Healthcare AI Guy Weekly Newsletter | 3/26

Our Picks ✨

Highlights if you’ve only got 2 minutes…

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Neaurlink patient plays chess with his mind

Neuralink, Elon Musk’s brain-computer interface company, just live-streamed a video on X showing the first human patient to receive an implant (who is paralyzed from the shoulders down) playing a chess game using his brain. Neuralink’s technology interprets brain activity to identify intended movements and translate them into commands. Here are the key details from this ground-breaking update:

• This development comes after receiving FDA approval for the trial.

• 29-year-old Noland Arbaugh received the implant in January and reported no cognitive impairments, saying the surgery was "super easy."

• Using the implant, he played online chess and the video game ‘Civilization VI’ for 8 hours straight.

• Elon Musk also revealed that “Blindsight is the next product after Telepathy, working to restore vision of people who were born blind.

• Musk further stated that Tesla’s Optimus could eventually be controlled as prosthetics via a Neuralink brain chip to replace human limbs.

What a time to be alive. Neuralink's ambitions to help restore autonomy to those with unmet medical needs are rapidly progressing from science fiction to medical reality. The near-term impact this can have on individuals like Noland and their caretakers is truly astonishing, making one wonder what further human potential could be unlocked with a generalized brain interface. (link)

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Epic’s bet on AI

Epic is betting that generative artificial intelligence will be the future of health care. Epic is developing over 60 applications that use AI, including a billing chatbot and tools to create denial and appeal letters and emergency department discharges.

As we wrote about before, Epic’s dominance in the hospital industry could give it an advantage in the generative AI market. Health systems are more likely to invest in a company they’ve already spent tens – to hundreds – of millions on for their EHRs. Houston Methodist is among the first to test Epic's AI-backed coding app that scans clinician notes. Epic utilizes GPT-4 technology from OpenAI for its AI applications and also has industry partnerships with clinical documentation company, Nuance.

Given Epic’s market presence, they will play a key role in accelerating the use of AI in healthcare and it looks like Epic and CEO Judy Faulkner are very much bought in. (link)

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Hippocratic AI building AI nurses

Hippocratic AI raised $53M last week in a Series A funding round bringing its total raised to $120M and valuation to $500M. Aside from the funding announcement, Hippocratic AI is developing a staffing marketplace where payors, health systems, and other stakeholders can “hire” generative AI agents to complete low-risk, non-diagnostic, and patient-facing tasks. Here are the key details on the healthcare AI agents:

• NVIDIA is working with Hippocratic to develop these agents.

• Initial roles for the AI agents include chronic care management, post-discharge follow-up for specific conditions (congestive heart failure, kidney disease), as well as SDOH surveys, health risk assessments, and pre-operative outreach.

• Hippocratic is comparing its AI agent’s $9/hr costs to a human nurse’s $90/hr salary.

• Hippocratic claims its AI nurses outperform human nurses regarding bedside manner, education, and narrowly miss on satisfaction, according to a survey.

• The company’s technology is being tested by over 40 healthcare providers around the country.

Hippocratic states on its website that “With Generative AI, the incremental cost of healthcare access and interventions is trending to zero,” and “LLMs are the only scalable way to close this gap,” referring to the difference in healthcare supply and demand. Let’s see if Hippocratic and its elite roster of VCs can pull this off. (link)

Tools & Partnerships 🔧

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

TOOLS

• AI identifies breast cancer missed by humans: Mia, an AI tool—developed by the UK’s National Health Service—can identify signs of breast cancer, potentially improving cancer diagnosis rates by 12%. Alongside clinicians, Mia analyzed over 10,000 mammograms and identified all those with breast cancer symptoms, including 11 that human doctors failed to spot. Mia also reduces results waiting time from 14 days down to 3. (link)

• AI tool predicts kidney failure 6x faster than humans: AI tool predicts kidney failure six times faster than human analysts, providing accurate and super-fast analysis of total kidney volume, potentially revolutionizing kidney clinics worldwide. (link)

• Google to launch Fitbit AI chatbot: Fitbit is integrating AI features in collaboration with Google Research, developing a Personal Health LLM to provide users with personalized coaching and insights on biometric data. (link)

• First AI psychedelic seeking FDA approval: The first psychedelic drug selected by AI for its promise to precisely target mental illness could secure FDA approval for clinical trials within the next few weeks. Mindstate Design Labs trained its AI on over 70,000 trip reports pulled from online forums, books, and clinical trials before the model landed on 5-MeO-MiPT (AKA moxy) as the best candidate for targeting conditions like depression or anxiety. (link)

PARTNERSHIPS

• Nvidia Partnerships (link)

  • Abridge: Abridge, AI clinical documentation startup, collaborating with Nvidia for compute resources, foundation models and expertise in efficiently deploying AI systems.

  • Microsoft: Tech giant Microsoft and Nvidia to advance the use of generative AI, the cloud and accelerated computing to healthcare and life sciences organizations.

  • GE HealthCare: Healthcare tech company GE HealthCare is teaming up with Nvidia to bring AI to ultrasound.

  • Hippocratic AI: Startup Hippocratic AI and Nvidia to to develop AI healthcare agents.

  • Johnson & Johnson: Johnson & Johnson’s MedTech unit is collaborating with Nvidia to incorporate AI into surgical applications.

• Regard + Banner Health: Regard, an AI tool that helps clinicians diagnose conditions, is partnering with Banner Health to roll out Regard’s tool in a phased approach to all 33 acute-care hospitals in its system across six states in 2024. (link)

• Meditech + Microsoft’s Nuance: Nuance Communications, part of Microsoft, announced that its DAX Copilot automates clinical documentation during patient appointments in Meditech Expanse EHR. (link)

• Arcadia + Vim: Health data platform Arcadia is partnering with Vim, point-of-care connection platform, to streamline its ability to deliver insights to payors and providers within their existing workflows. (link)

Deal Desk 💸 

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

FUNDING

• Carlsmed, a CA-based AI-enabled personalized surgery company, raised $52.5M in Series C funding. B Capital and U.S. Venture Partners led the round and were joined by The Vertical Group. (link)

• PocketHealth, a Toronto-based medical image exchange platform for patients and health care providers, raised $33M in Series B funding from Round13 Capital, Deloitte Ventures, Samsung Next, Questa Capital, and Radical Ventures. (link)

• Ultrahuman, a Bangalore, India-based developer of wearable health monitoring technology, raised $25M in Series B funding from Blume Ventures, Steadview Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, Alpha Wave, and Deepinder Goyal. (link)

• Stanhope AI, a London-based developer of AI models designed to make decisions without previous training by providing them with neuroscience data, raised $2.9M in seed funding. The UCL Technology Fund led the round and was joined by Creator Fund, MMC Ventures, Moonfire Ventures, Rockmount Capital, and angel investors. (link)

MERGERS & ACQUISITIONS

• Journey + Felt, Employee-focused mental health company Journey acquired AI-driven emotional wellness platform Felt (fka Mine’d). (link)

Other Relevant News 🔍

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

• Inside Mayo Clinic's $5B 'digitized' hospital (link)

• EHR vendors, hospitals, tech developers grappling with how to govern AI (link)

• Tech's blind spot: ignoring the aging revolution​ (link)

• Physicians billing for emails due to workload (link)

• The dawn of ChatGPT in medicine (link) 

• What AI's new 'memory' means for healthcare (link)

• NVIDIA released 8 free courses on AI (link)

Visuals of the Week 📸

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