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Georgia Today
Georgia Today: HIV Funding; Dekalb County Superintendent indicted; AI in Healthcare
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Georgia is the new hotbed for musical talent and the music industry knows it record executives are turning their eyes to the peach state to discover the next big thing on gpb's peach jam podcast you'll hear those rising georgia artists before anyone else listen and discover the sound of what's next on the peach jam podcast from georgia public broadcasting.
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Welcome to the georgia today podcast here we bring you the latest reports from the gpb newsroom on today's episode a program that provides free hiv home testing kits nationwide has its funding restored the superintendent of georgia's dekalb county school district has been indicted on federal charges and does ai belong in health care people need to.
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Be aware that the fda regulates ai technology right now i believe there's about twelve fifty tools that are fda approved and those can make a diagnosis on.
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Their own today is friday october tenth i'm peter biello and this is georgia today funding for an atlanta based program that has provided nearly one million free hiv home testing kits nationwide has been restored allowing it to continue for another year together take me home based at emory university now has ten million dollars in funding for another year the program delivers the tests through an easy to use website and integration with dating apps the program is funded by the cdc funding cuts had been announced earlier this year the project's executive director says that decision now has been reversed the ten million dollars in funding is two million dollars more than the prior year together take me home is funded through an hiv fighting initiative launched by president donald trump during his first term it steers resources to areas with the highest rates of hiv including dekalb cobb gwinnett and fulton counties which have the highest rates of new cases among states artificial intelligence is transforming entire sectors of the american economy but not without some criticism in healthcare especially the technology has raised concerns from helping with medical diagnoses and the discovery of new drugs to analyzing patient data and reducing costs ai in healthcare comes with potential benefits and risks the medical college of georgia at augusta university last month named an eminent scholar to address some of these issues doctor jeffrey talbert is the college's inaugural chair of the department of ai and health he recently spoke with gpb's orlando montoya doctor.
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Talbert congratulations on your appointment and thanks.
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For being here thank you for having me really excited to talk to you.
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About ai today now i think most people now are familiar with ai whether through online searches shopping suggestions and even some content creation but in healthcare they might not know it's being used so so how is ai being used in healthcare right now that patients might not.
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Even notice yeah you know ai goes back a lot of years in healthcare there's some tools that have been around for twenty years now in the icu that basically is a risk score that tells the physicians what's your risk that you're gonna die in the next seventy two hours or twenty four hours or whatever it happens to be we've been using those for a long time right i think what we're seeing the explosion around is all the generative ai things where the chatbots are here et cetera that people are excited about and so some of the things that really right now if we look at the research where the most advance is happening in ai it's around medical imaging so breast cancer screening there's tools that can do mammography and they can do it and see things that human beings can't see and some of those tools are rating really well compared to how humans perform same thing for lung cancer screening nodules on the lungs there's tools that can do this as well as other cancer screenings and other imaging things that do with radiology mris ultrasound things like that so that's where ai really is doing the best right now are there also.
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Administrative tasks or administrative intelligence that the computers can be used for to save.
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Costs for instance absolutely there's a lot of administrative things and there's different kinds of ai that can be used for that so if you think of like scheduling how does the hospital know how many people to schedule in the emergency department at all hours of the day ai can look at massive amounts of data and look at other things too the weather sporting events and other things that might help them understand when patients might come to the emergency department to help them schedule things better now we.
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Know that ai systems can be wrong they can be biased i mean you ask ai a question sometimes and the answer can come back goofy or it can come back just flat out wrong and dangerous and how do you address trust in ai when people experience bias and error in it so i think.
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We need to understand where the bias and the error comes from and so the first part is i would say that we have to have transparency in ai so if someone's using ai for your healthcare you need to know that and they need to tell you that and be upfront about it but where the bias comes from is ai works by we train models and the models are trained based on data where do we get data we get data from historical data sources so if i look at all of the patients that come into a hospital over the last five years and generate a model to do a prediction for let's say recognizing a cancer or doing a trajectory for someone with substance use disorder that's based on the data that's in there if the patients that are coming to that facility are all from one race they're all from one area the model it does really well at predicting those types of patients if a patient is from a different area and not from that particular race or that region or that income level the model won't do as well and so that's where you get bias so if you train a model with the data it's really good for the data that it was trained on not good at other data it's not trained.
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On should patients trust that their doctors are completely making the decisions when they.
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Come through ai well i think it depends on what you're talking about when decisions come through ai there are very few decisions that will come through ai at this point the ones that are available right now are the ones around the imaging models that i told you about so there's people need to be aware that the fda regulates ai technology right now i believe there's about twelve fifty tools that are fda approved and those can make a diagnosis on their own there's still going to be a radiologist or a pathologist look at that same image and confirm that the ai did it correctly sometimes the ai can make a mistake where the doctor intervenes sometimes the ai can see things the doctor didn't see i would also encourage people not to think that ai is going to replace their doctor i like to think about it as augmented intelligence right it's not replacing people it's augmenting what they can do and it can help them do it quicker i'd like.
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To share a personal experience if i could related to another criticism of ai in healthcare a few weeks ago i had to visit urgent care and i chose this particular urgent care office because it appeared to be affiliated with the medical system that i go to for all my other care but when i got there i found out that it was not despite the name out front the same company and i had to spend like fifteen minutes like filling in all my information again everything from my address and phone number to my mother's cause of death and insurance and all that and if the healthcare system can't even integrate basic data like that how can they integrate ai into their complex.
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Operations that's a great question and it's embarrassing that that exists but it does and so i think one of the biggest challenges in healthcare is data interoperability i mean you hit it right on the head and so there are some cases where we have the same electronic health record system let's say epic for example epic's in a lot of hospitals you would think even if you go to multiple epic hospitals that all your data would be in there that may or may not be true right so even under the best circumstances your data may not be in there the data interoperability for ai is even more complicated than that because it's not just fields like your name and address and building billing information we're talking about if we're comparing imaging data from a radiology or from a ct scanner or from an mri machine it depends on what kind of machine that was on how compatible it is with a different machine and so part of our challenge as researchers in doing with ai is i get a pile of images let's say fifty thousand images that are all the same image of a particular type of tumor i've got to standardize those images somehow to make sure that they're all formatted correctly and the same so that the computer can understand the difference in the image itself not the image the way.
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It was generated we're talking about vast amounts of data here personal data and we know of data breaches so how can we be assured that when this vast amount of data goes up to the ai brain to learn that it's not going to be used incorrectly yeah.
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So that's also a great question so there's some hipaa rules and hipaa is a health insurance portability act which really concerns the data security and when we are allowed to use patients data for research and so right now the way that we avoid data breaches is we de identify your data so if we have a data set like your visit you went to the doctor recently for that could be used to train a model with but it wouldn't have any of your personal information in there if it's just the raw data left over after we remove those things then there's no risk of a data breach because there's no probability that it can ever get back to identify you and i.
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Know mcg is a research college as well it is what kind of research did you want to do yeah so.
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I'Ve got my personal research that is involved with substance use disorder and so we developed a project in kentucky where i was before which basically takes data from about one hundred different sources at the community level and we predict when there's going to be an opioid overdose and we can do this with about three to four months ahead of time and so we're able to then alert our public health partners on these projects so they can intervene in those areas if they can by distributing more naloxone which is a lifesaving medication for opioid overdoses to try to actually prevent some of the overdoses from happening if we can identify where they're at risk and so one of my goals is to try to bring a version of that project to georgia so that we can again improve health outcomes in different areas.
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Well doctor jeffrey talbert is the inaugural chair of the department of ai and health at the medical college of georgia at augusta university thanks again thank you.
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Talbert spoke with gpb's orlando montoya.
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The.
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Superintendent of georgia's dekalb county school district has been indicted on federal charges alleging he ran a kickback scheme in suburban chicago gpb's chase mcgee reports devon horton.
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Was indicted wednesday in chicago on seventeen counts of wire fraud embezzlement and tax evasion three other people were also charged in the case prosecutors allege horton issued over two hundred eighty thousand dollars in contracts to friends when he was previously superintendent of the evanston skokie school district horton is alleged to have received more than eighty thousand dollars in kickbacks and used money from evanston skokie for personal expenses the dekalb county school board held an emergency meeting thursday and suspended horton with pay the district says its operations will continue as normal horton's lawyer says he is eager to address the case in court for gpb news i'm chase mcgee.
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Federal health agencies are warning against the use of acetaminophen during pregnancy they say using the drug sold under the brand name tylenol is linked to autism medical providers in georgia are dealing with the fallout of these statements which they say have left their patients confused and concerned gpb sophie gradis has more a.
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Few days before federal health agencies claimed acetaminophen could cause autism in babies and atlanta based obstetrician and gynecologist dawn mandeville sent out a notice to her pregnant.
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Patients and we felt like we needed.
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To get ahead of this her practice assured patients that the medication is safe and trusted medical organizations concur but claims made by federal health officials have left more of mandeville's patients worried that treating pain or a fever could hurt their.
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Baby we are fighting an uphill battle.
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To convince them to say here these.
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Are your options pediatrician kiana washington says parents at her metro atlanta practice are.
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Equally hesitant we have recently gotten questions from parents about my child has autism and now they have a fever and.
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What do i do she's spending more time talking through their concerns i've offered.
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Telemedicine visits and those have actually been helpful we can talk through how you navigate and figure out what is actually.
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True for now both providers are telling patients to avoid advice from self titled experts online and be cautious of believing blanket statements about what might cause or treat autism for gpb news i'm sophie gradis in atlanta.
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Dozens of atlanta parents and their children are parking their cars and grabbing a bike helmet during national walk and roll to school week gpb's amanda andrews has more from riders joining what they're calling the bike bus.
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At.
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Burgess elementary the bike rack is overflowing from all the students riding to school they're pedaling predetermined routes in groups led by parents called the bike bus the atlanta department of transportation's safe routes to school program is encouraging more students to walk or bike april stammel and her daughter joined the bike bus in twenty twenty two she says they haven't driven to school this year but so many.
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More kids are doing it now and.
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It just means that it's safer and.
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It'S more fun and something the kids.
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Look forward to on friday mornings even.
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When it's a little chilly the bike.
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Bus is scheduled to take place every friday through the end of the school year for gpb news i'm amanda andrews.
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This is all things considered on gpb i'm peter biello alan caldwell's collection of poetry the only verse can captures little moments where grief rears its head where the present moment in all its beauty clashes with awful memories when the realization hits that love has endured in spite of tremendous obstacles alan caldwell is with me now to talk about his book welcome to the program nice to be.
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Here thank you for having me so.
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These are mostly autobiographical poems right right very much so well i wanted to ask about your childhood to start because there are some poems that hint at a childhood that could have been difficult in some ways can you tell us a little bit about your childhood and how it manifests in this way well.
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I mean people say that they know monster my father was a monster by any technical by any definition monster and i knew part of it growing up and if you live in that kind of situation with that kind of person that has you know i think he was rapid cycling bipolar and i think he was you know a lot of things i don't know how to classify i think you live in a constant state of ptsd because it was constant conflict and constant verbal and sometimes physical abuse at me and my mother so that's that's certainly a factor in the book he shows up when i wrote the first book that i wrote he sort of appears in my essays and then in my short stories as i move along i thought maybe i was done with him but when i started writing the poems i found out he still had to be talked about what.
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Was left to say about him in this book that you felt was necessary.
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To put in verse i think i need to point out to other people that have a similar experience that effect never goes away i mean you can have a wonderful life and have the best wife in the world and have a great son and daughter in law and two great grandkids and you'll be dealing with life and then that'll come up again and you'll realize that it wasn't as buried as you thought it was and maybe it should yeah so.
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To what extent does writing about it help you deal with it i mean.
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You know the old saying and i think it was cs lewis said that we read to know we're not alone well i think even more so we write to know we're not alone i had the poetry group up in carrollton georgia the cultural arts center and we have a lot of great poets here very talented people and they'll come and they'll tell their story and doing so is de facto therapy so when you're.
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Revising a poem with the understanding that writing the first draft at least can sometimes be therapeutic what do you look for make sure that a poem is not simply a work of therapy for you but also something for an audience.
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Well i mean i think you talk about universals you make references to things universals that people understand you don't talk about i try to mix a personal story that i have and maybe a metaphor that is something that i remember it might be something that i remember from my childhood and then try to make that universal it's difficult to do.
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I'Ll put you on the spot here and pause if you need to think about it is there an example of what you just described in this book that really stands out to you an example of of reaching for the universal.
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It'S called running for no reason and it talks a little bit about i was in the hospital for depression in twenty twelve and it talks about that i know a lot of people have had a similar experience and like i say i've lost four kids including two of my absolute favorites to suicide so i mean i write about that in here and then try to point out some things that help me to sort.
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Of hold on to so well i.
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Love this poem so would you read.
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It for us i would i'll try to read slowly it's called running for no reason he sprints just ahead of me gleeful heart and head shuffling through the early yellow poplar leaves as fast as his preschool legs can take him catch me papa he says pursued by no one he runs for reasons i can't name i can only dream of running for no reason but i tell myself i could catch him if i had to maybe this fall i can i can't speak for future falls and pursuits autumn here comes and goes and is more often hot than not maybe the poplars submit to drought or to the ever shortening days or maybe they simply tire from holding on so long one dozen years ago this october i too grew tired my feet like lead my lips wrapped around a revolver my brain aching like a rotten tooth i can't say with any certainty that i'll never be there again not holding on to my leaves not even wanting to but this october my feet are heavy but not lead my revolver is put away my aches are dull and distant and i dream of running for no.
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Reason i was struck by the shift in the middle of that poem where you go from a scene with your grandson running to a revolver we can't see it listening to this conversation but the shift stands alone on a line and kind of shocks you at least it shocked me is that what you.
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Were going for i remember the exact instant this happened there was a little small field by my house and i was on one end of it and asher my grandson was running towards the other end of it and i'm like oh i gotta come back it's hard to catch him he's really fast and i thought about juxtapositioning that moment with the moment i remember when i didn't think i would ever have that to hope for and so i wanted that.
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To pop up well alan caldwell thank you for laying yourself bare in this book it's called the only verse thank you so much for speaking with me.
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About it thank you for having me.
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On alan caldwell's book is called the only verse and it's the subject of our latest episode of narrative edge gpb's podcast about books with georgia connections find narrative edge wherever you get your podcasts.
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Sources and methods the crown jewels of the intelligence community shorthand for how do we know what's real who told us if you have those answers you're on the inside and npr wants to bring you there from the pentagon to the state department to spy agencies listen to understand what's really happening and what it means for you sources and methods the new national security podcast from npr.
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And finally the savannah bananas unveiled their twenty twenty six tour schedule last night during a live city selection show broadcast on espn two espn disney and youtube team founder jesse cole said banana ball drew more than two million fans this year and he hopes to grow that number to three million in twenty twenty six banana ball will be played in fourteen major league parks including a three day stand at truest park in atlanta additionally last night featured the announcement of two new teams to the banana ball lineup the loco beach coconuts and with a special presentation from the president of the negro league baseball museum the indianapolis clowns.
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One of the most influential teams in history came out of the negro leagues in the nineteen thirties they were the first to combine high level play with dazzling entertainment you couldn't take your eyes off the field they had a fans first mentality long before anyone else but they were also getting some great talent.
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Where did you learn to handle a.
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Ball like that in nineteen fifty two they were the first to sign an eighteen year old future hall of famer henry hank aaron one of their stars gooch tate also played for the harlem globetrotters the first female pro players joined the team even satchel page pitched for them this is what made them so special that combination of entertainment and great baseball the team was good enough to win four titles in the nineteen fifties they had no idea that they were making history you see they just wanted to play ball they played games in canada cuba mexico and puerto rico forty one thousand saw them put on a show in detroit they were the last surviving negro league team then in nineteen eighty nine they disappeared.
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Please welcome to.
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The stage the president of the negro league baseball museum mister bob toltrow.
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And.
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Now they are back i am proud to introduce the newest banana ball team the indian napolis clowns.
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And that is a wrap on georgia today thanks for tuning in we appreciate you choosing us to help you stay informed if you want to learn more about any of these stories check out our website gpb dot org news and remember to subscribe to this podcast because we're going to be back next week with all the latest headlines if you've got feedback we'd love to hear from you the best way to send your feedback is by email the address is georgia todaypb dot org and when you send an email to that address comes to the whole team again georgia todaypb dot org i'm peter biello thanks again for listening and have a great weekend.
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Sources and methods the crown jewels of the intelligence community shorthand for how do we know what's real who told us if you have those answers you're on the inside and npr wants to bring you there from the pentagon to the state department to spy agencies listen to understand what's really happening and what it means for you sources and methods the new national security podcast from npr.