Josh Tyrangiel began reporting on AI by writing what he describes as The Washington Post's first AI column.
“as I was beginning to write what was, I guess, the first AI column for the Washington Post, I went out to the valley.”
Person
Josh Tyrangiel
1 episodes · 17 quoted claims
Josh Tyrangiel says the major AI labs are in debt and have received very large investments from backers who expect them to become highly profitable.
“On top of it, all of the labs are in debt. They have massive, massive infusions of investment coming in from people who have expectations of them.”
Josh Tyrangiel says the Cleveland Clinic's operating margin is about 2.2%, which he calls heroic for healthcare.
“you know, the margins at the clinic are like 2.2%, which most of your listeners are like,”
A Cleveland Clinic CEO told Tyrangiel the clinic's first priority is the best care and outcomes for patients, with efficiency second so more money can go into care.
“We have two priorities here. The first is to provide the best possible care to create the best possible outcomes for our patients.”
At the Cleveland Clinic, each AI pilot is run by a product manager who is a doctor or clinician.
“There's a product manager who runs every pilot of AI, and that product manager is a doctor or a clinician.”
The Cleveland Clinic worked with Palantir to build a scheduling tool that predicts when hospital patients are ready to be discharged or transferred.
“And what they did is they called Palantir. They came in and they built basically a kind of rudimentary scheduling tool that would tell the hospital team when patients were getting ready to go.”
Josh Tyrangiel says the Cleveland Clinic earns much of its income from transfers of international patients.
“You can move people in and out. The clinic gets a lot of its income and revenue from transfers from international.”
Tyrangiel says the Palantir-built tool raised the Cleveland Clinic's transfer rate and cut emergency room wait times by ninety minutes.
“They increased the transfer rate tremendously. They cut down on emergency room wait times by ninety minutes, and they were able to improve the bottom line, right?”
Josh Tyrangiel says sepsis kills about 350,000 people a year in the United States, more than prostate cancer, breast cancer and opioid addiction combined.
“sepsis is basically the biggest killer in the United States. It kills about 350,000 people a year more than prostate cancer, breast cancer, opioid addiction combined.”
In 2021 the Cleveland Clinic reviewed its sepsis death figures and decided to act, according to Josh Tyrangiel.
“So the hospital in 2021 looked at its numbers for sepsis deaths and said, This is outrageous.”
The Cleveland Clinic chose Bayesian Health, a vendor of predictive software that flags possible sepsis, for its sepsis project.
“Found a good vendor called Bayesian Health, which is predictive software that just flags the possibility of sepsis.”
Josh Tyrangiel says Bayesian Health's software was integrated with Epic, a complex healthcare records system he describes as present in nearly every US hospital.
“they integrated with Epic, which is a very complicated healthcare system that basically is in every hospital in America.”
Doctors initially did not use the sepsis tool because its red, yellow and green flags came without explanations and did not fit ICU culture.
“doctors wouldn't use it because the software was not actually integrated into the culture of what it's like in an ICU”
After explainability was added, the sepsis tool helped cut sepsis mortality at the Cleveland Clinic by 41% over a year, according to Josh Tyrangiel.
“Around the hospital, over the course of a year, they reduced mortality by 41%.”
Josh Tyrangiel says in about 10% of ICU cases clinicians recognized sepsis by sight or smell before the software flagged it.
“in about 10% of cases in the ICU, a nurse or doctor would be able to look at a patient and simply by smelling them or looking at the pallor of their skin”
Josh Tyrangiel says a federal job retraining program that had retrained about 5 million people, largely in auto manufacturing in the Midwest, ended in 2022.
“We had about 5 million people who had been retrained, largely in the Midwest, around auto parts and auto manufacturing. That died in 2022.”
Tyrangiel recounts that engineers using Claude Code can produce about 80% of software in a tenth of the usual time, but may still overlook parts of a customer brief.
“they're so empowered to make 80% of their software happen in 10% of the time it used to take, that they think they've solved the problem.”