health tech
Can doctors trust clinical AI? Should they?
Camille MacMillin/STAT
Hundreds of thousands of U.S. doctors use clinical large language models from companies like OpenEvidence, Doximity, and UpToDate as an alternative to the mainstream, hallucination-prone models. But as STAT’s Katie Palmer reports, few studies have actually pitted the clinical tools against the general Big Tech models. This summer, researchers at NYU did a head-to-head study. The results, as Katie put it, rang out like a gunshot.
“Some of the tension that’s going on right now in the industry is not even between companies,” said Daniel Nadler, OpenEvidence’s founder and CEO. “It’s between academia and doctors.” The stakes are high, and the debate around the study’s results have reflected that. Read more on what the data really tell us.
public safety
A neglected issue in pedestrian, biker deaths
In 2024, more than 9,000 pedestrians and cyclists were killed on U.S. roads — a 65% increase from 2010. A July report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office pointed to the increased size of passenger vehicles and the blind spots created by common design features as potential risk factors affecting driver visibility. The congressional watchdog recommended that the Department of Transportation create a method to analyze visibility in passenger and commercial vehicles, then specifically analyze and address any accompanying risks.
The agency agreed with the first recommendation, but not the second. Transportation secretary Sean Duffy has adamantly opposed what he called “DEI bike lanes,” and his agency has removed references and tools regarding bike safety from federal websites.
Here in Boston, where cyclist and bike safety advocate Louisa Gag was recently killed by a truck, blind spots were an early point of debate before more details about the collision emerged. “As a driver of a car, I am well aware of the right-turn blind spot, so I double- and triple-check before making a right turn,” one Boston Globe reader wrote to the paper. “I’m scared to death of hitting a cyclist I cannot see.”
