December 12, 2023

Survey: Most health execs aren't ready for data sharing mandate

While it's been almost a decade in the making, federal rules easing health data flow — including banning interference with records sharing — could be moving too quickly for health executives. A survey commissioned by health data management company Verato, tapping about 200 hospital, health system and insurance leaders, found that just 43% felt their organizations were fully compliant in maintaining the technical infrastructure underlying the secure transfer of data. The same amount felt they were fully able to receive patient-level information from other health care organizations.

Among other interesting tidbits: More than half — 57 % — expect that an inevitable deluge of external data requests, or data flowing into their health systems, will lead to a patient data-matching crisis. (Verato, of course, sells those types of data services and stands to gain customers by highlighting the challenge.)

from the bay

Why one security company is coming out of stealth

Last month I wrote about a troubling escalation in violence against health care workers and the crop of tech companies like Commure emerging to outfit hospitals with wearable panic buttons and detailed risk analyses.

I recently spoke to competitor Canopy — a Palo Alto-based physical security startup boasting at least 30 health system customers that has decided to emerge out of stealth and rebrand so it can connect directly with hospitals, instead of selling its wearable panic buttons and network of sensors to customers through other distribution partners. (The company was founded as SMP Labs in 2019, and is now launching as Canopy.)

Co-founder Shan Sinha says security companies chasing hospital customers can compete based on the geographic reach of their security systems — whether it works both inside and outside, for instance — and the ease with which hospitals can install them.

Though it already worked with hospitals through intermediary sellers, marketing to hospitals directly gives Canopy better insight into their needs, Sinha said.

Research

NEJM's new pub aims to hold AI to account

The New England Journal of Medicine is lending its prestige and influence to a new publication evaluating AI's potential land grab in medicine. Its leaders hope it can wholly change how AI is researched and discussed today.

"What we're trying to do is apply the boring old criteria of medical empiricism to these models," Isaac "Zak" Kohane, the journal's incoming editor, told Casey Ross.

"The bread and butter of NEJM AI is going to be prospective clinical trials. That's the only way we can figure out if it really makes a difference."

Of note: The journal's early sponsors include a slate of companies deeply invested in the technology's use in health care, including Microsoft, the top investor in OpenAI. Read more on Kohane's vision here, and let us know what you think.

Chatbot's potential as a diagnostic partner

Speaking of AI research, a new letter in JAMA Network Open suggests large language models aren't necessarily always terrible at clinical reasoning, and could outperform doctors in certain limited circumstances.

Researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center compared Chat GPT-4 — a publicly available tool — to clinicians by entering in a series of example medical cases along with an identical prompt 100 times, and asking for the likelihood that a patient had a certain diagnosis given patient's presentation. They also asked it to update its estimates given certain test results like mammography for breast cancer. Researchers compared the probabilistic estimates to those gathered from a national survey of more than 550 human practitioners. Depending on the case, the chatbot's estimates were sometimes more accurate than humans'.

"Humans struggle with probabilistic reasoning, the practice of making decisions based on calculating odds," author Adam Rodman said. But that's just one of many parts of the diagnostic process, he added, and authors "chose to evaluate probabilistic reasoning in isolation because it is a well-known area where humans could use support."

Interestingly, if the patients' test results were positive, the chatbot was sometimes more accurate, similarly more accurate or less accurate than humans. But when test results were negative, the chatbot was more accurate than humans in all test cases. Rodman said humans often associate negative test results with higher risks, potentially leading to over treatment or more tests. Thoughts on the research and its implications are welcome.

Lizzy's device digest

GE HealthCare CEO to chair AdvaMed

Medical device lobbying giant AdvaMed has named Peter Arduini, who leads GE HealthCare, the chair of its board of directors, Lizzy Lawrence writes. The announcement coincides with the establishment of the lobbying group's new division focused on policy issues for medical imaging technology; that group was formed just a couple months after it launched a digital health task force. The moves come as FDA heightens its evaluation of digital health tools, Lizzy writes. Read more.

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Thanks for reading! More on Thursday - Mohana

Mohana Ravindranath is a Bay Area correspondent covering health tech at STAT and has made it her mission to separate out hype from reality in health care.