Industry Watcher’s Digest

Buzzworthy developments of the past few days.

• By 2027, a good chunk of consumers will favor ‘AI-free’ offerings in all kinds of product categories. The business consulting firm Gartner makes the prediction in a marketing forecast posted Feb. 14, likening the coming trend to many shoppers’ preference for farm-to-table food over mass-produced groceries. Gartner doesn’t extend the vision to healthcare, but it probably could. “Acoustic brands—those that prioritize authenticity and ethics, and identify and address points of extreme customer wariness—will differentiate themselves by promising AI-free experiences,” the firm predicts. “These brands can potentially position themselves as a safer or more premium alternative.”
   
• CIOs and CFOs haven’t always seen eye-to-eye, but technology itself may be coaxing a durable peace. “As digital technology courses through the business world, their conversation has become broader and deeper,” according to a Valentine’s Day piece in The Wall Street Journal. Spurring the closer kinship is a mutual appreciation of one another’s need for the other’s point of view “as their respective roles evolve in the pressure-cooker of digital transformation.” It seems unlikely CIOs have really heard the last refrain of Haven’t we spent enough on computers and IT? But winter is fading and hope springs eternal.
   
• Slow down, you innovate too fast. With $28 billion of investment in healthcare AI startups, impatient financiers have a hand in pushing the technology along quicker than regulators can do their thing for patient safety and privacy. As one venture capital mover and shaker tells KFF Health News, policymakers are “terribly behind the times.” At the same time, at least one leading physician worries Washington will “come in with guns blazing and overregulate.” Summary coverage here.
   
• An investment banking analyst offers a bracing heads-up for healthcare providers. “The most immediate place [AI] is being used by payers is to engage in cyber-warfare against your revenue cycle,” says the expert watcher, Gary Taylor of TD Cowen. Everything payers do to make reimbursement difficult is “going to get a lot smarter,” Taylor told attendees at an annual meeting of 600 healthcare leaders. To push back, he suggested, providers themselves will have to invest in AI.  
   
• ‘Computers will never fully duplicate the poetry, reasoning and eloquence of the human mind.’ However, it’s hard to imagine a modern healthcare ecosystem succeeding in the 21st century without the amazing human-mimicking powers of NLP and large-language AI models. Mayo Clinic Platform President John Halamka, MD, tells why in commentary for HealthSystemCIO.com.
   
• Researchers at Mount Sinai Health System in New York City have won a $4.1 million grant to develop AI for helping sufferers of sleep apnea. The funding is from NIH’s National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. Announcement.
   
• A healthcare AI startup aimed at tackling claims denials ‘head-on’ emerged from stealth Feb. 15 with a $3.1 million funding round. Called RapidClaims, the company says its core product is a medical coding automation module. The idea for the software germinated five or so years ago when one of its founders worked at Abbott Healthcare. Since then the co-founder, Dushyant Mishra, “has closely monitored the space, which gained significant momentum in 2022 as two key trends emerged: an increase in claim denial rates across the U.S. and the effective demonstration of large language models as a solution to these challenges.” More info here.
   
• The FDA has cleared AI software for analyzing CT scans of the liver. The product was developed and is marketed by Nanox of Petach Tikva, Israel. The company notes this is the third of its offerings to win a go-ahead from the FDA. Announcement.
   
• AI startup Kahun of Tel Aviv is introducing generative AI software geared for physicians. Called “Dialogue,” the product takes the form of a HIPAA-compliant chatbot that welcomes questions related to clinical care and replies with insights backed by medical literature. Announcement.
   
• From AIin.Healthcare’s news partners:
   
  • Radiology Business: RadNet: General radiologists achieve specialist-level performance interpreting mammograms with help from AI’
  • Health Imaging: Radiology AI developer Deepc acquires Osimis image management platform
  • Radiology Business: 6 key trends in medical imaging physics