Healthcare AI newswatch: UnitedHealth hearts AI, agentic AI again, healthcare AI dependency, more

artificial intelligence AI in healthcare

Buzzworthy developments of the past few days.

  • UnitedHealth Group is all about AI. Still. One might read the perseverance as a sign of defiance, given the insurance giant’s fight against a class action lawsuit over AI-aided claims denials. But that doesn’t seem to be it, according to a May 5 Wall Street Journal article. The reporter found UnitedHealth now has around 1,000 applications up and running. And an eye-opening 20,000 of its engineers are using the technology to write software. CTO Sandeep Dadlani tells the newspaper AI “has a role to play” in the claims evaluation process, but that’s a small slice of AI’s deployment across UHC. Dadlani says the company wants to eventually market some of its AI innovations to other healthcare companies but is in no rush to do so. “AI is the most exciting technology,” Dadlani tells the WSJ. “But my job is to help really be practical and pragmatic, ambitious and yet very responsible with this.”
     
  • Lacking a healthcare-specific problem to solve, healthcare AI is just cool math. That’s the perspective of the CEO and COO of the Parkland Center for Clinical Innovation in Texas. “As leaders in AI applications for clinical decision support and population health, we continually encounter new challenges,” write the execs, Steve Miff and Aida Somun. “[H]owever, we remain confronted by our most enduring issues—patient access challenges and resource capacity.” They make a strong case for healthcare AI’s success hinging on trustworthiness, which they state isn’t achievable without transparency. Hear them out in D magazine. (That’s D as in Dallas).
     
  • We keep hearing that self-running algorithmic agents will be the next big thing in AI. So what are they going to do in healthcare? Newsweek sent a reporter to ask that question of a handful of experts. The way some talk about these digital agents, the darn things may as well punch timeclocks and take breaks. “I’m hopeful that my team of care coordinators and AI agents can work together,” says one professional. The human-machine collaboration will help “make sure the patient actually gets everything they need done at the appointment, their population health is taken care of [and] their family dynamics are considered.” Read the rest. 
     
  • The World Health Organization wants to establish unified standards for AI in healthcare via the United Nations. In a paper published April 23 in NPJ Digital Medicine, WHO-affiliated researchers break the organization’s proposal into four sets of priorities—ethics, regulation, implementation and operations. These separate but overlapping spheres of attention are “foundational in the advancement of equitable, safe and effective AI for the global community,” the authors write. The organization’s Global Initiative on Artificial Intelligence for Health—GI-AI4H—“builds on global momentum to establish health AI governance [guidelines] that are durable and balanced in their approach, unifying and strengthening diverse capabilities across member states.” That’s a bare summary. If interested in the WHO’s thinking on globally sharable AI standards, read the whole thing. 
     
  • IT workers are always in high demand. That doesn’t mean they’re not just as worried as the rest of us about AI taking their jobs. Computerworld considers the proper care and feeding of these essential but professionals who are understandably uneasy of late. One IT leader, Daniela LaCelle of the employee-benefits company Unum, says encouraging staff to view AI as an enabler rather than a threat “shifts the focus toward opportunities rather than fears.” The aim is allowing IT teams to think in terms of strategy and creativity, which “encourages greater engagement while easing employees’ fears about job security.” 
     
  • Give healthcare workers AI to do their jobs and you might make them AI-dependent. Casey Greene, PhD, a biomedical informatics professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine acknowledges the challenge in a conversation with the school’s own news operation. Asked how to present AI as a tool while keeping it from becoming a crutch, Greene says remaining mindful of the risk is “absolutely vital. We want to reduce friction but not critical thinking.” There are areas where humans excel, he says before adding: “We want to ensure we’re supporting that and not replacing it.” Q&A here. 
     
  • AI is one of the more exciting sister technologies to mind-meld with surgical robotics. It’s also one of the more apt to complexify things. In MD+DI, Tarken Friske, senior director of consulting with the software developer Full Spectrum, offers suggestions to robotics leaders for producing multifaceted, multi-technology surgical systems so they can bring these products to market sooner rather than later. His top three: integrate early and often, revisit risk management and emphasize verification planning. “While applying these concepts cannot eliminate all potential for program delays,” he writes, it can “drastically improve the observability of development progress and give development teams more opportunities to influence positive outcomes.”
     
  • Recent research in the news: 
     
  • Regulatory approvals & certifications:
     
  • M&A activity:
     
  • Funding news of note:
     
  • From AIin.Healthcare’s news partners:
     

 

Dave Pearson
Dave Pearson

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.

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