Healthcare AI Guy Weekly | 7/9

Our Picks ✨

Highlights if you’ve only got 2 minutes…

1/

Sam Altman and Arianna Huffington’s new health AI company

Huffington Post and Thrive Global founder Arianna Huffington and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are launching a new Health AI company, Thrive AI Health, that aims to build AI-powered assistant tech to promote healthier lifestyles.

Backed by Huffington’s mental wellness firm Thrive Global and the OpenAI Startup Fund, Thrive AI Health will build an AI health coach to give personalized advice on five key behaviors: sleep, food, fitness, stress management and connection. DeCarlos Love, who led fitness and health experiences at Google‘s Fitbit, has left Google to be the CEO. Walmart co-founder Helen Walton’s Foundation is also joining as a strategic investor.

According to Huffington and Altman, Thrive AI Health’s end goal is to train an AI health “coach” on scientific research and medical data, that learns from users’ behaviors and offers real-time, health-related “nudges” and suggestions. Such as “swap your third-afternoon soda with water and lemon or “go on a 10-minute walk with your child after school at 3:15 p.m.”. We love to see more and more people building in the healthcare AI space and attempting to help people live better/healthier lives. (link) (tweet)

2/

AI voice agents in healthcare

Here come the voice agents. Nearly half of the world’s call centers intend to use some form of AI tech in the next year, and healthcare is no exception. We are transitioning from IVR (interactive voice response), a traditional touch-tone model where the agent gives the customers a set of options (press 1 for sales, 2 for X…) → to 1.0 AI voice (phone tree), a slightly more flexible version of IVR, where the consumer speaks in natural language and gets funneled through a series of conversational flows → to 2.0 AI voice (Large Language Model-based), more free-form conversation.

The development of LLMs has significantly enhanced these chat solutions, not only improving traditional contact center tasks like appointment scheduling and patient intake but also now supporting clinical workflows, such as care management or medical history interviews, etc. We think this is a significant step in reducing the billions wasted annually on administrative overhead in healthcare — helping healthcare orgs save time and labor costs, reallocate resources towards revenue-generating activities, and enhance compliance and consistency in customer experiences. Below are some leading vendors in the space, called out by a16z and Elion.

3/

K Health $50M raise

K Health, an AI-powered company offering a chatbot for patient interaction before physician consultations, raised $50M to enhance its AI-powered services and expand its reach. The funding round was led by the Claure Group, bringing total funding to $380M and valuing the company at ~$900M. K Health expects to be profitable soon.

• Company Overview: K-Health is branding itself as “AI-driven primary care” and utilizes the patient’s smartphone as the first step in the care journey. K Health’s AI for primary care takes patients through a personalized chat to walk through their symptoms, develops an assessment grounded in the EHR, then delivers insights to providers to inform their diagnoses and treatments. K Health also offers chronic condition management and preventive care, as well as urgent care and mental health services for anxiety and depression.

• The AI Knowledge Agent: Recently debuted, the Knowledge Bot incorporates the patient’s medical history to provide highly tailored responses to questions. It’s optimized for accuracy by using curated sources, then leverages multiple specialized agents to verify the answer matches the sources and the EHR data is appropriate.

• Partnering with Health Systems: A core component of company growth is partnering with health systems. K Health partnered with Cedars-Sinai to use AI with the patient’s EHR and Cedars-Sinai’s brick-and-mortar assets to properly route patients, from primary care and specialists to labs and tests within the same interface. K Health has also partnered with the Mayo Clinic and others.

Primary care is the gateway to the healthcare system, but the current gateway is starting to show some cracks. Tech-enabled alternatives could help us bridge the gap between an aging population and a shortage of providers. (link)

Tools & Partnerships 🔧

Latest on business, consumer, and clinical healthcare AI tools and partnerships…

TOOLS

• HonorHealth saved $62M as an early adopter of AI: Since integrating its existing EHR system with an AI tool from Qventus in 2021, the health system has been able to take on an additional average of 3.3 cases per operating room per month. On top of that, it also allowed the health system to reduce length of stay by 0.65 days. (link)

• AI recreates images from brain activity: Researchers at Radboud University just developed an AI system capable of reconstructing remarkably accurate images of what someone is looking at based on their brain activity recordings. Tech like this could help stroke victims communicate better for example. (link)

• Tempus AI granted CPT code: Recently-IPO'ed health tech firm Tempus AI (NASDAQ: TEM) received the first-ever CPT code for an algorithm-only analysis of previously-sequenced, laboratory-developed test transcriptomic data. TLDR: AI molecular phenotyping has a new business model. (link)

• Engineered skin tissue to the complex forms of humanoid robots: University of Tokyo researchers developed a new technique to bind living human skin to robotic faces, potentially enabling more lifelike androids in addition to other medical applications. Their research could be useful in the cosmetics industry and to help train plastic surgeons. (link)

PARTNERSHIPS

• Laudio + Children’s National: Children’s National Hospital is expanding its partnership with Laudio to bring its nurse educators onto the workforce management platform. The Laudio platform centralizes frontline leaders’ core workflows and automates tasks like employee rounding, new hire check-ins, quality audits, and overtime assessments. (link)

• OMNY Health + ArisGlobal + QuantHealth: OMNY Health has partnered with ArisGlobal and QuantHealth to leverage its extensive patient data for AI applications, marking its entry into the AI space. OMNY’s data, representing 78 million patients by 2024, aims to support AI advancements in predicting adverse events and optimizing clinical trials. (link)

Deal Desk 💸 

Spotlight on latest capital raises, M&A, and investments…

FUNDING

• K Health, an AI company offering a chatbot for patient interaction prior to physician consultations, raised $50M. The round was led by Claure Group and included Mangrove Capital Partners, Valor Equity Partners and others. (link)

• Zing Coach, a Munich-based AI fitness app closed a $10M Series A led by Zubr Capital and TriplePoint Capital. (link)

• Watch Your Health, an Indian personalized health recommendation startup focused on diet and exercise, raised $5M in Series A funding co-led by Cornerstone Ventures and Conquest Global. (link)

GRANTS

• US Government, President Joe Biden’s administration is awarding $504M in funding for 12 regional technology hubs to expand research in areas such as AI, part of an effort to boost private investment in cutting-edge industries outside the country’s traditional innovation centers. (link)

Other Relevant News 🔍

News, podcasts, blogs, tweets, resources, etc…

• AI’s role in drug discovery gaining attention of investors (link)

• Mount Sinai's vision: AI in every IT system within 5 years (link)

• Hospital C-suites' AI plans crystallize (link)

• Apple Watch becoming physicians’ favorite medical device (link)

• AI to analyze patient referrals (link)

👇 EVENT 👇

If you're in the Bay Area, come hang out in August! If you are interested in sponsoring and/or speaking let me know! Get your tickets here!

Visuals of the Week 📸

Funny memes, cool pics, and interesting data from around the web…