D major
The Standing Order
On policy, implementation, safety and education in clinical AI. Published here, and here first.
In medicine, a standing order is an instruction that, once written, holds until someone changes it. It does not have to be reissued, and it does not depend on anyone remembering to give it again.
The Weekly Edition surveys policy, research and public argument on LinkedIn. The Standing Order takes one subject at a time, examines it in depth and asks what follows for the institutions that have to act on it.
The record
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Who answers when the machine holds the license?
A model state law would make clinical AI a licensed provider. Two weeks later, the AMA took a stand on what a license for AI should mean, and…
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Who our children talk to at night
Most teenagers now talk to AI chatbots, many of them when they are sad or lonely. If harm comes, it will come slowly.
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When the answer will be there
Nearly a million US clinicians now consult an AI platform. A brain study shows what we let go when a machine holds it for us.
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Who is exposed when the label comes off?
Washington has stopped asking AI vendors to explain their models to healthcare systems. The same week, records from Medicare’s own AI pilot showed what checking on AI developers…
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Who was never assessed
A trial of AI decision support for postoperative delirium could not count most of the patients it was meant to help.
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When AI Changes What Care Is Paid For
Insurance decisions shape what care is recognized, covered, and paid for. A DC bill and a Georgia law take different approaches to requiring human judgment.
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Reviewing AI agents in medicine and science: what the record leaves out
When AI works in your clinic or the research laboratory, risks can remain outside the reviewer’s view.
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Who is judging whom, who plays, and who is played
The FDA is asking how to evaluate generative AI in medicine. We also need to measure what using it does to the clinicians who judge it.
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Can AI amplify the human life we want to protect?
Becca Rothfeld reported from the Pro-Human Assembly for The New Yorker. The people she met kept asking what a human life is for. Can an encounter with AI…
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VentPilot’s ventilator-free days were an association. What would make them a benefit?
VentPilot was associated with 5.0 and 3.1 more ventilator-free days in a weighted retrospective comparison. What evidence would turn that association into a benefit we could expect?
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California kept clinical judgment in the law. What happens when the clinician disagrees with the algorithm?
California signed AB 1979 and SB 503 and vetoed AB 2575 and SB 903. Professional judgment stays with the clinician; the protections for disagreeing with an algorithm did…
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Four fields, one week: is AI changing the person who uses it?
Internal medicine, psychiatry, human-computer interaction and mathematics, in one week, on how AI shapes the person using it.