Healthcare AI Digest
Buzzworthy developments of the past few days.
- AI is so five nanoseconds ago. True techies are looking beyond it to LI. As in “living intelligence.” The futurist Amy Webb, a leading LI thinker, defines the technology as “systems that can sense, learn, adapt and evolve, made possible through AI, advanced sensors and biotechnology.” Her thinking is grounded enough that the American Hospital Association has posted a set of ways folks can “act now” on living intelligence. These include “demystifying advanced and emerging technologies for your organization” and “creating pragmatic scenarios for disruption and new value creation.” Webb is CEO of an organization called the Future Today Institute and professor of strategic foresight at NYU’s Stern School of Business. She’s also an author whose best-known book is probably The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity. Read the AHA introduction to living intelligence as conceived by Webb here.
- People are still asking if AI will replace doctors or other healthcare workers. Why wouldn’t they? It’s still a reasonable question. And anyway, hasn’t AI only gotten more refined since the worry was first voiced? (Well, sure, but so has the hype.) “AI will not replace doctors,” assures Koushik Kasanagottu, MD, MPH, who practices internal medicine at UC-Riverside and serves as physician advisor for a healthcare AI startup, DocAide. However, he adds, the technology “will undoubtedly change how we practice medicine.” How? “By handling repetitive tasks and augmenting clinical decision making.” Yeah, we’ve heard that before. Meanwhile, Kasanagottu stresses, “the human element of patient care, empathy and clinical judgment will always be essential.” For some, those words are just what the AI doctor would have ordered.
- Where medical travel meets healthcare AI, there you’ll find AI-informed health insurance for medical tourists. Travel agencies, insurance companies and healthcare providers are soon to collaborate on this. They’ll use AI to cater to health tourists and offer them tailored—and covered—medical services. So predicts the author of an article posted Feb. 3 in the International Travel & Health Insurance Journal. Health tourists, of course, are people who journey outside their home countries to receive particular medical services, often at bargain prices. Meanwhile health tourists with existing disabilities or chronic conditions can be accompanied on their trips by suites of mobile monitoring tools. The author notes that these tools “open up enormous potential for travel advisers and destinations to attract these large markets, which in the past have not been well served.”
- A former hedge fund manager has health insurers in his crosshairs. They use AI to automate claim denials? Fine. He’ll use AI to appeal the rejections. After seeing his wife endure such denials while battling cancer, Neal K. Shah launched a company called Counterforce Health. Its AI system, he says, generates customized appeal letters based on medical practices’ documentation, walks staff and patients through the appeals process and even uses voice AI agents to handle phone calls with insurer reps. “Through AI innovation,” he writes for a neurology audience in Neurology Live, “we can equip practices with the same technological capabilities that insurance giants are using against them.”
- A bill has been introduced in one state’s legislature that would prohibit any ‘nonhuman entity’ from using the title nurse in healthcare settings. The state is Oregon. There Rep. Travis Nelson (D-Portland) wants to make sure AI vendors like Thailand-based Botnoi don’t hoodwink providers with pitches claiming their “AI nurse” software can do the job of an RN for only $9 an hour. “Nelson said he’d like a broader bill to let patients opt out of healthcare providers using AI to treat them,” the Lund Report reports. “But he said that probably won’t happen before the session ends in June, and it’s important to act fast given how quickly AI is evolving and spreading.” If passed, the law would follow California’s recent “Physicians Make Decisions” legislation. This requires a doctor in the loop when AI is used to formulate care plans.
- Computer science and medicine employ a lot of researchers who want to be ahead of the curve on AI. Computer science has 44% who self-identified as such in a recent survey by the publisher Wiley. Medicine came in second at 38%. The average for all fields was 34%. Life Sciences researchers are “the most cautious in their approach to AI,” Wiley finds, with the smallest proportion of early adopters (27% vs. 34% overall). But they’re on par with other disciplines as regards using AI to conduct or write study reports. Download Wiley’s full findings and analysis here.
- Healthcare consumers who have the means are availing themselves of full-body scans that get initially interpreted by AI. (Remember when Kim Kardashian spotlighted the option?) Typically these reads only go on to imaging experts when an algorithm flags something troubling. While acknowledging the risks—not least false positives and false negatives—a commentator at the Financial Times also defends the practice. “[T]rustworthy private scanning providers should still be a welcome addition to overburdened health services in many countries,” writes John Thornhill, the FT’s innovation editor. “That is especially true given that governments rarely win credit for prioritizing preventive care. Politicians are happy to cut ribbons to open new hospitals; they win fewer votes for preventing problems that never materialize.” Read the rest.
- Klas Research is out with its annual ‘Best in KLAS’ awards for software and services. A quick perusal of the report shows Navina scored a No. 1 ranking in the clinician digital workflow category for its clinical AI copilot product, and ClosedLoop earned the distinction for its offering in the category of healthcare AI: data science solutions. Did my eye miss any other healthcare AI winners?
- Recent research in the news:
- Penn Medicine: AI tool helps find life-saving medicine for rare disease
- University of Oklahoma: How AI bias shapes everything from hiring to healthcare
- Flinders University: Testing AI with AI: Ensuring effective AI implementation in clinical practice
- Penn Medicine: AI tool helps find life-saving medicine for rare disease
- Notable FDA Approvals:
- Funding news of note:
- From AIin.Healthcare’s news partners:
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.