| | | Medical students are broadly familiar with digital health technologies and, relatedly, believe AI will play a crucial role in the future of medicine. However, their hands-on experience with dHealth is limited—and their initial readiness for real-world medicine is significantly tied to two factors. These are a.) their comfort level with the constituent parts of evidence-based medicine and b.) their perceptions of AI’s burgeoning importance to healthcare. These are among the key findings of researchers who surveyed 1,400 medical students at the University of Montreal’s medical school. After analyzing 177 of the responses, the team concluded that North American medical education is due for a redesign. To adequately prepare up-and-coming generations of physicians for modern practice, the authors suggest, curriculums need to combine immersion in evidence-based medicine with a deep dive into AI. The study report posted Jan. 31 in Medical Education Online. Senior author is IT professor Guy Paré, PhD, of the University of Montreal. Corresponding author is business informatics professor Gerit Wagner, PhD, of the University of Bamberg in Germany. Here are seven key conclusions the authors lay out in their discussion section. 1. Competencies and perceptions of dHealth and AI technologies are positively related to medical students’ behaviors around evidence-based medicine. ‘This insight is valuable for medical practice, as it suggests potential synergies between advanced technologies and evidence-based medicine, and it highlights that different competencies can be taught within the medical curriculum.’
2. Experiential competencies have a significant positive effect, while knowledge competences are not significantly related to evidence-based medicine. ‘Thus there is an essential difference between familiarizing medical students with concepts and giving them the opportunity to experiment with IT systems, telehealth applications, AI-related technologies and mobile medical apps.’
3. Individual backgrounds—particularly gender and academic level—significantly impact dHealth competencies, including both knowledge and experiential aspects. ‘This highlights the necessity of integrating dHealth competencies into medical education and practice to accommodate varying individual backgrounds and technological advancements.’
4. Medical students’ dHealth competences and accurate perceptions of AI can make a positive contribution to their mastery of evidence-based medicine. ‘This implies that strengthening education in the areas of dHealth and AI in medical curricula may simultaneously strengthen students’ evidence-based medicine and offer an effective basis for the technology-supported future of medicine.’
5. Experiential learning can prepare prospective physicians to effectively integrate advanced technologies into their practice, ultimately supporting the widespread adoption of evidence-based medicine. ‘While prior research on medical education and AI has highlighted the need to go beyond traditional approaches of delivering teaching contents, it is evident that faculty members at medical schools need to acquire requisite dHealth competencies, e.g., through interdisciplinary initiatives, training or hiring.
6. It is advisable to cover fundamental dHealth technologies broadly instead of focusing on AI exclusively. ‘This aligns with prior curriculum development efforts that situate AI contents as an advanced topic after covering basic data literacy or IT infrastructure topics.’
7. Propositions for medical curricula that emphasize the links between AI and evidence-based medicine have emerged in the scientific literature. ‘Our findings thus constitute both a theoretical and an empirical foundation for such propositions, as evidence generation and evidence synthesis are increasingly enabled by AI and machine learning—and as AI becomes a mean for prospective physicians to overcome the barriers encountered in their learning and practice of evidence-based medicine.’
The study is available in full for free. |
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| | | Nabla is rolling out its ambient AI assistant at Denver Health - Denver Health, Colorado's primary safety-net health system, is deploying Nabla across its entire clinical workforce. In just the first week of system-wide implementation, a record 400 clinicians signed up to use the ambient AI assistant for clinical documentation.
During a successful 8-week pilot, Denver Health clinicians reported the following outcomes, including: ☑️ 40% reduction in note-typing per patient encounter
☑️ 82% of participants feeling less time pressure per visit
☑️ 15-point increase in patient satisfaction scores Read the press release
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| | | Buzzworthy developments of the past few days. - Institutions resistant to change. Companies profiting from inefficiency. Policymakers hesitant to challenge the status quo. Sounds like a rundown of impersonal background players in the next Wolf of Wall Street. But in fact it’s one tech watcher’s diagnosis of what’s keeping AI from doing all the good it could do in healthcare. Or even better, AI combined with blockchain. “The question facing us is not whether AI and blockchain will transform healthcare but who will control this transformation and whose interests it will serve,” the commentator comments. “It’s time to acknowledge the uncomfortable truth: The barriers to a healthcare revolution are structural and political.” The author is Chris Crecelius, founder of a decentralized autonomous organization, AxonDAO, a vendor in the healthcare blockchain space. His opinion piece is current in CCN, a media outlet focused on cryptocurrencies, business, finance and technology. Worth a read.
- Hey look. Another entrepreneur looking to drive AI deeper into healthcare. And this one is a billionaire. It’s LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and he’s co-launching a healthcare AI company called Manas. His vision is to not only make a bundle for investors but also to do so while helping cure cancer. Just for starters. Competitors in the space should take notice, as he’s both earnest and serious about the endeavor. So far he’s helped raise $25 million in seed funding. “Most people have had friends, family members, et cetera, who’ve died from cancer or had serious cancer problems,” Hoffman tells CNBC. “If we can make a huge difference on this—and this is the kind of thing that AI can make a huge difference in—it’s the kind of reason why AI can be great for humanity.” Manas’s other co-founder is the oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee, MD, who won a Pulitzer for his 2010 book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.
- Watch for AI to deliver notable gains in healthcare this year. Don’t be surprised if the wins include digital health agents that revamp the patient experience, robots that perform complex surgical tasks and generative AI models that continue contributing to drug discovery. The expectations are set by Eva-Maria Hempe, PhD, a healthcare and life sciences exec at Nvidia. She even sees healthcare AI producing systems that can reason. “From research labs to patient care, AI-powered solutions will enhance the healthcare experience for administrators, professionals, researchers and patients alike,” Hempe predicts at TechRadar. “[W]e’ll discover new applications and ways to interact with AI.”
- Out with ‘safe and effective.’ In with ‘protective and worth it.’ That’s the word swap healthcare professionals should make when trying to win buy-in on vaccines from balky healthcare consumers. So say four co-founders of the Council for Quality Health Communication. And they’re all for enlisting bots in the campaign. Healthcare professionals should consider a “substantive role for AI chatbots in the clinical setting, such as in the waiting room, to help debunk misinformation and communicate vaccine nuance,” the team writes in a piece published Jan. 28 by MedPage Today. “Early research suggests people will interact and respond favorably to this technology.” Hear them out.
- Tech proponents shouldn’t pressurize physicians who don’t like sharing work with AI. A better approach is to suggest a deliberate division of labor. The doctor does his or her thing. The machine does its own. That’s the pitch of healthcare AI researcher Pranav Rajpurkar, PhD, and cardiologist/bestselling author Eric Topol, MD. Publicizing their recommendation via the New York Times, the pair warns against “forcing both human doctors and AI to review every case side by side and trying to turn AI into a kind of shadow physician.” A more effective tactic, they add, is to “let AI operate independently on suitable tasks so that physicians can focus their expertise where it matters most.” Read the whole thing.
- A large supplier of healthcare-experience technology is strategically collaborating on generative AI with a cloud giant that’s a household name. The experience company maintains a healthcare-performance dataset built with more than 7.5 billion patient encounters in something like 40,000 sites of care. The cloudster is a Big Tech mainstay based in Washington State. Together the duo—Press Ganey and Microsoft—say they’ll design and distribute GenAI-equipped products that help provider orgs make things better for consumers and clinicians alike. Or, as they put it in a Feb. 3 announcement, they’ll leverage Microsoft’s Azure infrastructure to develop “a suite of generative AI-powered solutions that redefine actionable insights, driving transformational improvements in the safety, quality and experience of care delivery.”
- Don’t judge DeepSeek on the innovativeness of its programming. Judge it on the degree to which it shakes up the economics of the AI market. So advises the editorial board of Telegraph India. “DeepSeek is open-source, which allows others to learn from it and build on it, unlike Silicon Valley entities that guard AI technology as a precious secret,” the editorial reads. “By circumventing the need for Western hardware and capital, China has shown that sanctions can be taken up as a challenge to push innovation instead of stifling it.” How’s that for a shot across U.S. Big Tech’s proverbial bow? Read the rest.
- The ‘most profound’ AI application is healthcare. We didn’t say that. It comes from the head of a major investment firm that’s laser-focused on disruptive innovation in public equity markets. Cathie Wood, chief executive of Ark Invest, made the comment this week on the CNBC show “Squawk Box.” She also advised watching for gene sequencing and drug discovery stocks to benefit with particular oomph as “AI continues to reshape healthcare as we know it.”
- Recent research in the news:
- Notable FDA Approvals:
- Funding news of note:
- From AIin.Healthcare’s news partners:
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