Industry Watcher’s Digest

Buzzworthy developments of the past few days.

• Focus on value-added clinical tasks and let AI handle much of the rest. Do this over the next 10 years and, by the time 2035 gets here, your healthcare organization will be in great shape to adopt things like robotic medication administration. The advice is from the American Hospital Association. The group arrived at this pointer after reading a recent analysis by the consulting firm Oliver Wyman. AHA offers three more things to do in the runup to ’35. Consider the suggestions here.
   
• A shortage of tech talent is (still) the top challenge for IT leaders who’d like to unleash more generative AI firepower. Even those who report high levels of AI expertise on their teams are “rethinking talent strategies around AI, with upskilling playing a vital role in attempting to bridge AI skills gaps,” CIO.com reports. Bone up on this and five other “hard truths” for leaders looking to take gen AI enterprise-wide here.
   
• Kaiser Permanente is offering AI-equipped clinical notetaking to pretty much all its clinicians. It’s a big share, as KP runs 40 hospitals and 600+ medical offices in eight states plus the District of Columbia. The software, supplied by Abridge, summarizes conversations between patients and clinicians, then prompts the user to review and finalize the written output before entering it into the EMR/EHR. Kaiser medical director Ramin Davidoff, MD, suggests the technology captured the organization’s imagination with its promise to “create space” for the patient-physician connection. “We hope those connections and improved efficiencies,” he adds, “will help with the sustainability of the practice of medicine for many doctors.” Announcement.
   
• AI’s potential impact on democracy is enormous. Recognizing the opportunities and challenges inherent in the observation, two organizations are joining forces to promote responsible and collaborative AI governance around the world. The orgs are Reston, Va.-based Regulating AI Inc., which describes itself as “a leading nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing the understanding and regulation of AI,” and Club de Madrid. The latter is the world’s largest forum of democratic former presidents and prime ministers. The late Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, was a founding member. Sanjay Puri, founder and president of Regulating AI, says the partnership “represents a pivotal moment in shaping responsible AI governance. By combining the wisdom of former world leaders with cutting-edge AI expertise, we’re poised to create impactful policies that will guide the ethical development of AI on a global scale.” Announcement.
   
• Healthcare financial leaders are overall eager to tap AI for improving revenue cycle management. They do have concerns, though. Tops among these are the reliability and accuracy of the tools. The trick to getting full buy-in may be assuring holdouts of human-in-the-loop policies and practices. “When technology and expertise are combined, the potential for the best outcomes is present,” an industry leader tells HIMSS Media’s Healthcare IT News. More here.
   
• Microsoft’s Azure Health Bot service let its guard down. But not for long. Tenable Research discovered a couple of serious vulnerabilities not in the cloud-based service’s AI models but in the cloud-based service’s architecture. If not caught quickly, the problem could have allowed hackers to access supposedly secure patient data. Tenable reports that Microsoft says it patched the holes before any mischief or unhappy accidents came to pass.
   
• Med-tech biggie Stryker is snatching up Care.ai. Massachusetts-based Stryker wants to leverage Florida-based Care.ai for its platform and sensors that enable various AI-assisted workflows. These can help provider orgs deliver virtual care workflows, smart room capabilities and ambient intelligence solutions, Stryker says. Announcement.
   
• Recent research in the news:
   
  • Technical University of Munich: Navigating the European Union Artificial Intelligence Act for Healthcare
     
  • UC-Davis Health: New brain-computer interface allows man with ALS to ‘speak’ again
     
  • NIH: Leading AI models struggle to identify genetic conditions from patient-written descriptions
     
  • University of South Australia: Say ‘aah’ and get a diagnosis on the spot: Is this the future of health?
     
• AI funding news of note:
   
  • PayZen closes $232M B round in equity and debt led by NEA to boost healthcare affordability with AI
     
  • Consensus raises $11.5M in Series A funding to make the world's scientific research discoverable and consumable
     
  • Investors are suddenly getting very concerned that AI isn’t making any serious money
     
• From AIin.Healthcare’s news partners:
   
  • Health Imaging: Meta’s new large language model excels at board-style radiology prompts
     
  • Health Exec: FDA on track to clear 1,000+ clinical AI algorithms by end of the year