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Vice President Kamala Harris waves to members of the media as she boards Air Force Two at Sky Harbor in Phoenix on Oct. 11, 2024.
Harris challenges Trump on his health: “Your turn”
Vice President Kamala Harrisreleased her medical records this weekend, confirming she is in “excellent health” and “possesses the physical and mental resiliency” necessary for the presidency. Harris then accused Republican rival Donald Trump of withholding his records, claiming he “doesn’t want the American people to see whether or not he’s fit” for office.
Critics have raised concerns over Trump’s mental health – citing erratic statements at campaign rallies – and ability to serve a full term, but his campaign quickly pushed back on Harris’ challenge,quoting Trump’s doctor as saying he’s in “perfect and excellent health.” They also took aim at Harris, claiming she “does not have the stamina” to match Trump’s “busy and active campaign schedule.” Still, Trump has not released his full medical record.
Harris’ campaign reportedly hopes the release of her health information will also contrast with Trump’s comparative lack of transparency. While the vice president is ahead in national polls, battleground states are still too close to call, and her campaign is looking for any edge it can find – including a doctor’s note.A doctor checks the progress of a patient with tuberculosis at the Beijing Chest Hospital March 31, 2009. Health officials gathered in Beijing on Wednesday warned against deadly drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis, which are spreading fastest in developing countries that lack the infrastructure to tackle the disease.
Please cough for the AI
What if an artificial intelligence stored on your phone could listen and hear how sick you are? Google is training a bioacoustic AI model called Health Acoustic Representations with 300 million snippets of audio collected from around the world — of people sneezing, coughing, and breathing. The goal? To spot tuberculosis early and treat it.
A whopping 1.3 million people died of tuberculosis in 2022 alone, according to the World Health Organization, and 10.6 million fell ill with the disease. “TB is a treatable disease, but every year millions of cases go undiagnosed — often because people don’t have convenient access to healthcare services,” Google’s Shravya Shettywrote in a blog post. “Improving diagnosis is critical to eradicating TB, and AI can play an important role in improving detection and helping make care more accessible and affordable for people around the world.”
Google is focused first on preventing tuberculosis in India and is partnering with an Indian company called Salcit Technologies, whose own AI app Swaasa is being used by healthcare providers on the subcontinent. Swaasa will integrate Google’s model to improve its own detection of the disease.
Patient has an eye test at Venice Family Clinic in Venice, California, June 25, 2009.
Your new insurance advocate is AI
Health insurers are routinely using artificial intelligence and algorithms to evaluate insurance claims, but now the tables have turned. Doctors are increasingly turning to generative AI to write appeals for prior authorizations and to fight insurance denials.
A survey from the American Medical Association found doctors and their staff spend an average of 12 hours a week dealing with such denials, which insurance companies routinely issue, even in serious cases including cancer and HIV/AIDS care. Now, with the help of HIPAA-compliant apps like Doximity GPT, physicians can use the power of AI to generate persuasive reply letters, citing all the relevant medical research they need, in minutes.
One physician even told the New York Times that he tells the bot to make his letters four times longer: “If you’re going to put all kinds of barriers up for my patients, then when I fire back, I’m going to make it very time-consuming.”
So the next time you find yourself annoyed by a glitchy AI chatbot customer service, just remember, AI might help you get lifesaving drugs one day.
The G42 logo.
Hard Numbers: Microsoft’s big Gulf investment, Amazon’s ambitions, Mammogram-plus, Adobe pays up, Educating Don Beyer
1.5 billion: Microsoft has announced a deal to invest $1.5 billion in G42, an artificial intelligence firm based in the United Arab Emirates that recently cut ties with Chinese suppliers that had raised US security concerns. Washington and Abu Dhabi relations have been strained over the UAE’s ties to Chinese tech companies. But this deal – which grants Microsoft a minority stake in the company – could signal a new era of relations with the US.
33: Amazon is talking about artificial intelligence – like, a lot. In his recently published annual letter to shareholders, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy mentioned AI 33 times. The company invested $4 billion in Anthropic, which makes the Claude chatbot, and will host Anthropic on Amazon Web Services. Jassy said the company wants to build AI models more so than applications (think GPT-4 instead of ChatGPT) and sell directly to enterprise clients.
40: Clinics are starting to offer an AI-assisted add-on to typical mammograms. Interested patients typically incur an out-of-pocket charge between $40 and $100 to have an AI model scan their breast screening for additional insights — even, possibly, early breast cancer detection.
3: Adobe is planning to compete with OpenAI’s Sora video model. To do so, it’s offering photographers and videographers $3 per minute to upload videos of people doing everyday activities like walking around or sitting down, or simple shots of hands, feet, or eyes to train their new generative AI model. It’s an expensive but cautious approach intended to build up a comprehensive database while staying on the right side of copyright law and avoiding potential imbroglios like the one OpenAI faces for using YouTube videos to train its models
73: Congressman Don Beyer, a Democrat from Virginia, decided he wanted to return to school to learn more about AI. So, that’s what he did. The 73-year-old car dealership mogul-turned-politician recently enrolled in a master’s degree program in machine learning at George Mason University. He’s even learning to code, which he says is helping him better think about all kinds of problems in Washington.A man uses a chatbot in this illustration photo.
Get AI out of my health care
You fall and break an arm. Doctors set the break and send you to rehab. It’s pricy, but insurance should take care of it, so you submit your claim – only to be denied. Was it a claims examiner who rejected it? Or AI?
On Feb. 6, the US government sent a memo to certain Medicare insurers clarifying that no, they cannot use artificial intelligence to deny claims. While machine-learning algorithms can be used to assist them in making determinations, an algorithm alone cannot be the basis for denying care.
This memo, sent by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, follows lawsuits against health insurers for allegedly using AI to erroneously deny deserved care to patients. United Healthcare and Humana have each been sued by patients claiming the companies used the AI model nH Predict nefariously — a model they claim has a 90% error rate. It’s a clear and present danger of the technology at a time when many regulators and critics are focusing on far-off threats of AI.
CMS also said it’s concerned about the propensity for algorithms to “exacerbate discrimination and bias” and said the onus is on insurers to make sure these models comply with the Affordable Care Act’s anti-discrimination requirements. And it’s not just the federal government: A number of states including New York and California have issued warnings to insurance companies to ensure their own algorithms aren’t discriminatory.
Illustration of a female healthcare worker wearing scrubs and a surgical mask created with Generative AI technology.
The WHO’s AI warning
Generative AI could be game-changing for the world of medicine. It could help researchers discover new drugs and better match ailing patients with correct diagnoses.
But the World Health Organization is concerned about everything that could go wrong. The global health authority is formally warning countries to monitor and evaluate large language models for medical and health-related risks.
“The very last thing that we want to see happen as part of this leap forward with technology is the propagation or amplification of inequities and biases in the social fabric of countries around the world,” said WHO official Alain Labrique. This advice was issued as part of a larger guidance on AI in healthcare, a topic on which the WHO began advising in 2021.
Artificial intelligence systems are susceptible to bias, because the inclusion or absence of data could seriously affect its outputs. For example, if a medical AI model is trained solely on health data from people in wealthy nations, it could miss or misunderstand populations in poorer nations and do harm if used improperly.
Female doctor in hospital setting.
Slapping nutrition labels on AI for your health
At a congressional hearing last week, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) noted how AI can help detect deadly diseases early, improve medical imaging, and clear cumbersome paperwork from doctors’ desks. But she also expressed concern that it could exacerbate bias and discrimination in healthcare.
Patients need to know who, or what, is behind their healthcare determinations and treatment plans. This requires transparency, which is a key part of Biden's AI Bill of Rights, released last year.
The new rule, first proposed in April by the HHS’s health information technology office, would require developers to publish information about how AI healthcare apps were trained and how they should and shouldn’t be used. The rule, which could be finalized before January, aims to improve both transparency and accountability.
Residents fix a sign reading "Nipah containment zone" on a barricade
Hard Numbers: Kerala reacts to lethal virus outbreak, Brazil insurrectionists on trial U.S. inflation stays stubborn, uranium prices spike,
2: Two people in the southern Indian state of Kerala have died from the rare but highly-lethal Nipah virus, forcing authorities to declare a containment zone over 7 villages and shut down public schools and offices. One more adult and one child are currently hospitalized with confirmed infections, while 130 more have been tested for the disease. There is no cure or treatment for Nipah virus.
4: Today the first four supporters of Jair Bolsonaro go on trial for their actions during Brazil’s January 8th insurrection. Thousands of Bolsonaro’s supporters, outraged over his loss in the October election, stormed the capital city Brasília-- vandalizing the presidential palace, parliament, and the same supreme court where they stand trial today. The court condemned the rioter’s actions as an attack on Brazil’s democracy, and will hear the cases of two hundred more insurrectionists in the coming months.
3.7%: New US inflation data for August showed that U.S. households paid about 3.7% more for goods and services than they did a year ago. That’s up half a percentage point from the July reading and still well above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target. Most of the cost bump was fueled by higher energy prices, as Saudi Arabia and Russia recently cut oil production to boost global crude prices. The good news is that consumers continue to get relief on products besides food and energy, as so-called “core inflation” continued its 6-month downward trend.
30%: The benchmark price for uranium has soared 30% so far this year, as the transition away from fossil fuels continues to spark fresh interest in nuclear power. A pound of the radioactive stuff now costs $62, more than double what it was just five years ago. And you know who is loving the price spike? Russia, home to 40% of the world’s uranium refinement capacity.