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Carbon Health founder resigns from top position
Carbon health‘s Managing Director and Co-Founder Bali – Paradise withdraws from the primary care technology sector and returns to the education sector instead Udemy He was the company’s co-founder and chief technology officer, as he announced in a tweet late last week.”Udemy is my first baby. It has a special place in my heart and I have always been on the board, so I have never parted ways with the company,” he said. Carbon’s Chief Operating Officer Kerem Ozkay will take over as CEO and Bali will remain executive chairman at Carbon, he said in the post.
It’s just the latest top-level leadership change at the company, which launched with a focus on a hybrid business model that seeks to combine the best of virtual and in-person care. Carbon has since increasingly invested in integrating AI into its own health record, which it markets to other provider groups. Myoung Chaformer President and Chief Strategy Officer of Carbon, joined Truly At the beginning of the year as Chief Product Officer.
Abridge introduces AI technology in 40 Kaiser hospitals
Competition in the field of medical writing technology is intensifying. Nuance, Abridge, Augmedix, Suki, Nabla and others vying for hospital business. A great success for Abridge: The startup’s environmental documentation tool is now available to clinicians in 40 Kaiser Permanente Hospitals and more than 600 medical practices in several states across the country. “By reducing administrative tasks, we make it easier for our doctors to focus on patients and create an environment where they can ensure effective communication and transparency,” Ramin Davidoffthe Southern California Permanent Medical Groupsaid a press release.
My colleague Katie Palmer wrote about how health systems are testing these AI writers in a recent update to STAT’s Generative AI Tracker.
Separately, Kaiser has published a set of exciting principles for the responsible use of AI: read them and let me know what you think.
Could the FDA use AI to monitor drug safety? This research team believes
There are numerous arguments for using large language models to facilitate the actual delivery of health care: searching through medical literature and health records, providing patients and doctors with easy-to-understand answers to complex questions, and perhaps even making diagnoses one day. But what about getting help from federal regulators?
This week, a team of researchers, including two from Food and Drug Administrationmade a provocative suggestion in JAMA Network Open: Why not use LLMs to mine unstructured text in EHRs, social media posts, insurance claims, and other sources for data on the safety of specific drugs once they hit the market?
I spoke to the main author Michael Matheny, A Vanderbilt Professor of Biomedical Informatics and principal investigator for one of the few FDA Innovation Centers for Guardianthe federal agency’s electronic system for product monitoring and evaluation. Among other things, he said in our interview: While there are concerns about hallucinations, the risk of error and the potential impact on patient safety depend on the context.
“You could ask a large language model, ‘Was anyone diabetic?’ but maybe diabetes doesn’t play a role in assessing the risk of an adverse event. If someone is taking a certain medication and it doesn’t really matter whether they’re diabetic or not, you could imagine that a 10% error rate in detecting diabetes might not have a big impact (on safety analyses),” he told me. “On the other hand, if the adverse event is bleeding after taking a medication, and that bleeding can only be detected by natural language processing, and only 10 or 20% of nosebleeds are bad enough to require going to the emergency room, and the rest are maybe just reported to the doctor… Then that’s really important for that detection. Because the whole analysis depends on detecting that adverse event.” Read more.
Another lawsuit filed against FDA over lab-developed testing rule
Also at the FDA level, a trade group representing molecular pathologists has filed a lawsuit against the agency for exceeding its authority to regulate tests developed by labs, writes Lizzy Lawrence. This is the second legal challenge to the plan: the American Clinical Laboratory Association filed a similar lawsuit in May.
“We filed this lawsuit to ask the court to vacate the FDA rule because the agency lacks the authority to regulate LDTs and to avert the significant and harmful disruption to laboratory medicine,” Society for Molecular Pathology president Maria Arcila in a statement.
As Lizzy writes, the FDA has not regulated laboratory-developed tests in the past, but their potential to harm patients has increased as the products, such as misleading prenatal genetic tests or Theranos“Fraudulent blood tests are becoming increasingly complex. Read more from Lizzy.”
AI pharmaceutical company Recursion’s path to industry dominance
My biotech colleague Allison DeAngelis took a deep dive into a company pushing to the forefront in the increasingly crowded field of AI-assisted drug development: Recursion Pharmaceuticalsa NVIDIA partner and recently planned acquirer of ExscientiaFounded by a medical student, an e-commerce entrepreneur and a University of Utah As a scientist, Recursion was not always successful and initially struggled to attract interest from biotech venture capitalists. “We were laughed out of quite a few rooms,” co-founder and CEO Chris Gibson said Allison, who spoke to more than 30 Recursion executives, investors, former employees and analysts.
“Recursion is a startup that plans both world domination and survival,” said Viswa Collurua former employee who now runs his own learning-based biotech company, Enveda Biosciences. Read more.
Cancer detection company Grail announces layoffs
Another industry darling continues to face challenges: Grailbest known for its blood-based detection test gallery (and partner of a celebrity-backed consumer lab screening company Functional healthwhose fundraising campaign I mentioned in the newsletter at the beginning of the summer) has announced far-reaching staff cuts, which will a third of current and planned hiring, reports my colleague Jonathan Wosen. That equates to about 350 existing and 150 vacant positions. The company announced the cuts the same day it reported its second-quarter results, the first such announcement since the DNA sequencing company was sold Illumina in June.
As Jonathan writes, Grail’s test is available on the market for nearly $1,000 out-of-pocket, but it has no regulatory approval and is rarely covered by insurance. Clinical trials could change that, but Britain’s National Health Service has already announced that preliminary data from a recent study were not strong enough to launch a large-scale pilot study testing Galleri’s potential use in routine care. Read more from Jonathan.
What we read
- 5 health issues to watch at the Democratic National Convention, STAT
- Health Technology Policy Summary for Q2 2024, FierceHealthcare
- Potential healthcare savings and clinicians’ views on the feasibility of shifting care sites, JAMA
