AI Health

Friday Roundup

The AI Health Friday Roundup highlights the week’s news and publications related to artificial intelligence, data science, public health, and clinical research.

June 13, 2025

In this week’s Duke AI Health Friday Roundup: agentic AI for oncology decision support; CDC’s expert advisory panel for vaccines dismissed; revisiting the lessons of the Statesville experiments; worries that visa clampdown will worsen doctor shortage; commercialization pathways for medical AI; CHAI working with Joint Commission on responsible health AI standards; the role of patient expectations in outcomes; much more:

AI, STATISTICS & DATA SCIENCE

An image of multiple 3D shapes representing speech bubbles in a sequence, with broken up fragments of text within them. Image credit: Wes Cockx & Google DeepMind / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Image credit: Wes Cockx & Google DeepMind / https://betterimagesofai.org (CC BY 4.0)
  • “Our study also observed how attitudes toward AI varied significantly based on demographic factors and health status. Young, healthy males viewed AI most positively, whereas older patients and those with poorer health expressed more reservations. This gradient of acceptance suggests that as the likelihood of AI being applied to one’s own care increases, patients become more cautious in their outlook. Similar patterns were also observed for the use of AI depending on disease severity, with patients less likely to accept AI for more severe conditions.” A survey study published in JAMA Network Open by Busch and colleagues probes patient attitudes about the use of AI applications in healthcare from a global sample.
  • “…a review of device recalls revealed a striking disparity: 14.4% of AIMDs from established public companies and 11.8% of those from smaller public companies were recalled, compared with only 1.3% of those from private companies. This translates to a 16-fold and 30-fold higher recall occurrence rate per cleared AIMD for established and smaller public companies, respectively, compared with private companies. This contrast suggests that the commercialization pathways of public and private firms may create distinct pressures on quality assurance and regulatory compliance.” An analysis published in NEJM AI by Lee and colleagues examines pathways to commercialization for AI-enabled medical devices and the regulatory issues raised by them.
  • “The Joint Commission convened a meeting last fall to discuss how the organization could get involved in regulating AI use in health care. Reached after the meeting last year, Anderson said that because the Joint Commission is involved at the implementation level of health care, it can help ensure people are adhering to best AI practices.” STAT News’ Brittany Trang reports that the Coalition for Health AI (CHAI) will be working with the Joint Commission hospital accreditation organization to create an evaluation and certification framework for responsible health AI.
  • “Compared to GPT-4 alone, the integrated AI agent drastically improved decision-making accuracy from 30.3% to 87.2%. These findings demonstrate that integrating language models with precision oncology and search tools substantially enhances clinical accuracy, establishing a robust foundation for deploying AI-driven personalized oncology support systems.” A research article published in Nature Cancer by Ferber and colleagues reports findings from a study evaluating the performance of an agentic AI system used for clinical decision support in oncology.
  • “When asked to explain the suspension, Bloomberg reports the Yuanbao and Kimi chatbots responded that functions had been disabled ‘to ensure the fairness of the college entrance examinations.’ Similarly, the DeepSeek AI tool that went viral earlier this year is also blocking its service during specific hours ‘to ensure fairness in the college entrance examination,’ according to The Guardian.” The Verge’s Jess Weatherbed examines a series of media reports (some of them second-hand) to the effect that the Chinese government has ordered AI companies to turn off the chatbot taps during China’s college entrance examinations.

BASIC SCIENCE, CLINICAL RESEARCH & PUBLIC HEALTH

Photograph of sulfur-crested cockatoo against a background of blue sky and white clouds, with its yellow crest on display and its white body feathers ruffled. Image credit: Bruce Comber/Unsplash
Image credit: Bruce Comber/Unsplash
  • “Every cockatoo exhibited slight variations in its plan of attack. But the general strategy was the same: Each placed one or both of its feet on the fountain’s twist handle, then lowered its weight to twist the handle clockwise and prevent it from springing back up. As the parrots slurped water from the bubbling spout, their sharp beaks often left behind chew marks on the fountain’s rubber top.” In a news article for Science, Jack Tamisiea reports on recent evidence indicating that some of the cockatoos in Sydney, Australia have learned how to use (human) water fountains.
  • “Some of the attacks levied at mRNA are about the technology itself, while others stem from general vaccine skepticism and frustrations with vaccine mandates during Covid. But the impact is the same: Waning political support of mRNA is leading to waning investor support, and public health experts worry the field will flounder, leaving Americans without vaccines in the event of another pandemic.” At STAT News, Lizzy Lawrence and Isabella Cueto report on the growing suspicion and even hostility toward mRNA vaccine technology taking root in US government agencies.
  • “I’m very worried. ACIP is the model for the rest of the world in terms of how you carefully deliberate and are thoughtful and look at all of the data….And so to disband that, to disband what is often considered an international gold standard for vaccine policy, and to disband it in this way is just sending a very clear message to the rest of the world. And also sending a clear message to Americans that scientific expertise is no longer of use for making vaccine policy.” STAT News’ Helen Branswell interviews vaccine expert Helen Chu, who along with the rest of her colleagues on the CDC’s Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices, was abruptly dismissed this week.

COMMUNICATION, Health Equity & Policy

A group of masked and gowned doctors and/or nurses in an operating room looking down, as seen from the perspective of a patient lying on a table. Image courtesy National Cancer Institute.
Image courtesy National Cancer Institute.
  • “Patients’ perception of clinician warmth and competence may affect treatment effectiveness. Warmth can be expressed by empathy and verbal and nonverbal signs of understanding (eg, validating the patient’s concerns, eye contact, affirming nods). Competence can be conveyed with well-structured communication, references to past successful interventions and current treatment guidelines, and confirming expertise with the treatment.” A JAMA Insights article published by Laferton and colleagues explores ways physicians can manage patients’ expectations about their treatment in ways that can potentially increase the likelihood of benefit.
  • “Revisiting Stateville with a focus on the experiences of Black participants offers a number of lessons for contemporary medicine that move beyond the considerations of consent that have dominated conversations—about the fraught relationship between race and genetics, about the dangerous gap between what gets promised of research involving racial and ethnic minority groups and what gets delivered, and about how to properly acknowledge a group of people whose lasting impact on clinical research and clinical care has been unjustly forgotten.” A perspective published this week in JAMA by Allen and Tabrey revisits a series of experiments testing antimalarial therapies in the 1940s at the Statesville prison in Illinois.
  • “The physician shortage is already here. But what we do now determines how dire this issue will become. We cannot afford to keep overlooking talented, motivated students, and we cannot let July 1 come and go without having a plan in place for the thousands of new physicians currently in limbo.” In an editorial for STAT News, former DHHS Secretary Tom Price warns that clamping down on J-1 visas may result in significant physician shortages in the United States, which is already facing a shortage of doctors.

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