Industry Watcher’s Digest

Buzzworthy developments of the past few days.

• AI helps head off heart attack over a lifetime. Researchers have designed a deep learning model that can predict a patient’s risk of myocardial infarction and other cardiac events as particular dangers develop over time. What’s more, the model presents its predictions in colorful graphs that are easily understandable to most patients. The work was carried out at Cedars Sinai Medical Center and is running in NPJ Digital Medicine. Journal study here, institutional news here.
   
• Billing and collecting begets buying and selling. Generative AI Solutions Corp. of British Columbia, also known as “GenAI,” has bought Global AI Billing Corp. of Delaware City, Del. GenAI says its interest in Global AI Billing hinged in no small part on the latter’s 10% ownership stake in Remitz, Inc., a medical billing vendor whose proprietary AI software has helped it collect more than $100 million from more than 1 million patients and/or their payers. Read the announcement.  
   
• Pathology partnership nudges field toward AI adoption, digital transformation. Digital pathology vendor Paige is working with pathology AI supplier Visiopharm to offer pathologists a one-platform pathway into AI-aided cancer diagnoses. At the same time, the combo offering will help the field of pathology delve more deeply into digitization. Announcement posted here.
   
• AI is ‘uniquely poised’ to play matchmaker between vendors and providers. So suggests Optimize Rx Corp., which recently surveyed more than 120 physicians. Key finding: Specialists as well as PCPs are ever on the hunt for information about products and services relevant to their individual practices. However, most “still experience gaps in the amount, type, clinical focus and timing of brand information they need to make fully informed patient care and prescribing decisions.” Full survey results and overview here.
   
• Ready for proteins invented by AI? Non-natural proteins that just might fool Mother Nature are in the offing at the University of Toronto. There researchers have developed a system that does the job with generative AI. The initial hope is to help hasten the pace of drug development. “All our proteins appear to be biophysically real,” explains Prof. Philip Kim. “They fold into configurations that enable them to carry out specific functions within cells.”
   
• AI may assist doctors wishing for more treatment options. The digital platform supplier myTomorrows has launched a beta version of AI-based software that finds clinical trials into which they might steer hard-to-help patients. The capability could help frustrated patients—and by extension their stymied doctors—try investigational meds and other therapies before they’re cleared by the FDA. The product is called TrialSearchAI. Learn more.
   
• Providers mitigate ‘demand-capacity mismatches.’ In a business-news item posted May 8, legacy media dinosaur CBS News takes a look at three U.S. healthcare systems at which physicians are giving ChatGPT a go. What all three have in common is a desire to communicate with patients without involving doctors. “Patient messages in-and-of themselves aren’t a burden—it’s more of a demand-capacity mismatch,” gastroenterologist Patricia Garcia, MD, tells the network’s MoneyWatch operation. “Care teams don’t have the capacity to address the volume of patient messages they receive in a timely way.” Read the whole thing.
   
• Aspirational healthcare AI startup gets $4M infusion. Autonomize AI (Austin, Texas) has locked down $4 million in seed funds to help the company refine and commercialize its healthcare AI platform. Autonomize says algorithms running on the platform facilitate data-driven decisionmaking by clinicians, researchers and other end-users—regardless of technical prowess. Investment leader Skip Fleshman of Asset Management Ventures says there’s “a lot of talk about AI in healthcare,” but “extracting insights buried within unstructured medical data in various silos is essential for fostering breakthroughs in patient care and overall health outcomes.”
   
• AI writes well more than a dozen academic papers in well less than half a year. OK, it had a little help from a physician-scholar. Or vice-versa. “I’m a researcher and I publish articles on a regular basis,” radiologist Som Biswas tells the Daily Beast. “Those two things linked up in my brain: If ChatGPT can be used to write stories and jokes, why not use it for research or publication for serious articles?” Full story here, summary here.