‘Behind the Times’: Washington Tries to Catch Up With AI’s Use in Health Care
Lawmakers and regulators are trying to understand how AI is changing health care and how it should be regulated. The industry fears overreach.
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Lawmakers and regulators are trying to understand how AI is changing health care and how it should be regulated. The industry fears overreach.
When bankers and investors flocked to San Francisco for the largest gathering of health care industry investors, the buzz was all about artificial intelligence, the next hit weight-loss drug, and new opportunities to make money through nonprofit hospitals.
Artificial intelligence software to aid radiologists in detecting problems or diagnosing cancer has been moving rapidly into clinical use, where it shows great promise. But it’s a turnoff for some patients asked to pay out-of-pocket for technology that’s not quite ready for prime time.
For the patient, it was a quick and inexpensive virtual appointment. Why it cost 10 times what she expected became a mystery.
A rural South Dakota medic said using an ambulance video system to communicate with a doctor gave him peace of mind as he treated a patient who was seriously injured when gored by a bison.
Software sifts through millions of medical records to match patients with similar diagnoses and characteristics and then predicts what kind of care an individual will need and for how long. New federal rules will ensure human experts are part of the process.
Doctors say billing for email consultations reduces message volume and gives them more free time. The increasingly prevalent practice has also raised fears about negative impacts to patient care.
To contain the opioid crisis, health and law enforcement agencies have turned to technology to monitor doctor and patient prescription data. Experts have raised questions about how these systems work and worry about their accuracy and potential biases. Some patients and doctors say they’re being unfairly targeted.
Consumers should know that this type of fraud can happen, whether from a large-scale breach or theft of an individual’s data. The result could be thousands of dollars in medical bills.
U.S. hospitals have seen a record number of cyberattacks over the past few years. Getting hacked can cost a hospital millions of dollars, expose patient data, and even jeopardize patient care.
The National Eating Disorders Association’s help line has seen demand climb to unsustainable levels since the beginning of the covid pandemic, with more people reporting severe mental health problems, the nonprofit says. But staffers worry this chatbot may make things worse.
The Department of Health and Human Services is tasked with monitoring denials both by Obamacare health plans and those offered through employers and insurers. As insurers’ denials become more common, they sometimes defy not just medical standards of care but sheer logic. Why hasn’t the agency fulfilled its assignment?
Given a dire shortage of human behavioral health providers in the U.S., it may prove tempting for insurers to offer up apps and chatbots to meet the federal mental health parity requirement. But artificial intelligence, by definition fake, can’t master the empathic flow between patient and doctor that’s central to therapy.
Giant corporations like Microsoft and Google, plus many startups, are eyeing health care profits from programs based on artificial intelligence.
The computer program, designed in 1996 to be a secure location for foster children’s medical and school records and histories of neglect and abuse, is older than Google — and has had far fewer updates.
The AI program ChatGPT can save time and energy spent meal planning, especially for people with dietary restrictions. But be sure to double-check its work, users say.
A new survey from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finds that teenagers, particularly girls, are reporting all-time high rates of violence and profound mental distress. Meanwhile, both sides in the abortion debate are anxiously waiting for a district court decision in Texas that could effectively revoke the FDA’s 22-year-old approval of the abortion pill mifepristone. Alice Miranda Ollstein of Politico, Sandhya Raman of CQ Roll Call, and Joanne Kenen of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Politico join KHN’s chief Washington correspondent, Julie Rovner, to discuss these issues and more.
Entrepreneurs see smartphones as an opportunity to meet patients where they are. But many app-based diagnostic tools still need clinical validation to get buy-in from health care providers.
KHN Editor-in-Chief Elisabeth Rosenthal joins "CBS This Morning" to discuss how difficult a clerical error can be to fix and how patients can respond if it happens to them.
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