The ideas and innovators shaping health care
| | | | |  | | By Daniel Payne, Carmen Paun, Ruth Reader, Erin Schumaker and Toni Odejimi | | | | | 
Dr. Sipra Laddha | LunaJoy Health | | Advanced artificial intelligence could make specialized medical training more accessible for doctors — ultimately leading to higher-quality care for patients. Dr. Sipra Laddha, a psychiatrist who specializes in women’s mental health and a co-founder of digital mental health clinic LunaJoy, told Daniel that AI has the potential to ramp up the number of health providers who can get specialized training. How so? Advances in language-based AI systems allow chatbots to act as patients when doctors learn how to best deal with certain ailments. Using the new systems could save a significant amount of time and energy compared to how Laddha trained, which involved reviewing stacks of transcripts of her conversations with patients. AI “patients” can describe particular concerns with a doctor in training — and the clinician’s performance can be monitored in real time. “That happens all in like three minutes as opposed to hours,” Laddha said. Assisting women before, during and after pregnancy is one of LunaJoy’s specialties. “There’s just not enough people that are trained in reproductive psychiatry,” she said. But AI could be “instrumental in enabling more practitioners to be able to help that population.” Even so: Several AI experts are concerned that advanced AI needs further development before it’s fully ready for widespread use in health applications. Laddha agreed that humans need to stay in the loop for those systems but suggested AI tools still hold significant promise even in their current form.
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Edgartown, Mass. | Aimee Schumaker | This is where we explore the ideas and innovators shaping health care. People who develop alpha-gal syndrome, a meat allergy, after being bitten by a Lone Star tick, may not have to eschew meat entirely. Some may be able to eat pork from genetically modified pigs without a reaction, the Associated Press reports. 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, Erin Schumaker at eschumaker@politico.com, or Toni Odejimi at aodejimi@politico.com. Send tips securely through SecureDrop, Signal, Telegram or WhatsApp.
| | |  AI could help family members grapple with a loved one's end-of-life care. | Pascal Pochard-Casabianca/AFP via Getty Images | Doctors are imagining how advanced artificial intelligence could transform decisions around palliative care. AI could flag past patient conversations with their doctor about their care wishes — or help predict the likelihood of outcomes — to help family members make a decision when considering palliative care for a loved one, three University of California, San Francisco, doctors write in a new article in JAMA Internal Medicine. In considering the current use of AI in health care and charting how it might develop in the coming months and years, providers envision a world in which AI systems could often assist in making key decisions. How so? Much of the infrastructure that would power such capabilities is already being deployed. AI systems that listen to patient interactions with their providers could give family members more detailed information about patient history and offer a better understanding of their loved one’s mindset. “Ambient voice technology could give voice to the voiceless,” the doctors wrote. Doctors also use algorithms to help predict patient outcomes. Should those AI predictions continue to improve, they could offer valuable insight for making end-of-life decisions. Even so: The authors said they share other doctors’ concerns about handing over deeply human judgments to AI systems. But because of the immense stress surrounding decisionmaking for critically ill patients, they argued that “it behooves us to consider how AI could be safely, ethically, and equitably deployed to help surrogates for individuals who are seriously ill.”
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