Industry Watcher’s Digest

Buzzworthy developments of the past few days.

• Healthcare AI sellers are making promises that their products aren’t exactly keeping. That’s the view of hundreds of healthcare professionals surveyed on technology deployments by Black Book Market Research. The firm received responses from 907 participants. A jaw-dropping 96% of early AI adopters said they’ve been disappointed with ROI so far. A similarly striking 92% indicated their current AI systems are not accurate or actionable enough to do much good in clinical settings. And 85% who’d hoped AI would help automate diagnostics or treatment planning said the solutions they purchased “failed to grasp the complexities of real-world clinical environments.” Worse yet, AI is only one of eight technologies that Black Book found to be “draining value” from healthcare systems. Ouch. 
   
• On the other hand, large language AI models are likely to reach near-ubiquity over the next 10 years. And the tally of medical devices that are both equipped with AI and cleared by the FDA is soon to top 1,000. The juxtaposition, highlighted in a University of Pennsylvania blog post, seems to suggest a counter to the widespread buyer’s remorse uncovered by Black Book Research. That said, clinical resistance is indeed a major obstacle standing between AI hopes and AI payoffs. “Clinicians have a lot of expertise and authority, which makes changing the way they think and challenging their judgments particularly difficult,” explains Marissa King, PhD, faculty co-lead of UPenn’s Wharton Healthcare Analytics Lab. 
   
• Then again (again), more voices are rising from the naysayers’ side. At UC Santa Cruz and the University of British Columbia, two researchers combine to contend that healthcare AI is “positioned to become the latest in a long line of technological advances that ultimately have limited impact.” How do they figure? Well, AI and like technologies “engage in a politics of avoidance” vis-à-vis “fundamental structural problems in global public health.” The duo isn’t completely down on healthcare AI due to their evident activist instincts (which, after all, may well reflect top priorities for tech wielders seeking to improve population health on a global scale). Hear them out in an item posted by UC Santa Cruz’s news operation. 
   
• Continuing on that same theme … The Global Health Institute at Duke University hosted an event titled “AI in Global Health: Hope, Hype and Realities” earlier this month. Among the speakers was Moka Lantum, MD, a physician and entrepreneur from Kenya. “The commitments we need to make in healthcare have not yet been made,” Lantum told attendees. “We have to be very deliberate about what we should do with AI—not just what we can do with AI.” Find event coverage plus an hourlong video here. 
   
• Say hello to JAMA+ AI. The American Medical Association introduced its newest journal in an Oct. 8 editorial written by the journal’s editor-in-chief, Roy Perlis, MD, and Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, PhD, MD, editor-in-chief of JAMA and the JAMA Network. They state JAMA+ AI will be “a window into the world of AI across the JAMA Network and a first stop for authors and readers seeking the best science and commentary on AI and its application to medicine and public health.” Read the rest. 
   
• After reporting for possible jury duty, a physician found himself with too much time on his hands. Apparently it was one of those “hurry up and wait”—and wait, and wait some more—situations. And what did the good doctor do with all that downtime? What else? Thought about AI in healthcare. “I don’t think any of us is ready to release to a computer the full responsibility of taking care of patients—just as none of us would want, at this point in time, to be tried and convicted by a computer,” writes the physician, Weill Cornell internist Fred Pelzman, MD. “But my hope is that as these systems become more fully fleshed out, we, the doctors and nurses and others in healthcare who are on the front lines taking care of patients, are an integral part of the design and refining of what happens when a computer interacts with a patient.” MedPage Today published the piece Oct. 7. Check it out. 
   
• ‘I continue to be amazed by the impact it has had.’ So said the humble Princeton emeritus physicist John Joseph Hopfield upon accepting the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics with co-winner Geoffrey Hinton. The “it” to which 91-year-old Hopfield refers was his 1982 study of associative neural networks. This laid the groundwork for Hinton’s contributions to the field, which have earned him the unofficial title “Godfather of AI.” Following this week’s announcement of the Nobel, the two will forever be remembered for “creating the building blocks of machine learning” that are “revolutionizing the way we work and live,” for better or for worse, as put in coverage by the news service Phys.org. For his part, Hinton, 76, told the Associated Press: “Whenever I want to know the answer to anything, I just go and ask GPT-4. I don’t totally trust it because it can hallucinate, but on almost everything it’s a not-very-good expert. And that’s very useful.” 
   
• At the other end of the age spectrum is a recent high-school graduate who’s built a brilliant AI app. Augustus Holm says he started working on the digital tool when he was just 14. Today it’s a ready-for-primetime product called CheckRx. What’s it do? Just make it super-easy for Medicare beneficiaries to manage their Part D plan selections and prescription costs. The app “not only helps seniors,” Holm says, “but also Medicare agents by decreasing the number of CMS allegations while ensuring compliance amid constant policy changes.” News coverage here, CheckRx website here. 
   
• Recent research in the news: 
   
  • University of Sydney: More than 160,000 new virus species discovered by AI
     
  • University of Kansas: Study finds parents relying on ChatGPT for health guidance about children
     
  • German Cancer Research Institute: AI chatbot surpasses the accuracy of experienced urologists on specialist examination
     
• Funding news of note:
   
  • Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. family donates $25M to establish Gerstner Scholars Program in AI Translation at Mayo Clinic
     
  • Health startup Roon is raising $15M from Sequoia to replace ‘Dr. Google’
     
• From AIin.Healthcare’s news partners:
   
  • Health Imaging: ChatGPT is overly worried about ED patients
     
  • Cardiovascular Business: FDA grants AI-powered ECG screening tool for aortic stenosis its breakthrough device designation