Healthcare AI News 9/20/23

News

Oracle announces Clinical Digital Assistant, a voice-first mobile app for clinicians that responds to voice commands, uses ambient listening to generate clinical notes from conversations, allows creating notes and clinical documentation from voice narration, and creates notes and chart details.

Ochsner Health is testing the use of Epic’s new feature that creates draft responses to MyChart patient messages that physicians then review.

Drug and medical technology maker Johnson & Johnson describes how it is using AI:

• Applying AI to diagnostic tests and connected medical devices to detect disease earlier.
• Driving drug discovery.
• Analyzing de-identified patient datasets to identify clinical research research sites, to bring trials to patients outside of major medical centers, and to diversify trials.
• Analyzing demand and inventory trends to prioritize drug shipments.
• Creating a “highlight real” of surgical video that allows surgeons to perform post-case analysis that can be used for teaching.

In Japan, commercial insurer Sompo – which is the country’s largest nursing home operator with 301 facilities and 58 day centers — will install TytoCare’s remote medical examination technology in its facilities.

Business

Denmark-based Corti, whose voice assistant system listens to doctor-patient conversations and makes AI-powered suggestions based on millions of other such conversations, raises $60 million in a Series B funding round.

Research

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative will fund and build a 1,000 GPU computing cluster that will allow researchers to study how cells behave in health or disease

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Healthcare AI News 9/13/23

News

A Harrisburg, PA TV station covers UPMC’s use of Abridge to create transcripts of doctor-patient encounter conversations. UPMC VP/CMIO Salim Saiyed, MD, says he has never had a scribe, but the system is like having a real-time scribe whose accuracy is 95%. He adds that the physician can focus on the patient instead of the computer and spends less “pajama time” completing documentation after hours.

Mass General Brigham and GE HealthCare will collaborate to develop an AI algorithm that will optimize radiology patient scheduling as part of GE HealthCare’s commercially available Radiology Operations Module.

OpenAI will hold its first developer conference on November 6 in San Francisco.

Business

RCM technology vendor Aspirion acquires AI-powered intelligent document processing platform vendor Infinia ML. Aspirion says it will run Aspirion as an R&D development shop that will be run by Infinia ML executive chair Nick Giannasi, PhD,  who was previously chief AI officer of Change Healthcare.

Crunchbase News leads off its list of “failed and struggling AI-focused unicorns” with Babylon Health, which it notes mentioned “AI” 25 times in its SPAC filing, raised $600 million at a valuation of billions, then filed bankruptcy last month.

Notable launches a conversational AI tool that helps patients find doctors, schedule appointments, create directions to a location, pay bills, and request prescription refills. It is fully customizable (including tone of voice), can converse in 130 languages, and can have its training extended by uploading training manuals or other documents.

A former Google AI researcher raises $100 million from big-name Silicon Valley investors for Inceptive, his startup that will use AI to develop drugs and vaccines.

Research

Researchers note that ChatGPT has accumulated 1,000 PubMed citations in nine months, which predicts its future influence even though one-third of the cited articles were opinion pieces. Google needed 14 years to hit the 1,000-citation mark.

Other

Attorneys note the healthcare regulatory risks of using AI:

• Running afoul of privacy laws when training AI systems using patient data.
• Using AI to replace rather than support clinicians, which could be construed as the unlicensed practice of medicine.
• Providers deviating from the standard of care based on AI recommendations, creating malpractice risk.
• Reducing physician supervision of lower-level employee who instead use AI, which could fail to meet payer requirements.
• Running afoul of the Anti-Kickback Statue if using vendor-developed AI algorithms that favor use of their products.
• Inadvertently practicing unlawful discrimination by using algorithms that use factors such as race, color, national origin, sex, age, or disability.

The Today show features a mother whose son’s chronic pain and other symptoms had baffled 17 doctors who had seen him over three years. She pasted notes from his MRI into ChatGPT, which provided a diagnosis of tethered cord syndrome, a deformation that limits the movement of the spinal cord and is related to spinal bifida. He is recovering from surgery to repair the condition.

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Healthcare AI News 9/6/23

News

Google Chief Health Officer Karen DeSalvo, MD, MPH, MSc says in NEJM Catalyst that large language models will give patients “a more personalized and anticipatory experience” and that medicine needs to change to meet consumer expectations for a mobile-first digital health experience.

A hospital in Israel declares that an AI app saved a patient’s life when it detected brain bleeding from their CT scan and alerted doctors, who called him to return immediately for additional scans and surgery. The app was developed by Viz.ai.

Research

A study finds that consumer voice assistants such as Alexa as well as ChatGPT delivered poor results when asked layperson questions about performing CPR, with the authors suggesting that bystanders should call 911 instead of asking Siri. The voice assistants gave “grossly inappropriate” responses that often weren’t related to CPR and almost always failed to recommend calling emergency services.

National Taiwan University Hospital develops an ultrasound device that uses AI to assess a person’s risk of sleep apnea in 15 minutes instead of an overnight sleep study. The machine diagnosed sleep apnea with 95% accuracy in requiring patients to breathe a few times while awake. At-risk patients are then referred for traditional polysomnography.

Other

OSF HealthCare develops an AI model that predicts an inpatient’s death at admission using 13 commonly available data elements, allowing clinicians to work with the identified patients to document their end-of-life wishes.

Two teens launch Vytal.ai, whose app uses the camera of a laptop or mobile device to assess brain health using a 30-second gaze tracking exercise. The high school students have developed use cases that include early detection of neurological problems, clinical trials, and concussion screening. Co-founder, CEO, and CTO Rohan Kalahasty, who is 18, has spent three years as a researcher in Harvard’s ophthalmology AI lab and has performed AI research at MIT, while co-founder, COO, and CFO Sai Mattapali, aged 17, has spent time as an intern in both neurophysiology and business growth.

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Healthcare AI News 8/30/23

News

OpenAI releases an enterprise version of ChatGPT that features enhanced security, privacy, and speed. The product overlaps the offerings of the company’s investor Microsoft, which provides a similar offering as part of Azure. The ChatGPT service costs $30 per user per month.

Hackensack Meridian Health will work with Google Cloud on generative AI projects, while HCA Healthcare announces similar plans.

Business

Viz.ai will commercialize three ECG AI algorithms that were developed by UCSF. The algorithms detect cardiac amyloidosis, pulmonary hypertension, and supraventricular tachycardia.

AI-powered, message-based care provider Curai Health joins Amazon Clinic’s virtual care marketplace.

Drug maker Bayer expands its digital therapeutics business with a partnership with Mahana Therapeutics, which offers an FDA-cleared digital product for irritable bowel syndrome.

Research

A consumer research survey finds that 82% of Americans haven’t used ChatGPT, 81% of them don’t expect it to have a major impact on their jobs, and 85% don’t think it can help them do their work.

A study of EHR data in Israel finds that AI can predict food allergies in newborns, surprising researchers who found a significant correlation in the exposure of pregnant women to antibiotics. They conclude that the antibiotics may have interfered with the babies’ microbiome, which influences allergy development.

ChatGPT successfully improves the readability of patient consent forms, researchers find, creating versions that are shorter and easier to read. The required reading level dropped from college freshman to eighth grader.

ChatGPT-generated cancer treatment plans are full of mistakes, researchers find, where one-third of the tested plans contained incorrect information. ChatGPT also mixed correct and incorrect information together in a way that made it hard for even experts to detect.

Other

KFF News headlines a story about Bamboo Health’s NarxCare as “Artificial Intelligence May Influence Whether You Can Get Pain Medication.” The software predicts the likelihood that a patient will overdose based on their documented use of narcotics, sedatives, and stimulants. CDC has warned providers to make sure use of the algorithm doesn’t harm patients, such as turning them away for visits or denying them medications for documented chronic pain, and has voiced concern about “proprietary algorithms” whose methods are not transparent.

A startup sells Nextflix-type subscriptions to access the AI clones of celebrities who earn recurring earnings for doing little more than providing content from elsewhere and setting the guidelines for how their clones will operate. Experts fear the chatbot will worsen loneliness and encourage replacing human interactions with “parasocial” ones. The founders noted the success of a YouTube influencer whose “virtual girlfriend” earned her $71,000 in its first nine days.

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Healthcare AI News 8/23/23

News

In China, the Beijing Municipal Health Commission proposes prohibiting the use of AI by online services to generate prescriptions, make diagnoses, and deliver treatment. The commission also plans to take a supervisory role for medical institutions that run online services.

Business

Microsoft lists its AI collaboration efforts with Epic as showcased at UGM:

• Note summarization for clinicians to speed up documentation.
• Nuance DAX Express embedded in Hyperdrive and Haiku.
• Providing medical coding staff with suggestions based on the clinical documentation.
• Adding NLP queries and interactive analysis to SlicerDicer.

Genesis Therapeutics, which hopes to advance its AI-discovered drug pipeline to clinical development, raises $200 million in a Series B funding round.

Suki integrates its AI-powered clinical documentation assistant with Cerner, adding to its previously announced integration with Epic.

Research

A Mass General Brigham study finds that ChatGPT delivered 72% accuracy in making diagnoses and care management decisions throughout a patient’s complete case, performing equally well in primary care and emergency settings. ChatGPT struggled with differential diagnosis, demonstrating the value of physician expertise at the beginning of the encounter, where a small amount of presenting information is used to consider possible diagnoses.

Other

Three physicians say in a Time opinion piece that healthcare AI could create a “nightmare scenario” where AI tools block patients from talking to humans for reassurance or to offer input in care decisions. Studies have shown that AI is perceived by some as more empathetic and compassionate than doctors, which means it’s time to hit the “reset button” on how doctors approach patient communication and teach those skills to medical students and residents.

Dermatologists describe how ChatGPT could be used to support rural dermatology practices, including creating disease-specific educational patient handouts at appropriate readability levels, generating procedural note templates, and creating drafts of prior authorization requests.

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Healthcare AI News 8/16/23

News

Abridge, whose app turns doctor-patient conversations into transcripts and visit summaries, becomes the first member of Epic’s Partners and Pals integration program. The company also announced that Emory Healthcare will deploy its solution.

Piction Health launches a dermatology virtual clinic in Massachusetts in which patients complete an online intake questionnaire, attach at least three pictures of their area of concern, and then receive a dermatologist’s evaluation – supported by AI image analysis and comparison to its own image database — within two days. The company says that two-thirds of patients receive a treatment plan without an in-person visit. The service is available for patients in New Hampshire, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Florida and is covered by some insurances or costs $80 otherwise.

Business

Morgan Stanley lists four areas in which it expects AI to create significant investment opportunities:

• Drug discovery, manufacturing, and physician-patient engagement.
• Earlier detection of disease, more efficient patient access, claims processing, supply chain management, and helping patients use their insurance and prescription benefits effectively.
• Support for advanced diagnostics that combine EHR, genomic, and imaging data to gain disease insight and to personalize treatment.
• Enhance monitoring by analyzing data streams from medical devices such as sensor-equipped implants, continuous glucose monitoring, and cardiac monitoring.

Research

Vanderbilt University Medical Center researchers develop an NLP algorithm that analyzes EHR data to identify patients who need lung cancer screening, improving existing methods that look only at EHR smoking flags. The team found that nearly half of the documented smokers are missing discrete EHR data related to pack years and quit dates, but the NLP analysis of clinical notes delivered 96% accuracy.

Taiwan’s National Cheng Kung University creates AI-powered software to detect age-related muscle loss (sarcopenia) from CT scans. The government has approved the software for sale to other hospitals, although the creators suggest that hospitals perform screening of cancer patients for free since they already have their CT images. Sarcopenia, which increase fall and fracture risk in older patients and those undergoing chemotherapy, can be improved through diet and rehabilitation if caught early.

Carnegie Mellon University is using AI, ML, and NLP to analyze YouTube videos that offer patients information on conditions or treatments for accuracy, comprehension level, trustworthiness, and delivery of actionable guidance. They hope to create filters that give doctors a short list of videos that can be reviewed and then prescribed as needed.

Newly developed, AI-powered “smart socks” will allow people with dementia to live at home, where the wearable tracks heart rate, sweat levels, and motion to determine when the wearer is in distress. The socks look like real socks, are machine washable, and do not require charging.

Other

In Canada, a report warns that successful use of healthcare AI will be limited by the healthcare system’s reliance on fax machines, handwritten notes, scanned files, and paper recordkeeping.

Veterinary chain Banfield Pet Hospital offers customers a free AI-powered device – developed by Whistle Health, which like Banfield, is owned by candy and dog food maker Mars — that attaches to a dog’s collar to track caloric intake, scratching that could indicate skin problems, and other health data, with an app that allows chatting with a veterinarian. An enhanced version allows tracking the pet’s location.

An AI expert notes that AI-created influencers – realistic, computer-generated characters – will increase mental health issues and suicides among followers who can’t function in the real, imperfect world. He says that mental health was already threatened by the false perfection of Photoshopping and plastic surgery. An AI-generated influencer who portrays a young woman from Finland has thousands of followers on TikTok and Instagram, while another influencer created an AI-powered “virtual girlfriend” version of herself using ChatGPT that she expects to generate $60 million per year in subscriptions from an audience that is 98% male.

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Healthcare AI News 8/9/23

News

Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) expresses concerns to Google officials that hospitals are testing the company’s Med-PaLM 2 large language model. He asks specifically whether the LLM memorizes the full set of a patient’s data, whether patients are notified of its use or are offered the chance to opt out, and for the company to provide a list of those hospitals that are participating in testing. Warner raised questions in 2019 about whether Google’s “secretive partnerships” with hospitals that would use patient data without their consent could create privacy issues.

A hospital in Israel adds a startup’s ChatGPT-powered clinical intake tool to its ED admission process. It collects the results of a three-minute chatbot Q&A that the patient answers in their own words, after which the system generates a condition summary for the doctor.

Business

MUSC Health will use Andor Health’s ChatGPT models to create a virtual care ecosystem that will include virtual visits, virtual hospital, virtual patient monitoring, virtual team collaboration, and virtual community collaboration.

A Bain survey of health system executives finds that while 75% of them think that generative AI has reached the turning point that is necessary to change healthcare, only 6% of their organizations have established a strategy to use it. They rank the top three uses over the next 12 months as clinical documentation, analyzing patient data, and optimizing workflows, while within 2-5 years they will be looking at using AI in predictive analytics, clinical decision support, and making treatment recommendations.

Research

A University of Maryland School of Medicine article says that physicians need more training in probabilistic reasoning to productively use AI-powered clinical decision support. The authors suggest that physicians undertake training in sensitivity and specificity, to help them understand test and algorithm performance, and learn about how they should use algorithm recommendations in their decision-making.

Harvard Medical School researchers find that AI-generated narrative radiology reports aren’t yet as good as radiologist-generated ones, but they have developed two tools to evaluate them for ongoing improvement.

Other

Pharma bro and former federal prisoner Martin Shkreli takes social media umbrage with a PhD AI researcher who thinks LLMs like the one he’s selling shouldn’t give medical advice, calling her an “AI Karen.” Shkreli claims that his Dr. Gupta, which uses ChatGPT, will ease physician burdens, reduce healthcare costs, and help the economically disadvantaged. Shkreli’s claim to healthcare fame was buying rights to a old, cheap drug to treat parasitic disease and immediately jacking up its price from $13.50 to $750, after which the FTC forced him to return his $65 million in profit for suppressing competition. Shkreli has also created a veterinarian version of Dr. Gupta called Dr. McGrath. Experts note that in addition to the legal exposure of providing medical advice over the Internet, Dr. Gupta at one time identified itself as a board-certified internist, although it now answers the identity question with, “I understand that you may have questions about my credentials, but let’s focus on addressing your symptoms and concerns.”

Time magazine recaps how struggling New York City-based urgent care chain Nao Medical is apparently using AI to generate nonsensical articles to improve its search engine rankings. The above article helpfully clarifies the understandable confusion between color guard and colonoscopy (or its own failure to know the difference between color guard and Cologuard colon cancer screening test), noting the subtle difference that “Color guard is a performance art, while a colonoscopy is a medical procedure.” The young software engineer who runs the company previously developed Fake My Fact, which generated phony Google results and online evidence to use “when you knew you were wrong but wanted to be right.”

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Healthcare AI News 8/2/23

News

Duke Health will create an AI Innovation Lab and Center for Excellence in partnership with Microsoft, with one of its research topics being the reliability and safety of generative AI in healthcare. Duke Health will use Azure and its OpenAI Service.

The British Standards Institution issues guidance for using AI in healthcare that includes criteria for evaluating products for clinical benefit, performance standards, safe integration into clinical environments, ethical considerations, and equitable social outcomes.

The Australian Medical Association, which previously warned doctors to stop using ChatGPT to write medical notes because it does not protect patient confidentiality, says that Australia lags other countries in regulating AI. It calls for clinicians to always make final decisions and to obtain patient consent before using AI for their treatment or diagnosis.

Business

Using synthetic patient data for research – applying AI to convert real medical records to broader sets of realistic but artificial data that involves no privacy issues – is appealing, but the industry is challenged to create those data sets while preserving many relevant variables so that the results reflect real-life situations. The WSJ article also notes that most of the data vendor markets are young startups, as big cloud providers that might be a more comfortable choice for customers haven’t shown an interest in that market so far.

Forbes profiles OpenEvidence, which collects current medical data before answering questions, an “open book” approach that works around the expensive problem of constantly retraining AI models, potentially competing with human-edited reference databases such as Wolters Kluwer UpToDate. OpenEvidence analyzes 31,000 peer-reviewed journals from the National Library of Medicine, weighted by impact factor, and places their content into the company’s retrieval database within 24 hours. Physicians who register can test the system by asking their own questions. The founder’s previous company developed an AI-powered tool that analyzes the stock market to identify arbitrage opportunities. OpenEvidence is a Mayo Clinic Platform Accelerate company.

Healthcare talent software and staffing company Aya Healthcare acquires two AI software companies whose tools forecast patient demand and staffing needs.

Other

Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz says that AI’s biggest impact will be in healthcare, predicting that the industry will jump from fax machines straight to AI similar to how the developing world skipped credit cards in going from cash to mobile payments. It says that any new technology must be 10 times better than whatever it displaces since marginal improvements aren’t worth the effort, noting that while enterprise software failed to clear that 10x bar in healthcare, AI does so easily. It predicts that AI can’t fail because it can help address clinician shortages and reduce costs while saving lives.

Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD says that AI will perform some of the activities of doctors “sooner than we think.” He sees four areas of AI usage: (1) processing claims or creating and analyzing medical records, such as Amazon HealthScribe; (2) analyzing medical images and ECGs; (3) providing clinical decision support using patient-specific data; and (4) AI operating as an independent tool to diagnose and prescribe, although he admits that is unlikely any time soon given regulatory caution. He says that using AI in a clinician-supporting role won’t lower costs because healthcare is a people-centric business where workers are paid increasingly more despite no change in their productivity (the Baumol effect), with no cost improvement unless AI replaces doctors completely.

A NEJM perspective piece says that medical educators should take an activist approach to integrating AI into physician training, because if they don’t, external forces that are motivated by efficiency and profits will do it for them. The authors question the role of cognitive apprenticeship when medical students will likely use AI-powered chatbots on their first day of training and how lifelong learning fits with using AI to  immediately and reliably answer questions at the point of care.

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Healthcare AI News 7/26/23

News

Amazon Web Services launches AWS HealthScribe, which allows developers to create clinical documentation tools that use speech recognition and generative AI. Software companies can use a single API to create transcripts, extract terms, and create summaries of doctor-patient conversations. The service will initially support applications for general medicine and orthopedics. AWS HealthScribe is priced per second of audio transcript, with the company estimating that processing 1,000 visit transcripts per month would cost $1,500. The company also says that the service is HIPAA-eligible and the company will not use its content for machine learning training.

ChatGPT developer OpenAI sunsets its tool that it hoped would be able to identify whether text was generated by AI or humans, citing the software’s low rate of accuracy.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is investigating Google’s attempts to gain access to data from the military’s Joint Pathology Center for use in building healthcare AI tools, also accusing the Defense Department of showing favoritism toward Google. ProPublica previously reported that Google offered to digitize the military’s 55 million pathology slides in return for exclusive access to the archive.

Business

Safety-focused healthcare large language model developer Hippocratic AI raises another $15 million in its seed funding round, increasing its total to $65 million.

Vanderbilt University Medical Center will use Nference’s AI-powered federated clinical analytics platform to analyze combined de-identified data from EHRs, imaging systems, and digital pathology in biomedical research. VUMC will digitize its glass slide pathology using a digital pathology solution from Nference-owned Pramana.

Korea Exchange warns investors that share prices of some of the country’s medical AI companies show signs of manipulation, noting as an JLK, whose shares are up 1,000% so far this year.

Other

A hospital in Belgium is using a smartphone app called PMcardio that can analyze an ECG in five seconds to detect 38 cardiovascular conditions, either as a second opinion for cardiologists or as a primary diagnostic tool for ED doctors and GPs. Powerful Medical says its app is available for use in 15 European countries.

Researchers confirm that Prevencio’s AI-powered lab tests can accurately determine the risk of heart attack, stroke, and cardiac death, as validated by coronary or peripheral angiography. The company’s seven tests are AI-derived and algorithmically score multi-proteomic biomarkers. President, CEO, and board member Rhonda Rhyne is a pharmacist with life sciences leadership experience who joined the company in 2013.

The VP of data science at Unity Health, the first hospital in Canada to form a dedicated applied AI team, describes how AI might be used by hospitals:

• AI will make sense of the data that is already stored in hospital systems.
• It will get better at highlighting at-risk patients.
• High quality, nationwide health data sets are needed to create algorithms for rare conditions.
• AI should be trained on peer-reviewed publications rather than incomplete or low-quality data found on the Internet.
• Unity Health will use generative AI to help generate admission notes, discharge notes, and progress notes that clinicians will review, edit, and approve.

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Healthcare AI News 7/19/23

News

Meta and Microsoft release Llama 2, a fully open competitor to ChatGPT 3.5 that is free for research and commercial use. Unlike ChatGPT, users can add their own data to Llama 2.

Elon Musk forms XAI, an AI company that he says will seek to “understand reality” and will work with Twitter, Tesla, and other Musk-owned companies.

Teladoc Health will use Microsoft’s AI services and its Nuance DAX ambient documentation product into its virtual care platform, expecting to automate the creation of clinical documentation during virtual exams. The company’s medical group will use Nuance DAX Express for the visits it provides directly.

Engineering consortium MLCommons develops MedPerf, an open benchmarking platform that evaluates the performance of AI models on real-world medical data while preserving patient privacy.

Business

Causaly, which created an AI platform for drug development, raises $60 million in a Series B funding round.

Nividia invests $50 million in AI drug discovery vendor Recursion Pharmaceuticals, which will train AI models on Nvidia’s cloud platform. RXRX shares jumped 80% on the news, valuing the 10-year-old company at $2.6 billion.

Research

A Google paper proposes supporting medical imaging predictive AI in a “know when they don’t know” manner, where the extra AI layer can decide via a confidence score whether it should defer to a clinician. The use of such a system reduced false positives by 25% while still identifying all true positives.

A new study finds that ChatGPT’s healthcare-related output is hard to distinguish from that created by healthcare providers, but patient trust decreased as task complexity increased, suggesting that the best use of healthcare chatbots is to assist with patient-provider communication related to administrative tasks and routine management of chronic conditions.

Researchers find that Google’s PaLM large language model generated long-form answers to common medical questions that aligned with scientific consensus just 62% of the time, but system tuning improved performance to equal that of human clinicians, with 93% of its answers found to be scientifically correct. The system generated potentially harmful answers 5.8% of the time, slightly outperforming clinicians.

A Science perspective piece predicts that pairing AI applications with medical robotics will create a new era of medicine in which autonomous robots could perform diagnostic imaging and surgical procedures as well as create and optimize the use of prosthetics.

Researchers are developing an AI too that can quickly recognize the genetic features of gliomas, the most common form of brain cancer, providing a molecular diagnosis in 15 minutes versus the manual process that takes weeks. Surgeons could use the results to make immediate operating decisions in the OR.

Other

UMC Health System deploys ZeroEyes, an AI-based platform that identifies guns from live security camera video streams. The company’s monitoring center can verify threats, issue alerts, and dispatch first responders within 3-5 seconds of detection.

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Healthcare AI News 7/12/23

News

Lovelace Health System in New Mexico implements CareHarmony’s AI-powered care coordination software to help patients with two or more chronic conditions better manage their treatment, including medications.

Lehigh Valley Health Network (PA) will integrate Aidoc’s enterprise AI implementation and integration platform and imaging AI algorithms with its radiology department workflows. LVHN will also leverage Rad AI’s Omni and Continuity solutions, which, respectively, will automatically generate study impressions from a radiologist’s dictation and automatically send follow-up recommendations to patients and providers when incidental findings are reported.

Productive Edge announces GA of Generative AI-enhanced solutions for prior authorization, patient engagement and marketing, and health plan member engagement.

Mayo Clinic pilots Google’s Med-PaLM 2 AI tool in several hospitals. Built on the language model powering Google’s Bard chatbot, the tool is designed to answer questions about healthcare information.

Research

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and University of Pittsburgh Medical Center develop an easy-to-use, high-risk patient identification model using an algorithm that learns from the digital medical records of 1.25 million surgical patients. Deployed at 20 UPMC hospitals, researchers have found that the model does a better job of identifying high-risk patients than the standard – and manual – American College of Surgeon’s National Surgical Quality Improvement Program.

Children’s National Hospital and Virginia Tech will use new seed funding to expand the work of a collaboration that has sprung up between the hospital’s Research & Innovation team and the university’s Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics. Research will focus on how AI can help to treat specific diseases, enhance smart surgery for pediatric health, and improve hospital management.

A majority of clinicians believe AI isn’t ready for medical use, according to a GE HealthCare survey of 7,500 clinicians in eight countries. Less than half of respondents – 26% in the US – are ready to trust AI.

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Healthcare AI News 7/5/23

News

In New York, Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine launches the Center for Ophthalmic Artificial Intelligence and Human Health to help ophthalmologists more quickly diagnose eye disease and assess underlying health conditions. The center will initially work with AI models in Mount Sinai’s ophthalmology tele-consult program, tele-retina program, and eye stroke service.

Business

A local Dallas media outlet profiles Sniffle, an AI-powered virtual care app that offers telemedicine to patients, and white-label virtual consult capabilities to physicians. The State of Arkansas has invested in the company, and its technology is now used by 85 physicians in 10 Arkansas clinics.

Research

Crisis call support line operator Protocall Services and Lyssn will use a $2 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to customize Lyssn’s AI technology for use in the analysis and review of crisis calls. Lyssn’s call evaluations and summary dashboards are intended to help call center counselors improve their assessment of a caller’s suicide risk. The companies will soon begin an 18-month study to determine whether or not Lyssn’s software improves the performance of counselors over time.

UPMC researchers develop a machine learning algorithm for the ECG diagnosis of occlusion myocardial infarction in patients with chest pain that outperforms providers and other ECG interpretation software.

Other

The Responsible AI in Healthcare consortium launches to help health systems and other providers safely use AI. Backed by the Responsible AI Institute, Harvard Business School, and NHS in the UK, the group is working to develop a Responsible Generative AI Safety Index scoring system for healthcare.

Mayo Clinic scientists develop an AI-augmented kidney stone test to help providers pinpoint any underlying health conditions that may have contributed to the patient’s condition.

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Healthcare AI News 6/21/23

News

Google adds the ability to search for skin conditions to its Lens visual search tool. Users take or upload a photo of their skin condition and the system finds visual matches, which it says is easier than trying to describe the situation with words.

Startup Dandelion Health, which offers de-identified health system data for clinical research, launches a free public service that will evaluate the performance, fairness, and equity of health algorithms. It will initially focus on predictive algorithms for cardiology. The company’s pilot program – which uses data from Sharp HealthCare, Sanford Health, and Texas Health Resources – will evaluate if an algorithm trained on one area’s dataset performs equally well when applied to other populations and if it does so fairly for everyone.

Business

Korea-based AI medical solutions vendor SPASS receives FDA 510(k) clearance for its AI-based detection software for sepsis, anaphylaxis, and hypovolemic shock.

DeepX earns FDA clearance for its digital dermatoscope, which will acquire images for teledermatology review. The company is seeking FDA approval for integrating the images with an AI algorithm that will analyze lesions based on their light transferring properties to provide fast-track diagnosis of skin cancer.

A McKinsey report predicts that generative AI will add $4.4 trillion to the global economy, with leading use cases being in banking, technology, and life sciences.

ChatGPT creator OpenAI is reportedly planning to launch a marketplace for AI models that use its technology, which could raise competitive issues with its partners.  

Research

Researchers find that AI-powered analysis of EHR data can predict pancreatic cancer earlier, identifying heightened risk up to three years before diagnosis. Unexpected predictive symptoms include gallstones, Type 2 diabetes, anemia, and GI symptoms. The researchers believe that 320 of each 1,000 people the AI model identifies as high risk will develop cancer. The federal government doesn’t recommend screening symptom-free people for pancreatic cancer, but targeting AI-identified high-risk patients would make surveillance more affordable and improve long-term survival.

AI algorithms for predicting inflammatory bowel disease have been enhanced to offer personalized treatment recommendations and – by incorporating patient-reported outcomes, sensor data, and biomarkers – to detect early signs of worsening or to predict which treatments will be effective.

Other

Meredith Broussard, MFA, whose 2018 book “Artificial Unintelligence” coined the term “technochauvinism” in describing the belief that technology can solve any problem better than humans, describes her experience with running open-source AI models on her mammograms to see if it would detect the cancer that her doctor has already diagnosed:

The AI that I used did, in fact, work. But it doesn’t diagnose the way that a doctor does. It drew a circle around an “area of concern” on a single flat image and gave me a score between zero and one … I realized that I had expected more—not the Terminator, and not a Jetsons-style robot doctor, but at least a humanlike diagnosis based on my entire medical record. This is pretty typical. We often have imaginary expectations about AI, and the technology fails to live up to what we imagine it can do. It would be really great if we could diagnose more people earlier. It would be great if we could use technology to save more lives from cancer. We are absolutely all united in that goal. But the idea that AI is going to be our salvation for diagnosing all cancers in the next few years is a little bit overblown.

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Healthcare AI News 6/14/23

News

The American Medical Association’s House of Delegates considers a resolution that would urge doctors to educate patients about the risk of large language models. It also directs AMA to work with the federal government to protect patients from inaccurate, AI-generated medical advice.

Dartmouth launches the Center for Precision Health and Artificial Intelligence.

In England, the British Labour Party recommends that the UK create a mandatory licensing model for companies that do AI work.

A UK pathologist who pioneered the use of AI to diagnose prostate cancer is advocating the use of similar AI pathology tools to diagnose breast cancer within three days and help finalize treatment recommendations within a week. He says that diagnosing cancer isn’t hard, but it takes more time to review biomarkers to determine optimal treatment, creating patient uncertainty and straining staff resources.

Business

Healthcare analytics vendor BurstIQ acquires Olive’s AI business intelligence solution.

Healthcare analytics vendor Apixio acquires ClaimLogiq, which offers health plan claims technology.

The CEO of drug manufacturer Sanofi says it will be the first pharma company that is powered by AI at scale, using AI and data science to discover drugs, design clinical trials, and improve manufacturing and supply chain processes.

Accenture will spend $3 billion to double its AI-focused employee headcount to 80,000, incorporate generative AI in its client work, and help customers use the technology.

Opinion

A Health Affairs opinion piece predicts that AI will set interoperability back, as providers will use technical and legal tools to prevent large competitors from using their data to train large language models to create competing consumer medical services.

Research

Researchers test ChatGPT’s ability to provide venomous snakebite advice to consumers, finding that it gives accurate and useful responses, including recommendations to seek medical care when appropriate, but with limitations involving outdated knowledge and lack of personalization.

Other

Peter Lee, VP of OpenAI investor Microsoft, says he was “alarmed” to learn that within the first three days of the release of ChatGPT, doctors were not only using it, but were asking it to help them communicate with patients more compassionately. A former physician executive at Microsoft says that he was “blown away” by ChatGPT’s ability to help him communicate empathetically with a friend with cancer, but observes that doctors don’t evangelize its use because that would require admitting that they aren’t good at talking to patients.

A health technology firm creates Lifesaving Radio, an AI-based radio station whose playlist of hard rock music is optimized to get surgeons “in the zone” of relaxed high efficiency during surgery. The playlist was developed using Spotify’s AI DJ analytics technology to find songs with the ideal tempo, key, and loudness for surgeons. It features an AI-powered DJ that calls out the surgeons and team members by name. The channel’s first music set is an AC/DC-inspired collection called “Highway to Heal,” which includes parodies such as “You Sewed Me All Night Long.”

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Healthcare AI News 6/7/23

News

Mayo Clinic will use Google’s low-code Enterprise Search in Generative AI App Builder to combine Google search with generative AI to provide information to clinicians and employees.

Boston Children’s Hospital, which drew recent attention for posting a job for a ChatGPT prompt engineer, tells Mashable how it may use the technology to solve real-world problems such as helping patients navigate its buildings or to create patient-specific discharge and rehabilitation instructions using their EHR data.

Wolters Kluwer Health acquires Invistics Corporation, which offers AI-enabled software for drug diversion detection.

Primary and urgent care chain Carbon Health launches hands-free AI charting across all of its clinics and providers. Appointment audio is analyzed with AWS Medical Transcribe, then processed with GPT-4 to generate an EHR-ready notes document. Early studies show that unedited accuracy is 88%, charts are 2.5 times more detailed than with manual entry, and chart completion time was reduced from 16 minutes to four. The company says it may sell the software to other provider groups.

AvaSure adds AI-powered enhancements to its TeleSitter virtual care platform in which the virtual safety attendants will be alerted when a patient who is at risk for a fall or elopement tries to sit up or leave the room. The company is partnering with Kinometrix, which applies AI predictive analytics to EHR data to identify patients with fall risk.

FDA issues 510(k) clearance for Ezra’s AI-enhanced MR images for early cancer detection, which the company says would reduce full-body MRI screening cost by 30%. The company says it hopes to offer a 15-minute, $500 full body scan versus today’s one-hour scan that costs $1,950.

Business

LeanTaas announces a generative AI solution that gives leaders insights about patient flow, scheduling, block management, and other capacity management measures.

Clarify Health is beta testing a generative AI solution called Clara, which analyzes claims data to recommend care opportunities.

ObjectiveHealth launches an AI-powered clinical trials feasibility and recruitment platform that identifies the most qualified study candidates using risk factors and biomarkers from their EHR data, then keeps participants engaged by streamlining appointments and communications.

SafelyYou, which offers AI video and remote monitoring support for dementia care in senior living communities, including fall detection, raises $30 million in funding.

Research

University of Colorado medical school researchers are studying patient experiences with AI that simulates conversation, raising questions about potential bias created by the appearance of the chatbot’s avatar and the ethics of nudging people into healthcare behaviors without restricting their choices.

Researchers find that ChatGPT provides evidence-based answers to public health questions with 91% recognition versus a cumulative 5% recognition among Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, Cortana, and Bixby. However, ChatGPT, along with the other tools, rarely offers referrals and instead gives advice. The authors conclude that public health agencies should publish a database of recommended resources that AI could use in fine-tuning its responses to refer people to vetted resources.

NYU medical school researchers describe NYUTron, a large language model they trained to on EHR notes to forecast clinical and operational event in real time with better accuracy compared to traditional methods. They tested the system at NYU Langone Health System on five predictive tasks: 30-day readmission, in-hospital mortality, co-morbidity index, length of stay, and insurance denial. The authors say that models trained on highly tailored data are more useful than using larger, less-specific datasets, but they still require a lot of computational horsepower.

Other

Kenya-based “contract cheaters” who ghost write essays and complete assignments for students in wealthy countries worry that ChatGPT could replace them. One of them says that most of his customers are studying nursing and healthcare. A January study found that 89% of the surveyed students are using ChatGPT to help them with homework and 53% used it to write an entire essay.

South Korea is using AI-powered image analysis to assess the health of North Korea’s leaders, determining that Kim Jong Un weighs over 300 pounds, has dark circles under his eyes, and may suffer from a sleep disorder.

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Healthcare AI News 5/31/23

News

Microsoft adds intelligent meeting recap to Teams Premium, which generates meeting notes, a task list, and personalized timeline markers.

In Australia, five-hospital South Metropolitan Health Service orders doctors to stop using ChatGPT for work-related activity, citing confidentiality concerns. SMHS found that at least one doctor used ChatGPT to create a discharge summary, backtracking on an earlier statement in which it said that several doctors were creating notes in ChatGPT and then pasting them into the EHR.

Business

AI chipmaker Nvidia hits a market capitalization of $1 trillion following a strong quarterly report, joining nine companies that have reached that mark including Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Saudi Aramco. A $10,000 investment in the company five years ago would be worth nearly $60,000 today.

Hyro, which offers conversational AI-powered healthcare workflow and conversation solutions, raises $20 million in a Series B funding round.

In England, AI drug discovery company Benevolent AI, which went public last year in a SPAC merger, will cut half of its workforce and scale back its laboratory facilities. The company had hoped to license its AI-designed drug candidate for atopic dermatitis, but it failed to improve symptoms in early-stage clinical trials.

Research

Researchers use AI to design an antibiotic for treating hospital-acquired infections caused by the broadly resistant Acinetobacter baumannii bacteria. Researchers tested thousands of drugs for their ability to kill the bacteria or slow its spread, trained AI on the results, and then ran the resulting AI model against 6,700 other drugs to generate a 240-drug short list of candidates. The AI-chosen drug, abaucin, targets the bacteria specifically and therefore is less likely to cause drug resistance. Laboratory and clinical testing will take several years, with the first AI antibiotics expected to reach the market in 2030.

Opinion

Google Health debunks five myths about medical AI:

• The more data, the better. Data quality matters more and expert adjudication in touch cases helps improve labeling quality.
• AI experts are all you need. Building an AI system requires a multidisciplinary team.
• High performance provides clinical confidence. Real-world validation is needed to make sure the model generalizes to real-life patients.
• AI fits easily into workflows. AI should be designed around human users.
• Launch means success. AI systems must be monitored to detect potential issues when patient populations or environmental factors change.

Other

Nvidia profiles Nigeria-based physician, informaticist, and machine learning scientist Tobi Olatunji, MD, MS, who started Intron Health to transcribe physician dictation using AI with 92% accuracy across 200 African accents. The company was supported by Nvidia’s startup program. He earned a Georgia Tech computer science master’s and a UCSF master’s in medical informatics after he completed medical school in Nigeria.

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Healthcare AI News 5/24/23

News

Microsoft will integrate ChatGPT into Windows 11, where it will run in its own Copilot window as a personal assistant to perform Windows commands and summarize documents that are dragged into it. The user rollout will start in June.

Tell, whose app allows users to seek advice from medical experts, integrates ChatGPT to translate medical jargon into accessible language.

OpenAI says that AI systems will exceed expert level in most domains within 10 years and recommends steps to mitigate its risks:

• Coordinate development efforts across countries and hold companies to a high standard of responsibility.
• Create an organization similar to the International Atomic Energy Agency provide oversight and inspection AI efforts that exceed a specific level of capability or resource requirements.
• Develop technical capabilities to make superintelligence safe.

OpenAI launches a ChatGPT app for the IPhone.

In Pakistan, the government of Punjab launches a two-hospital pilot of using AI to assist in diagnosis.

Google launches the Google for Startups Growth Academy: AI for Health program for companies based in Europe, Middle East, and Africa. Startups from seed to Series A will be offered a three-month virtual program of tailored workshops, collaboration, and mentorship.

Business

Alicja AI offers a $500 per month enterprise clinical documentation tool that integrates with EHRs. 

Research

ChatGPT has passed several medical exams, but researchers find that it falls just short of passing the American College of Gastroenterology Self-Assessment Tests.

A University of Arizona Health Sciences-led study finds that participants are almost evenly split in preferring a human doctor versus AI for diagnosis and treatment. The authors recommend further research about how AI can be incorporated into the work of physicians and the decision-making process of patients. 

Other

Business Insider profiles ED physician and two-company VP of innovation Joshua Tamayo-Sarver, MD, PhD, who says that it “probably should be embarrassing” that has sometime uses ChatGPT to explain medical issues in patient-friendly terms. He concludes that ChatGPT is “the most brilliant, talented, often drunk intern you could imagine” that is great at explaining concepts but not good at diagnosis or other tasks that require clinical reasoning.

Kaiser Permanente ED doctor and technologist Graham Walker, MD pens an excellent piece on how he views AI as a physician:

• AI can pass a medical school exam, which involves basic multiple choice questions, but that capability is not very related to interacting with patients to determine their multiple issues and their viewpoints about options.
• Doctors know how to successfully address a patient problem up to 95% of the time due to their specialization, residency training, and repeated exposure to the same common issues, and therefore would see no value in asking a “medical bot” for recommendations.
• Where AI could help is to differentiate among possible problems that exhibit similar symptoms.
• AI might offer a convincingly objective second opinion to a patient who is told, for example, that they don’t need antibiotics for a viral infection.
• He says he would “virtually hug and kiss a digital agent” that could generate discharge instructions, describe the logic behind the chosen medical plan, and answer questions are likely to have.
• AI could help identify and correct confirmation bias, where the doctor needs fresh perspective to see that evidence might not support the suspected diagnosis.
• AI could help steer an ED patient to local sources of help that might be better than the ED.
• AI could help doctors and patients understand why lab tests may not be indicated and how to react to positive or negative results.

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