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Nvidia’s AI Bot Outperforms Nurses: Here’s What It Means for You  

By ROBBIE PEARL

Soon after Apple released the original iPhone, my father, an unlikely early adopter, purchased one. His plan? “I’ll keep it in the trunk for emergencies,” he told me. He couldn’t foresee that this device would eventually replace maps, radar detectors, traffic reports on AM radio, CD players, and even coin-operated parking meters—not to mention the entire taxi industry.

His was a typical response to revolutionary technology. We view innovations through the lens of what already exists, fitting the new into the familiar context of the old.

Generative AI is on a similar trajectory.

As I planned the release of my new book in early April, “ChatGPT, MD: How AI-Empowered Patients & Doctors Can Take Back Control of American Medicine,” I delved into the promise and perils of generative AI in medicine. Initially, I feared my optimism about AI’s potential might be too ambitious. I envisioned tools like ChatGPT transforming into hubs of medical expertise within five years. However, by the time the book hit the shelves, it was clear that these changes were unfolding even more quickly than I had anticipated.

Three weeks before “ChatGPT, MD” became number one on Amazon’s “Best New Books” list,  Nvidia stunned the tech and healthcare industries with a flurry of headline-grabbing announcements at its 2024 GTC AI conference. Most notably, Nvidia announced a collaboration with Hippocratic AI to develop generative AI “agents,” purported to outperform human nurses in various tasks at a significantly lower cost.

According to company-released data, the AI bots are 16% better than nurses at identifying a medication’s impact on lab values; 24% more accurate detecting toxic dosages of over-the-counter drugs, and 43% better at identifying condition-specific negative interactions from OTC meds. All that at $9 an hour compared to the $39.05 median hourly pay for U.S. nurses.

Although I don’t believe this technology will replace dedicated, skilled, and empathetic RNs, it will assist and support their work by identifying when problems unexpectedly arise. And for patients at home who today can’t obtain information, expertise and assistance for medical concerns, these AI nurse-bots will help. Although not yet available, they will be designed to make new diagnoses, manage chronic disease, and give patients a detailed but clear explanation of clinician’ advice.

These rapid developments suggest we are on the cusp of technology revolution, one that could reach global ubiquity far faster than the iPhone. Here are three major implications for patients and medical practitioners:  

1. GenAI In Healthcare Is Coming Faster Than You Can Imagine

The human brain can easily predict the rate of arithmetic growth (whereby numbers increase at a constant rate: 1, 2, 3, 4). And it does reasonably well at comprehending geometric growth (a pattern that increases at a constant ratio: 1, 3, 9, 27), as well.

But even the most astute minds struggle to grasp the implications of continuous, exponential growth. And that’s what we’re witnessing with generative AI.

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What Walmart said & What Walmart Did: Not the same thing

Walmart surprised us all and changed its mind about primary care yesterday. It’s out.

Because so few people have seen it I want to show what Walmart‘s head of health care said just 18 months ago (Nov 2022). Today they are finally killing off the 6th different strategy they’ve had (maybe it was 4). I guess (unlike CVS & Walgreens) they don’t have to write down investment in Oak Street or VillageCare, but they never worked out that primary care is only profitable if it’s 1) very low overhead 2) a loss leader for more expensive services (as most hospitals run it) or 3) getting a cut of the $$ for stopping more expensive services (Oak Street, Chenmed, Kaiser).

At HLTH 18 months ago I interviewed Cheryl Pegus who was then running Walmart and I asked why anyone should trust them, given how often they changed. Sachin H. Jain, MD, MBA Jain answered for her and said, “because they have Cheryl!” — Cheryl then said, “at Walmart the commitment to delivering health care is bigger than anywhere I have ever worked”. “Right now I have 35 centers in 3 years I’ll have 100s”  see 11.00 onwards in the video below, although the whole thing is worth a look

Cheryl though left Walmart THE NEXT WEEK!

What’s behind all these assessments of digital health?

By MATTHEW HOLT

A decent amount of time in recent weeks has been spent hashing out the conflict over data. Who can access it? Who can use it for what? What do the new AI tools and analytics capabilities allow us to do? Of course the idea is that this is all about using data to improve patient care. Anyone who is anybody, from John Halamka at the Mayo Clinic down to the two guys with a dog in a garage building clinical workflows on ChatGPT, thinks they can improve the patient experience and improve outcomes at lower cost using AI.

But if we look at the recent changes to patient care, especially those brought on by digital health companies founded over the past decade and a half, the answer isn’t so clear. Several of those companies, whether they are trying to reinvent primary care (Oak, Iora, One Medical) or change the nature of diabetes care (Livongo, Vida, Virta et al) have now had decent numbers of users, and their impact is starting to be assessed. 

There’s becoming a cottage industry of organizations looking at these interventions. Of course the companies concerned have their own studies, In some cases, several years worth. Their  logic always goes something like “XY% of patients used our solution, most of them like it, and after they use it hospital admissions and ER visits go down, and clinical metrics get better”. But organizations like the Validation Institute, ICER, RAND and more recently the Peterson Health Technology Institute, have declared themselves neutral arbiters, and started conducting studies or meta-analyses of their own. (FD: I was for a brief period on the advisory board of the Validation Institute). In general the answers are that digital health solutions ain’t all they’re cracked up to be.

There is of course a longer history here. Since the 1970s policy wonks have been trying to figure out if new technologies in health care were cost effective. The discipline is called health technology assessment and even has its own journal and society, at a meeting of which in 1996 I gave a keynote about the impact of the internet on health care. I finished my talk by telling them that the internet would have little impact on health care and was mostly used for downloading clips of color videos and that I was going to show them one. I think the audience was relieved when I pulled up a video of Alan Shearer scoring for England against the Netherlands in Euro 96 rather than certain other videos the Internet was used for then (and now)!

But the point is that, particularly in the US, assessment of the cost effectiveness of new tech in health care has been a sideline. So much so that when the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment was closed by Gingrich’s Republicans in 1995, barely anyone noticed. In general, we’ve done clinical trials that were supposed to show if drugs worked, but we have never really  bothered figuring out if they worked any better than drugs we already had, or if they were worth the vast increase in costs that tended to come with them. That doesn’t seem to be stopping Ozempic making Denmark rich.

Likewise, new surgical procedures get introduced and trialed long before anyone figures out if systematically we should be doing them or not. My favorite tale here is of general surgeon Eddie Jo Riddick who discovered some French surgeons doing laparoscopic gallbladder removal in the 1980s, and imported it to the US. He traveled around the country charging a pretty penny to  teach other surgeons how to do it (and how to bill more for it than the standard open surgery technique). It’s not like there was some big NIH funded study behind this. Instead an entrepreneurial surgeon changed an entire very common procedure in under five years. The end of the story was that Riddick made so much money teaching surgeons how to do the “lap chole” that he retired and became a country & western singer.

Similarly in his very entertaining video, Eric Bricker points out that we do more than double the amount of imaging than is common in European countries. Back in 2008 Shannon Brownlee spent a good bit of her great book Overtreated explaining how the rate of imaging skyrocketed while there was no improvement in our diagnosis or outcomes rates. Shannon by the way declared defeat and also got out of health care, although she’s a potter not a country singer.

You can look at virtually any aspect of health care and find ineffective uses of technology that don’t appear to be cost effective, and yet they are widespread and paid for.

So why are the knives out for digital health specifically?

And they are out. ICER helped kill the digital therapeutics movement by declaring several solutions for opiod use disorder ineffective, and letting several health plans use that as an excuse to not pay for them. Now Peterson, which is using a framework from ICER, has basically said the same thing about diabetes solutions and is moving on to MSK, with presumably more categories to be debunked on deck.

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Ready for Robots?

By KIM BELLARD

When I was young, robots were Robby the Robot (Forbidden Planet, etc.), the unnamed robot in Lost in Space, or The Jetsons’ Rosey the Robot. Gen X and Millennials might think instead of the more malevolent Terminators (which, of course, are actually cyborgs). But Gen Z is likely to think of the running, jumping, back-flipping Atlas from Boston Dynamics, whose videos have entertained millions.

Alas, last week Boston Dynamics announced it was discontinuing Atlas. “For almost a decade, Atlas has sparked our imagination, inspired the next generations of roboticists and leapt over technical barriers in the field,” the company said. “Now it’s time for our hydraulic Atlas robot to kick back and relax.”

The key part of that announcement was describing Atlas as “hydraulic,” because the very next day Boston Dynamics announced a new, all-electric Atlas: “Our new electric Atlas platform is here. Supported by decades of visionary robotics innovation and years of practical experience, Boston Dynamics is tackling the next commercial frontier.” Moreover, the company brags: “The electric version of Atlas will be stronger, with a broader range of motion than any of our previous generations.”

The introductory video is astounding:

Boston Dynamics says: “Atlas may resemble a human form factor, but we are equipping the robot to move in the most efficient way possible to complete a task, rather than being constrained by a human range of motion. Atlas will move in ways that exceed human capabilities.”

They’re right about that.

CEO Robert Playter told Evan Ackerman of IEEE Spectrum: “We’re going to launch it as a product, targeting industrial applications, logistics, and places that are much more diverse than where you see Stretch—heavy objects with complex geometry, probably in manufacturing type environments.”

He went on to elaborate:

This is our third product [following Spot and Stretch], and one of the things we’ve learned is that it takes way more than some interesting technology to make a product work. You have to have a real use case, and you have to have real productivity around that use case that a customer cares about. Everybody will buy one robot—we learned that with Spot. But they won’t start by buying fleets, and you don’t have a business until you can sell multiple robots to the same customer. And you don’t get there without all this other stuff—the reliability, the service, the integration.

The company will work with Hyundai (which, ICYMI, owns Boston Dynamics). Mr. Playter says Hyundai “is really excited about this venture; they want to transform their manufacturing and they see Atlas as a big part of that, and so we’re going to get on that soon.”

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Jeff Gartland, Relatient

Relatient focuses on intelligent scheduling, specifically for the larger specialty groups. They touch over 50m patients and 45,000 providers a year, and are now a significant player in the key part of patient experience–converting a patient looking into an actual appointment with the provider. I spoke with CEO Jeff Gartland at HIMSS in March 2024.–Matthew Holt

Aasim Saeed, CEO of Amenities

Aasim Saeed is the CEO of Amenities. He’s a doc, ex-McKinsey Consultant and spent a lot of time building a version of his tool for Baylor Scott & White. We had a wide ranging conversation about how health systems treat patients (not well), whether health systems know the value of their customers (no!), and how to bump up “in network” utilization. Amenities is a front door tool that essentially replaces those sh*tty MyChart portals, and eventually will lead to creating a loyalty membership experience. He gave me a tour of the new-ish tool that is live at MemorialCare in southern California, and coming soon to a system near you.–Matthew Holt

Harnessing Digital Innovation to Unlock Cancer Discoveries

By DOUG MIRSKY & BRIAN GONZALEZ

What if digital innovations could be the key to reducing the burden of cancer? CancerX was founded in 2023 as part of the Cancer Moonshot to achieve this goal. By uniting leading minds across industries such as technology, healthcare, science, and government, we are breaking down silos and leveraging digital innovation in the fight against cancer. With ambitious goals to cut the death rate from cancer by at least 50% and to improve the experience of people who are affected by cancer, digital innovation is critical.

As a public-private partnership co-hosted by Moffitt Cancer Center and the Digital Medicine Society, CancerX has created a unique ecosystem and community of public and private innovators. We are focused on fostering innovation and collaboration to accelerate the pace of digital tools to help patients across their entire cancer journey. We unite experts across industries and the government, leveraging the success of the Department for Health and Human Services’ InnovationX model; a public-private partnership approach that has driven breakthroughs in kidney care, Lyme disease and COVID-19. In collaboration with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) and the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health (OASH), CancerX is in sync with the US government in our common Cancer Moonshot goals to boost government-wide engagement with industry muscle. This type of multidisciplinary partnership is necessary to change the landscape of cancer treatment and care.

At the one year anniversary of CancerX, we look back on a very fast pace in building up our three pillars of work, demonstrating the ways that digital innovation is contributing to fighting cancer:

  1. Pre-Competitive Evidence Generation – A rolling series of multi-stakeholder initiatives to develop evidence, best practices, toolkits, and value models to drive the success of the mission.
  2. Demonstration Projects – These implementation projects pilot novel, mission-aligned approaches to demonstrate their value and sustainability for scale to drive broad adoption.
  1. Startup Accelerator – This program provides mentorship, education, and exposure to funding and clinical partnership opportunities to a start-up cohort aligned with the mission.

And we are already deeply underway with efforts across each of the three pillars.

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Will Artificial Intelligence (AI) Trigger Universal Health Care in America? What do expert Academics say?

By MIKE MAGEE

In his book, “The Age of Diminished Expectations” (MIT Press/1994), Nobel Prize winner, Paul Krugman, famously wrote, “Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run it is almost everything.”

A year earlier, psychologist Karl E. Weich from the University of Michigan penned the term “sensemaking” based on his belief that the human mind was in fact the engine of productivity, and functioned like a biological computer which “receives input, processes the information, and delivers an output.”

But comparing the human brain to a computer was not exactly a complement back then. For example, 1n 1994, Krugman’s MIT colleague, economist Erik Brynjolfsson coined the term “Productivity Paradox” stating “An important question that has been debated for almost a decade is whether computers contribute to productivity growth.”

Now three decades later, both Krugman (via MIT to Princeton to CCNY) and Brynjolfsson (via Harvard to MIT to Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI) remain in the center of the generative AI debate, as they serve together as research associates at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and attempt to “make sense” of our most recent scientific and technologic breakthroughs.

Not surprisingly, Medical AI (mAI), has been front and center. In November, 2023, Brynjolfsson teamed up with fellow West Coaster, Robert M. Wachter, on a JAMA Opinion piece titled “Will Generative Artificial Intelligence Deliver on Its Promise in Health Care?”

Dr. Wachter, the Chair of Medicine at UC San Francisco, coined his own ground-breaking term in 1996 – “hospitalist.” Considered the father of the field, he has long had an interest in the interface between computers and institutions of health care. 

In his 2014 New York Times bestseller, “The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age” he wrote, “We need to recognize that computers in healthcare don’t simply replace my doctor’s scrawl with Helvetica 12. Instead, they transform the work, the people who do it, and their relationships with each other and with patients.”

What Brynjolfsson and Wachter share in common is a sense of humility and realism when it comes to the history of systemic underperformance at the intersection of technology and health care.

They begin their 2023 JAMA commentary this way, “History has shown that general purpose technologies often fail to deliver their promised benefits for many years (‘the productivity paradox of information technology’). Health care has several attributes that make the successful deployment of new technologies even more difficult than in other industries; these have challenged prior efforts to implement AI and electronic health records.”

And yet, they are optimistic this time around.

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If data is the new oil, there’s going to be war over it

By MATTHEW HOLT

I am dipping into two rumbling controversies that probably only data nerds and chronic care management nerds care about, but as ever they reveal quite a bit about who has power and how the truth can get obfuscated in American health care. 

This piece is about the data nerds but hopefully will help non-nerds understand why this matters. (You’ll have to wait for the one about diabetes & chronic care).

Think about data as a precious resource that drives economies, and then you’ll understand why there’s conflict.

A little history. Back in 1996 a law was passed that was supposed to make it easy to move your health insurance from employer to employer. It was called HIPAA (the first 3 letters stand for Health Insurance Portability–you didn’t know that, did you!). And no it didn’t help make insurance portable.

The “Accountability” (the 1st A, the second one stands for “Act”) part was basically a bunch of admin simplification standards for electronic forms insurers had been asking for. A bunch of privacy legislation got jammed in there too. One part of the “privacy” idea was that you, the patient, were supposed to be able to get a copy of your health data when you asked. As Regina Holliday pointed out in her art and story (73 cents), decades later you couldn’t.

Meanwhile, over the last 30 years America’s venerable community and parochial hospitals merged into large health systems, mostly to be able to stick it to insurers and employers on price. Blake Madden put out a chart of 91 health systems with more than $1bn in revenue this week and there are about 22 with over $10bn in revenue and a bunch more above $5bn. You don’t need me to remind you that many of those systems are guilty with extreme prejudice of monopolistic price gouging, screwing over their clinicians, suing poor people, managing huge hedge funds, and paying dozens of executives like they’re playing for the soon to be ex-Oakland A’s. A few got LA Dodgers’ style money. More than 15 years since Regina picked up her paintbrush to complain about her husband Fred’s treatment and the lack of access to his records, suffice it to say that many big health systems don’t engender much in the way of trust. 

Meanwhile almost all of those systems, which already get 55-65% of their revenue from the taxpayer, received additional huge public subsidies to install electronic medical records which both pissed off their physicians and made several EMR vendors rich. One vendor, Epic Systems, became so wealthy that it has an office complex modeled after a theme park, including an 11,000 seat underground theater that looks like something from a 70’s sci-fi movie. Epic has also been criticized for monopolistic practices and related behavior, in particular limiting what its ex-employees could do and what its users could publicly complain about. Fortune’s Seth Joseph has been hammering away at them, to little avail as its software now manages 45%+ of all encounters with that number still increasing. (Northwell, Intermountain & UPMC are three huge health systems that recently tossed previous vendors to get on Epic).

Meanwhile some regulations did get passed about what was required from those who got those huge public subsidies and they have actually had some effect. The money from the 2009 HITECH act was spent mostly in the 2011-14 period and by the mid teens most hospitals and doctors had EMRs. There was a lot of talk about data exchange between providers but not much action. However, there were three major national networks set up, one mostly working with Epic and its clients called Carequality. Epic meanwhile had pretty successfully set up a client to client exchange called Care Everywhere (remember that).

Then, mostly driven by Joe Biden when he was VP, in 2016 Congress passed the 21st Century Cures Act which among many other things basically said that providers had to make data available in a modern format (i.e. via API). ONC, the bit of HHS that manages this stuff, eventually came up with some regulations and by the early 2020’s data access became real across a series of national networks. However, the access was restricted to data needed for “treatment” even though the law promised several other reasons to get health data.

As you might guess, a bunch of things then happened. First a series of VC-backed tech companies got created that basically extract data from hospital APIs in part via those national networks. These are commonly called “on-ramp” companies. Second, a bunch of companies started trying to use that data for a number of purposes, most ostensibly to deliver services to patients and play with their data outside those 91 big hospital systems.

Which brings us to the last couple of weeks. It became publicly known among the health data nerd crowd that one of the onramp companies, Particle Health, had been cut off from the Carequality Network and thus couldn’t provide its clients with data.

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