Issue link: https://beckershealthcare.uberflip.com/i/1522996
37 INNOVATION Can AI triage emergency room patients? By Giles Bruce Artificial intelligence could help triage emergency room patients, aiding providers during busy times, a new study found. University of California, San Francisco researchers fed 10,000 pairs of deidentified ER visits into GPT-4, a large language model developed by OpenAI, asking the technology to identify which had the more severe condition, according to the May 7 JAMA Network Open study. e AI was correct 89% of the time. Another 500-pair subset was evaluated by physicians as well as AI. e AI was right in 88% of cases, compared to 86% for physicians. "Imagine two patients who need to be transported to the hospital but there is only one ambulance. Or a physician is on call and there are three people paging her at the same time, and she has to determine who to respond to first," said lead author Christopher Williams, MD, a postdoctoral scholar at UCSF's Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute, in a May 7 statement. But he noted that AI isn't ready to be used in EDs until it's tested in clinical settings and biases are eliminated. "It's great to show that AI can do cool stuff, but it's most important to consider who is being helped and who is being hindered by this technology," Dr. Williams stated. "Is just being able to do something the bar for using AI, or is it being able to do something well, for all types of patients?" n Why Mayo Clinic's patents keep growing By Giles Bruce R ochester, Minn.-based Mayo Clinic has been filing an increasing number of patents because of the high degree of institutional support for innovation, the Rochester Post-Bulletin reported. The health system's patents in Rochester have grown from 19 in 2000 to 93 in 2023 with 54 already this year, surpassing IBM, which had 215 patents in Rochester in 2000 and 30 this year, according to the May 18 story. Mayo Clinic has long developed therapeutics, like cortisone in 1921, and medical technology, like magnetic resonance elastography to diagnose liver disease, but its business development department has increased in recent years, growing by 40 people since 2019 to 120 today, the newspaper reported. The health system also has a technology transfer arm called Mayo Clinic Ventures that commercializes ideas invented by Mayo staffers. "We've been much more intentional with working with our innovators to bring these technologies forward," Mayo Clinic Patent Liaison Supervisor Chelsea Lassiter, PhD, told the news outlet. "Now we're just better able to do that because we have even more resources and more staff." In 2021, Mayo Clinic disclosed more inventions (663), executed more licenses (157) and formed more startups (16) than any other health system, according to the story. Mayo Clinic also ranked 17th on the National Academy of Inventors' 2023 list of utility patents for nonprofit and government research institutions, trailing only Somerville, Mass.-based Mass General Brigham among health systems. n Image Credit: Adobe Stock