Industry Watcher’s Digest
Buzzworthy developments of the past few days.
- Working with Medicare Advantage insurance plans is like playing poker in the Wild West. And it’s gotten a lot harder to win “since the cowboys started using AI.” The colorful quote is from a hospital executive who spoke with Newsweek about the trend. The outlet also points to a Senate subcommittee report noting that human reviewers assisted by AI models—especially those that produce big savings—“could be pressured to follow the predictive technologies’ recommendations.” Read the whole thing.
- Physicians wishing they could try AI products before buying them have a new way to do so. It’s the Healthcare AI Challenge. Hosted by Mass General Brigham in collaboration with Emory Healthcare and the Universities of Wisconsin and Washington, the initial phase of the project is focusing on radiology. Fittingly, it will feature input from the American College of Radiology. Participating AI shoppers will have a chance to assess products for image interpretation and various other clinical tasks in a virtual environment. The idea is to “put clinicians in the driver’s seat,” says Keith Dreyer, DO, PhD, chief data science officer at Mass General Brigham. The experience will allow clinicians to “evaluate the utility of different AI technologies and, ultimately, determine which solutions have the greatest promise to advance patient care.” Announcement here, challenge homepage here.
- A multi-armed da Vinci robot watched videos of surgeons plying their trade. Now the machine is just as good as the human experts at manipulating a needle, lifting body tissue and suturing incision sites. HealthDay reports that the robot’s “brain” is a GenAI iteration that uses not words but kinematics, which renders motion as math. “All we need is image input, and then this AI system finds the right action,” explains the Johns Hopkins researcher who led the work, adding that the model can even generalize new environments it hasn’t encountered. Get the rest.
- Healthcare is one of the most promising and lucrative areas for B2B companies investing in GenAI-driven innovation. Pymnts concludes as much after surveying vendor executives. The outlet found 90% of respondents reporting positive ROIs on GenAI spends they’ve already made. “This is remarkable,” Pymnts points out, “considering technology investments tend to be slow and expensive to implement.” On average, Pymnts says, the surveyed field expects to fully embed GenAI across their businesses in 7.4 years.
- Q. Who wants ‘sovereign AI’ in healthcare? A. Healthcare people in countries that want to cut their dependence on U.S.-based data centers and, instead, derive their data inputs from local sources. A cloud supplier executive in France tells CNBC it’s seeing strong demand for its European-based infrastructure, and the pull is coming from customers who “understand the value of having their data in Europe, [where it’s] subject to European legislation.” Similar developments are afoot in Japan, and they’re described in a blogpost from Nvidia.
- Atlanta is emerging as something of a healthcare AI hotspot. The latest anecdotal evidence supporting the hypothesis comes from the city’s choice of its best new startup. The fledgling company, GenAI Healthcare Inc., has a platform called NexCura. It’s designed to help individuals and enterprises “proactively manage wellness through actionable insights,” according to coverage by regional outlet Hypepotamus.
- AI companies helped cause problems with racial bias in healthcare algorithms. And AI companies can help solve them. So states the CEO of a startup working in the healthcare GenAI space. Writing for Stat, the entrepreneur notes that his family has been directly impacted by racial bias in medical technology. The experience helped push him into a “personal quest to make AI more trustworthy.” Racial bias, adds Amber Nigam, founder of Basys.ai, “is a human problem first—and a technology problem only to the extent that humans design our technologies.”
- A nurse working in neuro-intensive care worries AI may badly wound intuition, skills and training in all nurses. “The reasoning for bringing in AI tools to monitor patients is always that it will make life easier for us,” the healthcare professional tells Coda. “But in my experience, technology in healthcare rarely makes things better. It usually just speeds up the factory floor, squeezing more out of us, so they can ultimately hire fewer of us.” Hear him out.
- Recent research in the news:
- University of Virginia: Does AI improve doctors’ diagnoses? Study finds out
- University of Michigan: In 10 seconds, AI model detects cancerous brain tumor often missed during surgery
- North Carolina State University: Machine learning predicts highest-risk groundwater sites to improve water quality monitoring
- University of Virginia: Does AI improve doctors’ diagnoses? Study finds out
- Funding news of note:
- From AIin.Healthcare’s news partners:
Dave P. has worked in journalism, marketing and public relations for more than 30 years, frequently concentrating on hospitals, healthcare technology and Catholic communications. He has also specialized in fundraising communications, ghostwriting for CEOs of local, national and global charities, nonprofits and foundations.