The Ascension incident shows the gap of the AHA statement indicting third parties. Hospital/healthcare organizations need to step up their…
Healthcare AI News 11/15/23
News
The estates of two deceased men sue UnitedHealth Group, claiming that the company uses AI algorithms to deny care to seniors who are enrolled in its Medicare Advantage plans. The complaint says that the AI system that UHG gained in its 2020 acquisition of NaviHealth has a 90% error rate and creates generic care recommendations that are used to override physician assessments of medical necessity, placing the Medicare Advantage patients at a disadvantage compared to traditional Medicare. A previous report found that patients who were entitled to up to 100 days in a nursing home following hospital discharge were usually cut off within 14 days by UHG.
Elsevier and OpenEvidence create an early access version of ClinicalKey AI, which allows doctors to enter patient information that is matched against Elsevier’s medical journal data to help them make clinical decisions. OpenEvidence’s original system is available for demonstration.
OpenAI pauses new signups for ChatGPT Plus due to a user surge following the company’s November 6 DevDay. The company also acknowledges that it is working on GPT-5, which will require more public and proprietary data sets.
Business
The CEO of an AI-powered robotics company says that the factors that made ChatGPT successful – training on a vast and diverse dataset and aligning the model’s response with what humans find useful – are being applied to AI robots that can understand their surroundings, make decisions, and adapt to changing circumstances. He predicts widespread deployment of robots that can perform object manipulation in 2024.
University of Miami Health System will use Aidoc’s technology system-wide to identify and triage abnormalities in patient scans. The Israel-based company offers 13 FDA-cleared algorithms. The CEO is a former AI leader in the Israeli Air Force and co-founded the company with military peers one year after discharge.
Montreal-based Pathway, which provides evidence-based responses to clinician queries, raises $5 million in seed funding.
Research
Researchers in Australia refer to large language models that have limited guardrails as “weapons of mass disinformation” in a JAMA Internal Medicine article, where they describe using ChatGPT to create 102 disinformation blog posts about vaccines and vaping. Creation of the posts that totaled 17,000 words, which included fake patient and clinician testimonials and scientific-looking references, took just over one hour. Additional OpenAI tools contributed realistic images and a deep-fake video.
AI outperformed tissue biopsies in grading the aggressiveness of retroperitoneal sarcoma, which could potentially spare low-risk patients from unnecessary treatments and tests.
Tech-heavy medical practice operator Forward Health develops a standalone, app-powered medical station it calls the CarePod, which it hopes to place in malls and office buildings where members will pay $99 per month for access. Founder and former Google computer scientist Adrian Aoun, who says “I don’t even believe a doctor’s office should exist,” hopes to turn healthcare into a product rather than a service. CarePods are powered by a large language model that uses medical research data to create care plans. The company just raised a $100 million Series E round and hopes to launch 25 CarePods initially and scale to 3,200 within one year. Aoun says he hopes to enhance the machines to perform open heart surgery within the next 20 years.
Other
AI expert Mark Hinkle builds a GPT into which users can upload PDFs of their health insurance plan options during open enrollment, then ask ChatGPT specific questions and have it compare plans.
A Nebraska oncology research nurse’s lung cancer is detected by Methodist Hospital’s AI-powered LungGPS, a Medtronic system that double checks radiology images and reports for incidental nodules. She was X-rayed for pain in her left side, but LungGPS noted nodules on the other side, with the early detection allowing her stage 1 lung cancer to be cured via surgery. LungGPS caught 26 patients with undetected cancer in 2022 and 15 so far this year.
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Re: the claim that “UnitedHealth Group using AI algorithms to deny care to seniors”….why is there no Medicare oversight into how outcomes compare between seniors having Original Medicare and an MA plan????