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AI Brain Drain, Stedi Series B, and Apple Watch Upgrades
August 18, 2025
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Together with
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“I’m not as concerned about AI de-skilling us in polyp detection, but diminishing our overall critical thinking skills. If we outsource thinking to AI, where does that leave us?”
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UNC Professor of Medicine Spencer Dorn
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A study in The Lancet threw some refreshingly cold water on the AI hype train after finding that healthcare’s shiny new models might be de-skilling physicians.
Here’s the setup. Researchers tracked four Polish health centers that gave their gastroenterologists AI to help spot polyps during colonoscopies before yanking it away after three months.
- Long story short, the doctors’ ability to detect polyps plummeted 6% below baseline following the AI rugpull.
- Unassisted polyp detection rates fell from 28.4% before the AI teaser to 22.4% after, raising concerns that relying on AI might rob physicians of hard-won skills.
Sounds familiar. The findings echo a recent MIT preprint that showed that people who used AI to write essays used less of their brains and had worse recall of their writing than those who mustered up the words on their own.
- That’s probably not a shocker to anyone that’s used ChatGPT for more than five minutes, but it’s easy to see that it might spell trouble when applied to medicine.
- If gastroenterologists start leaning on AI to detect polyps, what happens if they lose their ability to detect them without it?
Right idea, wrong question. People were better at mental math before they had calculators, but that doesn’t mean society would be better off without them. The question we have to ask ourselves is, which skills are we willing to lose?
- Gastroenterologist Dr. Spencer Dorn nails it: AI doesn’t just risk de-skilling doctors in polyp detection, it risks diminishing their overall critical thinking skills.
- “My real concern is not the technical skills we can afford to lose, but the foundational ones we can’t: critical thinking, sound judgment, and compassionate care. These aren’t just important to preserve – they’re irreplaceable.”
The Takeaway
If doctors keep outsourcing their thinking to AI, it could be a one-way ticket to a world where Dr. GPT is the only one patients can turn to. Seems dystopian, but is it really that bad if it also means better outcomes for those patients?
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Start Getting Leads From ChatGPT and Google AI
If your healthcare company isn’t getting leads from ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews, it’s probably because your content isn’t optimized for AI search. Tely AI runs keywords and questions research, generates and publishes GEO content, and captures new leads – all on autopilot. Create your first article on us to start filling your pipeline with patients and partners from today’s lead sources.
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Elevate 2025: Medallion’s Virtual Conference Returns September 17
Now in its fourth year, Medallion’s annual conference is back – bringing together healthcare leaders to explore this year’s theme: Elevate the present. Reframe the future of healthcare. Hear from industry voices like Tom Lawry, author of Hacking Healthcare, UPMC Chief Medical Information Officer Robert Bart, and many more. Reserve your spot now.
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- Epic Rejects $30B Takeover Offer: It’ll take more than $30B for Judy to hand over the keys to Epic, but we can’t blame Health Data Atlas CEO Michael Stratton for trying. Stratton shared the unsolicited offer in a LinkedIn post before following it up with a response from the head honcho herself: “Sorry but we’re not for sale – not now and not in the future.” The move was probably 1% serious and 99% a PR play to capitalize on Perplexity’s offer for Chrome. Stay tuned for DHW’s takeover bid for The New York Times next week.
- athenahealth Joins AI Era: Hot on the heels of Oracle “ushering in a new era of AI-driven health records,” athenahealth is now “ushering in the era of AI-enabled, intelligent interoperability.” The athenaOne platform will be rolling out AI enhancements “over the coming months” to help ambulatory care practices engage patients, deliver care, and manage their revenue cycle. The new solutions include intelligent summaries for patient charts, as well as a Model Context Protocol server that allows AI models to better access data from the EHR.
- Altera TouchWorks Note+: Just in case you needed more proof that scribing is now an EHR feature, Altera Digital Health debuted TouchWorks Note+, a fully EHR-integrated solution that combines ambient listening, voice dictation, and macros into codified data. Unlike third-party tools, TouchWorks Note+ eliminates extra logins, manual copy-paste, and redundant data entry – all with the same seamless scribing capabilities that providers have come to know and love.
- Here Come the Oral GLP-1s: The post-pandemic boom in virtual prescribers offering injectable obesity drugs looks ready to start boiling over after Eli Lilly announced positive Phase 3 results for its orforglipron oral GLP-1. Tested in 3,000+ adults, the highest orforglipron dose (36mg) achieved 12.4% weight loss (27.3 lbs) versus 0.9% with placebo at 72 weeks. Nearly 60% of participants lost ≥10% body weight, and 40% lost ≥15%. Lilly plans regulatory submission by year-end for its once-daily oral alternative.
- Fast and Stedi: RCM startup Stedi packed its $70M Series B announcement with some major milestones along its journey “to make healthcare transactions as reliable as running water.” The biggest updates were the debut of Stedi Agent and the Stedi MCP server, the 18 month old startup’s new AI-native ways to automate healthcare clearinghouse workflows, starting with eligibility checks. Stedi has apparently been finding success with both providers and health tech companies, GenAI players now representing a third of its customer roster.
- Apple Watch Gets a New (Old) Feature: The Apple Watch’s blood oxygen tracking feature is returning to the U.S. after the end of a multi-year legal battle with Masimo. Blood oxygen tracking was initially introduced to the Apple Watch back in 2020 before getting disabled due to Masimo’s patent infringement lawsuit towards the end of 2023. The feature’s triumphant return arrives via the watchOS 11.6.1 software update that includes a workaround to show the data on users’ iPhones rather than the watch itself.
- Citizen Series A: Citizen Health, the health data company formerly known as Ciitizen, locked in $30M of Series A funding to pursue the same mission it was striving toward when Invitae acquired it in 2021: empower patients with full access to their complete medical history. The platform aggregates EHR data, genomic information, imaging, and self-reported outcomes to help patients with rare diseases overcome treatment obstacles. Citizen is reportedly gearing up to launch V1 of its AI Advocate tool in Q3.
- Fake Terms Spike Hallucinations: A new study in Nature Communication Medicine shows that including a single fake term when prompting popular LLMs like ChatGPT and DeepSeek leads to convincing – yet false – medical misinformation. After eliciting hallucinations from six LLMs by injecting fake terms into 300 medical vignettes, hallucination rates ranged from 50% to 82% across the models, not great news considering the number of people turning to AI as a first stop for health questions.
- Zyter Symphony Launch: Zyter took the lid off its Zyter Symphony Agents-as-a-Service platform to automate enterprise workflows. Symphony orchestrates multiple agents to reduce “process debt” across clinical and administrative workflows, with the initial deployment focusing on integrating with Zyter’s own TruCare solution that already supports over 44M covered lives across 45+ health plans.
- Study Disputes CMS Efficiency Adjustment: In its proposed 2026 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule, CMS proposed a 2.5% reduction in physician payments as an “efficiency adjustment” based on its assumption that physicians are more efficient than five years ago. A new research letter in a surgery journal disputes that assumption, finding that for 1.7M surgical procedures across 249 CPT codes from 2019 to 2023, operative times actually increased 3.1%. Not a stretch to assume the same is true in other increasingly complex specialties.
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Next Generation Ambient Tech and Agents
The ambient AI transformation is already sweeping across health systems, reducing administrative burdens and improving patient outcomes. So, what’s next? Tune into this on-demand session to learn how systems like Carle Health and Denver Health are leveraging Nabla to eliminate Pajama Time and build a future where agentic AI unlocks true workforce sustainability.
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Real Time Prior Auth at the Point of Conversation
Abridge is partnering with Highmark Health and AHN to solve the challenges and frustrations of prior authorization. The technology will compare, in real time, Highmark’s medical authorization requirements to the information that is being collected during the patient visit. If any pieces of required documentation are missing, Abridge will prompt the clinician to gather what’s needed. Read more about this game-changing partnership.
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- Scale Remote Patient Monitoring With BPM Pro 2: BPM Pro 2 is the next generation cellular blood pressure monitors, empowering care teams to scale remote patient monitoring and streamline operations. Discover why leading providers are choosing BPM Pro 2 to collect highly precise measurements and enrich data with Patient Insights from their daily lives.
- Navina Ranks #1 Best in KLAS for Clinician Digital Workflow: KLAS ranked Navina’s AI copilot #1 for Clinician Digital Workflow in its 2025 Best in KLAS report. Navina’s AI copilot empowers the entire workflow from the exam room to the back office with a holistic solution for improving outcomes, physician satisfaction, and performance under value-based care. Find out why Navina is the market-leading clinical intelligence platform.
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