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.

May 9, 2025

In this week’s Duke AI Health Friday Roundup: tortoises, hares & disruption in AI governance; scrutinizing LLM apps for patient portal notes; new direction for vaccine development; instrumental variables for clinical trials; unpacking the costs of a cancer therapy; why primary care is different for ML; genetic study illuminates remarkable free-diving abilities; much more:

AI, STATISTICS & DATA SCIENCE

There are 16 different small square images in this collage. Each of them have a grid background and different neon coloured square patterns in the squares. One looks like a flower, another looks like a random array of pixels, and the other is 4 blue squares. Image credit: Elise Racine / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Image credit: Elise Racine / https://betterimagesofai.org (CC-BY 4.0)
  • “The choices that people have and can realize, within ever expanding freedoms, are essential to human development, whose goal is for people to live lives they value and have reason to value. A world with AI is flush with choices the exercise of which is both a matter of human development and a means to advance it….Going forward, development depends less on what AI can do—not on how human-like it is perceived to be—and more on mobilizing people’s imaginations to reshape economies and societies to make the most of it.” The UN’s 2025 Human Development Report is devoted to exploring developmental pathways for AI around the globe.
  • “This study identified AI-generated responses to patient portal messages that posed safety risks due to hallucinations, outdated information, and failing to correctly evaluate or communicate the criticality of the situation and advised actions. …Despite the known risks that this technology poses, a current iteration is already in use in over 100 healthcare systems…this rapid rate of implementation may serve as a testament to the urgency and crisis that is physician burnout, it is misaligned with our understanding of this technology’s safety.” A research article published in NPJ Digital Medicine by Biro and colleagues scrutinizes the accuracy and appropriateness of LLM-drafted messages to patient portals touted as a potential means to reduce physician workload and burnout.
  • “General ML for health care guidelines and best practices are relevant to primary care; however, to achieve optimal performance and outcomes, approaches need to be tailored to the distinct nature of this foundational component of the health care system. We have focused primarily on the ML development stage, highlighting key differences between settings and presenting considerations to help ensure that data and technical decisions align with clinical needs. Additional research is needed to explore ethical implications, data quality, and model interpretability or transparency, particularly to determine whether these features or their importance vary across care settings.” A perspective article by Kueper and colleagues published in NEJM AI examines the peculiar challenges of developing machine-learning tools from EHR data derived from primary care encounters.
  • “Many randomized clinical trials fail to play out as intended: some participants assigned to the treatment group remain untreated, while others assigned to the control group cross over and receive treatment. In such settings, intention-to-treat analyses that compare participants by treatment assignment are diluted by noncompliance, while per-protocol analyses that compare participants by treatment received are contaminated by selection bias. Instrumental variables methods can address both problems.” An NEJM Evidence article by Angrist and colleagues walks readers through the use of instrumental variables in clinical trials analysis.

BASIC SCIENCE, CLINICAL RESEARCH & PUBLIC HEALTH

James H. Shannon Building (Building One), NIH campus, Bethesda, MD. Image shows a three-story brick building with a classical façade at the front entrance with Corinthian columns. Credit: Lydia Polimeni, National Institutes of Health
Image credit: Lydia Polimeni/National Institutes of Health
  • “Bhattacharya blamed some NIH restrictions since January on ‘panicked overreaction to directions from above’ and decried ‘panicked reporting’ among media covering NIH. He dismissed an article in Nature on the pending policy on foreign collaborators as ‘rumors’ hours before that policy came out.” Science’s Jocelyn Kaiser sits for an abbreviated interview with new NIH director Jay Bhattacharya to discuss recent developments at the research and public health agency.
  • “Semaglutide and tirzepatide prescriptions within Epic-affiliated health care systems increased slightly between 2021 and 2024, but their uptake remained limited, with only 3% of eligible patients having ever received a prescription during that period….Low adoption and disparities in use likely reflect both system-level access barriers and patient-level demand, including narrow eligibility, limited insurance coverage, and financial considerations that may lead some individuals to forgo treatment after prescription.” A research letter published in JAMA by Kim and colleagues examines patterns of prescribing and utilization for a pair of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs.
  • “We present the first evidence of naturally selected genetic variation in the Haenyeo divers of Jeju Island, Korea. Using natural selection combined with association, we found a genetic variant that is significantly associated with diastolic BP. We also identified a training effect in the Haenyeo that likely contributes to their skillful diving. Populations like the Haenyeo are integral for uncovering relationships between genes and the regulation of physiology due to their demographic and evolutionary history.” An article published in Cell Reports by Aguilar-Gomez reports findings from a study of Korea’s Haenyeo divers that suggest the group of women from the island of Jeju known for the remarkable free-diving abilities benefit from unique genetic adaptations. (A non-technical story by CNN’s Katie Hunt summarizing the findings is also available.)

COMMUNICATION, Health Equity & Policy

An engraving illustrating the final moments of the race in the fable of the tortoise and the hare. A mole stands upright on a milestone while the tortoise rears up as it crosses the finish, with the hare rounding a final curve behind it. Image is a 19th-century illustration of La Fontaine's Fables by Jean Grandville. Image credit: Jean Grandville via Wikipedia
Image credit: Jean Grandville via Wikipedia
  • “One prevalent depiction of the disruption economy appears as a foot race, with the “hare” of technological innovation speeding past the slow-moving “tortoise” of policy and governance. This characterization has gained particular traction in discussions about artificial intelligence (AI) as its expanding use across society has elevated the matter of technology governance to one of the most pressing challenges of our time….This prevailing perspective on the relationship between disruption and innovation is both incomplete and inaccurate.” In a post for the National Academy of Engineering, Alondra Nelson critiques the rhetorical construction of “disruption” surrounding the AI industry and its implications for regulation.
  • “Even with my experience, the cost of Revlimid stood out. When I started taking the drug, I’d look at the smooth, cylindrical capsule in my hand and consider the fact I was about to swallow something that costs about the same as a new iPhone. A month’s supply, which arrives in an ordinary, orange-tinged plastic bottle, is the same price as a new Nissan Versa….I wanted to know how this drug came to cost so much — and why the price keeps going up.” ProPublica’s David Armstrong goes deep on a story about drug pricing for a venerable cancer therapy whose costs keep increasing.
  • “Others were mystified by the decision, since the candidate vaccine uses technology that was largely abandoned in the 1970s and eschews techniques developed in recent decades through funding from the Department of Health and Human Services and the Defense Department.” Kaiser Family Foundation Health News’ Arthur Allen reports on a significant resource shift within HHS as funding for pandemic preparedness has been allocated to a little known vaccine development program.

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