The Future of Generative AI in Health Care

November 25, 2024

Leaders from federal health agencies and their committee of digital advisors came together last week to discuss the future of generative AI in health care.

During the event, the FDA’s Digital Health Advisory Committee focused on how the public health agency should regulate and review medical devices that use chatbots and other forms of generative AI.

“The novel capabilities of GenAI may offer unique benefits to patients and public health, but the use and adoption of GenAI also come with specific risks and complexities that challenge FDA’s approach to the regulation of devices,” the report notes.

Here’s what you need to know:

• Background:  Generative AI includes new models that mimic input data to create synthetic content (images, videos, audio, text, and digital content).
  • These technologies look for patterns in the data to create new data that resembles the original source.
• Pitfalls:  These modes can struggle to overcome “hallucinations” or the creation of false content that reaches the wrong objective to fulfill a user’s prompt.
• Potential uses:  Generative AI has potential to support medical teams to help “identify a possible clinical diagnosis, treatment solution, and new associations in complex medical data for patients (and) health care professionals.”
• Regulatory model:  While these technologies may have unique benefits, the FDA faces new regulatory complexities and may need new approaches that properly address benefits and risks for new devices.
• Quotable:  “We need these technologies to be developed, deployed ,and used responsibly in the best interest of patients and consumers,” said Robert Califf, FDA commissioner during the conference.

The executive summary and a replay of the conference are available online.