Journal of Urgent Care Medicine

Will AI Discharge Summaries Help To Reduce Burnout?

AI-generated reports using large language models (LLMs) seem inevitable in healthcare, especially when it comes to the time-consuming task of writing up patient discharge summaries, a commentary post in JAMA Internal Medicine states. Right now, the responsibility of compiling summaries is one of the many administrative burdens leading to burnout among clinicians, and leveraging LLM tools could reduce that burden if done thoughtfully and with appropriate data integration. In a related article, researchers found no …

AI Model Triages Primary Care Cases To Specialty Care

In a study published in JAMA Network Open, researchers developed an artificial intelligence (AI) model and tested its ability to assist in triaging referrals from primary care to specialized care. Evaluated against a reference standard, the AI tool achieved good overall accuracy of 0.716 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.694-0.737) of referrals with high specificity (0.801, 95%CI, 0.777-0.822) but lower sensitivity (0.542, 95%CI, 0.501-0.582). In other words, the AI model correctly classified 71.6% of referrals while …

Ransomware And Other Hacks On The Rise For Healthcare Industry

From 2010 to 2024, healthcare data breach incidents in the United States rose significantly, with the total number of reported breaches increasing from 216 to 566—a 162% rise. Ransomware-involved cyberattacks across all Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)-covered entities increased from 0% of breaches in 2010 to 31% in 2021. However, by 2024, ransomware attacks more recently trended down to 11% of incidents (61 of the total 566 incidents for the year). Even more …

AI Tools May Take Some Tasks Off The Radiologist’s Hands

A review published last week in Health and Technology found that AI can read and interpret images more effectively and faster than radiologists, suggesting that AI could help make impact on today’s radiologist shortage. Even so, the industry must be mindful of the ethical and legal implications of AI use. To be clear, the authors state that AI can’t replace human radiologists but rather that AI tools can complement their work, offer guidance, and assist …

What Happens When AI Goes Head-To-Head With Urgent Care Doctors?

Accuracy among healthcare artificial intelligence (AI) tools has grown exponentially in a short amount of time, and the place for these tools in urgent care might be that much more evident now. Research published in the Annals of Internal Medicine recently concluded that AI has the ability to match and to outperform physicians delivering virtual urgent care. In fact, AI agreed with doctors’ diagnosis and management recommendations 56.8% of the time among the 461 virtual …

Patients Can Miss Critical Glucose Monitor Alerts, FDA Warns

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) posted an alert this month warning that patients who use continuous glucose monitors (CGMs), insulin pumps, automated insulin dosing systems, and other diabetes devices are at risk of not receiving or not hearing audible alerts from their smartphones regarding their devices. A missed alert could possibly lead to severe hypoglycemia, severe hyperglycemia, diabetic ketoacidosis, and death, the agency says. Because apps for diabetes CGMs and other devices allow users …

Americans Don’t Trust Health Systems to Use AI Responsibly

An observational analysis published in JAMA Network Open examined the level of trust Americans have when it comes to health systems’ use of artificial intelligence (AI). Researchers conducted a national survey of 2,039 adults, analyzing factors that could influence their trust, including AI knowledge, health literacy, and experiences of discrimination in healthcare, using a 4-point Likert scale. The results indicate that most respondents have low trust in health systems to use AI responsibly (65.8%) or …

New Year, New Data Breaches in Healthcare

Indiana University Health announced that in November there was unusual activity detected in an email account, resulting in a data breach across the health system’s tech infrastructure. An external investigation determined that a hacker may have obtained personal information, such as Social Security numbers, addresses, ages, medical record numbers, diagnoses, or other treatment information for some patients. Nonprofit Indiana University Health began notifying affected individuals on January 2, 2025, and is offering a call center …

Nebraska Sues Change Healthcare For Damages After Cyberattack

It’s the healthcare disruption that seems to remain top of mind. Nebraska’s Attorney General has now filed a lawsuit against Change Healthcare, alleging the company violated state consumer protection and data security laws, making Change vulnerable to the massive ransomware attack in February that brought wide channels of the US healthcare system to halt. Poor security and other systemic failures allowed cybercriminals to steal personal and health data while also freezing Change systems that process …

New FBI Advisory Warns of Hackers Targeting Healthcare

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and a number of its partners issued a joint advisory last week, highlighting cybercriminal activities by a ransomware group known as BianLian. With a history of attacking the healthcare sector, BianLian has targeted various other industries as well. The group gains system access using legitimate remote desktop protocol credentials then steals system-user credentials. The hackers then extort the target organizations by threatening to publicly release the stolen data. By using …

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