Let’s get the girl to check the numbers. You mean Katherine? Yes, sir, the smart one. And if she says they’re good, I’m ready to go. That’s dialogue from Hidden Figures, a movie based on the true story of astronaut John Glenn being the first human, in 1962, to orbit the Earth. He asks Katherine Johnson, a NASA mathematician and “human computer,” to check the IBM computer’s calculations for the mission’s landing zone. This is like what we are trying to do with regulating health AI today – making sure there is a human involved to check the computer’s decisions so a doctor or patient can rely on them. In the One Thoughtful Paragraph below, we take note of an idea about how to make this happen.
The health information policy news this week is more focused on tech and codes than humans:
- Huma AI, a cloud-based platform that can connect to a range of regulated medical devices and is designed to accelerate the adoption of digital health, raised $80M in Series D funding.
- CMS proposed new codes that support payment of digital mental health treatments in its 2025 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule Proposed Rule – allowing clinicians to bill for supplying FDA-approved digital therapeutics as part of behavioral health treatment.
- U.S. Senators introduced The Healthcare Cybersecurity Act of 2024. This bipartisan bill is designed to strengthen collaboration between HHS and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and provide cybersecurity resources to nonfederal entities.
After a hot and busy week of consulting about health care, I am looking forward to going to an overly-air-conditioned movie theater this weekend to see the sequel of one of my favorite disaster-but-its-going-to-be-ok movies: Twisters. Actor Glen Powell plays the leading man in Twisters (you may remember him as the hot one in the 2022 Top Gun sequel). Glen is less well-known for his role as astronaut John Glenn in Hidden Figures, where he is totally believable as the guy who prefers to trust a female mathematician’s calculations over a computer when his life is at stake in a historic flight around Earth. A thought-provoking piece about how to regulate AI this week made me think of this situation. Two former HHS officials, former ONC National Coordinator David Blumenthal, and former FDA digital health chief Bakul Patel, proposed a novel regulatory approach for clinical generative AI – to regulate them not as devices but like we do clinicians – by making the AI tools pass rigorous exams, get trained, certified, and recertified, and subject them to legal liability when they fail to meet certain expected standards. It is a thoughtful and well-written proposal that is worth considering. But first, we plan to go hear this line that is reportedly from the new Twisters movie: “You know, a tornado rating, it’s not based on size or wind speed. It’s based on damage.” We could very well rate health AI tools the same way soon.
