Industry Watcher’s Digest

Buzzworthy developments of the past few days.

• However handily AI’s pros outweigh its cons, the technology surely does pose some serious national security risks. Four senators are concerned enough that they’ve sent a letter to congressional colleagues spelling out ways to manage myriad “extreme” risks across four realms: biological, chemical, cyber and nuclear weapons. In U.S. healthcare, for example, the overlap between AI and biotechnology could lead to “the deliberate and incidental creation” of novel public health risks. On that point the senators quote a recent analysis by the Department of Homeland Security. The group of four is made up of two Democrats (Jack Reed of Rhode Island and Angus King of Maine) and two Republicans (Mitt Romney of Utah and Jerry Moran of Kansas). Letter here, TV news summary here.
   
• Healthcare AI that adds to users’ workloads isn’t worth the trouble. Avoiding such a scenario before it becomes a situation requires envisioning workflows from starting line to endpoints. “You might be solving a problem on the clinical side, but then you might create a problem on the administrative side where you have extensive support burden,” explains Sunil Dadlani, MBA, the CIO and digital transformation officer at Atlantic Health System in New Jersey. “Or you might solve a problem on the operation side, but it creates extensive in-basket messages on the physician side—and you create more frustration and more burnout.” Dadlani makes the remarks in an interview with the American Medical Association. Audio recording and textual summary here.
   
• Broad adoption of medical GenAI could well prove harmful to patients and, with them, U.S. healthcare as a whole. The good news is, there’s still time to address the various concerns that spur wary AI watchers to issue such advance warnings. The one who puts this one out there, Andrew Borkowski, chief AI officer at the Department of Veterans Affairs’ largest health system, spoke on the matter with TechCrunch. Relying too heavily on GenAI for healthcare, he points out, “could lead to misdiagnoses, inappropriate treatments or even life-threatening situations.” Read the article.
   
• Want to avoid planting AI timebombs in your organization? Then you’d better build in scalability and interoperability, invest in continuous education and training, develop a patient-centric approach—and take seven other unskippable steps. All 10 come as recommendations from subject matter expert Brian Spisak, PhD, via commentary posted April 16 in HIMSS Media’s Healthcare IT News. Read the piece.
   
• Four of the top 11 hospitals in the world are on Mayo Clinic Platform. The institution does this little bit of bragging by way of informing the public that some heavy hitters—eight institutions across three continents—have newly signed on to its digital-health platform. Mayo Clinic president and CEO Gianrico Farrugia, MD, says the new and existing partnerships will help produce “more innovation, more collaboration, more answers and more hope for those in need as we continue to build something that has never existed before in healthcare: a platform with truly global reach.” For more, including the identities of the latest Mayo Clinic Platform joiners, click here.
   
• Two-state, 16-hospital OSF HealthCare is bringing in a conversational AI supplier to help train primary care providers. The vendor, Wyoming-based Brand Engagement Network, aka “Ben,” will dispatch its AI assistants to help PCPs sharpen their skills in, primarily, clinical assessments and diagnostic documentation. OSF’s catchment area spans Illinois and Michigan. Announcement here.
   
• Elsevier Health has rolled out a GenAI chatbot for nursing students. Called Sherpath AI, the toolkit promises to help users navigate courses, prepare for exams and make the transition from classroom seats to clinical settings. Announcement.
   
• ChatGPT gets co-authorship credit in a new book aimed at healthcare people. Working ably with human author Robert Pearl, MD, former longtime CEO of Kaiser Permanente and present Stanford prof, the bot helps describe ways AI-equipped patients and doctors can “take back control of American medicine.” The result is ChatGPT, MD. Details here.
   
• Recent research roundup:
   
  • UC-San Diego Health: Study reveals AI enhances physician-patient communication
     
  • NEJM AI: GPT-4 in a cancer center—institute-wide deployment challenges and lessons learned
     
  • AI in Precision Oncology: Exploring the role of artificial intelligence in early cancer detection
     
  • Mamata Medical College (India): Optimizing the clinical direction of artificial intelligence with health policy: A narrative review of the literature
     
  • Bonn University (Germany): AI to improve cataract surgery in the Global South
     
• Funding news of note:
   
  • Kontakt.io raises $47.5 million series C funding from Goldman Sachs to fuel AI development and expansion into US hospitals
     
  • UMass Chan and MITRE launch Health AI Assurance Laboratory with MassTech grant of $555,000
     
  • Healthcare startup valuations are coming back to earth—except in AI. Here’s what investors are pouring money into. (Business Insider)