Health Wanted: AI in Health Care
HEALTH WANTED, a weekly radio show and podcast produced in partnership with WABE, brings need-to-know public health headlines and breaks down the science behind trending topics.
The Episode
The topic: Artificial intelligence (AI) holds great potential to improve and expedite a variety of processes in health care. This week on Health Wanted, host Laurel Bristow and guest Sayash Kapoor explore AI's capabilities, current limitations, and highlight the next steps in using its power to reach better health outcomes.
The takeaway: Generative and predictive AI have the potential to improve efficiency and expand access to health care, but current technology still has a long way to go to ensure reliable outcomes and safeguard patient privacy. As these tools evolve, careful attention is needed to balance innovation with quality.
- Generative AI uses existing data to respond to a prompt. This can help reduce administrative burdens, through summarizing patient notes, translating documents, or helping with insurance appeals. However, these models need to improve to ensure accuracy, privacy, and proper evaluation, especially in sensitive tasks like medical translations or automated patient recommendations.
- Predictive AI uses data to predict outcomes of scenarios. In health care, it can be used to predict patient outcomes. Despite its potential, predictive AI requires careful validation and transparency to ensure that the predictions are accurate and reliable.
- AI in health care is still new, and has much room to be improved. Current systems often lack proper real-world testing and can be difficult to interpret, making it hard for clinicians to utilize. But with continued advancements in data validation and better integration into clinical systems, AI could significantly enhance health care delivery in the future.
- Beyond direct patient care, AI has the potential to help in clinical trials. It has the power to optimize trial design by predicting patient outcomes and identifying suitable trial sites, especially for rare diseases. Additionally, AI could ease the burden of paperwork, such as formatting and submitting clinical trial documentation.
The Interview
The guest: Sayash Kapoor
The key takeaways:
- Generative and predictive AI can improve efficiency and accuracy in health care, especially in areas like drug discovery and diagnosing certain conditions. However, their current applications still require human input to ensure patient safety.
- Generative AI can produce and report results in a way that seems professional and trustworthy but may actually be inaccurate and harmful to patients. Until generative AI’s reliability and validity can be improved, its uses in clinical and patient-facing interactions are limited.
- AI is generally good at predicting basic outcomes, but some attempts at using predictive AI tools in real-world health care settings have failed due to the complexity of health care data and patient variability. In addition, AI can only make predictions based on information that already exists, so its ability to make predictions about a new disease, interaction, or pattern is limited.
- Most medical devices, medications, and other interventions can be tested in laboratories or smaller trials before being taken up on a larger scale. We can’t assume that AI will work the same way in one hospital or clinic as it would in another. Thus, AI needs to be tested, monitored, and adjusted in each health care setting to avoid errors.
The Listener Questions
What do the Department of Health and Human Services and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and the heads of those departments, do?
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) oversees a total of 13 complex divisions, including but not limited to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). HHS also includes 10 regional offices that directly support and partner with state and local health organizations.
The work of HHS includes everything from monitoring the safety of our food and medicine supply to promoting and funding new research. The department has a multi-trillion-dollar budget.
The Secretary of HHS manages all of our government health systems at the highest level and provides guidance to the president about the health and welfare of the country. The current secretary, Xavier Becerra, is a lawyer who was formerly a congressman and attorney general of California.
The job of CMS is to oversee Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program—which provides insurances for kids in families that don’t qualify for Medicaid but can’t afford private insurance—and the Affordable Care Act marketplace. About half of the population of America gets their medical insurance through one of those programs. CMS also oversees the quality standards in long-term care facilities, meaning that they are in charge of making sure that nursing homes are providing adequate care.
The current head of CMS, called the administrator, is Chiquita Brooks-LaSure. She has spent years working in both CMS and HHS as a health policy director.
Both the secretary of HHS and the administrator of CMS are extremely high-level positions. They are usually filled by people who have a lot of experience managing complex health systems, large budgets, and drafting health policy.
Are patches a good way to get your daily vitamins?
Probably not! Vitamin patches might seem more appealing than swallowing one or many horse-sized pills every day, but there’s no evidence that they work better than pills.
Normally, vitamin supplements are absorbed through your intestines. The problem with patches is that your skin’s whole purpose is to be a barrier between the outside world and your bloodstream.
Some transdermal patches work to transport substances across the skin barrier, - it’s the same concept as birth control patches, fentanyl patches, and nicotine patches - but those only allow tiny, fat-soluble molecules across the barrier. There’s no evidence that vitamin patches are formulated in a way that would allow for vitamins to be absorbed through the skin.
Additionally, patches can potentially use adhesive that can be irritating to the skin. I would also be skeptical of multivitamin patches as they aren’t technically dietary supplements, because they aren’t ingested. This also means that they likely don’t have the minimal regulation that regular supplements do.
What is mouth taping, and is it beneficial?
Mouth taping is what it sounds like: you tape your mouth shut at night and people claim it improves sleep.
There is no data to support that mouth taping improves sleep, but there are benefits to breathing through the nose and keeping your mouth shut while you're asleep.
First, it’s quieter than breathing through your mouth and could reduce snoring, which happens when the tissues in your mouth and airway relax and start reverberating.
Sleeping with your mouth open can also dry out the mouth. This can contribute to changing bacteria levels, which increases the risk of gum disease and tooth decay.
If you want to try mouth taping anyway, be careful. Use medical tape, but know there’s still a possibility that the adhesive could be irritating. Additionally, be mindful if you have clear nasal passages or not. You don’t want to make it harder to breathe by taping your mouth.
If taping your mouth shut does not sound appealing, you could also try nose strips to open your nasal passages. If you have a lot of trouble sleeping through the night, you should talk to your doctor about options for sleep studies to rule out something more serious, like obstructive sleep apnea.
Catch all the listener questions and Laurel’s answers on the full episode of Health Wanted by:
- Streaming at wabe.org or the WABE app
- Subscribing on Apple or Spotify
- Watching on WABE's YouTube channel
