Healthcare Brew covers pharmaceutical developments, health startups, the latest tech, and how it impacts hospitals and providers to keep administrators and providers informed.

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An image of a red cross, pill bottles, and health carts surrounding a phone. 

Digital tools may ease inequities in maternal healthcare, report finds

It’ll all boil down to equity-centered design, according to the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions.

Ransomware 101: The need-to-knows for healthcare execs

The Change Healthcare cyberattack may be just the beginning.

Amanda Eisenberg

HCA Healthcare pilots Google AI to aid handoff documentation

The large language model processes a 12-hour shift and condenses the highlights into a report that helps the next nurse pick up where the previous left off.

A computer processor icon denoting healthcare technology

Tech

Cassie McGrath

 are rapidly making their way into healthcare, Adrienne Kline is one researcher leading the way in development.

Head of AI and engineering at Illinois-based Northwestern Medicine’s Center for Artificial Intelligence at the Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute, Kline received $1.4 million in research grants in the last year from tech giants Amazon, Microsoft, and Nvidia to develop new AI technologies for both patients and healthcare administrators.

These companies regularly make investments into AI, with Microsoft pledging in January $80 billion to create AI-enabled data centers to train models and deploy AI and cloud-based applications globally.

With this funding, Kline spearheaded the creation of a medical deidentification tool called PixelGuard, which removes identifying data for safe sharing of sensitive health information. The assistant professor at Northwestern also led the creation of a multimodal cardiac platform, Project Corazon, which reads MRI slices to diagnose cardiac abnormalities.

Kline spoke with Healthcare Brew about how she’s used research grants over the past year and what she’s working on now.

While Kline was finishing her postdoctorate in the department of preventive medicine, private tech companies wanted to recruit her. She ultimately decided to stay in academia, though, because she wanted more autonomy to choose what she would work on, she said.

Since Kline was already on these companies’ radars, they contacted her with grant offers and gave her another way to collaborate on ideas she had. With National Institutes of Health funding cuts issued by the Trump administration (funding is 

 at Northwestern), industry financing provided her an opportunity to continue “really important” research, she said.

“Some of these industry partnerships are a bit of a godsend to continue to get your research pushed through and get your research published,” she said, which ultimately helps researchers try “to make a difference in the world.”

De-indeification tools, like the one she built, aren’t “sexy,” Kline said, but they are essential for protecting data sharing, including within hospitals or between industry partners.

PixelGuard does this for images, she said, meaning healthcare providers can safely share MRI slices externally, like, for example, with a health plan that wants to double-check it for billing purposes.

She worked with Amazon and IT company ScaleCapacity to develop the tool, which took about seven months from “pitch to deployment,” she said. 

Working with Nvidia, Amazon Web Services, and tech company Quantiphi, Kline also led the development of a program, Project Corazon that can read cardiac MRI scans and assess medical images “the way a radiologist would.” In other words, the tool uses AI to assist clinicians in making diagnoses.

Project Corazon is not ready to be used in hospitals yet, Kline said, but with the CDC reporting 6.7 million US residents over 20 as having heart failure, she sees the need to ease the diagnostic process.

After sitting in on a faculty meeting and hearing about scheduling challenges, Kline started drawing up plans for a new operating room scheduling tool.

When completed (she’s aiming for November or December), the tool will review items like surgeons, beds, and room availability as well as emergent patient needs to find the most efficient way to conduct procedures.

“We want high utilization, but we also want to ensure that our emergencies are handled without delay, taking into account people going on vacation or [getting] sick,” she said, “because that really ties back to hospital profit margins.”

Headshot of Northwestern's Adrienne Kline on a small blue cloud with darker blue stars nearby

This Northwestern researcher got $1.4m in grants from Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia. Here’s what she built

Adrienne Kline made de-identification tool PixelGuard and heart diagnoser Project Corazon with private industry research money. 

 of using AI in the clinic, like cybersecurity risks and a 

 published Aug. 12 in the Lancet found another possible issue: clinicians losing their skills.

The research was conducted by hospital and academic researchers affiliated with institutions in Poland, Spain, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Japan, and the UK from Sept. 8, 2021, through March 9, 2022. It looked into how well endoscopists who “regularly used AI” performed colonoscopies when the technology was and was not available to them.

Researchers conducted the observational study of 1,443 patients at four endoscopy centers in Poland that began using AI tools to help detect polyps. They evaluated the quality of colonoscopies three months before and three months after implementing AI.

They found that when using AI tools, clinicians had lower adenoma detection rates (ADR), or a way to measure colonoscopy quality by detecting polyps, compared to when they performed the procedures without AI.

The study also found that the ADR of standard colonoscopy dropped from 28.4% (or 226 of 795 participants) before AI was in place to 22.4% (145 of 648 participants) after AI usage.

“Continuous exposure to AI might reduce the ADR of standard non-AI assisted colonoscopy, suggesting a negative effect on endoscopist behavior,” the researchers wrote.

This research coincides with other studies, including 

 that suggests AI usage weakens critical thinking skills.

Digitized looking pill capsule with small brains inside

Study: AI may weaken clinical skills 

The research aligns with other studies that suggest AI weakens critical thinking. 

Maia Anderson

 using artificial intelligence (AI) as part of their workflows, and while the technology can bring increased efficiency, it can also bring a greater risk of 

 the FDA’s AI tool, Elsa, which was made to accelerate drug and medical device approvals, generated fake research studies in its citations. And in early August, the Verge 

 Google’s healthcare AI model, Med-Gemini, mentioned a nonexistent body part in a 2024 research paper.

 from Mount Sinai health system in New York released on Aug. 2 found AI chatbots are “highly vulnerable” to attacks promoting false medical information.

Given the rising trend of AI use in healthcare, we asked executives from across the industry how leaders should respond when errors occur and what safeguards could be put in place to prevent harm.

Matthew DeCamp, an internal medicine physician and health services researcher at the University of Colorado’s Center for Bioethics and Humanities, told us there’s still “a lot of uncertainty” about who holds responsibility when AI errors occur in healthcare, as it’s not been 

However, the industry can look to existing protocols for sharing responsibility between different stakeholders, such as the AI developer and the end user, he said.

“Even before AI was involved, we found ways to divvy responsibility between, say, the maker of a CT scanner, the health system who purchased it, the radiologists who use it, and the primary care physicians like myself who might read the final report,” DeCamp said. “I think we can be reassured by this, and perhaps take a similar approach.”

Thomas Fuchs, SVP and chief AI officer at pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, told us the priority for healthcare organizations using AI “should always be patient safety and maintaining trust.”

He echoed DeCamp’s sentiment that it’ll take a group effort to mitigate AI errors, adding that the technology developers should “design systems with rigorous validation, transparency, and continuous monitoring.”

Meanwhile, the organizations that use the technology should set up processes to “detect, assess, and respond” to errors quickly and adhere to guidelines like the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s AI Risk Management Framework, Fuchs said, which was designed by the government agency to help manage risks associated with using AI.

Ethan Berke, chief medical officer and SVP of integrated care at virtual care company Teladoc Health, said that in the same way healthcare organizations have systems in place to address other kinds of medical errors, they should create systems to “track, classify, and investigate” any safety threats that may arise from using AI. Then they can use that data to prevent potential future errors.

Teladoc has more than 60 proprietary AI models, Berke said, and the company has created a “rigorous” process to test and evaluate them for “accuracy, bias, and safety” before they’re deployed.

“We all have a responsibility to ensure that AI solutions are reliable, ethical, and secure,” he said. “By investing in patient safety and quality, we’ve been able to build a program that can analyze potential safety events more quickly, address root causes, and catch errors before they even reach the patient.”

A healthcare cross made up of glowing binary code with a warning sign over the top right corner.

Healthcare execs talk AI errors and how to address them

Everybody makes mistakes; everybody has those days. 

illustrated headshot of caroline catherman, healthcare brew reporter

Caroline Catherman

Artificial intelligence (AI) is now commonplace in healthcare. Robust rules for the tech? Not so much, according to a new report.

About 88% of 233 health system executives said their system uses AI in some form, but only 18% have a mature 

 and full AI strategy, according to an Aug. 12 

 from the professional membership organization Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA) and Eliciting Insights, a healthcare strategy and market research company.

“I think a lot of organizations need to step back and say, ‘Oh, wait, we have 10 departments doing work with AI,’” Richard Gundling, HFMA’s SVP of professional practice, told Healthcare Brew. “We need an overall governance structure now, so each department is using it the same way, the same oversights are done.”

Responses from 115 of the sampled healthcare system executives suggest the most common use of AI is for 

 and clinical notetaking, with 42% using it for this purpose. Coding is the second most common, at 28%, followed by clinical documentation improvement, denial prediction, and 

The good news: Though most surveyed healthcare orgs don’t have a comprehensive strategy, the report shows nearly three-quarters of CFO respondents said they are at least in the early stages of developing an AI governance structure—a set of rules and regulations around how departments should use AI.

But how should they go about creating one?

, AI could hurt rather than help the organization. There have been instances of AI 

 in the journal npj Digital Medicine suggests large language learning models may recommend “inferior” psychiatric treatments when told a patient’s race.

One important step in creating these guardrails is to make sure all departments are represented in crafting AI strategy, including financial executives, clinical leaders, and human resources professionals, Gundling said.

The most common duty of governance groups is to determine a data policy for AI, according to the report. The groups are also often used to identify and vet AI vendors.

There’s a growing number of resources to help groups create a governance structure.

The American Medical Association released an AI governance toolkit April 29 with an eight-step module highlighting steps such as designating an executive to be accountable for AI’s outcomes and establishing a vendor evaluation policy.

Other groups like the public-private Coalition for Health AI—a collaboration between providers, tech companies, and other health organizations—have 

 a robust AI implementation and assessment process to ensure AI is developed safely and companies 

.“Even if you feel like you’re behind the curve, you can still catch up,” Gundling said.

A medical cross made out of binary code held behind yellow and black safety guardrails.

Health systems are adopting AI faster than they’re adopting safeguards

While 88% of health systems are using AI, only 18% have mature governance.

 artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots as therapists.

 shows testimonies from users who swear by ChatGPT as a confidant, and several companies have designed chatbots specifically for this purpose. But there are also tales of AI 

As use of AI grows, regulators are struggling to keep up. Mental health experts told us AI can potentially fill gaps amid a 

 for new patients in a 2024 survey. But providers caution against relying on AI too heavily.

“There’s a mental health, global crisis,” Russell Fulmer, a licensed professional counselor and associate professor at Kansas State University, said. “AI can be a piece of that puzzle to help, and it will continue to gain ground and probably help us with things like diagnosis. But I don’t see it replacing [practitioners] because of that human connection that is needed.”

Clinicians hold varied perspectives about AI for therapy, Vaile Wright, American Psychological Association (APA) senior director for healthcare innovation, told us.

“There is a group of individuals who recognize that it’s very human to turn to ChatGPT for emotional support,” Wright said. “There’s a group of individuals that just think AI has absolutely no place in this space at all. These can be, in some ways, overlapping groups.”

Olivia Uwamahoro Williams, a licensed professional counselor and clinical assistant professor at the department of School Psychology and Counselor Education at William & Mary, said she sees chatbots as a tool. For example, they could be used to help “triage” people who call chronically 

But she doesn’t think chatbots can replicate the 

—an honest, empathetic connection between a therapist and client—which 

 suggests can be crucial to therapy’s effectiveness.

Uwamahoro and Fulmer worked in a group formed by the American Counseling Association to draft a number of recommendations. The group urges avoiding overreliance on the tech, advocates for further research, and says AI should be a tool, not a replacement, for human care.

 on the use of AI therapists, but plans to start soon.

Separately, Brown University is set to lead a research institute focused on AI assistance in behavioral health, backed by $20 million from the US National Science Foundation, the university announced July 29.

For now, APA is urging federal regulators to put out guidelines and require apps to have safety measures like crisis support. One of the biggest concerns is making sure users understand what these apps can and can’t do and risks associated with using them, Wright added.

One newer app—a chatbot called Ash—was created by 

Backed by $93 million in funding, the company unveiled Ash on July 22 after 18 months of development with 50,000 beta users.

Ash is different from other AI offerings because it’s trained on its own large language model that includes “hundreds of thousands of hours” of clinical conversations and a vast array of therapeutic approaches, Daniel Reid Cahn, co-founder and CEO of Ash, told us.

Unlike other AI chatbots, it’s also not designed to tell people 

, agree with them, or be their friend, Cahn added.

Ash is advertised on the company’s website as a nonjudgmental tool that will “challenge” users and remember conversations, during which the AI will ask constructive questions and offer users insights.

The app primarily targets people without clinical-level mental disorders, but it can identify and flag people in crisis or experiencing delusions for the app’s team of clinicians to review, founding clinical lead and clinical psychologist Derrick Hull said. Unlike a therapist, it won’t try to evaluate or recommend treatment.

“We don’t believe that the relationship will be exactly the same as the relationship that people would form with the human therapist. Nor should it be exactly the same,” Hull said.

Fulmer said the directors and advisors at Ash “appeal to clinical expertise,” but one thing that makes him wary is the lack of peer-reviewed research.

Cahn said that’s coming, but it’s a long process. Early results have him feeling confident, though, he added.

In addition, Ash, like similar apps, advertises “AI built for therapy” and “AI-powered mental health support,” but in the terms and conditions, the company says the tool “is not a healthcare provider or a provider of mental health services and does not engage in the practice of medicine.” Instead it gives users an opportunity to “self-help.”

“Are they a tool that actually treats mental illness?” Wright said, speaking generally about AI therapy apps. “They’ll say in the fine print, no, but that’s how they’re marketing themselves. And if that’s the case, then they really ought to be regulated by the FDA, and they’re not. They’re in the direct-to-consumer wellness space.”

Hull said the app makes clear what it can and can’t do.

“The nuances of healthcare are lengthy and complicated. We save a lot of that for the in-app experience. So if there are expectations that people have of Ash that Ash cannot and should not meet, there’s signposting throughout and baked into Ash’s behavior,” he said.

Psychologist AI humanoid robot talking with a sad depressed patient, artificial intelligence and psychology concept

As AI therapy grows, clinicians try to chart a path forward

Bots have the potential to both help and hurt the mental health crisis, experts say.

In June, the head of the National Health Service (NHS) in England, which operates the public healthcare system, announced a commitment to incorporate robots into most minimally invasive surgeries by 2035.

 and free up beds for operations like joint replacements and hysterectomies. Currently, 1 in 5 (or 70,000) minimally invasive surgeries are robot-assisted in the UK annually, the NHS said in its announcement. The goal is to raise that number to 90%, or 500,000, a year in the next decade.

In comparison, the US is the world leader in robotic surgery, with the 

 2.6+ million surgeries in 2024 involving robots from da Vinci, the leading medical robotics company in the US. That figure is up 17% from the year prior.

The surgical robot market is worth $3 billion, according to a 2023 analysis by consultancy 

, which also reported that 78% of US surgeons are interested in adopting the technology.

Robots bring a lot of benefits to surgery, like 3D cameras and precision tools that don’t shake, unlike human hands. These tools can make smaller incisions that require less recovery.

Robotics adoption is largely due to “the precision, the safety, the stability that a robot provides beyond what the human hand is capable of, that allows you to treat patients with better outcomes and to reduce risk,” David Fischel, CEO of robotics company Stereotaxis, told us.

 between $500,000 and $2.5 million each, which also drives up individual costs per procedure. 

 found robot-assisted abdominal surgeries cost an average of $18,300 compared to an average of $16,000 for laparoscopic ones.

On top of that, Harish Yalamanchili, a surgeon at vascular clinic Coastal Vein Care in California, said it’s hard to implement robotics at times because many surgeons are used to and skilled in laparoscopic surgery, which involves hands, a small tube, and a camera. Both types of procedures produce 

Robotic tools can also only be used about 15–20 times before they need to be replaced, according to medical device company Steris. Yalamanchili, however, said his clinic has laparoscopic tools that are 10 years old and still safe for surgery.

Still, Yalamanchili said “robotic surgery has a wonderful place for especially advanced surgeries.”

The digital surgery revolution is dependent on robotics in the operating room (OR), Fischel said, as the tools act as a foundation for enhanced technologies. For example, he said robotics could allow physicians to connect and collaborate remotely when hospitals are shortstaffed.

Robotics also helps power AI. When everything is digitized in a robotics-centric OR, data storage becomes easier and therefore, insights that can be gleaned from that data during the procedure can enhance quality of care, Fischel said.

“How does the computer help focus the physician’s eyes on the important information and warn them about potential risks, help them in the decision-making process about what to do next?” he said. “That is the most exciting thing of what’s [going to be] playing out over the next decade.”

As the UK looks to expand surgical robotics, leaders are taking a cue from the US 

Surgical robots can be valuable tools in healthcare, but they also present challenges.

 for the past four years, virtual care platform Current Health is reclaiming its independence.

In a June 24 blog post, company co-founder Christopher McGhee announced plans to return as CEO of the newly autonomous company, which was founded in 2014 and helps health systems move patient care into home settings. Best Buy purchased the company for $400 million in 2021, though neither party disclosed the financial details of the 

McGhee spoke with Healthcare Brew about his plans for Current Health as he takes the helm once again. He told us he wants to focus the company on treating acute and complex patient populations as opposed to long-term chronic condition management, as that’s where he believes it can “most move the needle on outcomes for the patient and cost.”

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What changes can we expect from Current Health now that you’re an independent company again?

I’m really trying to take us back to our scrappy startup roots. I want us to innovate and build out our product with urgency and deliver the absolute best frontline experience to our clinical users and to our patients. I want to see rapid innovation in what we do, in building our product, and expanding our product.

How do we continue to build out our health monitoring services and clinical team and what that team does?

How do we use more AI and automation to allow these programs to cost-efficiently scale? The world is dramatically different today than the one it was when I sold the company in 2021. The AI technologies that are out have fundamentally changed the game for how some of these services can be done.

How do we orchestrate all of the technology and all of the services that are going on in the home?

Then the fourth one is the business model: How do we make sure that it’s aligned to the way our customer makes money?

You have partnerships with more than 40 health systems, including big names like Mount Sinai and Mass General Brigham. What’s your strategy when it comes to deciding which systems to partner with? 

We want to work with any organization that wants to deliver healthcare in a different way and wants to deliver more of that healthcare in a community or home setting. Some of the most innovative and forward-thinking healthcare organizations are really small, but they’re making dramatic changes to care in their local communities. That can have a pretty dramatic impact on local cost and outcome improvement. We certainly aren’t just looking to partner with the biggest.

In your post announcing your return as CEO, you mentioned you want to build Current into the “world’s largest healthcare organization.” What are your biggest challenges to meeting that goal?

Honestly, just the status quo. When we started Current Health, there wasn’t necessarily a ton of acute and complex care in the home. Hospital-at-home existed, but it didn’t really exist at any scale. Fast-forward nine years, and it’s a seismic shift in the way healthcare is delivered in this country. Now all of the sudden, people are culturally and psychologically ready to deliver more care in the home than they were five, 10 years ago.

But I think the biggest challenge still remains the cultural change around moving from a world that’s very centric around large brick-and-mortar facilities to one where healthcare is delivered in the community and the patient’s own home. How do we get more solid payment models like the waiver, which 

 to be done? It’s a temporary waiver that 

Headshot of Current Health CEO and co-founder Christopher McGhee