On Friday, Dr. Mehmet Oz, nominated to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid by President Donald Trump, testified before the Senate Finance Committee. The hearing included substantive discussions regarding healthcare policy.
Health technology, including telehealth and artificial intelligence (AI), was a key topic. Dr. Oz shared views on AI, touching on relatively uncontroversial ideas regarding technology’s ability to improve patient care and reduce administrative burdens for clinicians. He also emphasized the need for safeguards to prevent potential negative outcomes.
Oz highlighted AI’s potential 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 stated. “It’ll take a lot of the angst out of the system for the American people.”
When questioned about AI’s use by Medicare Advantage insurers to potentially deny care, Oz suggested that AI itself could be used to identify such problems. “We should be using AI within the agency to identify that early enough so that we can prevent it,” he said.
In the broader healthcare landscape, the application of AI is still in its early stages. A review of over 500 healthcare large language model studies, published between 2022 and 2024, revealed that nearly half of the studies assessed the models’ knowledge using multiple-choice questions, akin to those found on the U.S. Medical Licensing Examination. However, performing well on such tests does not guarantee success when applied to real-world tasks like summarizing patient records or devising billing codes accurately.
