| | | |  By Casey Ross, Katie Palmer, Mario Aguilar, and Mohana Ravindranath | Next week, on May 24, our team will be in San Francisco for the STAT Health Tech Summit. It’s going to be a jam-packed day of discussion with digital health leaders from Google, Tempus, Duke, UCSF, and many more. There’s still a chance to join us in-person or virtually: See the full agenda here, and we hope to see you! | | | Google hires FDA's former digital health chief Google has tapped Bakul Patel, the former head of digital health at the FDA, to lead its strategy for developing and commercializing AI tools around the world. Patel, who left the agency last month, announced the new role in a statement posted to his LinkedIn account on Monday. In an interview with STAT, he said the job will allow him to help shape the use of AI tools not only in the U.S., but in developing countries that lack the resources available to most Americans. “I started thinking, ‘Can I do more than just the U.S.?’” Patel said. “I wanted to devote time to thinking about how we talk to the other regulators. How do we create products that will reach millions?” Casey has the full story. | What do we really know about online prescribing? As scrutiny of Cerebral’s stimulant-prescribing practices continues, providers and regulators have lots of questions about how online scripts have affected the quality of care. But there aren’t many good answers. “We really lack information about how tele-access to prescribing has affected appropriateness of prescribing,” said Craig Surman, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School — both because the practice is so new, and because reporting guidelines limit the availability of data on remote prescribing and outcomes. In her latest story, Mohana lays out three burning questions that will be critical to answer as telemedicine companies lobby for long-term leniency for prescribing certain drugs virtually. | AI isn't immune to health tech's funding dip Like most health tech companies, artificial intelligence-driven startups have been on a tear over the last two years. Total funding for healthcare AI has increased every quarter since the end of 2019 — but it’s finally found a peak. In the first quarter of 2022, CB Insights reports, total funding for the sector fell by 32% from the last tally of $3.7 billion. That dip mirrors the downward trend for digital health, whose quarterly funding dropped 60%, from nearly $2 billion to $792 million. But it’s all relative — pouring $2.5 billion into automation and decision support is no small potatoes, and healthcare companies still led the AI sector in total funding and mega-rounds. In the grand scheme of things, a pretty tiny course correction. 
Credit: CB Insights
| With an unmatched healthcare system and $1B city investment, NYC primed to be an innovation hub Driven by the largest biotech workforce in the US, 9 major medical centers, 50+ hospitals, and a robust VC & startup ecosystem, NYC has all the makings of an innovation hub. LifeSci NYC is a $1B city initiative to support the industry and help companies expand and grow. Discover more about life sciences in NYC | Framing the future of medical licenses Prescribing practices are just one element of telehealth regulation that shifted during the pandemic: At the National Telehealth Conference held by the Health Resources and Services Administration on Monday, experts talked about many of the temporary allowances that supported the adoption of virtual visits, and how telemedicine practices and regulations might evolve. One hot topic: the future of state-by-state clinical licenses, which can make it difficult for teleproviders to practice. During the pandemic, “most states in the United States said look, if you're licensed in good standing in another state, you can take care of patients in our state,” said hospitalist and health policy researcher Ateev Mehrotra. But as those provisions have lapsed through 2021, providers, regulators, and patients have clamored for more flexibility. Among the reforms being discussed: - Automatic reciprocity, like states already do with driver’s licenses
- Telehealth-specific licenses, or lowering the barriers to obtain existing licenses
- Licenses based on where the physician is located, not the patient
- Federal licenses, or federal incentives for states to join compacts supporting reciprocity
For more on telehealth’s future, you can watch the second day of the conference here. | When AI sees race, but the doctor doesn't When radiologists look at a chest X-ray or a mammogram, the patient’s race is usually the last thing on their mind. “Radiologists, we almost consider ourselves race-agnostic,” said Judy Gichoya, a radiologist and informatician at Emory University. But in research published in the Lancet Digital Health, she and colleagues came to an important finding: Artificial intelligence algorithms can recognize a patient’s self-reported race from radiological images alone.
“It's not just the detection of race that was surprising,” Gichoya told STAT, noting that deep learning models were able to do so across multiple parts of the body and multiple datasets. “It's that it's difficult to identify even when that is happening.” The models were able to detect a patient’s race even when the images were so corrupted, noisy, and grayed-out that a radiologist would hardly be able to assess them. Without knowing how models are inferring race from medical images, the authors write, it may not be able to remove racial bias from them, creating “an enormous risk for all model deployments in medical imaging.” | FDA nods and holding companies - Maternal health care coordination startup Mahmee raised $9.2 million in a Series A led by Goldman Sachs Asset Management, while Legacy, a startup focused on fertility care for the sperm-having set, raised $25 million in a Series B led by Bain Capital Ventures.
- Osmind, which makes a psychiatric health record tool, raised $40 million in a Series B round led by DFJ Growth. Its EHR is focused on tracking outcomes of what it calls “breakthrough mental health research and treatment,” including therapy using ketamine and transcranial magnetic stimulation.
- As digital health services expand, health system Bon Secours Mercy Health has launched its own digital holding company to capitalize on the growth. Accrete Health Partners will focus on investments and partnerships in IT services, analytics, patient experience, and new health tools.
- A new crop of AI clearances: RadNet got the FDA’s okay for a cancer-detecting algorithms for both breast and prostate. The breast cancer tool assigns a score to suspicious lesions, while the prostate cancer tool is meant to aid the reading of prostate MRIs.
| What we’re reading - How to protect your privacy if ‘Roe v. Wade’ falls, Wired
- Google and Samsung join forces to make it easier to sync fitness data between apps, The Verge
- A 3-item measure of digital health care literacy: development and validation study, JMIR Formative Research
| Thanks for reading! See you Thursday,  | | | | Have a news tip or comment? Email Us | |
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