Healthcare AI today: Help for dutiful caregivers, Trump vs. state regulators, healthcare AI supply & demand

News and views you ought to know about:

• $2M says home-based caregivers could use a little more AI in their day-to-day lives. But what would the technology do to help with all the nursing-adjacent—and often unpaid—tasks? Among these are bathing, dressing, feeding and waste cleanup. AI innovators have a new incentive to think the puzzle through and translate their ideas into tech-assisted actions. The carrot comes in the form of up to $2 million from the federal government. The money is being made available via a competition, the “Caregiver AI Challenge,” announced by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Nov. 18. “We’re calling on engineers, scientists, innovators [and] entrepreneurs across the country to harness artificial intelligence to make caregiving smarter, simpler and more humane,” he said at an announcement event. 
   
  • Saying the challenge will have three phases—design, testing and scaling—Kennedy added that paid caregivers are welcome to enter alongside the family members who take the duties upon themselves as a labor of love. An accompanying HHS news release cites research showing 1 in 4 Americans voluntarily cares for an elderly adult or disabled young person. That’s around 63 million of our relatives, friends and neighbors. 
     
  • “America’s caregivers carry our nation’s most vulnerable on their shoulders, and they do it with a strength and devotion that rarely gets the recognition it deserves,” Kennedy says in the press materials. “With the Caregiver AI Challenge, we are advancing the goals of the Make America Healthy Again Strategy Report by mobilizing innovation to lighten caregivers’ load and ensure every family has the support they need to care for the people they love.”
     
  • The designers of the challenge also hope to ease the burden borne by professional nurses and other healthcare workers. Hence the prize money’s availability to AI developers who come up with tools to support healthcare employers, not least by improving efficiency, scheduling and training in the caregiving workforce.
     
  • The HHS division running the competition is the Administration for Community Living. ACL exec Mary Lazare says her team is aiming to identify technologies that “empower caregivers and expand access to high-quality care at home.” She adds that ACL is “committed to advancing scalable, practical solutions that improve the lives of the millions of Americans who give and receive care every day.”
     
  • At the Nov. 18 launch, Kennedy suggested winning entries will reflect technology’s deference to humanity. “AI can change caregiving, but it will never replace compassion,” he said. “We will champion innovation, but we will never forget that the power of caregiving comes from the human heart.”
     
    • News release here, challenge launch coverage in various outlets. 
       
• President Trump doesn’t want states making laws to regulate AI. He’s only down with such rulemaking if it happens in Washington—and with his stamp on it. As is his wont, he’s taken to Truth Social to bullhorn his opinion. “Investment in AI is helping to make the U.S. Economy the ‘HOTTEST’ in the World, but overregulation by the States is threatening to undermine this Major Growth ‘Engine,’” he posted Nov. 18. “Some States are even trying to embed DEI ideology into AI models, producing ‘Woke AI’ (Remember Black George Washington?). We MUST have one Federal Standard instead of a patchwork of 50 State Regulatory Regimes. If we don’t, then China will easily catch us in the AI race.”
   
  • The President pushed Congress to take up AI regulation by adding a provision in the National Defense Authorization Act or passing a standalone bill on the matter. The notion to revise the NDA Act seems to have started with GOP House leaders, who earlier indicated they were mulling such a move. When word got out on that, expressions of resistance popped up from Congressional members of both parties. 
     
  • This skirmish has been flaring up and fizzing out at a relatively quiet level for months now. It started over the summer when the House wrote a tax-and-spending bill that included a 10-year ban on state and local regulations. The Senate deleted that provision with a near-sweep vote, 99 to 1, and the President signed the ban-less bill into law on the Fourth of July.
     
    • There’s plenty of partisan conflict between stakeholders over the would-be moratorium, so it’s no surprise there’s plenty of coverage across the media. 
       
• A lot of provider organizations look at insurance denials as an accounting nuisance or an unfortunate cost of doing business. One expert says there’s a better—and less boring—way to treat these no-pays. View them “as intelligence,” urges Neal Shah, a Johns Hopkins researcher and healthtech entrepreneur. “Each denial carries metadata—payer, denial reason, procedure code, date, appeal outcome,” he writes in a piece published by a North Carolina TV station Nov. 16. “Yet only a minority of clinics mine that information at scale. Clinic leaders should stop treating denial bins like the garbage can and start treating them like gold mines.” Hear him out. 
   
• It’s tempting to think of reliance on AI as a supply-side problem—if you build it, they will prompt. However, demand has much to do with the phenomenal multiplication of medical chatbots. So observes the close AI watcher Robert Wachter, MD, chair of medicine at UC–San Francisco. “If the system worked, the need for these tools would be far less,” he tells the Seattle Times. “But in many cases, the alternative is either bad or nothing.” Meaning AI bots are available at all hours every day and night of the year. Try getting that kind of attention—not to mention manners, empathy and appreciation for your trust—from your PCP. Wachter is just one source with whom the reporter spoke, although he’s a standout: His latest book, A Giant Leap: How AI Is Transforming Healthcare and What That Means for Our Future, is due out in February. Read the article. 
   
• Along those same lines, consider this thought: Healthcare AI makes you feel like you have ‘the smartest person in the world looking out for [you].’ The quote is from a mother of four. She made the comment for Fast Company. And she was referring not to medical advice per se but to help with doctors’ bills. The outlet reports that the mom, a professional content creator, “runs all her family’s hospital bills through ChatGPT to make sure they are not being overcharged. In a confounding system seemingly controlled by bots and byzantine policies, AI can feel like a lifeline.” Get the rest. 
   
• Also worth your while:
   
  • Empathetic, available, cheap: When AI offers what doctors don’t (New York Times)
     
  • Using AI in healthcare ethically by considering humanity (Inside Precision Medicine)
     
  • The coming evolution of healthcare AI toward a modular architecture (McKinsey & Company)
     
• From AIin.Healthcare’s sibling news outlets:
   
  • Radiology Business: Radiology Partners acquires healthcare AI company for $80M 
     
  • Radiology Business: RadNet touts results from largest real-world analysis of AI-powered breast cancer screening in US history