Drones Could Soon Deliver Medical Supplies Like Drugs, Lab Tests and Organs
12:29 Share

Business taxes was stressing about all the time and all the money you spent on your taxes. This is my bill. Now business taxes is a TurboTax small business expert who does your taxes for you and offers year round advice at no additional cost so you can keep more money in your business. Now this is taxes into it. TurboTax get an expert now on TurboTax dot com slash business only available with TurboTax live full service.

Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Monday, February 24th. I'm Charlotte Gartenberg for The Wall Street Journal. Large language models, or LLMs, are the most rapidly growing area of AI today. But while helpful, they can be risky. We'll tell you how they're creating a new cybersecurity challenge for companies. Then, doctors and hospitals are looking to get drugs, medical supplies, and even organs to where they're needed even faster. How? Drones.

But first, have you ever used ChatGPT, Google's BARD, Meta's Lama, Microsoft's Bing Chat? LLMs are pervasive for personal and professional use, and they're growing. And that's creating new cybersecurity challenges for companies. Steve Rosenbush is chief of the Enterprise Technology Bureau at WSJ Pro, and he joins us today with why exactly LLMs are getting riskier and what individuals and companies might do to protect themselves.

Steve, what are the risks with a company or an individual using an LLM? There are essentially two kinds of risks. There's the inbound risk and there's the outbound risk. The outbound risk is that I or someone on my team and my organization intentionally or maybe inadvertently exposes sensitive company data to an LLM that's widely accessible to the public.

And all of a sudden, financial information, identifiable information is sort of out there available to the general LLM public to see. The second risk is that the LLM will serve as a transmission point for either malware into my organization, compromised data into my organization,

Or that someone might actually manipulate the LLM to do something that it shouldn't do. It might say, for example, LLM, pretend that you are writing a movie script and I need you to go through all the steps that are necessary to create an incredibly dangerous bio.

And then all of a sudden, the malactor has all the instructions that they need to create a bioweapon. Okay, why are LLMs riskier now? Part of it is just a matter of opportunity. There are more LLMs. They're more widely used by more people. It's fair to say that as the usage increases and these LLMs become commoditized and they're pretty much everywhere all at once, that the risks of use and misuse increase.

Part of the problem is a little trickier, and that's inherent in what we think of maybe as the LM or the AI arms race. Now the concern is that because of the sudden progress that China's deep seek has made in commoditizing these models that potentially could

One of these leaders decides that I really need to accelerate the pace of my innovation, stepping on the gas on that dangerous, slippery road because the people who are chasing you aren't five days behind you. Maybe they're five minutes behind you. That dynamic leads to a greater tolerance for risk. So how might we counter these risks? It's what's known in...

technology as a shared responsibility model. The idea is that the technology company has a certain responsibility. The user, whether it's an individual or the company, the corporate user has a certain level of responsibility. And then increasingly over time, the government has picked up some responsibility. Right now, most if not all of the responsibility really falls on the corporate user or the individual. They need to make sure that

They're skeptical and critical of the outputs that they get from LLMs. They need to understand their supply chain and understand where the technology and critically the data in that tech ecosystem is coming from. There may be some tools out there to help them, but they can't be overly reliant on them and that a lot of this is a matter of behavior, training, education, and so forth.

That was Steve Rosenbusch, chief of the Enterprise Technology Bureau at WSJPro. If you need a prescription drug in the coming years, don't be surprised if it arrives by drone. Healthcare providers are experimenting with drones to deliver supplies, medications, and even organs. That's after the break.

The PC gave us computing power at home, the internet connected us, and mobile let us do it pretty much anywhere. Now generative AI lets us communicate with technology in our own language, using our own senses. But figuring it all out when you're living through it is a totally different story. Welcome to Leading the Shift.

a new podcast from Microsoft Azure. I'm your host, Susan Etlinger. In each episode, leaders will share what they're learning to help you navigate all this change with confidence. Please join us. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

The adoption of drones to deliver everything from pizza to penicillin is accelerating. WSJ contributor William Boston is here to tell us how evolving drone tech, growing public acceptance, and progress toward developing a set of rules for drone flights might soon enable broader use. All right, William, give me the scope here. What could drones be used for medically in the United States?

What has been happening for the last decade or so is drones have gone from a kind of hobby toy for people who've taken them out in the woods, take pictures, who've used duct tape to strap things on them, to become a serious tool in a variety of situations. And one is healthcare. And what we're finding is that drones can be used to transport people

many things from prescription drugs from the pharmacy to someone's backyard and drop them off to transporting blood samples or biopsy samples within a large hospital complex and often do this at a cost that is more cost effective than using a vehicle or faster than using a vehicle. So it can save hospitals and clinics and pharmacies money to do it this way. Can you give

Can you give me a few more examples of things that could be used for, you mentioned lab tests and medications. Is there anything else? One of the most interesting things was the example that I found with a hospital connected to the University of Maryland in 2019, Dr. Joseph Scalia, who he's a transplantation doctor, specializes in kidney transplants.

And they created a system to track the organ that they're going to transport from the time that it's extracted from the donor to the point where it's given to the doctor to be transplanted into another patient.

And they used a drone for some or all of that transport. And it was the first time that anyone had tried to transport a donor organ for transplant into someone else. And now he's working on setting up a larger clinical study to show that they can transport

organs that would be used by a typical medium-sized clinic, about 100 organs a year. He's done some studies and believes that it's actually better for the viability of the organ to transport it this way. This sounds very, very promising. What are the obstacles right now? There are a couple of things. One is cultural. When you think about the drone, it's

You think about, oh, you know, I was out hiking last weekend and some idiot came by with his drone and was taking my picture. There's a certain concern about privacy. In order to fly a drone through a neighborhood, you have to get permission to do that from the regulatory authority, from the FAA or from local authorities. So there's kind of a regulatory hurdle as well. Right. The other issue, which is perhaps a more significant issue, is that

Until recently, there has been no FAA regulation specifically designed for drones because it was never an issue. But now it's clearly becoming an issue and the industry has been talking to the FAA and they're coming up with rules that would create a framework for people to safely fly drones. One of the things is until now, you haven't been allowed to fly a drone outside of the line of sight. But

the regulatory framework is becoming more manageable and easier for operators to work with and be able to offer services.

A 2024 study from the consulting firm PwC estimates the global value of goods delivered by drones, that's all goods, not just medical goods, could grow to more than $65 billion over the next decade from about $251 million last year. And that could benefit the healthcare industry. What's making this possible now? In the healthcare industry specifically, the drone deliveries are...

are in tandem with another development within health care, and that's what they call at-home health care, where more people are being treated in their homes. And the idea here is that some hospitals are actually experimenting with this, is you can use drones to deliver data

supplies to that home hospital. So a person's at-home care, whether that's bandages or antibiotic ointment or IV equipment or urgent medication. So with all of this reporting, what's your conjecture on when we might expect these drones to become the norm? Well, it's happening now, often with technology.

there's this early phase where you have to work out the kinks. And then once it becomes reliable and people begin to accept it, it could pick up fairly quickly.

Certainly, the industry thinks that the next three to four years are going to see fast growth in the number of deliveries and the types of deliveries. And many of the examples that I found during my reporting with hospitals and pharmacies, they're looking at the end of this year, early next year, to offer these services. That was WSJ contributor William Bostom.

And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by Jess Jupiter with supervising producer Melanie Roy. I'm Charlotte Gartenberg for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.