to AI systems. He also predicts that medical devices such as ultrasound and CT scanners will be “a device plus a whole bunch of AIs” and that will create incredible value and opportunities.

A UC Berkeley public health professor and psychiatrist warns that using AI to offset a shortage of mental health providers and to address growing problems such as loneliness raises concerns. Jodi Halpern, MD, PhD  worries about the effect of companies marketing AI conversational bots as therapists and trusted companions to people who are depressed or vulnerable. She says that unlike therapists, app vendors are not regulated, companies may be motivated to use the “addictive engineering” of social media companies, and app users may rely on the app the point of withdrawing from human engagement.

A Georgia lawmaker introduces a bill that would make it illegal to use AI to discriminate against people or for making health insurance and public services decisions without human review.

Family-powered autism therapy AI platform provider Forta raises $55 million in a Series A funding round.

A Google-created AI system called AMIE that was optimized for diagnostic dialog outperforms primary care doctors in synchronous text chat with patient actors. The authors warn that while synchronous text chatting is not a common practice, their work is a milestone in developing conversational diagnostic AI to take patient histories, provide diagnostic support, and communicate with skill and empathy.

Business

Investor Mark Cuban predicts that AI will transform healthcare, but will involve millions of models that are created by individual companies and providers instead of a handful of big-name models. He says that the biggest issue is intellectual property protection, and expects health systems to limit access to the models they develop.

Workers’ compensation insurer MEMIC will use AI technology from Clara Analytics to automate medical records transcription and data extraction for claims reviews.

The CEO of medical device maker Medtronic says that the company will transform its products with AI, giving recent examples of its solutions for intelligent endoscopy, digital surgery, and remote surgery assistance.

Research

Mass General Brigham researchers show that large language models can be trained to automatically extract social determinants of health from clinician notes. The finely tuned model identified 94% of patients who have adverse SDoH versus the 2% that could be identified using diagnostic codes. The model was trained to identify sentences that refer to employment status, housing, transportation, relationships, the availability of social support, and parental status. Bias was less likely than with GPT-4. The model was much smaller than ChatGPT models and results were better even thought the model was trained on just a few hundred patient records.

Switzerland-based cardiologists and researchers use AI to improve the usefulness of the atrial fibrillation detection capabilities of consumer wearables that are made by AliveCor, Apple, Fitbit, and Samsung. The study authors say that the single-lead ECG functionality alone is not clinically useful because of high numbers of inconclusive tracings, but the model reduced the percentage of those from 16% to 1.2%. They caution that opportunities for further studies will be limited as those manufacturers enhance their algorithms in undisclosed ways and may restrict access to their raw data. The study used cardiac diagnostics AI products from PulseAI.

A Michigan Medicine team uses AI to review physician notes for signs of risky drinking, which identified three times the number of patients than would have been flagged by diagnosis codes alone.

ChatGPT failed to make an accurate diagnosis in journal-published pediatric case challenges 83% of the time. The authors note that systems such as Google’s Med-PaLM 2 that were trained on medical data would likely perform better.

Pharmacy professors find that ChatGPT performs well in answering questions that patients might ask a pharmacist who is working remotely. It also did a good job of answering general patient questions, offering dietary suggestions, encouraging patient adherence, and clarifying medical terms.

Other

UCSF Health is developing AI tools for nurses, which include patient deterioration detection, patient placement, and matching patients with specialized nurse expertise. A representative of UCSF Health’s nursing union isn’t convinced, declaring that AI has created a “disaster-capitalism moment” in being used to improve efficiency with an end result of reducing access to skilled care.

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Healthcare AI News 1/10/24

News

OpenAI launches the GPT Store, which allows users to distribute – and eventually charge for – customized GPTs that they have created. The company also announces ChatGPT Team, a $25 per-user per-month secure workspace for teams of up to 149 people that supports GPT sharing. The company lists Boston Children’s Hospital as a early adopter, which says that it has used Team to pilot GPTs for productivity and collaboration.

OpenAI announces that wearables vendor Whoop has incorporated GPT-4 into its app that offers personalized fitness and health coaching related to heart rate, workouts, sleep, and stress. The Whoop 4.0 device is free for those who sign up for a $239 per year subscription.

Microsoft changes the layout of its keyboard for the first time in 30 years by adding a Copilot key that invokes the AI assistant.

Business

The Mayo Clinic will use computing chips and systems from Cerebras to develop its own AI models, such as summarizing a patient’s medical records, analyzing diagnostic images, and reviewing genomic data.

Sword, which offers digital health solutions and services for pain prevention and treatment, says that it delivered 1.5 million AI Care sessions in 2023. Sword says that it developed and patented the world’s first AI care solution in 2018.

ShifMed launches ShiftAdvisor, an AI-powered solution that optimizes nurse shift scheduling by considering preferred days, times, pay, and locations.

Accenture invests in Israel-based QuantHealth, which uses AI to simulate drug clinical trials in the cloud.

Innovaccer announces Sara, an AI scribing assistant that transcribes, summarizes, and analyzes visit conversations to create SOAP notes.

Direct-to-consumer drug marketing technology vendor Swoop enhances its AI drug adherence tool to allow drug companies to market their products to patients and their doctors before a diagnosis has been made. They don’t say how they do that, but its other products create custom market segments using the de-identified data of 300 million people that it gets from Datavant and Epsilon.

Other

Vanderbilt University Medical Center lists its AI accomplishments in clinical and research settings:

• Running a 10-physician pilot of Nuance DAX Copilot to create encounter notes from ambient listening.
• Offering researchers a VUMC-created, GUI-based version of OpenAI’s large language module, which is HIPAA certified under VUMC’s business associate agreement with Microsoft. VUMC has disabled access to the public version of ChatGPT on its networks.
• Creating the IQueue platform to optimize chemotherapy infusion appointments.
• Developing a stroke patient evaluation tool that delivers quantified and color-coded CT perfusion maps.
• Creating its own AI application to predict elective surgical case volume.

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Healthcare AI News 1/3/24

News

Microsoft rolls out the Copilot app, which was formerly known as Bing Chat, for Android and IOS. It provides subscription-free access to OpenAI’s GPT-4 and the DALL-E3 image generator.

Humetrix announces a cloud-based international health communicator platform that presents clinicians with a patient’s medical records that it has translated into the clinician’s own language.

VideaHealth receives FDA 510(k) clearance for an AI-powered diagnostic tool for dental diseases, which will also be distributed by Henry Schein One to its dental software users.

In the Netherlands, the CMIO of University Medical Centre Groningen urges the EU to avoid overregulating AI since “it might be the only chance to have some level of healthcare shortly for older people.” The hospital is using AI tools to create draft responses to patient emails and to summarize the information in Epic for rounding,

Business

Bain & Company believes that investment in healthcare-related generative AI is just starting and expects the technology to drive productivity gains, offer a better provider and patient experience, and improve outcomes. It says that companies that were built around AI are raising significant investments, but also that the private equity owners of mature companies are adding AI to improve their products or businesses, which may pose a disruptive threat to some portfolio companies. The highest-risk business are those that provide services for content generation, administrative processes, call centers, and text writing and summarization.

Health insurance brokers are using AI to simplify the process of shopping for ACA marketplace and Medicare Advantage plans. The tools collect an individual’s information, make predictions about their health needs, and then score available plans based on income, prescriptions, and preferred doctors. They can also benefit users by eliminating the incentive for brokers to push the highest-commission plan.

WellSpan Health touts the use of AI in its six hospitals, which includes Artisight virtual sitting and nursing technology, Aidoc for image review, and DAX for ambient documentation.

Research

Dartmouth medical educators develop AI Patient Actor, a ChatGPT virtual patient that medical students can interview while reviewing their vital signs and lab results. The app provides individualized feedback that the student can use to try again. The researchers expect the tool to provide a stress-free environment for students to practice their clinical interaction before moving on to clinical settings or working with actors who pose as standardized patients.

Other

A Toronto newspaper profiles ChartWatch, an AI-driven early warning system for patient deterioration that was developed by St. Michael’s Hospital. The hospital says that use of the risk scores, which are calculated hourly, was associated with a 26% mortality reduction among non-palliative patients in its general medicine unit. The hospital is spending $4 million annually to test AI solutions, about 50 so far. It has also developed solutions to help assign nurses to ED roles, display wait times in the ED, and summarize the medical records of patients with multiple sclerosis that span years. The reports note that Health Canada has approved only AI-powered software in which the algorithms are locked, which requires applying for a license amendment if the algorithms can learn or can be changed.

UCSD Health’s newly named chief AI officer Karandeep Singh, MD, MMSc says that the best near-term use of AI in healthcare involves “keyboard liberation” in drafting patient message replies, summarizing chart documentation, and creating document from ambient conversations. He predicts that AI-powered decision-making “is very far away.”

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Healthcare AI News 12/27/23

News

Researchers predict that AI will enhance the longer-term benefits of using wearables data, such as step tracking, either by directly providing health coaching or by analyzing wearables data to give human health coaches a better picture of the user’s health. The Time article observes that Google will add AI insights to users of its Fitbit devices, Google DeepMind is working on “life adviser,” and Apple will reportedly release an AI health coach next year. Experts suggest that while these projects are interesting, evidence that AI-analyzed wearables data has not been proven to improve outcomes or mortality.

AI researchers obtain the email addresses of 30 New York Times employees by feeding ChatGPT some known addresses and then asking for more via its API, which bypasses some of ChatGPT’s privacy restrictions. The article notes that AI companies can’t guarantee that their systems haven’t learned sensitive information, although AI tools are not supposed to recall their training information verbatim. Training on inappropriately disclosed medical records weren’t mentioned in the article, but should be concerning.

Business

OpenAI is reportedly discussing a new funding round that would value the company at or above $100 billion, making it the second-most valuable US startup behind SpaceX.

Research

Researchers say that while AI can help nurses by automating routine tasks and providing decision support, it cannot replace their excellence in critical thinking, adapting to dynamic situations, advocating for patients, and collaborating. The authors note that nurses have hands-on clinical experience in assessing and managing patient conditions; take a holistic approach that considers the physical, emotional, and psychological aspects of patient care; and requires them to make ethical and moral decisions that respect the patient’s values, beliefs, and culture.

A study finds that ChatGPT 3.5 does a good job in simplifying radiology reports for both clinicians and patients while preserving important diagnostic information, but is not suitable for translating those reports into the Hindi language.

Three Stanford graduate students develop a tool that can accurately guess where a photo was taken by using AI that was trained on Google Street View. The system was trained on just 500,000 images of Google Street View’s 220 billion but can guess the country 95% of the time and can usually guess the location of a photo within 25 miles. The system beat a previously undefeated human “geoguessing champion.” Civil liberties advocates worry that such a system, especially if it is ever rolled out widely by Google or other big tech firms, could be used for government surveillance, corporate tracking, or stalking.

Other

An expert panel that was convened by AHRQ and the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities offers guiding principles for preventing AI bias in healthcare:

• Promote health and healthcare equity through the algorithm’s life cycle, beginning with identifying the problem to be solved.
• Ensure that algorithms and their use are transparent and explainable.
• Engage patient and communities throughout the life cycle.
• Explicitly identify fairness issues and tradeoffs.
• Ensure accountability for equity and fairness in AI outcomes.

Clinical geneticist and medical informaticist Nephi Walton, MD, MS warns that AI is convincing even when it is wrong. He asked ChatGPT how to avoid passing a genetic condition to his children and it recommended that he avoid having children. He says AI has improved, but the way that it is trained is a problem because it pushes old evidence and guidelines to the top while neglecting new information.

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