Sen. Mark Warner is worried that hospitals are integrating artificial intelligence from Google into medical decision-making before the technology is ready. The Virginia Democrat is in a position to do something about it, from his seat on the Finance Committee’s health panel. On Tuesday, he wrote to Google CEO Sundar Pichai to express his concern about “premature deployment of unproven technology.” The backstory: Google is collaborating with the Mayo Clinic in testing its Med-PaLM 2 chatbot and hopes to create an all-purpose virtual medical assistant. Med-PaLM 2 can already respond to medical questions, summarize doctors’ notes, and organize large data sets. The company in May said that physicians who’d reviewed Med-PaLM 2’s responses to medical questions overwhelmingly preferred them to answers written by doctors. Even so: Greg Corrado, a senior research director at Google who worked on Med-PaLM 2, told The Wall Street Journal that the product was still nascent. “I don’t feel that this kind of technology is yet at a place where I would want it in my family’s healthcare journey,” Corrado said. Warner’s questions: Corrado’s assessment worried the senator, who wants Pichai to provide more specifics about how Google and its partners are deploying the technology, safeguarding patient data, and ensuring its use doesn’t lead to “the erosion of trust in our medical professionals and institutions, the exacerbation of existing racial disparities in health outcomes, and an increased risk of diagnostic and care-delivery errors.” Google didn’t respond immediately to a request for comment.
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