| | | | |  | | By Daniel Payne, Erin Schumaker and Ruth Reader | | | | | 
Hospitals have greater confidence in AI's ability to make medicine more efficient, than they have about effectiveness. | Cesc Maymo/Getty Images | Hospitals are rolling out artificial intelligence tools for the efficiencies they foresee. They’re less sure about a more important metric: how the tools will affect patient outcomes. How’s that? Providence, a health system with 51 hospitals and 1,000 clinics, has introduced some “lower-risk” tools from a chatbot that can help patients refill prescriptions or reset passwords to AI systems that draft notes for doctors. Despite extensive testing before rolling out the systems — and some indications that the tools save time for patients and providers alike — it’s unclear whether those tools change care, even in relatively small ways. “It’s a little too early, from a mass-of-data perspective, to be able to say whether they’re making a big difference on catching more things or catching new things,” Sara Vaezy, Providence’s chief data officer, told Daniel. Why it matters: How AI systems may change — for better or worse — providers’ work is a big concern across the health sector. Some doctors worry that AI systems drafting notes for medical records or messages to patients could bias clinicians before they think about the problems independently. Doctors facing huge patient and paperwork demands could blindly accept output from the systems, the theory goes. At Providence: Vaezy said she and her colleagues are taking a conservative approach in introducing the tech by always keeping a human in the loop. And they’re already seeing significant upsides, she said. Patients feel empowered by the chatbot’s utility, and doctors are responding to patients’ inquiries nearly twice as fast. Even so: That doesn’t mean Vaezy isn’t concerned about how the tech will develop. Providence is vigilant about stopping system bias or performance degradation by monitoring how the AI works once it’s deployed.
| | | | YOUR GUIDE TO EMPIRE STATE POLITICS: From the newsroom that doesn’t sleep, POLITICO's New York Playbook is the ultimate guide for power players navigating the intricate landscape of Empire State politics. Stay ahead of the curve with the latest and most important stories from Albany, New York City and around the state, with in-depth, original reporting to stay ahead of policy trends and political developments. Subscribe now to keep up with the daily hustle and bustle of NY politics. | | | | | | | | | 
Washington, D.C. | Shawn Zeller/POLITICO | This is where we explore the ideas and innovators shaping health care. Bacteria has a new use, Science reports: Scientists created microorganisms that make self-dyeing textiles, which could one day replace environmentally harmful dyes. Share any thoughts, news, tips and feedback with Carmen Paun at cpaun@politico.com, Daniel Payne at dpayne@politico.com, Ruth Reader at rreader@politico.com or Erin Schumaker at eschumaker@politico.com. Send tips securely through SecureDrop, Signal, Telegram or WhatsApp.
| | |  ARPA-H's head, Dr. Renee Wegrzyn, has ambitious plans for fighting disease. | Josh Reynolds/AP Photo | The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health wants to help people with lymphatic dysfunction — a condition that can cause people’s arms and legs to swell — get diagnosed sooner. How so? The agency has announced a new program, Lymphatic Imaging, Genomics and Phenotyping Technologies, or LIGHT, to develop better diagnostic and detection tools for lymphatic dysfunction. ARPA-H, the agency President Joe Biden created two years ago to pursue high-risk, high-reward research, is seeking proposals in three technical areas: imaging technology; diagnosis and monitoring; and genetics, epigenetics (how behavior and environment affects genes) and modeling. Problem solvers: Lymphatic vessels are harder to see than blood vessels because they’re small and translucent. Lymph fluid also moves more slowly through them than blood does. That means many diagnostic tools used on veins and arteries aren’t effective on lymphatic vessels. The lymphatic system is underappreciated, according to Dr. Kimberley Steele, the program manager. “It takes care of waste removal, maintains our body’s fluid balance, transports fat and protein, and supports our immune system. It plays a critical role in the spread of cancer and is also an important factor in many chronic diseases, including heart disease,” she said in a statement. "We are decades behind in developing diagnostic tools to assess the health of the lymphatic system. This program will change that." Why it matters: More than 10 million people in the U.S. have lymphedema, when tissue swells because the lymphatic system isn’t properly draining fluid, according to the Mayo Clinic. People with lymphedema may feel heaviness or tightness in their extremities, have a restricted range of motion and have recurrent infections or skin hardening and thickening. Treatment is mostly palliative, like wearing compression garments or undergoing physical therapy to reduce the swelling. Difficulty securing an accurate diagnosis can result in inappropriate treatments, prolonged hospital stays, missing school or work, disability or death. “Today, people with lymphatic disease may remain misdiagnosed or undiagnosed for years; some never get a diagnosis,” ARPA-H Director Renee Wegrzyn said in a statement. “In the future, with a comprehensive set of tools, the journey to diagnose lymphatic dysfunction could be measured in minutes, accelerating the path to future interventions.” What’s next? A proposer’s day for learning about the application process and the agency’s vision for the program is May 14. Registration for the hybrid event closes May 7.
| | | | POLITICO IS BACK AT THE 2024 MILKEN GLOBAL CONFERENCE: POLITICO will again be your eyes and ears at the 27th Annual Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles from May 5-8 with exclusive, daily, reporting in our Global Playbook newsletter. Suzanne Lynch will be on the ground covering the biggest moments, behind-the-scenes buzz and on-stage insights from global leaders in health, finance, tech, philanthropy and beyond. Get a front-row seat to where the most interesting minds and top global leaders confront the world’s most pressing and complex challenges — subscribe today. | | | | | | | | |  Making sense of all the data is the challenge. | AFP via Getty Images | Mathematica, the consulting firm that works with government agencies, announced the launch of a Health Data Innovation Lab this week. The goal: help government and health organizations make sense of how the data and technology at their disposal affects their patients and constituents. The initiative points to surging demand for advice on adopting, growing and sustaining artificial intelligence systems at the forefront of the new tech. “I worry that the way that the current iteration of language models and many other models get created is the strip mining of a set of information that they have access to,” Ngan MacDonald, director of data innovations at the new lab, told Daniel. “People get left behind because their data is not accounted for.” Wide angle: Mathematica isn’t alone: More initiatives to meet that demand for guidance, whether within health systems or through outside institutions, are under development. Mathematica’s data trove — from Medicare, Medicaid and partnerships with other data vendors — is a major advantage for health systems looking to make sense of the tools before them, MacDonald said. “We all recognize that the health care system that we have in the U.S. is problematic at best,” she added. “And so there are just a lot of people who are willing and able to make the changes, but they’re not really sure what changes should be made.” | | | | Follow us on Twitter | | | | Follow us | | | | |
No comments:
Post a Comment