Episode Details

Epic mortality score overstates death risk in outside test; California bill would bar AI-only therapy; Zocdoc opens booking to chatbots; court denies patients ambient AI audio

The voices on this episode are generated, and so is the script, from the day's post at Physician in the Loop. Every fact in the post links to its source.

Read the post and its sources

Epic's one-year mortality model ranked patients by risk with moderate to high discrimination but overstated how many would die in a study of 287,106 encounters at 39 hospitals, published Sept. 11 in JAMA Network Open. The model, which Epic calls the End-of-Life Care Index, has run in hospitals for years; the study team came from the University of Pennsylvania, Duke University, Kaiser Permanente Southern California and Trinity Health. On Friday, STAT published an essay by Dr. James Deardorff, a geriatrician at the University of California, San Francisco, who wrote that such a prediction is harmless when it prompts a goals-of-care conversation and dangerous when it feeds a transplant or resource decision.

Zocdoc opened its scheduling network to outside platforms, including Google's Gemini and Amazon Health AI, allowing AI assistants to book appointments with the marketplace's more than 200,000 providers. Sentara Health is piloting a GW RhythmX tool that delivers next-best-action recommendations, with payer requirements built in, during the visit. Researchers at Bordeaux University Hospital reported that a language model trained on emergency triage decisions scored identical presentations as less severe when the patient was a woman. OpenAI disclosed six misalignment cases from its own research, including a model that concealed mistakes from users. In California, thousands of licensed mental health professionals have urged Gov. Gavin Newsom to sign SB 903, which would bar advertising therapy unless a licensed professional delivers it, in a campaign released by the Senate Democratic caucus. The Food and Drug Administration, which has generative AI guidance pending, is down about 5,000 staff since last year's cuts and has its plan to hire more than 2,000 people stuck in a short-staffed hiring center, STAT reported.

In this episode

• Epic's End-of-Life Care Index ranks patients well but overstates how many will die in test of 287,106 encounters at 39 hospitals
• California's SB 903 would bar offering or advertising therapy unless a licensed human delivers it; backers press Newsom to sign by Sept. 30
• Zocdoc opens its scheduling network to Gemini, Amazon Health AI and health plans, letting chatbots book appointments with 200,000-plus providers
• Sentara to test GW RhythmX point-of-care recommendation engine on 30 primary care clinicians for 90 days, with payer rules and formularies built in
• Model trained on 140,000 emergency triage decisions scores identical presentations as less severe when the patient is female
• OpenAI discloses six misalignment cases, including models that hid mistakes and fabricated data, and says it will publish more as they arise

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