One Medical’s AI bet

The ideas and innovators shaping health care

Dec 04, 2024 View in browser   By Ruth Reader, Erin Schumaker and Gregory Svirnovskiy WORKFORCE Dr. Sunita Mishra, Amazon Health Services chief medical officer, wants to use AI to lighten doctors' workloads. | Amazon Amazon’s One Medical, a national primary care brand, is using AI to combat physician burnout. Artificial intelligence is supposed to transform medicine. But with AI tools flooding the market, health systems are grappling with where AI might best fit into their workflows. Dr. Sunita Mishra, Amazon Health Services chief medical officer and former leader of innovative health projects at Providence Health, has long thought about ways to leverage technology to improve health care. At Amazon, she uses AI to obtain better data on One Medical’s primary care patients, aiming to reduce her doctors’ workloads. Mishra spoke with Ruth about how Amazon uses AI to advance patient care. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. How are you using AI to minimize the time doctors spend on administrative work? We’ve got about 15 health system partnerships across the country, and so with all of those, we have varying levels of interoperability. When the patient travels to New Mexico and gets an ER visit, or if you’re coming to us for the first time and haven’t been at any of the health systems we work with, we ask for records so that we can have a complete picture of the patient. We’ve now got tools that help us ingest that information and pull out the things that are relevant. How do you know you’re making the right tools? We have been really proactive in including our clinicians as we’re developing these tools. There’s several that are embedded in our product teams. That helps us with engagement because docs feel excited when they get to be part of building the future of health care, but it also helps us with our quality control. What metric do you look at to know that AI is helping? We look at provider inboxes to see how many tasks they have in them at the end of the day because that’s a really good measure of how much time they're spending at home, what we call the pajama time, doing work. And that actually correlates pretty well with burnout. Where do you see opportunities for AI? The big areas for us are care coordination. Our docs are having to go into Google to try to find the right resources, especially when there are things that need to be done outside of the health system partnerships. I think there’s a real opportunity to be able to give our providers that information at their fingertips so that they don’t have to hunt for it. WELCOME TO FUTURE PULSE Boston, Mass. | Aimee Schumaker This is where we explore the ideas and innovators shaping health care. Artificial intelligence topped health care research nonprofit ECRI’s list of health technology hazards in 2025. Among their key concerns: AI “hallucinations" and built-in bias. 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.    REGISTER NOW: As the 118th Congress ends, major decisions loom, including healthcare appropriations. Key focus: site neutrality. Can aligning hospital and clinic costs cut federal spending, reflect physician costs, and lower patient expenses? Join policymakers and providers to discuss.     FUTURE THREATS New research suggests there's a link between living in areas with high air pollution levels and eczema. | J. David Ake/AP People with the skin condition eczema are more likely to live in Zip codes with high air pollution levels, which suggests the two could be linked. How so: Researchers analyzed electronic health records from the National Institutes of Health’s “All of Us” program, which collects anonymized health data from Americans and has enrolled more than 750,000 participants. They also analyzed data from the Center for Air, Climate, and Energy Solutions, an Environmental Protection Agency-affiliated research center. The study, published in the journal PLOS One in November, found that people with eczema were more likely to live in Zip codes with significantly higher concentrations of PM 2.5, or fine particulate matter, than those who didn’t have eczema. Additionally, the odds of having eczema increased as the concentration of fine particulate matter in a Zip code increased. Air pollution in the body: “Particles of this size are small enough to travel deep into the airways,” the study authors wrote. Those tiny particles may spread from the airways, along the cells lining the lungs and through the vascular or lymph systems to reach other organs. If the particles enter the body through its tiny air sacs, they might also spread across and enter skin cells. Why it matters: Between 6 and 10 percent of U.S. adults have eczema, a common condition that causes dry, itchy and inflamed skin prone to flare-ups. Globally, eczema rates have risen alongside industrialization, the study authors noted. In addition to eczema, exposure to fine particulate matter is linked to a host of other health problems, including a higher risk for heart attack, aggravated asthma, irritated airways and difficulty breathing.   Billions in spending. Critical foreign aid. Immigration reform. The final weeks of 2024 could bring major policy changes. Inside Congress provides daily insights into how Congressional leaders are navigating these high-stakes issues. Subscribe today.     SAFETY CHECK Parents think their kids are using generative AI for homework, but teens are chatting with the bots instead. Most parents don’t know what their teenagers use generative artificial intelligence for — or what the technology’s risks are — according to a small study by researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. How so? The researchers trawled Reddit, analyzing more than 700 posts and 8,500 comments on generative AI use by teenagers. They also interviewed 20 parents and children for additional context. The research, published on Cornell University’s curated research-sharing platform, arXIv, found that teens don’t use generative AI just in the classroom or for homework help like their parents think they do: Teens turn to AI chatbots for use as social tools, relying on the bots as therapists, confidantes and sometimes even romantic partners. Why it matters: Generative AI is ripe for misuse by teenagers, the researchers write. And adult supervision isn’t enough to ensure that children use AI safely. Teens reported concern about becoming addicted to generative AI technologies. They worried about how their personal information is used and about racist content spreading online. Parents weren’t fully aware of how much sensitive information their children were predisposed to share online. Generative AI companies should be responsible for introducing safety features, the researchers said. “Existing parental mediation strategies are often inadequate for managing teenagers’ real-time interactions with GAI,” the researchers concluded. “This highlights the need for GAI platforms to implement more comprehensive, age-appropriate content moderation systems that can effectively address these risky behaviors.” But: The study’s small size means that its findings are more exploratory and might not be applicable to the broader population.   Follow us on Twitter Carmen Paun @carmenpaun Daniel Payne @_daniel_payne Ruth Reader @RuthReader Erin Schumaker @erinlschumaker   Follow us

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