💬 How well does conversational AI for diagnostic medical reasoning perform?

Hiya 👋

We’re back with another edition of the digital pharmacist digest!

Here are this week's links that are worth your time.

Thanks for reading,
Kevin

👓 Currently Reading: Feel-Good Productivity: How to Do More of What Matters to You by Ali Abdaal

📖 What I'm reading

AMIE: A research AI system for diagnostic medical reasoning and conversations
🤖 Artificial Intelligence & 🩺💻 Health informatics

"While LLMs can accurately perform tasks such as medical summarization or answering medical questions, there has been little work specifically aimed towards developing these kinds of conversational diagnostic capabilities...

Inspired by this challenge, we developed Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer (AMIE), a research AI system based on a LLM and optimized for diagnostic reasoning and conversations...

In this setting, we observed that AMIE performed simulated diagnostic conversations at least as well as PCPs when both were evaluated along multiple clinically-meaningful axes of consultation quality. AMIE had greater diagnostic accuracy and superior performance for 28 of 32 axes from the perspective of specialist physicians, and 24 of 26 axes from the perspective of patient actors."

Implementation and evaluation of a nurse-led intervention to augment an existing residential aged care facility outreach service with a visual telehealth consultation: stepped-wedge cluster randomised controlled trial
🩺💻 Health informatics

"Emergency department presentations of RACF residents can be both expensive and risky, and many are unnecessary and preventable. Processes or triage systems to assess residents with a health event, prior to transfer, may reduce unnecessary ED transfer. The Aged Care Emergency (ACE) service is a nurse-led ED outreach service that provides telephone support to RACF nurses regarding residents’ health events. This service is available Monday to Friday, 8am to 4 pm (ED ACE hours). The primary objective of this study was to assess whether the augmentation of the phone-based ED ACE service with the addition of a visual telehealth consultation (VTC) would reduce RACF rate of ED presentations compared to usual care...

A post-hoc logistic regression demonstrated a statistically significant 69% reduction in the probability that an episode of care resulted in an ED presentation within ED ACE hours post-implementation compared to pre-implementation (OR [95% CI]: 0.31 [0.11, 0.87]; p = 0.025)...

Findings have shown the positive impact of augmenting ACE with a VTC."

Top 10 Professional Society for Health Economics and Outcomes Research (HEOR) Trends
🩺💻 Health informatics

"The Professional Society for Health Economics and Outcomes Research (HEOR) continues to monitor healthcare trends and conduct horizon scanning around the world."
The 2024-2025 Top 10 HEOR Trends are:
1. Real-World Evidence: Leveraging the Power of RWE
2. Drug Pricing: Regulating, Negotiating, and Creating Transparency in Drug Prices
3. Artificial Intelligence: Using AI and Advanced Analytics in Healthcare
4. Fostering Innovation: Financing Innovative Health Technologies
5. Health Equity: Addressing Healthcare Disparities
6. Accelerated Drug Approvals: Developing Evidence for Regulatory Use
7. Value Measurement: Assessing Value and QALY Alternatives
8. Patient Centricity: Engaging Patients in Healthcare Research
9. Precision Medicine: Applying HEOR to Personalized Medicine
10. Public Health: Bringing Economic Evaluation to Public Health Policies"

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