Healthcare AI Digest

Buzzworthy developments of the past few days.

• Institutions resistant to change. Companies profiting from inefficiency. Policymakers hesitant to challenge the status quo. Sounds like a rundown of impersonal background players in the next Wolf of Wall Street. But in fact it’s one tech watcher’s diagnosis of what’s keeping AI from doing all the good it could do in healthcare. Or even better, AI combined with blockchain. “The question facing us is not whether AI and blockchain will transform healthcare but who will control this transformation and whose interests it will serve,” the commentator comments. “It’s time to acknowledge the uncomfortable truth: The barriers to a healthcare revolution are structural and political.” The author is Chris Crecelius, founder of a decentralized autonomous organization, AxonDAO, a vendor in the healthcare blockchain space. His opinion piece is current in CCN, a media outlet focused on cryptocurrencies, business, finance and technology. Worth a read. 
   
• Hey look. Another entrepreneur looking to drive AI deeper into healthcare. And this one is a billionaire. It’s LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and he’s co-launching a healthcare AI company called Manas. His vision is to not only make a bundle for investors but also to do so while helping cure cancer. Just for starters. Competitors in the space should take notice, as he’s both earnest and serious about the endeavor. So far he’s helped raise $25 million in seed funding. “Most people have had friends, family members, et cetera, who’ve died from cancer or had serious cancer problems,” Hoffman tells CNBC. “If we can make a huge difference on this—and this is the kind of thing that AI can make a huge difference in—it’s the kind of reason why AI can be great for humanity.” Manas’s other co-founder is the oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee, MD, who won a Pulitzer for his 2010 book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. 
   
• Watch for AI to deliver notable gains in healthcare this year. Don’t be surprised if the wins include digital health agents that revamp the patient experience, robots that perform complex surgical tasks and generative AI models that continue contributing to drug discovery. The expectations are set by Eva-Maria Hempe, PhD, a healthcare and life sciences exec at Nvidia. She even sees healthcare AI producing systems that can reason. “From research labs to patient care, AI-powered solutions will enhance the healthcare experience for administrators, professionals, researchers and patients alike,” Hempe predicts at TechRadar. “[W]e’ll discover new applications and ways to interact with AI.”
   
• Out with ‘safe and effective.’ In with ‘protective and worth it.’ That’s the word swap healthcare professionals should make when trying to win buy-in on vaccines from balky healthcare consumers. So say four co-founders of the Council for Quality Health Communication. And they’re all for enlisting bots in the campaign. Healthcare professionals should consider a “substantive role for AI chatbots in the clinical setting, such as in the waiting room, to help debunk misinformation and communicate vaccine nuance,” the team writes in a piece published Jan. 28 by MedPage Today. “Early research suggests people will interact and respond favorably to this technology.” Hear them out. 
   
• Tech proponents shouldn’t pressurize physicians who don’t like sharing work with AI. A better approach is to suggest a deliberate division of labor. The doctor does his or her thing. The machine does its own. That’s the pitch of healthcare AI researcher Pranav Rajpurkar, PhD, and cardiologist/bestselling author Eric Topol, MD. Publicizing their recommendation via the New York Times, the pair warns against “forcing both human doctors and AI to review every case side by side and trying to turn AI into a kind of shadow physician.” A more effective tactic, they add, is to “let AI operate independently on suitable tasks so that physicians can focus their expertise where it matters most.” Read the whole thing.
   
• A large supplier of healthcare-experience technology is strategically collaborating on generative AI with a cloud giant that’s a household name. The experience company maintains a healthcare-performance dataset built with more than 7.5 billion patient encounters in something like 40,000 sites of care. The cloudster is a Big Tech mainstay based in Washington State. Together the duo—Press Ganey and Microsoft—say they’ll design and distribute GenAI-equipped products that help provider orgs make things better for consumers and clinicians alike. Or, as they put it in a Feb. 3 announcement, they’ll leverage Microsoft’s Azure infrastructure to develop “a suite of generative AI-powered solutions that redefine actionable insights, driving transformational improvements in the safety, quality and experience of care delivery.” 
   
• Don’t judge DeepSeek on the innovativeness of its programming. Judge it on the degree to which it shakes up the economics of the AI market. So advises the editorial board of Telegraph India. “DeepSeek is open-source, which allows others to learn from it and build on it, unlike Silicon Valley entities that guard AI technology as a precious secret,” the editorial reads. “By circumventing the need for Western hardware and capital, China has shown that sanctions can be taken up as a challenge to push innovation instead of stifling it.” How’s that for a shot across U.S. Big Tech’s proverbial bow? Read the rest. 
   
• The ‘most profound’ AI application is healthcare. We didn’t say that. It comes from the head of a major investment firm that’s laser-focused on disruptive innovation in public equity markets. Cathie Wood, chief executive of Ark Invest, made the comment this week on the CNBC show “Squawk Box.” She also advised watching for gene sequencing and drug discovery stocks to benefit with particular oomph as “AI continues to reshape healthcare as we know it.”
   
• Recent research in the news: 
   
  • University of Cincinnati: Researcher uses AI to reimagine telehealth billing
     
• Notable FDA Approvals:
   
  • AI Optics’ portable Sentinel Camera gains FDA 510(k) clearance 
     
  • Modella AI gets FDA breakthrough device designation for generative AI copilot
     
• Funding news of note:
   
  • EU Invests €56M ($57.8M) in open-source AI 
     
  • AI-based workflow automation company Medsender closes $5M Series A investment
     
  • Affineon Health secures $5M to address provider burnout
     
  • MedMitra AI secures ₹3 crore ($345K) to transform healthcare with AI-driven solutions
     
  • Zoom bolsters workplace for clinicians plans, invests in Suki’s healthcare AI
     
• From AIin.Healthcare’s news partners:
   
  • Cardiovascular Business: More than words: AI takes NLP to the next level to identify signs of heart failure
     
  • Health Imaging: Overview of the regulatory landscape of AI in radiology