Industry Watcher’s Digest

Buzzworthy developments of the past few days.

• The ink wasn’t even dry on that expensive roadmap. Disappointed detractors wasted no time before throwing shade on Schumer and colleagues’ request for $32 billion in federal AI funding by 2026. Several news outlets suggested the bipartisan group had “punted” by leaving detailed rulemaking to future congressional committees. Other watchers went considerably further. The roadmap document shows far too much deference to the tech industry, says Alondra Nelson, former acting director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. “It is, in fact, striking for its lack of vision,” Nelson says in prepared remarks reported by Fast Company. “What it does is point to government spending, not on accountability, but on relieving the private sector of their burdens of accountability.” The same article quotes computer scientist Suresh Venkatasubramanian, PhD, a former White House tech advisor who’s now with Brown University. While participating in the Senate’s forums leading up to the drafting of the roadmap, he recalls, he and other experts consulted were “concerned this would be a dancing monkey show, and we’re the monkeys.” Now that a working document has come of the time and trouble, he adds, it’s even worse than that: “I feel betrayed.”
   
• If the $32B road mappers are as lacking in leadership as the critics are saying, nongovernmental bodies will need to pick up some of the slack. As it happens, some already are. The Lucian Leape Institute of the independent, nonprofit Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), for one, was busy stepping up when the Senate document was still a work in progress. This week the Leape think tank released a fairly sweeping guidance and use-case report on patient safety in a world bursting with healthcare GenAI. (The publication’s unveiling coincides with this week’s IHI Patient Safety Congress in Orlando.) Announcement with download links here.
   
• Backseat drivers aren’t just unhelpful. They’re also annoying. Might the same be said of image-interpretation AI used in radiology? Some radiologists would probably say so if they didn’t have to be polite. “If you want to help me drive, then you take the wheel so I can sit back and relax.” That’s from radiologist Saurabh Jha, MD, of the University of Pennsylvania. Jha gave the quote to the Associated Press, which asks and answers an aging question that may never die: “Will AI replace doctors who read X-rays and other medical images?”
   
• Here’s another saying about AI in healthcare that’s getting a bit long in the tooth: “AI will be as common as the stethoscope.” Then again, when the axiom is reiterated by as esteemed an expert as a Stanford lecturer in medicine and business who’s also the author of a current bestseller titled Chat GPT, MD and a former longtime CEO of Kaiser Permanente, you’d do well to listen. Get more of what Robert Pearl, MD, has to say about the present and future of GenAI in healthcare here.
   
• Now where did someone go and leave that missing gurney? Hospital transport teams won’t ever have to ask that question if they have real-time locating system (RTLS) and/or Internet of Things (IoT) technologies augmented with AI. Meanwhile hospital staff know when sheets are ready for changing, hands need more washing and all sorts of helpful (if sometimes a tad Big Brother-ish) things. RFID Journal has a quick overview.
   
• Nvidia is No. 6, Intel No. 5 and Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare No. 2. Find out which tech outfits make up the rest of the top 10 healthcare AI companies in the estimation of Healthcare Digital magazine.
   
• Be on the lookout for artificial history. Defining this as “highly credible but entirely fictional” chronicles of the past, writers at TechPolicy.Press warn that such bogus narratives “can empower nefarious actors to distort the truth in an effort to confuse, radicalize or recruit.” Ya think?
   
• The United Arab Emirates is in the GenAI game and rising fast. The Abu Dhabi-based Technology Innovation Institute says its latest series of large language models outperformed Meta’s Llama 3 and equaled Google’s Gemma 7B in independent testing. The series, called Falcon 2, is open-source, multilingual and multi-modal. Learn more here. And see the research news item from UAE below.
   
• Google’s Project Astra isn’t ready for prime time. Asked by a Business Insider reporter to critique his choice of clothes, the work-in-progress AI agent responded with, “I can’t provide stock quotes right now.” Am I the only AI enthusiast who feels oddly relieved when even the most uncannily intelligent bots turn out to be, in a certain sense, only human?
   
• Recent research roundup:
   
  • Stony Brook University: Using AI and social media to track depression in communities
     
  • Northwestern: Tech can’t replace human coaches in obesity treatment
     
  • American Academy of Sleep Medicine: New paper examines potential power and pitfalls of harnessing artificial intelligence for sleep medicine
     
  • University of Virginia: New AI risk-assessment tool to improve heart-failure care
     
  • Department of Health–Abu Dhabi partners with MBZUAI and Core42 to launch Global AI Healthcare Academy
     
• Funding news of note:
   
  • PolyAI secures near $500M valuation in boost to UK’s AI ambitions (Financial Times)
     
  • SmarterDx Raises $50M to Bolster Hospital Revenue Integrity and Quality with Its Clinical AI Solution
     
• From AIin.Healthcare’s news partners:
   
  • Health Imaging: FDA adds more than 120 new AI-enabled medical devices focused on radiology to list of approvals
     
  • Cardiovascular Business: Cardiology ranked No. 2 among all specialties with 122 FDA-cleared AI models
     
  • Radiology Business: Patient advocacy groups urge Congress to create pathway for CMS to cover AI in radiology
     
  • Cardiovascular Business: AI-based CAD assessments dramatically improve vascular surgery outcomes
     
  • Health Imaging: Radiographers are apprehensive about integrating AI into their workflow
     
  • Radiology Business: AI model for ankle stress radiography could reduce radiologists’ workload by average of 70%
     
  • Cardiovascular Business: Medtronic adds new AI models to its insertable cardiac monitors