Healthcare AI today: Docs and clerks, talk therapy renewed, Dr. AI vs. Dr. Google, more

News and views you ought to know about:

• Not long ago, physicians and grocery clerks had a key duty in common.  The clerk asked if you’d found what you came in for. The doctor asked if you had any symptoms of illness or injury. By inquiring and then listening to your answers, both were practicing “connective labor.” Today barcode reading machines sweep you through the checkout, whether it’s self-serve or manned. AI can handle most of your health questions, whether they’re general or specific. Such changes aren’t all bad, but they’re potentially destructive dehumanizers. So suggests a Johns Hopkins sociologist who has written a book titled The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World.
   
  • “[I]f a machine can do your job, then you’re going to lose it,” explains the author, Allison Pugh, PhD, in an interview with the Association of American Medical Colleges. “In the case of physicians, they’re going to get piled on with different work. There has never been a case in which our medical system has eased up on what we demand of physicians.”
     
  • “There is a balance. Too often we are off balance,” adds Pugh, who was a featured speaker at a recent AAMC event. “The problem with scripts and standardization (or protocols and procedures) is that they lead to degradation of connective labor. And as soon as you go down that slippery slope, you get people saying, ‘AI can do better than that.’ It leads to the automation of these vital human tasks. It’s contributing to mechanization.”
     
  • More: “The domination of metrics is a symptom of our pathology. We are letting the metrics and the insistence upon data analysis drive the bus. The human interactions should drive the bus. We should fit the other stuff in as it helps that bus go in the right direction.” Hear her out.
     
• Coupled with large-language AI, psychotherapy could well become a new treatment modality. Which is to say it would be perceived—and reimbursed—as its own thing, separate and distinct from the human-only kind. Not unlike mental healthcare with vs. without meds. The former, of course, requires a prescribing physician collaborating with the treating talk therapist. OK, but it’s no less likely that tech-savvy therapists will be assisted by LLMs so ably that they morph into “super clinicians like we’ve never encountered before.” That’s the prediction of a psychologist and a computer scientist commentating in MedCity News. Mental-healthcare providers “will have new insights about diagnosis, increased awareness of risk factors, more real-time understanding of clients and more effective and timely interventions that can be e-prescribed,” the authors add. “It is also likely that AI will be utilized to help clients between sessions to make progress and to afford 24/7 access to high quality, meaningful interventions that are directed by the mental health clinician.” Read the whole thing. 
   
• The divide on AI adoption between haves and have-nots is sure to widen. That’s true across society and true within the healthcare provider sector. Mayo Clinic wants to help the resource-strapped within the latter avoid missing out on the healthcare AI revolution. Toward that end, the decorated institution has begun offering an “affordable, guided path” for accessing Mayo’s clinical and operational expertise with AI and other digital-health advances. Calling the program Mayo Clinic Platform_Insights, the perennial favorite among hospital rankers says its aim is to help organizations “navigate the complex AI landscape in healthcare and implement solutions to solve their biggest challenges.” To this Mayo Clinic Platform CMO Clark Otley, MD, adds: “Technology should enhance, not complicate, the practice of medicine. Mayo Clinic Platform_Insights brings the humanism back into medicine by ensuring that every digital innovation serves one purpose: improving the patient experience and outcomes.” Announcement. 
   
• Dr. AI is more highly skilled than Dr. Google ever was. But your online medical smartbot, like its search-engine forerunner, tends to burden human physicians with direct-to-patients outputs that need explaining. “I’m expecting primary care doctors are going to be the ones who have to clean up the mess left by (created by?) AI” as it moves closer to actually providing healthcare, writes primary care doctor Fred Pelzman, MD, in MedPage Today. “But that mess will only exist if they don’t let us in the game early, let us help build and guide and change these systems, and support us, financially and with time and money and other staff, to make sure these things go well.” It’s unclear to whom he’s referring with they. Regardless, his gist is surely sound. “[T]he expectation from all of this healthcare-generated data is that we in primary care, primarily, will be the ones reviewing all of it, dealing with it, getting back to our patients about it, making medical decisions, taking some risk and keeping everybody healthy and happy,” Dr. Pelzman writes. “This could potentially be the next revolution in healthcare.” 
   
• This week a healthcare AI startup is being valued at a cool $3.5 billion. The company is Hippocratic AI. The eye-popping valuation comes atop a new funding round that brings its total investment past the $400M mark. The market’s vote of confidence probably has something to do with Hippocratic’s branching out from agentic AI for providers to agentic AI for patients. “Hippocratic AI’s backers say the rapid adoption of its agents signals broad trust in the potential of AI in healthcare, with its partners including some of the industry’s most respected names,” SiliconAngle reports. The outlet quotes an investment bigwig who calls Hippocratic one of the fastest-growing healthcare companies ever. Its fast expansion, says Andreesen Horowitz general partner Julie Yoo, is “a testament to the demand for solutions to our industry’s labor and patient access crisis.” 
   
• Also worthwhile:
   
  • From lab assistant to lead investigator: How AI is transforming medical research and review (Forbes)
     
  • Can AI decide your healthcare coverage? (KHON2)
     
  • Making healthcare AI human-centered through the requirement of clinician input (Federation of American Scientists)