Healthcare AI Guy Weekly Newsletter | 2/6

Our Picks ✨

Highlights if you’ve only got 2 minutes…

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Neuralink completes first brain chip implant in human

Elon Musk announced last week that Neuralink successfully implanted its advanced brain chip in a human test subject for the first time, saying the patient is ‘recovering well’ from the surgery.

• Musk reported "promising neuron spike detection," in the patient, suggesting the chip’s sensors are capturing individual brain cell activity.

• Musk also revealed that Neuralink’s first product will be called 'Telepathy’, which plans to enable paralyzed patients to control devices by thought.

• The company’s initial patient trials targeted quadriplegic patients over 22 years old who are suffering from spinal injuries or ALS.

AI in healthcare continues to push the art of the possible — Neuralink in this case pushing the boundaries of brain hardware. This innovation has the potential to restore key abilities for paralyzed patients and it’s exciting to see the progress live. Given the pace, this product should soon be commercially available. (link)

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AI can optimize palliative care utilization

Mass General Brigham used AI in a pilot program to identify patients who would benefit from palliative or hospice care referrals. The pilot program utilized an AI tool called ‘Smart Hospice’ and resulted in 40 patients receiving inpatient palliative consults, with 17 of them being patients who would have been missed without the tool.

If those patients enroll in hospice, the hospital would gain $850,000 in Total Medical Expenditure savings, equal to $2 million annualized, while improving those patients’ quality of life. With AI tools like this, health systems can improve end-of-life care, increase home-first care, save costs, and reduce unnecessary skilled nursing facility stays and acute inpatient utilization.

To be clear, the use of AI in end-of-life decision-making is intended to augment and support human decision-making, not replace it. The pilot program demonstrated how the technology can improve education and confidence among the hospital team in identifying patients for palliative care referrals. (link)

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People believe in AI for heart health  

According to a new 1,000-person survey from the Cleveland Clinic, 3 out of 5 Americans believe AI will lead to better heart care. Many Americans are taking a positive outlook on AI due to feature improvements they’ve already seen on their wearables and new tools available in the market (ex. CardioSignal)

Half of respondents use at least one type of tech to monitor their health, while 53% said their wearables cause them to exercise more regularly. Clinicians on the other hand are excited about AI’s potential to “help process data for certain studies like echocardiograms, or CT scans, or MRI.” (link)

Tool Box 🧰

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

🔧 Apple Vision Pro for care: Apple launched its Apple Vision Pro headset, which supports image viewing in an augmented reality/virtual reality environment. Researchers have already begun experimenting with use cases like image-guided interventional procedures to see how the tech holds up in the clinical realm. (link)

🔧 Iodine Software to help hospital utilization: Iodine Software rolled out new AI-based software to tackle the complex healthcare challenge of utilization management. Iodine says its new solution, called AwareUM, will help hospitals streamline utilization reviews. (link)

🔧 AI to detect ovarian cancer: Researchers at Georgia Tech just developed a new diagnostic blood test for ovarian cancer using AI and metabolic data that achieved 93% accuracy in detecting the disease. (link)

🤝 CHS leans in on Google AI: Community Health Systems, based in Franklin, TN, moved its clinical data platform to a new system and is now using Google Cloud technologies to introduce new generative AI features throughout its organization. By consolidating its data on the new system, Community Health Systems aims to simplify how its healthcare professionals locate information and grasp the clinical and operational metrics of the organization. (link)

Deal Desk 💸 

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

📈 Cohere Health: a clinical intelligence and prior authorization automation platform raised $50M in additional equity funding. The funding was led by Deerfield Management, with participation from Define Ventures, Flare Capital Partners, Longitude Capital, and Polaris Partners. (link)

📈 Aqemia: a French drug discovery startup that says it leverages physics and AI, raised €30M in Series A expansion funding. Wendel Growth led, and was joined by insiders Eurazeo, Bpifrance, and Elaia. (link)

📈 ArteraAI: a developer of AI tests to personalize therapy for cancer patients, raised $20M from Prosperity7 Ventures, EDBI, Walden Catalyst Ventures, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, and Trium Ventures. (link)

📈 Vital Interaction: a provider of healthcare business intelligence and workflow automation software based in Austin, TX raised $15M in Series A funding led by Next Coast Ventures. (link)

📈 Wisedocs: a platform for indexing, reviewing, and summarizing medical records based in Toronto raised $9.5M in Series A funding. Information Venture Partners led the round and was joined by Thomson Reuters Ventures and ManchesterStory. (link)

📈 Swift Medical: an AI-based wound care platform based in Toronto raised $8M in funding. (link)

📈 CARPL: a platform designed to make health care more accessible and affordable by connecting health care providers with AI applications, raised $6M in seed funding. Stellaris Venture Partners led the round and was joined by angel investors. (link)

✅ Cardinal Health + Specialty Networks: Healthcare product distributor and data analytics services company Cardinal Health has announced a $1.2B cash deal to acquire Specialty Networks, a platform offering supporting group purchasing contracts, population health management, patient engagement, workflow automation and clinical research. Specifically, the deal announcement called out Specialty Networks’ subsidiary PPS Analytics platform, which combines the real-world data extracted from electronic health records and other practice management systems with AI to deliver actionable insights. (link)

✅ Fabric Health + GYANT: Fabric Health, a healthcare experience optimization company, announced it acquired AI chatbot GYANT. Fabric seems to be stitching together an interesting "digital front door" platform partner for health systems. (link)

Other Relevant News 🔍

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

• Study: ambient AI scribes need improvement (link)

• AI use raises healthcare cybersecurity concerns (link)

• Providence CIO discusses creating its own chatGPT (link)

• How AI works - An entirely non-technical explanation of LLMs (link)

• Generative AI top 150 - Report on world’s most used AI tools (link)

• A recap of 6 years of “state of AI” reports (link)

Visuals of the Week 📸

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