Industry Watcher’s Digest

Buzzworthy developments of the past few days. 

• Healthcare AI has a checklist manifesto all its own. The document is the brainchild of an international team of researchers. They were led in the effort by a biostatistician and a quantitative medicine specialist at Duke-NUS Medical School. That’s the academic collaboration between Duke University and the National University of Singapore. The Duke-NUS duo says the team designed the work mainly for researchers working with GenAI, along with scientific journal publishers, institutional review boards, funders and regulators. They built the paper on nine widely accepted ethical principles—accountability, autonomy, equity, integrity, privacy, security, transparency, trust and beneficence. “As far as we are aware, our checklist is the first attempt at creating a practical solution to the ethical issues raised in the papers we included in our review [of existing ethical discourse],” the Duke-NUS researchers, Ning Yilin, PhD, and Liu Nan, PhD, tell the school’s news division. “While the checklist will not close all these gaps, it is a tool that can mitigate ethical concerns by guiding users in making comprehensive ethical assessments and evaluations.”
   
• Is it me or has talk about the Internet of Healthcare Things quieted? No matter. At least one expert in healthcare technology sees big things ahead from the combo of IoT and AI. He even names it as the AI innovation about which he’s most excited. In a Q&A with Intelligent CIO, Herat Joshi, PhD, MBA, also predicts quantum computing could “further transform healthcare by accelerating data processing for drug discovery, while federated learning will expand AI’s reach by enabling models to learn from decentralized data across multiple health systems, all while maintaining patient privacy.”
   
• LinkedIn, we have a good mind to fire you. Everybody’s favorite online networking platform recently started tapping users’ uploaded content to train its algorithms. It hasn’t been hard to opt out, but you had to know that you had to. You also had to noodle around to find the right click sequence. LinkedIn is paying the price now, albeit with nothing stronger than some bad press. “Hard to find opt-out tools are almost never an effective way to allow users to exercise their privacy rights,” F. Mario Trujillo, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, tells the Washington Post. “If companies really want to give users a choice, they should present users with a clear ‘yes’ or ‘no’ consent choice.” Additional coverage here. 
   
• The AI Gold Rush isn’t a onetime money flood. It’s more like a series of moon tides. This is clear because the word picture is back, floated to the fore by OpenAI’s reported bid to raise $6.5 billion at a $150 billion valuation. This development “could signal a new era in AI commercialization, potentially reshaping entire industries and sparking a fierce battle for market dominance,” write the editors at Pymnts. The implications “could be far-reaching, with businesses across sectors rushing to integrate advanced AI capabilities into their operations. Companies successfully leveraging OpenAI’s technology may gain substantial competitive advantages, potentially disrupting traditional business models and reshaping entire markets.” Read the rest. 
   
• Primary care could use a break. AI might be able to supply it. By having bots and other AI agents debrief and inform patients before they’re seen by overbooked clinicians, the technology could free one of the most perpetually time-pressed specialties to spend a full 15 minutes paying attention to the patient. Once the human-to-human interface finally happens, of course. Forbes contributor Sai Balasubramanian, MD, JD, takes a quick but fresh look at the potential. Companies seeking to AI-ify the space for service and profit “are indeed learning that care delivery, and specifically primary care delivery, is not easy,” he writes. “This is where AI tools and bots are being considered as potentially helpful.” 
   
• Mental healthcare is similarly ripe for AI. One of the things it might do is ease the transition individuals must make. Many have to change from a private person hiding their struggles to a patient willing to share such secrets with a stranger. AI can ease this difficult turnabout by helping to, believe it or not, make mental healthcare more human. “Ironically, by removing humans from the intake process, the non-judgmental nature of AI can create a more welcoming environment for those who might otherwise feel stigmatized or uncomfortable seeking help from an individual,” explains computational neuroscientist Ross Harper, PhD, in MedCity News. “In mental healthcare, we are increasingly thankful to AI for doing those things that allow us to be more … human.”
   
• Price transparency meets AI simplicity. UnitedHealthcare hopes to find that good things come to those who combine the two. To that end the country’s biggest health insurance company by revenue recently introduced its new Find Care & Costs tool. The algorithm steers enrollees to the right clinicians while also letting them know how much they’ll probably have to pay out of pocket for the visit. Data and analytics exec Craig Kurtzweil tellsFierce Healthcare the company is already seeing “better patterns of care, more utilization of preventive care, things like lower utilization of ER, those types of things start to pop out for members that can leverage this experience. So making it really convenient and something that they actually enjoy using is a win-win.” 
   
• I tried and failed to guess the company here: “Investing in This Healthcare Stock Could Be Like Catching Nvidia at the Dawn of the AI Boom.” Now you guess. Then see how you did. 
   
• Recent research in the news: 
   
  • University of Technology Sydney: AI chatbots rival doctors in accuracy for back pain advice, study finds
     
• Notable FDA Approvals:
   
  • Avicenna.AI lands FDA clearance for AI tool that detects cervical spine fracture
     
  • Somite Therapeutics treatment for Duchenne muscular dystrophy gets FDA orphan drug, rare disease tags 
     
  • Musk’s Neuralink gets FDA’s breakthrough device tag for ‘Blindsight’ implant
     
• Funding news of note:
   
  • Scribenote pioneers AI scribe to combat burnout among veterinarians as it secures $8.2M seed round 
     
  • Cercle raises $6M to advance AI-driven health data platform for women
     
  • Arya Health secures $4M seed funding to transform healthcare human capital management with AI
     
  • Funding supports Neuranics’ groundbreaking AI technology for remote heart health monitoring
     
• From AIin.Healthcare’s news partners:
   
  • Cardiovascular Business: AI detects hypertension in voice recordings
     
  • Radiology Business: Radiologist outperforms AI solution at detecting fractures on X-rays
     
  • Health Imaging: Providing chatbots with guideline context significantly improves their imaging recs