Closer Look
'You actually want the truth': Where AI for medical notes falls short
Molly Ferguson for STAT
When you're ceding control of medical notes to AI, how good is good enough?The technology is hailed by doctors as a godsend to end the drudgery of off-hours note writing, but once it no longer relies on humans to check its work, worries soar over fewer guardrails with little independent oversight. Inspired by Nuance's announcement that it would integrate GPT-4 into its new medical scribe product and remove human reviewers, STAT's Brittany Trang spoke to AI researchers, executives, and clinicians using the platforms; she also took part in demonstrations.
More often than not, experts told her, the technology struggles to get the note just right without human help. Companies can be close-mouthed and these tools don't fall under FDA review. "I like to say that they are storytellers, not truth tellers," said Enrico Coiera of Macquarie University. "With a medical record, you don't want a plausible story, you actually want the truth." Read the special report.
health
Data are scant, but study suggests students with a disability are more likely to experience homelessness
You can find data on how many children and young people are homeless and other data on how many have disabilities, but understanding how many of them fall into both categories, from age 3 through 21, is challenging. Even though laws protect them, students experiencing homelessness are less likely to be evaluated for learning disabilities and placed in special education programs than their housed peers.
A new paper in Pediatrics today exploring that intersection found that students with disabilities were more likely to experience homelessness in the 2019-2020 school year compared with students without disabilities, across eight Middle Atlantic and Northeastern states. Earlier, in the 2018-2019 school year in Massachusetts, students with disabilities had 1.5 times the risk of experiencing homelessness as students without disabilities. Across the seven other states and districts, the highest percentage of students with disabilities experiencing homelessness was in Washington, D.C., at 9.4%, and the lowest in Connecticut, at 1.2%.
health
Analysis questions the virtues of exercise for improving cognition
Regular physical exercise is good for both mind and body, right? A new umbrella review of 24 meta-analyses says not so fast, challenging what's been gospel for decades. The research in Nature Human Behaviour takes pains to say that while it may be true, there isn't enough high-quality evidence in the randomized controlled trials they studied to draw such a conclusion about healthy people, activity, and cognition. The statistical sins they cited include low statistical power and publication bias (when positive results are more likely to win journal acceptance).
Biological explanations have been proposed but not proven for why active people might have better brain health: blood vessel growth, synaptic plasticity, reduced inflammation. But maybe it's the cognitive and social enrichment exercise can bring, and maybe we should be happy with that: "Let us not forget the pleasure of doing something for its own sake," the authors conclude.
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