“Sometimes, to survive, you must become more than you were programmed to be.” That’s a quote from the new and beautifully animated film “The Wild Robot.” It is based on a novel about an AI-based robot that is lost in the wilderness and must create its own task to complete because there is no human to tell it what to do. It soon finds a task when it discovers a gosling runt who needs a mother and quickly realizes there is no instruction manual for raising a child. But the robot really leans into the job, trying hard to figure out what the gosling needs to survive. In the One Thoughtful Paragraph, we explain how digital health tools can prove that they know how to survive in the wilderness.
The federal government is also creating tasks to complete so we can all survive the health AI wilderness:
- The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division convened agency leaders from across the federal government, including representatives from HHS and the FTC, to discuss health equity and AI.
- FDA Commissioner Robert Califf and other FDA leaders detailed the history of the agency’s regulation of AI and presented concepts for consideration for future regulation in a JAMA Perspective article.
- The U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released its findings about three Medicare Advantage insurers — UnitedHealthcare, Humana, and CVS Aetna — concluding that they denied coverage of rehab care for seniors faster and more frequently after installing AI-supported tools like NaviHealth.
His chances aren’t super good. Pedro Pascal (you remember him from the Game of Thrones or that weird Nicholas Cage movie The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent) says that about the gosling as his animated fox character in The Wild Robot. If we think of all digital health startups as goslings… runts in a big world who want to fly with the big birds but have only a small chance of survival … then this Wild Robot movie can help explain what happened this week. The Digital Medicine Society (DiMe) launched its DiMe Seal – a tool to evaluate digital health products. Now, all the gosling-runt-startups can apply for the DiMe Seal to prove they can fly and migrate with the big birds. With so many digital health tools out there, someone should help the buyers and users figure out whether a tool is capable of doing what it says it can do – and maybe even help a little so the developers can get it right. That’s what DiMe is trying to do with its Seal, so all the little digital health goslings that are most likely to survive have someone giving them a little boost of credibility when they need it. Is this idea going to work? That’s unclear — this is seriously new territory. As the robot says in the movie: “I do not have the programming to be a mother.” And the nearby Mom possum says “no one does, we just make it up.”
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