Episode Details

Allina physicians strike over pay and AI; UC San Diego finds AI portal drafts slow complex replies; physician pay outpaces productivity; CPT panel weighs AI codes

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

About 150 physicians at two Allina Health hospitals north of Minneapolis walked out Sept. 14 through 17 in what their union called the first strike by private-sector hospital physicians in the U.S. Among the union's stated demands was a say in what the hospitals' AI systems are allowed to suggest. A SullivanCotter survey of about 235,000 employed physicians, released Sept. 17, showed pay rising faster than productivity, with radiology pay up 12% to 18% since 2024. And a year of data from UC San Diego Health, published in NEJM AI, found that edits requiring clinical judgment, such as interpreting a radiology result, add 60% to 70% to the time a physician spends on an AI-drafted portal reply.

The Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) Editorial Panel of the American Medical Association (AMA) met Sept. 17 to 19 in Minneapolis on a 94-item agenda that included seven proposals for codes describing AI services. The Consumer Technology Association (CTA), the consumer electronics trade group, asked Congress in a Fierce Healthcare op-ed for a single national health-AI framework in place of the more than 240 state bills it counted this year. California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order on frontier models on Sept. 18 that does not address the four health bills on his desk; those face a Sept. 30 deadline. STAT published an interview with Dr. James Deardorff on why an accurate model can still be used badly; Deardorff, a geriatrician at the University of California, San Francisco, wrote the commentary on Epic's mortality score covered in Thursday's post.

In this episode

• About 150 Allina physicians strike for four days at Mercy and Unity in what union calls a private-sector first; a say over AI among demands
• Year of edits by more than 1,000 UC San Diego physicians shows AI portal drafts that need clinical judgment take 60% to 70% longer to finish
• Pay outpaces productivity in SullivanCotter survey of 235,000 physicians; radiology up 12% to 18% since 2024, 65% of employers plan to hire
• CPT Editorial Panel takes up seven AI-service code proposals in Minneapolis, including algorithmic STEMI identification and a mammography risk score
• Consumer Technology Association CEO asks Congress for one federal health-AI framework, citing more than 240 health AI bills in 43 states this year