Industry Watcher’s Digest

Buzzworthy developments of the past few days.

• Mayo Clinic leads the league in AI readiness. Ranking private-sector health systems by their progress in AI innovation and execution, CB Insights places the Minnesota-based high achiever ahead of runners-up Intermountain Health, Cleveland Clinic, Kaiser Permanente and 20 others. The depth of Mayo’s innovative character shows in its patent activity, CB Insights remarks, noting that Mayo has filed more than 50 patents in numerous clinical areas. “It has also invested in AI-enabled companies addressing a range of use cases in healthcare, from clinical documentation to surgical intelligence,” the investment intel company points out.
   
• UnitedHealth Group buffers cyberattack pain with AI promise. The company is still paying out mountainous sums for the malicious breach on its Change Healthcare unit. But it’s betting its commitment to technological innovation will drive business growth over the next few years. “Our growing AI portfolio made up of practical use cases will generate billions of dollars of efficiencies over the next few years,” UHG’s chief executive Andrew Witty told investors in a July 16 earnings call. The strategy is already “allowing us to do things much more quickly and reliably than humans,” he added, “finding answers within complex datasets.”
   
• Google has no desire to deliver healthcare. But it’s very interested in equipping healthcare providers with digital tools they can use to sustain an ecosystem of partnerships, platforms and prevention. That’s the pledge of Karen DeSalvo, the tech giant’s chief health officer. Taking questions from a reporter at last month’s HLTH Europe 2024 conference in Amsterdam, DeSalvo agreed that technology is blending with discovery to drive medical advancements. This synergy is “palpable in the air,” she said, according to coverage by Medscape. Generative AI and other technologies, DeSalvo added, can help “democratize access to healthcare for people all over the world.”
   
• Healthcare GenAI is OK as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go very far toward helping California solve its healthcare problems. That’s the opinion of Jennifer McLelland, disability-rights columnist for the California Health Report. When she posed a deliberately dippy healthcare question to three popular chatbots—ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Meta Llama 3—all brought back potentially dangerous answers. More serious questions yielded more useful answers, but even these missed the mark too often for McLelland’s liking. What the Golden State really needs, she maintains, is to “increase Medi-Cal payment rates so that we can recruit more doctors, social workers and other providers.”
   
• Healthcare AI has brought ‘a lot of profound changes’ to healthcare jobs. And the changes are of a kind that no one could have seen coming just a few years ago. “You can imagine people would put up a lot of barriers” against such transformation, Jordan Dale, MD, chief medical information officer for Houston Methodist Hospital, tells the Houston Chronicle. “But I think [we do] a really good job of bringing people into this change and these technologies, making sure they have an understanding. That’s part of the process.”
   
• The European Union has published the final text of its AI Act. The development took place July 12, triggering a transitional go-live date of Aug. 1. The global law firm Hogan Lovells has posted informal guidance for medical device manufacturers. The authors suggest affected companies do things like update internal procedures and technical documentation, make sure they have the right personnel on the payroll and use AI Act-compatible datasets.
   
• How healthy is Amazon’s appetite for AI market power? The Federal Trade Commission wants to know. Right now FTC is specifically interested in the company’s pending move to hire top talent from AI startup Adept, which trains large language models to perform general tasks for enterprise clients. The request reflects the agency’s growing concern about how AI deals have been put together and “follows a broader review of partnerships between Big Tech and prominent AI startups,” Reuters notes before adding that such inquiries do not necessarily result in an official investigation or enforcement action.
   
• ChatGPT is funnier than 63% to 87% of humans trying to make people laugh. No, really. Researchers have actually quantified the competition. In one test, conducted in the psychology department at the University of Southern California, the bot went head-to-head with writers from The Onion at writing satirical headlines. The score was about even, but the entry judged the best by reviewers came from the AI: “Local Man Discovers New Emotion, Still Can’t Describe It Properly.”
   
• Recent research in the news:
   
  • Weill Cornell: Machine learning helps define new subtypes of Parkinson’s disease
     
  • University of Illinois Chicago: Apps and AI could help personalize depression diagnosis and treatment
     
  • NYU Langone: AI tool successfully responds to patient questions in electronic health record
     
  • Tel Aviv University: Researchers achieve success in allowing a patient to “speak” using only the power of thought
     
  • The BMJ: Trusted TV doctors “deepfaked” to promote health scams on social media
     
• AI funding news of note:
   
  • Anthropic launches $100M AI fund with Menlo Ventures, ramping up competition with OpenAI
     
  • Huma raises $80M as it opens up its digital healthcare platform
     
  • Nvidia, Pfizer lead $80M funding for Israeli medical AI tech firm CytoReason
     
• From AIin.Healthcare’s news partners:
   
  • Health Imaging: Developing board-style radiology questions is resource intensive. Large language models could help
     
  • Cardiovascular Business: Tech companies team up to help cardiologists reach high-risk heart patients
     
  • Radiology Business: Radiology AI firm AIRS Medical raises $20M in Series C financing