The healthcare AI market is moving fast with new advancements and products being announced every week. Stay up-to-date with the latest news with these quick hits.
Friday, Oct. 31
OpenAI took several actions this week that advanced its stake in healthcare.
First, the organization announced a corporate restructuring. The for-profit side of the business, the OpenAI Group, is now a public benefit corporation. Its longstanding non-profit side, now called the OpenAI Foundation, has been given additional ownership of the company, and its equity now totals an estimated $130 billion.
The Foundation, which has a controlling stake in the business, is now “one of the best resourced philanthropic organizations ever,” a release by the company said. Its equity in OpenAI means that if the company grows, so will the resources of the foundation. The OpenAI Group is worth an estimated $500 billion, after employees sold stock in October.
With the launch of GPT-5 in September, the company’s CEO Sam Altman recommended the use of GPT-5 to analyze users’ health records to break down medical jargon and pose questions for their doctors.
To kick off its work, the Foundation committed $25 billion across two areas: funding healthcare research and improving cybersecurity of AI.
The massive pot of money will fund healthcare breakthroughs like faster diagnostics, cures for disease and funding for scientists. The Foundation promised to start its healthcare work by building open-sourced and responsibly built frontier health datasets.
The other portion of the money will fund a cybersecurity resilience infrastructure for generative AI, similar to that built to protect critical infrastructure after the rise of the Internet.
OpenAI has faced questions from the federal government and a wrongful death lawsuit from the parents of an adolescent user who died by suicide after communicating with the chatbot. The Federal Trade Commission launched an investigation into how the companies measure, test, and monitor potentially negative impacts on children and teens.
The order was sent to the parent companies of Google, Instagram, Facebook, OpenAI, Character.AI, SnapChat and X (formerly Twitter).
Earlier in the week, OpenAI announced an initiative it undertook to improve the responses of ChatGPT, to mental health crises. The company convened over 170 mental health experts to inform updates to ChatGPT’s default model.
The updates allow the chatbot to better recognize signs of distress and implement de-escalation techniques when users express heightened emotions. The model has also been trained to recognize mania and delusion, suicide and self harm, and emotional reliance on AI.
ChatGPT will also recommend a user speak to a healthcare professional when necessary, and it has increased access to crisis hotlines. The company estimates the updates will reduce instances of undesirable responses to mental health crises by 65-80%.
“We believe ChatGPT can provide a supportive space for people to process what they’re feeling, and guide them to reach out to friends, family, or a mental health professional when appropriate,” a release by the company said. “In addition to our longstanding baseline safety metrics for suicide and self-harm, we are adding emotional reliance and non-suicidal mental health emergencies to our standard set of baseline safety testing for future model releases.”
Friday, Oct. 24
Microsoft announced this week new Copilot features to make the company's AI-driven assistant more personal and useful, executives said.
As part of Copilot Mode in Microsoft’s Edge browser, the tech giant unveiled a new "Copilot for health" feature that can answer users health-related questions. Microsoft said it has improved how it grounds responses in credible sources like Harvard Health to "empower users with reliable information," Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, said in a blog post.
Copilot for health, which is currently only available in the U.S., also serves as a care navigator. The AI assistant can connect users to care, matching them to healthcare providers based on specialty, location, spoken language and other preferences.
"Health and Education are two of the top use cases for AI chatbots and areas where we see huge opportunity for Copilot to add value," Suleyman said.
The Copilot health features are currently limited to the Copilot iOS app and the web version.
"Copilot Mode in Edge is evolving into an AI browser that is your dynamic, intelligent companion," Suleyman wrote. "With your permission, Copilot can see and reason over your open tabs, summarize and compare information, and even take Actions like booking a hotel or filling out forms. Voice-only navigation enables hands-free browsing."
"There's a lot of noise around AI at the moment. There's headlines, hype, fear, and quite frankly, I think it's all pretty overwhelming," Suleyman said in a video about the new Copilot features. "Through it all, I keep coming back to this very simple idea technology should work in service of people, and not the other way around, not ever, because fundamentally, this really is about trust, and right now, tech doesn't always have a lot of that people feel that in some respects, it's made life worse, more stress, more misinformation, more disconnection. Too many people feel like their relationship with technology is kind of broken, and that's a failure. It's on people like me and Microsoft AI to do much, much better."
The official launch for Edge’s Copilot Mode was in July, when it rolled out with basic features like a Search bar on new tabs and natural voice navigation, Tech Crunch reported.
Microsoft's Copilot updates come as OpenAI just launched its AI-assisted web browser, ChatGPT Atlas.
Monday, Oct. 13
Health IT company athenahealth launched AI-native updates to its revenue cycle management and practice management capabilities.
The company is embedding agentic AI directly into athenaOne at no extra cost, the company said in a press release.
Athenahealth provides electronic health records software, revenue cycle management and patient engagement solutions to small and independent provider practices. The company also is building out a suite of AI tools for ambulatory providers.
In August, athenahealth executives told Fierce Healthcare the company was soon rolling out AI features for ambulatory providers as part of a larger upgrade to an "AI-native" athenaOne platform. The aim is to provide a "reimagined user experience" for physician practices across key functions like interoperability, patient engagement, clinical documentation and revenue cycle management, the company said back in August.
The AI features will streamline practice operations from the front to the back office, including automated insurance selection and AI agents that improve the speed and quality of prior authorizations and claims processing, the company said.
The company said it is making AI part of its core infrastructure, not an add-on. The AI features will help reduce manual work and get providers paid faster, executives said.
“Curing complexity across the revenue cycle has always been core to athenahealth. Rapid advances in AI, coupled with our decades of experience are enabling us to make another transformative leap in reducing customer workload and improving revenue cycle outcomes for our practices,” said Paul Brient, chief product and operations officer at athenahealth, in a statement.
“Our AI-native, cloud-based co-sourcing model will yield revenue cycle results that were unimaginable only a year ago – clean claim rates at nearly 99%, time to bill in low single digit days, and assurance that our practices receive every dollar that they should. We can do all this while also wicking away half of the work our practices have historically done," Brient said.
More than 160,000 practicing ambulatory physicians use athenahealth's technology, and the company says it processes 315 million claims annually, representing $45 billion, through its athenaOne platform.
The company says its AI-powered billing solution results in fewer manual tasks (70% less work), cleaner claims (98.4%), faster payments (78% patient pay yield), and only 5.7% median denial rate (compared to greater than 10% industry average).
Athenahealth executives said in August that new AI-native capabilities include AI-enhanced document services, interoperability tools and intelligent clinical summaries. Other upgrades in the works include AI-native features for clinical workflow, revenue cycle and patient engagement.
The company previewed its new AI features just ahead of EHR giant Epic's annual User Group Meeting, also in August, where the company unveiled its AI innovations. Oracle also recently launched its next-gen EHR equipped with the latest AI and voice capabilities.
Friday, Oct. 10
Microsoft rolls out AI-based claims denial tool for rural hospitals
Tech giant Microsoft launched a claims denial navigator, a free, AI-powered tool that aims to help streamline the resolution process for insurance claims.
Microsoft Partners and rural health organizations developed the tool as part of the company's Rural Health AI Innovation Lab (RHAIL).
Microsoft says the tool can help hospitals handle denied claims more efficiently and receive appropriate reimbursement for their services. It is now available on GitHub for any healthcare provider, from small rural clinics to large urban health systems, Microsoft said.
A recent study noted that more than 700 rural hospitals across the United States are currently at risk of closure due to financial hardship. While many denied claims are eventually approved, the average cost of managing them for a small hospital is estimated at $330,000 annually. The process of resolving these claims consumes precious time and resources, slows cash flow and inflates administrative costs. Statistical analysis shows that rural hospitals have a denial rate of 18%, far higher than the 10% rate for urban hospitals.
The claims denial navigator streamlines resolution processes for denied Medicare, Medicaid and commercial insurance claims. The tool also offers recommendations for the most effective actions billing staff can take to resolve denied claims and learns from their actions and feedback to improve its recommendations over time.
Microsoft is partnering with the Texas Office of Rural Clinics and Hospitals as it supports its members in deploying and measuring success of the claims denial navigator, Microsoft said. The Washington State Hospital Association also is supporting access to the resource for its hospital members.
Notable launches conversational AI assistant for workflow automation
Healthcare AI platform Notable developed Flow AI as a conversational assistant embedded in its low-code platform, Flow Builder interface.
The AI assistant is designed to help healthcare teams automate faster and with less friction, according to the company. Healthcare organizations can use it to design, debug and optimize AI Agent workflows.
Flow Builder is Notable’s low-code interface for designing, customizing and deploying AI-powered workflows. Notable developed Flow AI to make it even easier to build in Flow Builder. Key features of Flow AI include conversational automation building to create, edit and understand workflows with natural language command and reusable patterns and intelligent suggestions, from generating filters for lab results to merging multiple data inputs, according to the company.
And, Flow AI can interpret workflows in context, offering clear explanations and guidance without requiring users to parse documentation or consult support channels.
Incredible Health debuts voice AI agents for healthcare workers
Incredible Health, a healthcare staffing platform, developed two AI voice agents, called Gale and Lyn, to help healthcare workers and employers in the hiring process.
Healthcare workers can use Gale to refine their resumes, prepare for interviews and find opportunities they may not have otherwise considered, according to the company. Incredible Health says that the AI voice agent has been used by 1 million U.S. healthcare workers on Incredible Health’s marketplace.
Gale is trained on data from millions of real career paths on the Incredible Health marketplace and has been trained to understand the nuances between specialties and care settings, such as med-surg, ICU, and ambulatory care, Incredible Health claims. More than 90% of nurses using Gale give it positive reviews and state they would recommend it to peers, the company said.
Lyn was designed as an AI copilot for healthcare employers. Healthcare organizations can use Lyn as an AI voice interview agent for personalized outreach to candidates and to conduct interviews.
The AI voice agent was built in collaboration with Johns Hopkins, NYPresbyterian, Baylor Scott & White Health and Sutter Health and trained on millions of hiring interactions from Incredible Health’s career marketplace, the company said.