Artificial intelligence
Inside a sepsis algorithm test
In 2021, Ohio-based Summa Health had a problem. A technology tool alerted clinicians that patients were likely to develop sepsis, but the system produced as many as 80,000 flags a month.
Clinicians couldn't figure out which alerts to respond to, so they were often ignored. In a new story, Katie Palmer explores how Summa tested a new algorithm developed at Duke, called Sepsis Watch that would flag people at risk for Sepsis who needed help, without overwhelming clinicians. The case study is emblematic of the challenge of launching clinical decision support technology in hospitals, especially at community health systems.
Read more here
research
Microsoft "superintelligence" hype misses the mark
At the end of June, Microsoft's AI team released a study on a new way to structure AI agents for diagnosing disease — one that was able to diagnose difficult cases at a rate four times higher than clinicians could. Those results led the company to claim it is on the path to "medical superintelligence."
The claims, and hyperbolic headlines that followed, have stirred controversy among physicians online. The "superintelligence" buzzword misses the mark, experts told STAT's Brittany Trang, and overlooks the actual innovations Microsoft made in the process.
Read more here
policy
To amend HIPAA or make something new?
Brittany Trang writes: At a Senate HELP committee hearing on health care cybersecurity yesterday, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) asked expert witnesses if anyone would object to medical information from wearables becoming covered under HIPAA, the federal law that protects health data privacy. The question follows health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s suggestion that everyone in America ought to use a wearable to help manage their health.
One rural health system CIO said she had no objections. But René Quashie, vice president of digital health at the Consumer Technology Association, voiced opposition, saying that HIPAA wasn't the appropriate vehicle to safeguard wearables data.
"HIPAA is a health care law, for health care stakeholders," he said. The CTA instead supports the idea of a federal privacy law with "specific health provisions" that would cover the breadth of entities not currently covered by HIPAA for use cases beyond simply wearable data.
Congress has tried and failed to pass a comprehensive privacy bill multiple times. Whether it's easier to amend HIPAA to cover non-health care companies that handle medical data, or pass a new privacy law, is yet to be seen.
No comments