It’s Dr. Oz’s turn to tout health AI on the Hill

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On Friday, Mehmet Oz, President Donald Trump’s pick to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, turned on the charisma and cruised through a confirmation hearing before the Senate Finance Committee that featured a lot of substantive discussion of policy. For an excellent analysis read STAT’s Tara Bannow’s coverage of the hearing. Health tech, including  telehealth and AI, came up a few times:

• On AI, Oz made a lot of statements most people would find totally uncontroversial, including about the ability of technology to augment care and reduce paperwork for clinicians, and about the need for guardrails to ensure bad things don’t happen.
• Oz noted that AI could be used to speed up pre-authorization for medical procedures. “We have AI support tools, navigation systems that could pretty quickly adjudicate whether you should have to wait even a day to get the medication that will get you out of pain, or even a week for the procedure that you should be allowed to have,” he said, “It’ll take a lot of the angst out of the system for the American people.” 
• Pressed about AI being used by Medicare Advantage insurers to make determinations about whether to deny care, Oz suggested AI could be used to spot the problem: “We should be using AI within the agency to identify that early enough so that we can prevent it.”

Evaluating AI on health tasks that actually matter

Last year, a review of 519 health care large language model studies published between 2022 and 2024 showed that 45% of them tested the artificial intelligence models’ knowledge by asking them multiple-choice questions like those you might see on the U.S. Medical Licensing Examination. But performing well on multiple-choice questions does not necessarily translate to the tasks LLMs might be asked to complete in the real world, like being able to summarize a patient record, come up with appropriate billing codes, or diagnose a patient.