| | | | |  | | By Daniel Payne, Ruth Reader and Erin Schumaker | | | | | 
Agencies within HHS are thinking hard about how AI can help them. | Alex Brandon/AP Photo | Health agency officials are making plans to use artificial intelligence in their work, they said at the annual FedHealth Conference last week in a Washington suburb. During panel discussions, the departments of Health and Human Services and Veterans Affairs and the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health were among those touting initiatives to use AI tools. “We in the government are starting to dabble in it,” Elizabeth Kittrie, senior adviser at the Health Resources and Services Administration’s Bureau of Health Workforce, told the audience of sector leaders in government services. How so? The agencies are taking different approaches, tailored to their needs. HRSA, which is part of HHS, is considering how the technology could support clinical decision-making, remote monitoring, education, call centers and more, Kittrie said. The Food and Drug Administration, another HHS agency that regulates drugs and medical devices, could face higher demands fueled by a wave of new medical products employing, or developed with, AI. That could prompt the FDA to use AI itself to scale its work and take over some of “the basic blocking and tackling,” according to Ram Iyer, the agency's chief data officer. ARPA-H, which funds cutting-edge research projects, is considering creating an external advisory board to understand how advanced AI may affect patients who are in minority groups, said Alastair Thomson, the agency’s senior adviser for data technology innovation. And the VA, which cares for millions of veterans, is looking at how it could integrate AI tools into its existing clinical workflows to improve care, said Charles Worthington, chief technology and AI officer at the VA’s Office of Information Technology. Even so: The technology can be expensive, some of the leaders said, and they want to know how they can use AI tools safely and reliably.
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Londontown, Md. | Shawn Zeller/POLITICO | This is where we explore the ideas and innovators shaping health care. Psychedelic medicine faces a crucial decision tomorrow, when independent FDA advisers will consider an application from Lykos Therapeutics to treat post-traumatic stress disorder with MDMA, often known as ecstasy, and talk therapy. 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.
| | |  UnitedHealthcare is among the insurers growing by merger. | Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images | Artificial intelligence could make health care less competitive, according to Ben Handel, associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He says insurers, particularly, use AI to gain efficiencies in the market. “They’re looking to assemble these large datasets across the whole supply chain ... to gain a competitive advantage in their businesses,” he said at Stanford Business School’s Conference on Promoting Competition in Artificial Intelligence. To do this, he said, insurers buy up pharmacy benefit managers, which negotiate drug prices for insurers; health care providers; and companies that crunch data on doctor-patient interactions. Traditionally, those kinds of mergers haven’t been an antitrust concern, but when data and AI are a central part of the merger, it can lead to competitive advantages so large that “it’s not obvious that these kinds of increasing economies of scale are worth the trade-off with market power," he said. Why it matters: The Federal Trade Commission under President Joe Biden has increased enforcement actions against mergers. Still, courts haven’t always agreed with FTC Chair Lina Khan’s legal theories. The FTC lost its bid to stop UnitedHealthcare from merging with Change Healthcare, the largest health care payments processor in the country, and a judge threw out its case against a private equity firm that had helped build a large anesthesia practice group in Texas. Some lawmakers are concerned about market consolidation in health care. In April, the House Budget Committee held a hearing to discuss rising health care costs associated with hospital mergers and ways to break up monopolies. What’s next? In addition to mergers, Khan recently said she’s concerned about the role AI could play in price-fixing, which also limits competition.
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Becerra said international agreement on new regulations signaled strong U.S. commitment to helping the developing world. | Rod Lamkey for POLITICO | World Health Organization members, including the United States, have agreed to continue trying in their bid to reach an agreement on how nations should respond to the next pandemic. The timeline: Diplomats will try to find an agreement “as soon as possible,” a resolution the WHO’s members adopted over the weekend says, but no later than the WHO’s next annual assembly in May 2025, our Rory O’Neill reports. The negotiators are now two years into their effort to reach a deal, with the key hangup being whether wealthy nations will provide vaccines and drugs to low-income countries in exchange for information about pathogens spreading in their populations. A separate deal: Delegates did agree to update the WHO’s International Health Regulations, which HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra called a “historic agreement to strengthen the world’s rules of the road” that “affirms our longstanding commitment to global health equity and security.” The WHO said the updates would more clearly define “pandemic emergency” to guide future responses, and create “a commitment to solidarity and equity on strengthening access to medical products and financing,” but didn’t mention specific targets along those lines. | | | | Follow us on Twitter | | | | Follow us | | | | |
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