If great power obligates its wielder to exercise great responsibility, those advancing AI in healthcare are up to their necks in duty.

So suggests an investment professional whose venture-capital firm specializes in putting up big dollars to back early-stage innovators. The speaker, Holly Maloney of Cambridge, Mass.-based General Catalyst, spoke at HIMSS23, which closes in Chicago today. Here are three highlights as reported by HIMSS’s in-house news operation.

1. One of the reasons AI has been slow to catch on with patients, payers and providers is a lack of trust. AI has held promise to transform healthcare for the better part of a decade now, but adoption has lagged far behind the steady flow of research demonstrating its capabilities, Maloney noted. “We need to focus on building systems that are fair and inclusive, that are robust and reliable, that are private and secure and that are transparent and knowledgeable,” she added.  

2. As adoption expands, AI is likely to inject some unintended consequences into U.S. healthcare. Underscoring the criticality of anticipating the “What if’s” of AI in healthcare, Maloney advised thoughtful preparation. “The stakes are incredibly high,” she told attendees. “There is a tremendous amount of super private information that can be monetized in many ways and who will rise on the other side in terms of automation and care pathways.

3. Developers of emerging technologies presently rocking healthcare possess the potential to “drive incredible change, but with that ability you have great responsibility, especially as we get into the role of AI and automation,” Maloney said. “How do we take a system that is historically badly fragmented, super costly, more reactive into one that is truly focused on access, quality, lower cost and personalized proactive experiences?”

> In a separate HIMSS23 session featuring investors, panelists dished on ways they’ve adapted their funding strategies to ride out the present time of sluggish investment activity.

From HIMSS Media’s coverage of this discussion:

• “Valuations have corrected. They’ve come down. While this is good for investors, it's also good for startups. We’re seeing companies be a little more cash conscious, capital conscious and allocate capital better.”—Sonal Panda, Tau Ventures
• “When we look at the last two years, it feels a little sadder today than it did two years ago. When we look at the five-year, 10-year horizon, there has never been a better time to be investing in or building digital health technology and systems.”—Ben Wanamaker, Humana
• “It is certainly an investor-friendly environment. And it’s not to say that we'll take advantage of that, per se, but I think the entire reset brings us to more rational levels.” —Milind Parate, Northwell Holdings

For more HIMSS coverage of HIMSS23, click here.

• Philips and MIT are opening access to a prodigious critical care dataset they’ve developed for, among other interested parties, researchers looking to advance AI in healthcare. The store houses de-identified data from 200,000 patients cared for in more than 200 ICUs. The duet launched the secure database, called the eICU Collaborative Research Database, back in 2016 but have since updated it to include many patients hospitalized with severe COVID-19. AI researchers taking them up on the offer will find detailed clinical info (diagnoses, vital signs, medication orders, lab results) as well as insights into treatments, comorbidities, readmissions, clinical outcomes and more. Full announcement here.
   
• Regardless of their station—provider org, payer, supplier—today’s healthcare leaders would do well to embrace healthcare AI without letting the excitement (or the nervousness) distract them from their organization’s mission. That’s the advice of Vishal Patel, president of global markets for Duke (University) Corporate Education. Publishing his pointers in TechNative, Patel warns against tapping AI for the mere sake of doing so. Instead, he writes, “ensure that it aligns with your organization’s goals and values and that you can effectively communicate this to your stakeholders, whether they are employees, investors or customers.” Read the whole thing.
   
• Care-enablement tech developer Memora Health has received a monetary infusion worth $30 million. San Fran-based Memora says it intends to put the cash windfall behind its drive to digitize and automate “high-touch,” AI-aided clinical workflows that can assist and relieve care teams. Meanwhile patients will experience the technology as conversational, text-based guidance that adjusts to their style of communicating. The funding is led by venture capital firm General Catalyst with participation from Northwell Holdings, both of which sent speakers to HIMSS23. (See story above.)
   
• Health cloud company Innovaccer used the stage that was its booth at HIMSS23 to introduce the world to “Sara.” A new mascot in a floppily oversized costume? No—“the first conversational AI for healthcare analytics.” Aimed not at patients but at clinical and business professionals, the virtual assistant can take complex text-based questions and quickly return on-point answers with germane metrics. The company says the name is short for Saraswati, a wise Hindu goddess who brings order out of chaos. Read more about Sara and five other offerings San Francisco-based Innovaccer debuted at HIMSS23 here.
   
• ChatGPT at its current level of, ahem, sophistication turns out to be something of a sciolist. The word comes from the Latin for “one who speaks with spotty or superficial knowledge.” That’s the conclusion, in so many words, of orthopedic researchers in the U.K. who found the chatbot wrote authoritative-sounding journal articles that may have fooled a layperson but were, in fact, “factually inaccurate and had fictitious references.” The study is running in Skeletal Radiology and covered by HealthImaging. ​​​​​​​

• Digital Magazine: This is Enterprise Imaging - In this digital magazine we talk about how moving from multiple PACS to a single enterprise imaging system is busting siloes and deepening integration; challenges in radiology imaging and how radiologists are getting more done—better and faster—by using enterprise imaging; skyrocketing image volume and an increased need for collaboration across multiple and geographically diverse sites has made image management far more complex and why cloud is a solution to this; our latest addition to Sectra Enterprise Imaging portfolio—ophthalmology and why it is a game-changer for ophthalmologists.

• Beyond the impression: How AI-driven clinical intelligence transforms the radiology experience - In this session, Nuance CMIO Sheela Agarwal, MD, and Senior Product Manager Luanne D’Antoni explore innovations in radiology report creation and the role of automated impression generation.

• AI quality assurance models saving lives and millions in avoided med-mal - Unrecognized imaging findings are an unfortunate, but undeniable, part of radiology. New advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning offer a critical safety net that is improving care and saving lives — as well as avoiding millions of dollars in potential medical malpractice costs.