AI scribes were supposed to make doctors’ lives easier, but many researchers are finding inaccuracies in their transcriptions.

A popular transcription tool used in medical centers, OpenAI’s Whisper model, is embellishing transcripts with dialogue that doesn’t appear in audio recordings, according to a study presented at the 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency.

Whisper is used by around 30,000 clinicians and 40 health systems to document interactions with patients, according to the Associated Press. But multiple studies have shown that Whisper produced fabricated or inaccurate transcriptions when it was tested on real-world audio like town hall recordings.

“We take this issue seriously and are continually working to improve the accuracy of our models, including how we can reduce hallucinations,” OpenAI spokesperson Taya Christianson told Healthcare Brew in an emailed statement.

Allison Koenecke, an assistant professor of information science at Cornell University and an author on the study, told Healthcare Brew that this analysis, along with other research projects she has conducted, highlight how AI transcription tools underperform when tested on speech data from people with accents, broken speech, or language disorders. In particular, Whisper inserted made-up statements that “include explicit harms such as perpetuating violence, making up inaccurate associations, or implying false authority,” she and her colleagues wrote in their study. In healthcare settings, such errors could misrepresent patients with speech irregularities and result in inaccurate assessment records.

Keep reading here.—CH

It’s not all good news for GoodRx.

The drug discount company is facing at least three separate class-action lawsuits from independent pharmacies accusing it of “conspiring” with pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) to fix reimbursement rates in a way that boosts the PBMs’ profits. Also named in two of the three suits are four PBMs: Caremark, Express Scripts (owned by Cigna), Medimpact Healthcare Systems, and Navitus Health Solutions.

PBMs are companies that negotiate between drugmakers, insurers, and pharmacies to decide which drugs insurers cover and how much pharmacies are reimbursed for dispensing those drugs.

The lawsuits come as PBMs face increasing scrutiny, with the Federal Trade Commission bringing a lawsuit against the country’s top three PBMs in September for allegedly boosting profits by inflating the price of insulin.

Keep reading here.—MA

Remember that hospital price transparency rule from three years ago that said starting January 1, 2021, every US hospital had to start posting prices for all its items and services in a way consumers could understand and in a machine-readable file format?

Well, good news, it’s totally working! Except when hospitals don’t follow it. Which, it turns out, has reportedly happened quite frequently.

In a random sampling of 100 hospitals nationwide, 34 didn’t publish comprehensive, machine-readable files with their pricing, and 14 didn’t follow all the steps necessary to display their prices in a way that the average patient could understand, according to a November 8 report from the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Inspector General. Both are required to be considered compliant.

The report estimates that 46% of the 5,879 hospitals with Medicare inpatient claims between January 2021 and June 2022 didn’t comply with one or more of the rule’s requirements.

Keep reading here.—CC