The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) finally got something right when it finalized rules allowing over-the-counter (OTC) hearing aids. Only kidding. The FDA can’t take credit for OTC hearing aids. It took the FDA five years after Congress passed legislation in 2017 forcing the FDA to create a category of OTC hearing aids.
Category: Artificial Intelligence and Healthcare
Should Insurers Use AI to Manage Care? Yes, but with Checks & Balances
Many states have passed laws limiting prior authorization. Physicians hate prior authorization and claim insurers and health plans use it to ration care. I tend to be more sympathetic to prior authorization because in an industry where patients are insulated from the cost of their care, there needs to be some checks and balances over unnecessary care and care that is unnecessarily expensive. I often tell the story about the time my wife unknowingly tried to schedule a CT scan at a hospital outpatient clinic near our house.
AI Practicing Medicine
Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb:
Artificial intelligence has the potential to help solve some of the most frustrating problems in health care. Clinicians may use it to stratify patients more precisely according to their personal risk and to identify increasingly tailored treatments that simultaneously account for a patient’s clinical history, genomic profile, and phenotypic characteristics. The combination of statistics and weighted observations in a neural network can be highly predictive. This is true even though each output for an individual patient is likely to differ from any other patient in a validation model, and even though the variables, when taken individually, are not likely to be nearly as predictive.
AI Chatbot Judged More Empathetic than Physicians
The human language artificial intelligence ‘chatbot’ ChatGPT scored higher on empathy than its human counterparts in a recent study of medical questions and answers. When compared to human doctors the AI chatbots answers were preferred 80% of the time. The study appeared in JAMA Internal Medicine. The study used questions from Reddit’s AskDocs social media forum. One possible weakness about…