Healthcare AI News 7/16/25

News

AdventHealth Shawnee Mission sues Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas City, accusing the insurer of withholding $2 million in payments by using Apixio AI chart review technology to flag “clinically invalid” diagnoses.

Mayo Clinic radiology department chair Matthew Callstrom, MD, PhD says that the organization is building AI into its fabric and has brought 97 AI applications live. He told attendees of his keynote at its AI Summit:

A lot of what clinicians do is they serve Epic. The future of healthcare — and it’s not very far away — we actually use technology in a different way. We push it into the background, we enable and empower our physicians and caregivers so that they actually have the information that they need in a way that is most effective.

Hippocratic AI and Sheba Medical Center will collaborate to integrate generative AI into clinical operations to improve patient care, focusing initially on conversational AI for patient communication and support.

Business

AI-powered medical search and clinical decision support company OpenEvidence raises $210 million in a Series B funding round that values the company at $3.5 billion.

Five-month-old AI startup Thinking Machines, which was founded by former OpenAI executive Mira Murati, raises $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation despite having neither products nor revenue.

Research

Researchers at Columbia University and NewYork-Presbyterian develop a highly accurate AI tool that analyzes ECGs to identify patients who should undergo more expensive ultrasound screening for structural heart disease.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Sponsorship information.
Contact us.

Healthcare AI News 7/9/25

News

Rock Health reports that US digital health startups raised $6.4 billion in the first half of 2025, which represents a modest increase over the same period last year. AI-enabled companies captured 62% of that total, raising average round sizes that were nearly double those of non-AI startups. Nine of the 11 funding rounds of greater than $100 million went to companies that offer AI-driven products, including two mega-rounds for Abridge within just four months.

An AI cybersecurity company says that its average health system audit uncovers 70 active AI applications, many of them embedded in tools from Microsoft, Salesforce, Google, and LinkedIn. It notes that while healthcare organizations often believe that they have limited AI use by blocking tools like ChatGPT and Gemini, they often overlook AI features that are contained in vendor-provided technology.

Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi appoints Peng Xiao, the CEO of Emirates-based AI development company G42, as its board chair.

Business

John Snow Labs spins off Martlet.ai, which will apply AI to HCC coding.

FDA grants Breakthrough Device Designation to Artera’s precision medicine tool for prostate cancer.

Research

UCLA researchers create an AI tool that turns structured EHR data into “pseudo-notes” that can be used by clinical decision support systems without EHR integration.

Mayo Clinic develops an AI tool that diagnoses surgical site infections by analyzing patient-taken photos of wounds after surgery.

University of South Florida researchers develop an AI system that assesses pain in NICU babies in real time by analyzing data from cameras and sensors.

Other

Huntsville Hospital (AL) upgrades its campus security system with 1,800 AI-powered cameras that employ facial recognition and license plate detection.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Sponsorship information.
Contact us.

Healthcare AI News 7/2/25

News

England’s NHS will enhance its patient app with an AI-powered assistant called My Companion, which it describes as a “ChatGPT for the NHS,” that helps users review their health information and explore care options. A separate feature, My Choices, will let patients compare providers based on wait times, clinical outcomes, and satisfaction scores.

Duke Medicine Chief Health Information Officer Eric Poon, MD, MPH says that ambient scribing is being used in 70% of Duke’s primary care visits. He notes that the technology saves him two hours on his own clinic days and admits that he hadn’t realized how much of his focus had been consumed by acting as a “courtroom transcriptionist.”

China-based Ant Group launches AQ, an AI app that lets users consult with AI avatars of real physicians before receiving priority access to care scheduling. The company says that AQ stands for “answer your question,” an English-focused name that suggests plans for a wider rollout. Ant, which is affiliated with Alibaba, operates Alipay, one of the country’s two major mobile payment systems. The company is increasingly focused on offering health-related services that it says are used by 800 million people.

CMS announces WISeR, a pilot project that will use technologies such as AI to expedite Medicare prior authorization for services that are vulnerable to fraud, waste, or inappropriate use.

Business

Sweden-based startup Tandem Health raises $50 million in a Series A funding round to further develop its Europe-focused ambient documentation system.

Website protection vendor Cloudflare is testing a pay-per-crawl system that allows content owners to either block AI training web crawlers entirely or charge them a fee for access.

Research

AI-powered drug discovery and design advances from theoretical to actual, as an AI-designed drug reaches phase 2a clinical trials. Rentosertib shows safety and efficacy in the treatment of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. AI was also used to generate the target before designing the molecule itself.

Mayo Clinic researchers develop an AI tool that can identify the brain activity patterns of nine types of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease, from a single PET scan.

Other

Bioinformatics researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center find that rural US medical centers face significant barriers to adopting AI. They conclude that limited data availability, lack of infrastructure, and inadequate staffing could create an AI divide between urban and rural hospitals that can be addressed through research, partnerships, and policies.

People are seeking advice from ChatGPT on how to inject themselves with facial filler at home to puff up their lips and cheeks.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Sponsorship information.
Contact us.

Healthcare AI News 6/25/25

News

Commure launches EHR-integrated voice and text assistants that use agentic AI to answer calls, schedule appointments, and handle referrals and prior authorizations.

Business

Ambient documentation vendor Nabla raises $70 million in a new Series C funding round, increasing its total to $120 million. The company will deploy agentic AI to expand its documentation offerings to coding, direct EHR interaction, and new capabilities for nurses.

Mandolin raises $40 million in seed and Series A funding. The company uses AI agents to manage specialty drug intake, benefits, prior authorizations, and RCM.

UMass’s medical school partners with business incubator Red Cell Partners in a two-year project to test, evaluate, and certify AI healthcare tools using real-world clinical data through the school’s Health AI Assurance Laboratory

Other

Gartner predicts that 40% of agentic AI projects will be scrapped by the end of 2027 due to escalating costs and questionable business value. The company calls out “agent washing,” in which companies falsely claim that their technology uses agentic AI, estimating that only 130 out of thousands of agentic AI vendors are real.

A federal judge rules that Anthropic’s use of copyrighted books for AI training qualifies as fair use, rejecting claims from authors that the company infringed by scanning purchased copies to create searchable digital versions. The court found that Anthropic made no additional copies, created no derivative works, and did not redistribute any content. A separate trial over alleged use of pirated books is scheduled for December.

New parents, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, are increasingly turning to AI tools like ChatGPT for parenting advice, raising questions about overreliance on technology, information overload, and the loss of human connection in child-rearing. AI is also being used to answer child psychology questions via chatbot, track pregnancy, and to power baby monitors, cribs, and strollers.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Sponsorship information.
Contact us.

Healthcare AI News 6/18/25

News

Lee Health (FL) launches Leah, an AI-powered conversational engagement platform that helps patients with hip, knee, and shoulder pain navigate the system’s services and receive guidance and education.

CONCERN EWS, an AI-powered early warning system that is powered by nurse observations and developed at CU Anschutz, analyzes nurses’ documentation patterns to predict patient deterioration up to 42 hours earlier than standard methods, reducing mortality and hospital stays while improving ICU transfers.

Abstractive Health launches Clinical Time Machine, an AI-powered game that lets users explore structured charts that are generated from centuries-old handwritten medical records. The company, which describes the tool as “a Microsoft Flight Simulator for Medicine,” says that fewer than 1% of physicians have ever seen a full AI-generated medical record summary.

SAS launches Health Cost of Care Analytics, a tool that analyzes claims data to build episodes of care, helping identify cost, quality, and outcome drivers to inform protocols and provider contracts.

Business

Abridge releases Inside for Inpatient, which converts bedside conversations into structured Epic notes. The company is also piloting integration of outpatient orders into Epic.

Hamilton Health Sciences is piloting an AI-powered phone receptionist that was developed by two local doctors and a software engineer. The system, which is being commercialized as Strello Health, books appointments, manages prescription refills, and answers questions. The company says it saves four hours per day and ensures that no caller is ever put on hold or sent to voicemail.

Intermountain Health will implement Layer Health’s AI-powered chart abstraction system for chart review and will invest in the company.

Other

Aidoc releases an open-source, expert-authored framework that it developed with Nvidia and 17 healthcare organizations that guides safe, scalable, trust‑focused deployment of clinical AI across technical, regulatory, operational, and monitoring domains.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Sponsorship information.
Contact us.

Healthcare AI News 6/11/25

News

A KPMG survey of 183 health system leaders in eight countries contains these key points about the use of AI in their organizations:

• Health systems are struggling to operationalize AI use cases beyond the pilot stage.
• Common hurdles are fragmented implementations, challenges in measuring ROI, and workforce culture issues.
• Self-development of AI solutions was reported by 85% of respondents.
• Emerging intelligent AI agents have the potential to increase productivity.
• Early use cases are ambient documentation, image analysis, virtual health assistants that help manage patient communication, early warning systems for patient deterioration, and claims and billing processing.
• The top five applications of AI are generative AI, speech recognition, agentic AI, machine learning, and robotics.
• One-third of respondents report that AI spending represents 10% or more of their technology budget. 

The Joint Commission and the Coalition for Health AI will partner to develop AI playbooks, tools, and a certification program.

OpenAI releases 03-pro, which performs PhD-level math and science tasks. The company also announced that it has dropped the price of o3 by 80%.

Apple announces Apple Intelligence enhancements to perform on-device live translation for Messages, FaceTime, and Phone and to perform contextual actions that are triggered by what appears on the iPhone’s screen. Apple’s WWDC announcements did not include anything pertaining to adding AI to Siri, which the company started mentioning last year.

The FDA launches an AI tool that it calls Elsa to summarize adverse events, compare product labels, and generate database code for non-clinical use. Rolled out ahead of schedule and under budget, Elsa is expected to be fully deployed by June 30. It is already being used to accelerate clinical protocol reviews and help perform scientific evaluations. A recent news report quoted FDA insiders who said that its AI tools are buggy, don’t connect to internal systems, and cannot access the Internet to retrieve studies.

Business

Mayo Clinic will invest in and collaborate with Hellocare.ai to develop ambient clinical intelligence technology. The company’s AI-powered platform passively listens to clinical conversations and detects care-related events that then trigger documentation and workflow actions. CEO Labinot Bytyqi, MS founded the Florida-based company, which was originally named Solaborate, in 2012 after working for several years at SAP.

Boehringer Ingelheim’s animal health unit will embed its canine heart murmur detection algorithms into Eko Health’s digital stethoscopes.

Clinical decision support developer OpenEvidence signs an agreement to incorporate data from 13 journals that are published by JAMA Network.

Research

Researchers develop an agentic AI system for choosing treatments for cancer treatments that agreed with the conclusions of experts 91% of the time. The system improved decision-making accuracy over GPT-4 from 30% to 87% and correctly cited recognized oncology guidelines in 75% of its answers.

Other

A ProPublica report says that software engineer Sahil Lavingia, who lacked healthcare or government experience, was tasked with canceling VA contracts using outdated, inexpensive AI models from OpenAI. He was fired two months into his assignment at the Digital Operations Growth Environment (DOGE) program for what he says were statements he made in an interview that fraud and abuse at the VA were “relatively nonexistent” and that he was surprised at “how efficient the government was.”

China-based AI startup DeepSeek is hiring interns to label medical data for applications that involve “advanced auxiliary diagnosis.” China-based researchers recently warned against the rapid adoption of DeepSeek by hospitals, warning that it is prone to hallucination and creates privacy risks.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Sponsorship information.
Contact us.

Healthcare AI News 6/4/25

News

RCM AI company Amperos Health announces $4.2 million in seed funding and the launch of Amanda, an AI tool designed to help providers automate denial management and collections.

The FDA launches Elsa, a generative AI tool that employees will use to automate reading, writing, and summarization tasks across the agency. The FDA is also working to develop AI for use within its Center for Devices and Radiological Health. That software, which would help employees with medical device reviews and approvals, is still in beta testing.

CVS Health will spend $20 billion over the next 10 years on technology upgrades to its consumer healthcare services. The company’s plans include developing dashboards for improved care coordination; improving transparency around insurance claims and cost estimates; and continuing to explore AI, which it already uses within its patient-facing pharmacy phone system. CVS Health Chief Experience and Technology Officer Tilak Mandadi says that while AI will have its place, the company will never use it in clinical decision-making or denials.

Business

AssistIQ, developer of AI-powered supply chain and management software, announces $11.5 million in funding and that Northwell Health (NY) has implemented its AIQ Capture solution.

Allina Health (MN) implements SoundHound AI’s agentic AI call center technology. SoundHound’s software is built on the Amelia AI platform, which it acquired last August for $80 million.

Research

Mount Sinai researchers develop a machine learning model that can recommend and manage insulin dosing for patients recovering from heart surgery in the ICU. They stress that the GLUCOSE algorithm, which is still in development, should be used as a clinical decision support tool rather than a physician replacement.

Providers are optimistic about the benefits AI could bring to their staffing and clinical processes, but are hesitant to truly embrace the technology, according to a new report from Wolters Kluwer Health. The majority of respondents worry that overreliance on AI may be detrimental to clinical decision-making, and note that their organizations do not have governance policies or training programs in place to ensure AI is used responsibly.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Sponsorship information.
Contact us.

Healthcare AI News 5/28/25

News

Ambience Healthcare develops an AI medical coding model using OpenAI’s Reinforcement Fine-Tuning technology that can record and document clinical conversations, and identify and integrate relevant ICD-10 codes for more accurate billing. The company claims the new AI scribe outperformed 18 physicians in a study of coding accuracy.

Get a Second Opinion launches to offer members access to AI-powered medication and medical condition analysis. The startup’s tool pulls from medical studies and FDA and clinical outcomes data to generate personalized medication and treatment plan reports for $35 a year.

Business

Google develops MedGemma, a set of AI models built on the company’s Gemma 3 technology that can help healthcare developers build apps integrating analysis of medical images and text.

Research

Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine (NY) and Morehouse School of Medicine (GA) use BeeKeeperAI’s EscrowAI software to quickly and securely test AI models on chronic heart failure data.

Researchers at West Virginia University determine that while AI tools like ChatGPT can assist ER doctors with diagnoses, the accuracy of AI-based diagnostics decreases as patient cases become more complex. They also found that the new version of ChatGPT was 15% to 20% more accurate than older versions.

A majority of patients trust AI when it comes to assisting their physicians with prior authorizations, according to a DrFirst survey of 1,000 consumers. They note that using AI as part of the PA process enables physicians to spend more time with them, helps them to start therapy more quickly, and potentially reduces human error during the PA process.

Other

AI-based mental healthcare software startup Cognera Health wins the $100,000 Alabama Launchpad competition. Co-founder Jaydeep Patel had worked in mental health counseling before partnering with co-founder and CEO Varnsi Jupudi to launch Cognera. The company, which is focused on using AI to help patients and providers in between therapy appointments, will use the prize money to accelerate the start of several pilot programs.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Sponsorship information.
Contact us.

Healthcare AI News 5/21/25

News

AI clinical documentation company Abridge is reportedly looking to raise new funding that would put its valuation at $5 billion, double its value earlier this year when it announced $250 million in Series D funding. The company has raised $475.5 million since getting its start in 2018. I interviewed Abridge founder and CEO Shiv Rao, MD back in 2023.

Business

New Mountain Capital combines portfolio RCM companies SmarterDx, Thoughtful.ai, and Access Healthcare to create AI-powered healthcare revenue management company Smarter Technologies.

PsychNow develops Chapter, an AI consultation copilot that helps behavioral health providers capture the contextual details of a patient’s story before the first appointment.

OmniMD announces GA of AI Clinicians, an AI assistant that incorporates clinical data, predictive analytics, and real-time decision support.

Onvida Health (AZ) will pilot AI clinical documentation software from Ambience Healthcare this summer.

Research

UnitedHealth Group’s Optum division is working with researchers at the Duke-Margolis Institute for Health Policy to automate Medicare risk coding using AI.

A Phyx Primary Care Innovation Lab survey of 120 physicians determines that their use of Navina’s AI Copilot helped to reduce clinical review time for complex visits by 40%.

Other

Stony Brook Medicine’s cardiology and radiology departments develop HeartFlow Plaque Analysis, an AI imaging tool that assesses a patient’s coronary artery disease and informs treatment plans.

Duke Health (NC) will work with Microsoft services company Avanade to develop an AI governance process for the responsible implementation of clinical AI in healthcare settings.

The DOD’s US Military Entrance Processing Command develops and begins using an AI summary tool to streamline the review of applicant medical documents during the medical pre-screening process.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Sponsorship information.
Contact us.

Healthcare AI News 5/14/25

News

OpenAI launches HealthBench, a physician-developed benchmark that evaluates large language models on real-world medical decision-making. It uses 5,000 realistic clinical conversations to grade models on communication quality, instruction adherence, accuracy, context awareness, and completeness.

Google is expanding its Gemini AI assistant beyond smartphones to other Android devices such as smart watches, cars, TVs, and extended reality headsets.

AI answer engine Perplexity adds PayPal “buy now” buttons to its results, enabling in-app purchases as it promotes “conversation-driven commerce.”

Business

Oracle Health launches its Clinical AI Agent in Canada, offering health systems automated note drafting and voice-enabled EHR navigation.

Patient-provider communication platform vendor OhMD launches Nia, an AI voice assistant that manages routine patient requests for scheduling and refills while routing sensitive requests to medical practice teams. OhMD co-founder and CEO Ethan Bechtel has executive industry experience with EMR Edge, Blueprint Health, and MBA HealthGroup.

The New York Post profiles Doctronic, a startup whose symptom-checking chatbot suggests potential diagnoses and then offers a $39 virtual physician visit to review. The company says its chatbot’s diagnosis and treatment plan match the doctor’s 70% of the time and that the platform serves 50,000 users weekly.

Research

Australian researchers report that over 1,000 health-related GPTs in OpenAI’s GPT Store operate outside medical device regulations. Authors of two of the 10 most-used GPTs declined to provide details, while the remaining eight offered no evidence of safety or regulatory approval.

Other

A House budget reconciliation bill would impose a 10-year moratorium on state and local regulation of AI.

A New York Times article notes that AI hasn’t displaced radiologists as some once predicted, highlighting that Mayo Clinic has grown its radiology staff by 55% over nine years and formed a 40-member AI team to build tools that support clinicians. Experts say that outsiders often misunderstand the role of radiologists, who in addition to reading images also advise physicians, review medical records, speak with patients, and contextualizing findings for a particular patient.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Sponsorship information.
Contact us.

Healthcare AI News 5/7/25

News

What I love about this is that AI doesn’t have to do anything superhuman. It’s performing a low intellect task, but at very high volume, and that still provides a lot of value, because we’re constantly finding things that we miss. We know we miss stuff. Before, we just didn’t have the tools to go back and find it.

Nvidia releases Parakeet 2, a lightweight, open source transcription model that runs on just 2GB of RAM and is free for commercial use, making it ideal for building transcription tools, voice assistants, or real-time subtitles.

Business

UnitedHealth Group is running 1,000 AI applications in production that summarize data, help process claims, run customer-facing chatbots, and help its 20,000 software engineers write code. The company says it won’t use AI to deny claims.

AI-powered clinical abstraction technology vendor Carta Healthcare raises $18.25 million in a Series B1 funding round that was led by UPMC Enterprises.

Hippocratic AI enters the Japanese market with a Tokyo-based partner, launching the first Japanese-language healthcare agent for non-diagnostic tasks like scheduling, follow-ups, chronic care check-ins, and med adherence.

Research

An Oxford study finds that while LLMs perform well on medical quizzes, they aren’t much help to non-experts who are making decisions. Users who relied on chatbots fared no better than those who Googled or guessed, mostly because they gave the technology incorrect or incomplete information about their situation. The authors warn against using chatbots as the front line of care.

Other

Purdue’s College of Pharmacy launches a $500 online AI certificate program for healthcare professionals, offering 42 AMA PRA Category 1 Credits for physicians and 42 contact hours for pharmacists.

Fiverr’s CEO candidly levels with employees about AI’s threat to their jobs and his. Meanwhile, my TIL term of the week is “vibe coder,” which describes someone who designs software by telling AI what they need, then letting it generate the code.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Sponsorship information.
Contact us.

Healthcare AI News 4/30/25

News

Meta rolls out Meta AI, featuring voice chat, a Discover feed that shows how others use AI, optional personalization that draws from the user’s Facebook and Instagram accounts, and support for Meta’s AI glasses.

Google’s NotebookLM can now create its podcast-like Audio Overviews in 50 languages.

Children’s Hospital Los Angeles launches a sensor-based home apnea risk evaluation that uses a newly created data collection app and Apple Watch algorithms. 

AI company Infinitus Systems releases patient- and provider-facing voice AI agents that automate outbound phone calls.

In the UK, Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children evaluates ambient documentation systems in an NHS-funded project.

Business

Healthcare AI workflow automation platform vendor Plenful raises $50 million in a Series B funding round.

Cleveland Clinic will use coding assistant and CDI AI tools from Akasa.

Ambulatory health IT vendor CareCloud launches a domestic and offshore AI Center of Excellence to further integrate AI across its technologies and processes. The company says the 50-member team will have 500 employees by the end of 2025.

A drug company and biotech firm will pay precision medicine technology vendor Tempus $200 million in data licensing and model development fees to create a cancer drug development model. Tempus says it has spent billions of dollars over the past decade to develop a database of the de-identified clinical data of cancer patients.

Research

UCSD researchers determine that a gene that was thought to be a biomarker for Alzheimer’s disease may actually cause the condition, which they determined using AI to analyze protein structures.

University of Zurich researchers secretly tested the persuasiveness of AI-generated Reddit comments, some of them falsely claiming to be from rape victims or a trauma counselor. Their 1,700 bot-written posts were 3–6 times more effective at changing user opinions than human ones, raising concerns about AI-created disinformation.

Other

A 19-year-old Case Western pre-law student and a law journal editor write a 50-page paper on the need for healthcare-specific AI regulations in Ohio, after which they were invited by lawmakers to help draft a bill on the topic.

Today I learned from a sign that veterinarians are using AI-powered ambient documentation. ScribbleVet’s digital scribe generates SOAP notes in real time, which the company says reduces end-of-day charting from two hours to 20 minutes. Pricing starts at $40 per user per month, while the full-featured plan offers unlimited SOAP notes, dental charts, callback summaries, customizable templates, and a medical record summary for $150 per full-time vet.

A woman who asked ChatGPT for a palm reading was surprised when it instead flagged a mole on her hand as potentially acral lentiginous melanoma, a rare skin cancer, and recommended that she see a dermatologist. She hasn’t yet posted the result.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Sponsorship information.
Contact us.

Healthcare AI News 4/23/25

News

The UK’s health secretary says that AI-driven health checks – called MOTs for measurements, observations, and tests — could transform care for frail patients who are over 65 by using machine learning and genomics to speed diagnosis, guide treatment, and predict illness. Japan offers a similar early detection program called Ningen Dock, a cash-only program that uses imaging, endoscopy, and lab work to generate personalized risk assessments. That service is also offered to foreign residents in a medical tourism package that is covered by some US insurers, such as Aetna (above).

Google DeepMind CEO Sir Demis Hassabis – who won a Novel Prize in chemistry last year after starting his career as a designer of widely popular video games — predicts in a “60 Minutes” interview that AI will reduce drug development time from years to weeks, making all diseases curable within 10 years.

Agentic coding platform Cursor draws online scorn and customer cancellations after its AI support agent incorrectly blames a user’s inability to run multiple sessions as company policy rather than a software bug. Cursor says that it will start labeling AI-generated responses after users questioned whether it was trying to pass off its “Sam” assistant as human. It also fixed the bug that the user had reported.

Business

Just 30% of healthcare AI pilot projects reach production, a new study finds, most often stalled by security concerns. Providers are much more interested in trying and buying AI solutions than they were with EMRs.

Middle East specialty provider Burjeel Holdings will use Hippocratic AI’s agents for patient-facing, non-diagnostic clinical tasks that will be delivered in multiple languages.

Research

A new study finds that AI models beat PhD-level virologists in solving complex wet lab problems, scoring 44% versus the experts’ 22%. While the findings offer hope for advancing infectious disease control, they also raise alarms about AI’s potential use to develop bioweapons.

Stanford Health Care researchers find that endocrinologists view AI-generated draft responses to patient portal messages as helpful, but see tools that use patient data, such as for triage, as risky. AI was rated most useful for administrative tasks like writing authorization letters and patient education, with the greatest potential use being the management of patient scheduling.

Other

A Spain-based Microsoft engineer who was frustrated by repeated misdiagnoses of his son’s rare condition develops DxGPT, an AI tool that analyzes user-reported symptoms to suggest possible diagnoses. Access is free.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Contact us.

Healthcare AI News 4/16/25

News

Anthropic adds a research feature to Claude that searches both internal and web-based content, using an agentic approach to run iterative queries, resolve open questions, and deliver well-sourced answers with citations.

A proposed federal bill would create a consistent Medicare reimbursement path for FDA-approved, AI-enabled medical devices by placing them in a new technology ambulatory payment classification under the Hospital Outpatient Prospective Payment System for at least five years, allowing time to collect data before determining if a permanent code should be created.

Research

A University of Florida researcher develops an open source AI tool that analyzes patient movement videos to help doctors detect subtle motor changes.

Other

North Carolina Central University is using Wolters Kluwer’s VRClinicals for Nursing, a virtual reality hospital simulation, to train its nursing students.

A medical writer with a PhD in math says that she doesn’t want AI scribes to write visit notes for her pulmonologist. 

My pulmonologist’s notes are much more than a summary of our privileged clinical encounters. Each of his notes is an important and carefully crafted document for my care planning and for coordination with other providers. Equally important, the notes are a communication to me, his patient. As I read his notes, I can feel his acumen and experience as a practitioner of medicine — his interest and understanding, his concern and compassion, his discernment and responsiveness. I don’t think an algorithm can re-create those specifically human experiences.

It’s interesting that the 2023 story about ChatGPT outdiagnosing 17 doctors is suddenly trending again despite no new developments. Maybe the AI has moved beyond diagnosis to ghostwriting clickbait.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Contact us.

Healthcare AI News 4/9/25

News

Counterforce Health offers no-cost AI tools that write patient appeal letters for insurance denials.

Google Cloud and Seattle Children’s Hospital launch Pathway Assistant, an AI-powered tool that gives clinicians instant access to evidence-based care pathways for 70 pediatric diagnoses.

Spain-based Neurologyca says that its Kopernica AI facial analysis tool can identify 100 emotions, even in crowds, which allows it to detect neurological conditions such as stroke and brain hemorrhages.

New CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz, MD, MBA says in his first town hall meeting that AI-powered avatars may outperform frontline doctors and may be preferable to humans by patients.

Research

An NIH-funded AI screening tool matched provider performance in identifying hospitalized patients who were at risk for opioid use disorder and recommending specialist referrals, while reducing 30-day readmission odds by 47%

A study by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai finds that AI models may recommend different treatments for identical medical conditions based on patients’ socioeconomic and demographic backgrounds, highlighting the need for safeguards to ensure equitable AI-driven medical care. ​

A study reports that implementing an AI-powered video management system enabled comprehensive documentation and analysis of over 10,000 minimally invasive surgeries, supporting the standardized assessment of key surgical steps and the self-assessment of surgeons.

Other

A new AI system for pediatrics that draws on data from 300 clinicians and years of hospital records will be deployed across China to deliver personalized care and interact with patients’ families.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Contact us.

Healthcare AI News 4/2/25

News

Amazon releases Nova Act, an AI model that can perform actions within a web browser. 

An Israel-based medical advocacy group urges the health ministry to develop AI usage guidelines and enforcement, citing cases in which clinicians misused AI tools and harmed patients. It says that faulty AI-generated medication dosing and diagnostic suggestions have caused life-threatening errors.

Apple will reportedly add an AI health coach to an updated Health app as early as 2026.

Business

Layer Health, which offers an AI-powered EHR data abstraction tool, raises $21 million in a Series A funding round.

Research

A new KLAS report finds that many health system executives are wondering if their organizations are falling behind their peers in using AI, but most are just getting started with strategy, governance, and choice of specific products. All executives from large health systems report that their organizations are using AI. EHR vendors are driving AI adoption through integration with their core products. AI use in imaging, operations, security, and revenue cycle is more focused but growing.

A small Dartmouth study finds that people with significant behavioral disorders improved after using a therapy-focused chatbot app. Depression symptoms dropped by 51%, while those with depression, anxiety, and eating disorders saw smaller but still meaningful improvements. The researchers say that chatbot-delivered therapy rivaled the results of traditional outpatient care and could help ease the mental health provider shortage.

Other

A woman in Australia files a complaint with the health regulator after her doctor used ChatGPT to interpret her lab results during a visit, which she called “lazy and unprofessional.”

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Contact us.

Healthcare AI News 3/26/25

News

OpenAI adds an advanced image generator into ChatGPT-4o. The new tool can handle up to 20 objects, learn from user-uploaded images, and create photo-realistic images. I had it reimagine a HIMSS conference session as if it were happening on the deck of a Caribbean cruise ship. This is my brilliant idea for guaranteeing booth traffic by trapping attendees at sea with nowhere to go except the exhibit hall. Think “Monsters of Rock Cruise” but with more AI panels and fewer grandparent-aged musicians stuffed like a sausage into long-mothballed leather pants.

China-based DeepSeek releases V3.1, which is free for commercial use and can run locally on a high-end Mac Studio.

Amazon is testing a health-focused chatbot that answers wellness questions and recommends products, with responses that it offers that have been reviewed by a US-based clinician marked with a “clinically verified” badge.

Business

Cleveland Clinic partners with UAE-based AI firm G42 to develop and apply healthcare AI solutions.

Healthcare AI clinician copilot developer Navina raises $55 million in a Series C funding round.

Research

A Stanford Medicine study finds that an AI tool that was trained on 80,000 EHR-based nutrition orders for premature infants could reduce medical errors, save time and cost, and improve care in low-resource settings. The AI identified 15 standardized TPN formulas that meet the needs of most patients and was able to accurately recommend the best option for each case. Neonatologists consistently preferred the AI-generated orders.

A fascinating Harvard Business School study of Procter and Gamble commercial and R&D employees looks a how AI might change worker performance, expertise sharing, and social engagement:

• Individual employees who used AI produced work of similar quality to two-person teams without AI, suggesting that AI can function as a “cybernetic teammate.”
• Teams that used AI submitted more balanced solutions that crossed functional boundaries, unlike non-AI teams whose ideas reflected only their own area of expertise.
• Participants who used AI reported increased excitement and energy, indicating that AI can replicate the social and motivational aspects of teamwork.
• AI enabled less-experienced employees to achieve output quality that was comparable to that of seasoned innovators.
• AI-assisted individuals and teams spent up to 16% less time on tasks while producing longer and more comprehensive solutions.
• AI-supported teams were three times more likely to generate top-quality solutions.

Other

A Duke University Medical Center study finds that ChatGPT accurately routed radiology procedure requests when it had been trained on team members, contact info, and schedules, but struggled with out-of-scope requests like those during evenings and weekends.

China’s military is using DeepSeek AI in its hospitals, where it provides treatment suggestions.

A New York Times article explores how doctors are using AI to repurpose existing drugs to treat rare diseases, 90% of which lack approved treatments and draw little interest from drug companies due to limited profit potential.

A woman asks ChatGPT about her anxiety and grief but rejected its suggestion of blood cancer, certain that her symptoms were caused by her father’s recent death. As her condition worsened, she saw a doctor who found that she had Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Contact us.