Rapidly Built Medical Crash Cart! Lessons Learned and Impacts on High-Stakes Team Collaboration in the Emergency Room Abstract --Designing robots to support high-stakes teamwork in emergency settings presents unique challenges, including seamless integration into fast-paced environments, facilitating effective communication among team members, and adapting to rapidly changing situations. While teleoperated robots have been successfully used in high-stakes domains such as firefighting and space exploration, autonomous robots that aid high-stakes teamwork remain underexplored. T o address this gap, we conducted a rapid prototyping process to develop a series of seemingly autonomous robot designed to assist clinical teams in the Emergency Room. We transformed a standard crash cart--which stores medical equipment and emergency supplies into a medical robotic crash cart (MCCR). The MCCR was evaluated through field deployments to assess its impact on team workload and usability, identified taxonomies of failure, and refined the MCCR in collaboration with healthcare professionals. By publicly disseminating our MCCR tutorial, we hope to encourage HRI researchers to explore the design of robots for high-stakes teamwork. Teleoperated robots have become indispensable tools for action teams--highly skilled specialist teams that collaborate in short, high-pressure events, requiring improvisation in unpredictable situations [1]. For example, disaster response teams rely on teleoperated robots and drones to aid search and rescue operations [2], [3]. High-stakes military and SW A T teams use teleoperated ordnance disposal [4] and surveillance robots [5] to keep the teams safe. Surgical teams employ teleoperated robots to perform keyhole surgeries with a level of precision that would be unimaginable without these machines [6], [7]. We built three teleoperated medical crash cart robots (MCCRs). MCCR 1 delivers supplies using a hoverboard circuit. MCCR 2 delivers supplies, recommends supplies using drawer opening capabilities, and was deployed at a medical training event which revealed insights.

We present Multi-expert Prompting, a novel enhancement of ExpertPrompting (Xu et al., 2023), designed to improve the large language model (LLM) generation. Specifically, it guides an LLM to fulfill an input instruction by simulating multiple experts, aggregating their responses, and selecting the best among individual and aggregated responses. This process is performed in a single chain of thoughts through our seven carefully designed subtasks derived from the Nominal Group Technique (Ven and Delbecq, 1974), a well-established decision-making framework. Our evaluations demonstrate that Multi-expert Prompting significantly outperforms ExpertPrompting and comparable baselines in enhancing the truthfulness, factuality, informativeness, and usefulness of responses while reducing toxicity and hurtfulness. It further achieves state-of-the-art truthfulness by outperforming the best baseline by 8.69% with ChatGPT. Multi-expert Prompting is efficient, explainable, and highly adaptable to diverse scenarios, eliminating the need for manual prompt construction.

Since the onset of COVID-19, rural communities worldwide have faced significant challenges in accessing healthcare due to the migration of experienced medical professionals to urban centers. Semi-trained caregivers, such as Community Health Workers (CHWs) and Registered Medical Practitioners (RMPs), have stepped in to fill this gap, but often lack formal training. This paper proposes an advanced agentic medical assistant system designed to improve healthcare delivery in rural areas by utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) and agentic approaches. The system is composed of five crucial components: translation, medical complexity assessment, expert network integration, final medical advice generation, and response simplification. Our innovative framework ensures context-sensitive, adaptive, and reliable medical assistance, capable of clinical triaging, diagnostics, and identifying cases requiring specialist intervention. The system is designed to handle cultural nuances and varying literacy levels, providing clear and actionable medical advice in local languages. Evaluation results using the MedQA, PubMedQA, and JAMA datasets demonstrate that this integrated approach significantly enhances the effectiveness of rural healthcare workers, making healthcare more accessible and understandable for underserved populations. All code and supplemental materials associated with the paper and IMAS are available at https://github.com/uheal/imas.

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has the potential to improve healthcare through automation that enhances the quality and safety of patient care. Powered by foundation models that have been pretrained and can generate complex content, GenAI represents a paradigm shift away from the more traditional focus on task-specific classifiers that have dominated the AI landscape thus far. We posit that the imminent application of GenAI in healthcare will be through well-defined, low risk, high value, and narrow applications that automate healthcare workflows at the point of care using smaller foundation models. These models will be finetuned for different capabilities and application specific scenarios and will have the ability to provide medical explanations, reference evidence within a retrieval augmented framework and utilizing external tools. We contrast this with a general, all-purpose AI model for end-to-end clinical decision making that improves clinician performance, including safety-critical diagnostic tasks, which will require greater research prior to implementation. We consider areas where 'human in the loop' Generative AI can improve healthcare quality and safety by automating mundane tasks. Using the principles of implementation science will be critical for integrating 'end to end' GenAI systems that will be accepted by healthcare teams.

Large AI models trained on audio data may have the potential to rapidly classify patients, enhancing medical decision-making and potentially improving outcomes through early detection. Existing technologies depend on limited datasets using expensive recording equipment in high-income, English-speaking countries. This challenges deployment in resource-constrained, high-volume settings where audio data may have a profound impact. This report introduces a novel data type and a corresponding collection system that captures health data through guided questions using only a mobile/web application. This application ultimately results in an audio electronic health record (voice EHR) which may contain complex biomarkers of health from conventional voice/respiratory features, speech patterns, and language with semantic meaning - compensating for the typical limitations of unimodal clinical datasets. This report introduces a consortium of partners for global work, presents the application used for data collection, and showcases the potential of informative voice EHR to advance the scalability and diversity of audio AI.

Ethical frameworks for the use of natural language processing (NLP) are urgently needed to shape how large language models (LLMs) and similar tools are used for healthcare applications. Healthcare faces existing challenges including the balance of power in clinician-patient relationships, systemic health disparities, historical injustices, and economic constraints. Drawing directly from the voices of those most affected, and focusing on a case study of a specific healthcare setting, we propose a set of guiding principles for the use of NLP in maternal healthcare. We led an interactive session centered on an LLM-based chatbot demonstration during a full-day workshop with 39 participants, and additionally surveyed 30 healthcare workers and 30 birthing people about their values, needs, and perceptions of NLP tools in the context of maternal health. We conducted quantitative and qualitative analyses of the survey results and interactive discussions to consolidate our findings into a set of guiding principles. We propose nine principles for ethical use of NLP for maternal healthcare, grouped into three themes: (i) recognizing contextual significance (ii) holistic measurements, and (iii) who/what is valued. For each principle, we describe its underlying rationale and provide practical advice. This set of principles can provide a methodological pattern for other researchers and serve as a resource to practitioners working on maternal health and other healthcare fields to emphasize the importance of technical nuance, historical context, and inclusive design when developing NLP technologies for clinical use.

We study the problem of planning restless multi-armed bandits (RMABs) with multiple actions. This is a popular model for multi-agent systems with applications like multi-channel communication, monitoring and machine maintenance tasks, and healthcare. Whittle index policies, which are based on Lagrangian relaxations, are widely used in these settings due to their simplicity and near-optimality under certain conditions. In this work, we first show that Whittle index policies can fail in simple and practically relevant RMAB settings, even when the RMABs are indexable. We discuss why the optimality guarantees fail and why asymptotic optimality may not translate well to practically relevant planning horizons. We then propose an alternate planning algorithm based on the mean-field method, which can provably and efficiently obtain near-optimal policies with a large number of arms, without the stringent structural assumptions required by the Whittle index policies. This borrows ideas from existing research with some improvements: our approach is hyper-parameter free, and we provide an improved non-asymptotic analysis which has: (a) no requirement for exogenous hyper-parameters and tighter polynomial dependence on known problem parameters; (b) high probability bounds which show that the reward of the policy is reliable; and (c) matching sub-optimality lower bounds for this algorithm with respect to the number of arms, thus demonstrating the tightness of our bounds. Our extensive experimental analysis shows that the mean-field approach matches or outperforms other baselines.

Growing populations around the world are experiencing (and contributing to) a shortage of healthcare workers, and the gap is expected to widen in the future. "The world will be short of 12.9 million healthcare workers by 2035; today, that figure stands at 7.2 million," as per a recent report by the World Health Organization (WHO). Globally, billions of people will suffer serious health consequences if the findings in today's WHO report are not addressed. Experts believe that integrating technology into healthcare and digitalizing the system can address future challenges. The healthcare sector has been embracing artificial intelligence (AI) by using it to assist doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and others in overcoming practical challenges.

As burnout among healthcare workers continues to be a major concern, the use of artificial intelligence, EHRs and other automation tools may be able to have a positive impact on hospitals and health systems. When it comes to artificial intelligence, some legal issues arise. That's why we interviewed Carly Koza, an authority on this topic and Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney associate. Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney is a national law firm with 450 attorneys and government relations professionals across 15 offices representing companies including 50 of the Fortune 100. Koza discusses what healthcare provider organizations should prepare for when it comes to growing AI implementation, how AI can help combat increasing demands on healthcare workers, ways AI can help healthcare provider organizations ensure quality patient care, and legal matters that arise from these issues.

With the rise of AI in healthcare, there's been a lot of talk about how it will affect the job market. But what does that mean for people who work in healthcare? The truth is, we don't know for sure yet. But what's clear is that artificial intelligence will change how we approach training healthcare workers. With AI, we can provide more targeted training methods than ever before.