Medical Debt Rules Relaxed in Washington State

Last month, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee signed a law that reduces the maximum interest rate on medical debt prior to a court judgment from 12% to 9%. It also prohibits sending a medical debt to collections until 120 days after the patient is sent the initial bill and requires collection agencies to provide itemized statements to patients for medical and hospital debts and to notify them of their possible eligibility for charity care.

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Mired In Medical Debt? Federal Plan Would Update Overdue-Bill Collection Methods

Machine Learning Trumps AI

Oxford University’s researchers suggest 47% of today’s jobs are candidates for AI obsolescence. Jobs prime for automation are readily found in the financial industry. Loan officers, for example, are ranked at 98% in likelihood of automation by the  Oxford study. Despite the hype AI has not passed a basic Turing Test, where humans can’t determine if they are speaking with another human rather than a computer. The major developments in the AI field are taking place in machine learning which uses programming models to mimic your brain. Financial projections and what-if scenarios are progressing/y achieving greater accuracy.

To be ready for the fourth industrial revolution start working on data governance by demanding data quality. The importance of clean data determines the quality of the model used for making decisions or recommendations. Internal controls are necessary to document “who is likely to pay,” for example to be ready to put in a format for machine learning.

Objective analysis based on machine learning will drive business decisions by extracting value from big data that until now was based on a hunch. True AI may be over-promised, as the joke goes machine learning is written in programming language, while AI is written in PowerPoint; but machine learning is already replacing spreadsheet decision making and human intervention.

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