The company behind ChatGPT didn't set out to tackle health care. But despite ongoing concerns about its technology's tendency to hallucinate, OpenAI is already inking deals with health care customers desperate to use it to speed up workflows without burdening their staff. OpenAI sells secure, enterprise commercial licenses for ChatGPT and its API to a range of health customers. Early adopters tell STAT they're aware of generative AI's risks, and are careful not to let it dispense medical advice directly to patients — instead, they're harnessing its ability to draw from disparate data sources to generate coherent responses in narrowly-defined settings: summarizing medical records, suggesting treatment plans, or distilling medical jargon into plain language.
More New Jersey hospitals are becoming members of large health systems and that's raising prices and medical debt for residents, while big hospital systems reap profits, according to researchers. Urban Institute, a think tank that conducts economic and social policy research, analyzed 10 years of data to explore the link between the number of large companies controlling hospitals in a given market and people's ability to pay their medical bills on time. Between 2012 and 2022, researchers found patients in counties that experienced larger increases in hospital market concentration — in which a small number of companies increasingly control a large portion of the market — had a harder time paying off medical debt. Healthcare experts say the research shows how unchecked hospital consolidation harms consumers.
A federal program serving 2.8 million veterans isn't delivering on key promises. The Veterans Community Care Program was set up to help veterans secure appointments with providers near their homes when they can't receive care from a VA facility. It has been touted as an important safety net as demand for mental health care grows. But the cost of the referrals has been rising, reaching nearly $30 billion in fiscal 2023. And since it was established in 2019, the program aimed at bypassing long wait times has instead exacerbated them, at a higher cost to taxpayers, per reports.
Boston Children's Hospital retaliated against a woman by firing her after she filed a gender discrimination lawsuit, a jury determined last week at the conclusion of a trial that also provided an extraordinary window into the hospital's gender clinic. The hospital must now pay Amy Tishelman, a psychologist who is a leader in the field of youth gender medicine and the former research director at the clinic, nearly $2 million in back pay and damages. However, the jury did not find Boston Children's discriminated against Tishelman.
Care delivery has never been an easy task. For decades, it was seen as a function of society delegated solely to hospitals and clinicians. However, over the years, care delivery has also become increasingly more complicated, begging for more innovation and change as a means to improve quality of care, increase access to care and ultimately, optimize health outcomes.
Artificial intelligence companies like OpenAI are seeking to overcome unexpected delays and challenges in the pursuit of ever-bigger large language models by developing training techniques that use more human-like ways for algorithms to "think".