Industry Watcher’s Digest

Buzzworthy developments of the past few days.

• Parkland Health in Dallas is rightly proud of its status as a public institution with outsize plans for healthcare AI. Another historic institution in Big D is giving Parkland its due for the visionary stance. “Even before AI was a buzzword, Parkland officials said the hospital system was an early adopter among its public hospital peers in using electronic health records,” write the editors of the 139-year-old Dallas Morning News. “This allowed the hospital system to collect valuable patient data and use machine learning and predictive analytics before those technologies were common.” For some, Parkland will always be remembered as the hospital to which President John F. Kennedy was taken that fateful November day in 1963. But its status as a community-forward tech innovator to reckon with may help it turn that page. “Parkland leaders say that being a public hospital actually helped them implement AI strategically,” the newspaper reports. “The hospital system’s budget doesn’t leave much room for experimental resources, so it uses existing AI tools that are highly vetted or collaborates with Parkland Center for Clinical Innovation on new technologies.” Read the rest.
   
• AI is high on the list of nontrivial pursuits at Kettering Health system in Ohio. The system just opened its Center for Clinical Innovation at Ridgeleigh Terrace. The last part of its name comes from the man who once made the place his home. That would be Charles F. Kettering, the inventor, engineer and business leader whose own name went to the health system. “Built in 1914, the house was the first in the United States to have electric air conditioning using freon, one of Kettering’s inventions,” Kettering Health informs. “The history and legacy of Charles F. Kettering’s focus on innovation and the future makes Ridgeleigh Terrace a fitting site for the innovations launched by Kettering Health physicians.”
   
• Nvidia, Microsoft and Alphabet. There you have the answer to the question: “What three little shops is The Motley Fool picking as tops in the race for AI preeminence?” Nvidia’s GPUs are “the must-have component in the AI revolution,” the Fool notes, while Microsoft is “leveraging its partnership with OpenAI in multiple ways” and Alphabet has been “investing in AI for years, from large language models to autonomous vehicles.” More here.
   
• The World Health Organization would like you to meet Sarah. No surname because she’s not a person but a GenAI-powered avatar. With apologies if this disappoints you, her name is an acronym for Smart AI Resource Assistant for Health. She’s charged with promoting good health digitally. She speaks eight languages and will be happy to answer your questions, albeit in a disembodied way, on all sorts of health topics any time of day or night. Read the background here and/or get acquainted with Sarah here.  
   
• Accelerating drug development is one of healthcare AI’s core competencies. This week The Week guides a tour through a number of fronts on which the use case is advancing most promisingly. Article here.
   
• A million and a half people have used the virtual therapist named Woebot. That probably figured in the thinking of producers at 60 Minutes when they sent medical correspondent Jon LaPook, MD, to get the story. One of the subject matter experts he interviews is Woebot’s main creator, psychologist Allison Darcy, PhD. “Our field hasn’t had a great deal of innovation since the basic architecture was sort of laid down by Freud in the 1890s,” Darcy tells LaPook. “We have to modernize psychotherapy.” View video or read transcript here.
   
• ChatGPT and Google’s Bard are … useful toys. “But the appropriateness of these platforms in frontline healthcare, and especially in specific guidance, is questionable—particularly when you consider that the free version of ChatGPT’s dataset is from early 2022.” So states Simon Noel, chief nursing informatics officer at Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust in the U.K. “Healthcare,” Noel adds, “moves on quickly.”
   
• Research roundup:
   
  • MIT: When an antibiotic fails: MIT scientists are using AI to target ‘sleeper’ bacteria
     
  • Georgetown: Virtual reality sessions lessen cancer pain in clinical trial
     
  • Utrecht University: Neural implants face ethical hurdles, study finds
     
• Funding rounds of note:
   
  • Investors in talks to help Elon Musk’s xAI raise $3B, adding to industry arms race (Wall Street Journal)
     
  • Jony Ive and Sam Altman seek $1B for the ‘iPhone of AI’ (Interesting Engineering)
     
  • Crypto VC firm Polychain tops up AI platform Ritual’s $25M funding round with ‘multimillion dollar’ investment (CoinDesk)
     
  • Manifold secures $15M in investment and launches AI-powered platform to accelerate clinical research
     
  • TrojAI raises $5.75M in seed funding to secure AI in the enterprise