AI Will Walk You Through Your Test Results Now

Plus: Nutrition Label For Healthcare Apps, and more

Welcome to our latest edition of HealthTech Zen – where practical information meets the latest digital health trends.

Here are the top stories we are covering in today’s newsletter:

• AI Will Walk You Through Your Test Results Now
• Nutrition Label For Healthcare Apps?
• 3 Ways Scheduling Software Curbs Clinician Burnout
• What else is making news in the world of HealthTech.

If you’re enjoying what you’re readying, please share this newsletter with a HealthTech professional or two. Every reader counts!

TOP STORY

AI Will Walk You Through Your Test Results Now

• 90% of patients who accessed their online medical records or patient portals did so to view their test results.
• 95.7% of users wanted to receive their test results as soon as they were available, even if their healthcare practitioner had not reviewed the results.

What is happening: Technology and changing patient preferences have cut down wait time for test results. Recent changes in accessibility rules, in the form of Cares Act, have allowed patients to see their test results as soon as they are uploaded to the patient portals.

The downside: Medical jargon can be confusing for common people and may act as a source of unwarranted alarm.

Technology to the rescue: Generative AI holds a lot of promise in the making reports easy to decipher for patients.

• AI can be used to translate medical jargon into easily understandable descriptions without taking up too much of radiologist’s time.
• Technology can also be used to generate multimedia aids, making the test results easily understandable for lay people.

Read more on AI’s game changing impact on patient communication of radiological test results here.

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ANALYSIS

Nutrition Label For Healthcare Apps?

Whats Happening: Federal regulators are proposing a new labeling system for AI healthcare apps. This would make it easier for healthcare for clinicians to spot pitfalls and shortcomings of mobile healthcare applications. In an attempt to impose safety requirements on technology, government is aiming to prevent mistakes by medical AI tools.

Office of National Coordinator for Health Information (ONC) is proposing adding a "nutrition label" to healthcare apps to disclose their uses and performance. ONC proposed its health IT certification program intended to make the information of how predictive algorithm works available to users including intended use, description of training data, external validation and update schedule.

Advocates for the proposal say it would help avoid the errors of some previous health tech platforms which perpetuated health inequities.

The flip side: Some health system and IT company executives say the warnings could be too onerous, adding costs to patients and stifling innovation. Companies are also worried about their proprietary algorithms being disclosed publicly. The risk-related information contains intellectual property that could be reverse-engineered and copied by others.

Take a deep dive into everything you need to know about healthcare mobile app development here.

INSIGHT

3 Ways Scheduling Software Curbs Clinician Burnout

Over a span of one year, the percentage of physicians reporting symptoms of burnout has increased to 63% up from 38% just a year earlier.

Appointment Scheduling Software Can Help: AI-based scheduling significantly has shown to improve physician engagement and reduce burnout by creating fair and flexible schedules that support work-life balance.

This article dives deeper into 3 ways appointment scheduling software tools are lowering clinician burnout rates:

1. Optimizing work schedules
2. Implementing patient self scheduling
3. Integration with other software tools

Read the full article here.

SNIPPETS

What else is making news

• Hamilton Physical Therapy Signs On Arkenea For Developing A Custom EHR
• Sutter Health has taken part in testing and researching a headset designed to help emergency technicians better identify large vessel occlusion ischemic strokes prior to patients arriving at the hospital. The headset, called Harmony, was capable of detecting and correctly identifying 78% of LVO strokes as compared to 60% by other conventional methods.
• Health system execs testify before house on AI use. Leaders from Nashville-based HCA Healthcare, Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins Medicine and UC San Diego Health testified before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health about how their organizations are using AI and what Congress should consider as the technology evolves.
• Flow security launches GenAI DLP, monitoring data In motion and at rest to empower enterprises to securely Leverage GenAI applications. In a test where GenAI was used to classify patient data to gain insights into disease patterns and treatment effectiveness, Flow's GenAI DLP quickly identified sensitive PHI data at risk that would have led to a HIPAA violation if it had continued to go unnoticed.
• Emory Healthcare has partnered with Nference, a software company that provides access to de-identified patient data. It plans to use the collaboration to support research in therapeutic areas like oncology, geriatrics, neurology, gynecology and urology, expanding Nference's federated data network with diverse, multimodal data for real-world evidence research and AI model development.