WEEKLY UPDATE: 02/20/25
Governor Ned Lamont’s 2025 legislative proposals on artificial intelligence (AI) are garnering support from hospitals and health systems. Gov. Lamont’s proposals, contained in SB 1249, An Act Addressing Innovations In Artificial Intelligence, seek to promote the use of AI in Connecticut through supporting innovation, investment, and exploration. The bill aims to achieve this in a manner that both recognizes the need to avoid hidden potential risks of AI discrimination and appreciates the importance of limiting uses of government held data to best protect privacy rights.
Hospitals recently provided testimony in support of this bill to the General Law Committee, with many hospitals and health systems expressing appreciation for the Governor’s efforts to balance exploring the potential for AI while avoiding overregulation.
AI is now inextricably woven into both clinical and administrative aspects of how healthcare is successfully delivered. Healthcare today could not function without AI and machine learning.
Patients benefit from AI uses every day, including through better accuracy on imaging findings, by detection of conditions and diseases at a pace far faster than humans alone can accomplish, through parsing of quality improvement and patient safety data and measures, and through highly sophisticated clinical decision support tools that function at a level barely dreamed of when the first mandates were published in 2010. There are also key administrative uses such as tracking supply and inventory to ensure efficiencies, assisting in insurance claims management, extrapolating financial data for better long-term planning, optimizing patient scheduling and reducing wait times, and informing staffing needs.
Click here to read CHA’s testimony supporting the bill.
Click here to read additional testimony from Connecticut hospitals and health systems.
