Industry Watcher’s Digest

artificial intelligence AI in healthcare

Buzzworthy developments of the past few days.

  • An influential industry group really likes President-Elect Trump’s choice of Dr. Oz for CMS administrator. And the thumbs-up of the group, AdvaMed, has much to do with emerging technologies. Mehmet Oz, MD, MBA—who is, after all, not only a TV personality but also a professor emeritus of cardiothoracic surgery at Columbia University—“has firsthand experience with medical technology and as a result understands the incredible impact these technologies can have in the lives of patients in need,” enthuses AdvaMed CEO Scott Whitaker. “And as a practitioner, he has also seen firsthand the negative impact a lack of access to these technologies can have on these same patients.” Other thought leaders aren’t convinced. “Not since the Wizard of Oz himself has there been a bigger fraud than this guy,” fumes Brad Woodhouse, executive director of Protect Our Care, a Washington-based nonprofit. MedPage Today has a reaction roundup. 
     
  • Legally speaking, healthcare is a ‘particularly devilish’ setting for AI that goes wrong or gets used improperly. Stanford Law School health policy expert Michelle Mello, JD, PhD, uses those words in a podcast posted this week. Mello backs up her point by describing a recent case that featured nurses changing shifts, using different EMR fields for the same patient and, in the process, causing key clinical notes to get missed by the algorithm. Some nurses “like to type out words instead of clicking structured boxes, so the tool was missing a lot of important information,” Mello explains before quipping: “If you’ve seen one hospital, you’ve seen one hospital.” Also sharing insights is Neel Guha, a Stanford JD/PhD candidate in computer science. He suggests healthcare AI lawsuits are starting to split into those that accuse the physician, those that target the hospital, those that blame the software developer—and those that go after any two or all three of the above at once. Audio and transcript here.
     
  • The homeless need healthcare too. Along some of the heavily tented streets of Los Angeles, AI is helping a fortunate few gain access. The technology “is really pushing us to be that provider we were supposed to be when we were taking histories in med school,” says primary care provider and addiction medicine specialist Steven Hochman, MD. “When I’m talking to patients in the field, the tech does a phenomenal job of providing me with accurate documentation of what we talked about, which allows me to focus on my job.” Hochman works closely with Akido Labs, a healthtech company that uses AI to, among other aims, help the poor. Fast Company has the story.
     
  • AI is the killer app for high-performance computing in healthcare. The holder of that notion has a vested interest in persuading others to see things his way, but that doesn’t mean he’s not right. “[H]ow do we improve the computer itself to be able to run not [just] the algorithms that we have now but [also] the algorithms that are yet to come?” says Camilo Buscaron, founder and CEO of Alafia AI, which recently introduced an AI supercomputer designed specifically for healthcare applications. “We have to design a computer from the ground up, with the best technology that we have in our hands today, just to support that next movement of technology.” Silicon Angle has the news plus a video interview. 
     
  • AI comes home to homecare. Innovators in the U.K. are using AI in patients’ homes as well as assisted living facilities to watch for facial expressions of pain, uneasy nights of sleeplessness, unusually frequent trips to the bathroom and all manner of possible warning signs. Others in the region are working with devices that predict and prevent falls, adjust air quality, detect when someone with dementia is dangerously confused and, yes, snitch on healthcare workers who fail to wash their hands. The Times of London looks at the spread of machines into such settings and asks: “Could smart tech save a failing system—or is it a dangerous shortcut to cutting staff numbers?”
     
  • Healthcare is now leading generative AI adoption with $500 million in enterprise spend. That puts our sector comfortably ahead of legal services ($350M), financial services ($100M) and media/entertainment ($100M). The figures are from a report by Menlo Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm. Menlo’s research shows enterprise spending on generative AI skyrocketed in 2024, rising from $2.3 billion to $13.8 billion, as “businesses made a decisive shift from AI experimentation to implementation.” The firm arrived at this conclusion after surveying around 600 enterprise IT decisionmakers. The authors note that optimism around the transformative potential for generative AI is high—72% of decision-makers expect broader adoption in the near term—but “enterprises remain focused on identifying high-value use cases, signaling we are still in the early stages of a large-scale transformation.”
     
  • It would take a lot of guts for a new-ish company to battle Google in the browser market. OpenAI might have just the innards for the job. Maybe Sam Altman’s brainchild sees an opening in the wake of the U.S. Department of Justice’s argument that Google ought to halt its monopolization of online search by selling its Chrome browser. Or maybe OpenAI is feeling feisty after entering the search market with SearchGPT. (It’s unclear whether they’re sticking with that name.) In any case, the potential for a browser battle royale has a lot of people talking. 
     
  • Energy-intensive infrastructure. Electronic waste. Resource depletion. Increased consumption. Four good reasons healthcare needs to get busy reducing its environmental footprint, in the opinion of Rubin Pillay, MD, PhD, MBA, chief innovation officer and assistant dean of medicine at the University of Alabama-Birmingham. As healthcare continues to innovate with AI and digital health, Pillay puts forth in a Nov. 21 Substack post, “we must expand our understanding of ‘do no harm’ to encompass not just individual patients but [also] the health of our entire planet.” 
     
  • Recent research in the news: 
     
  • Notable FDA Approvals:
     
  • 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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