Healthcare AI Guy Weekly Newsletter | 4/2

Our Picks ✨

Highlights if you’ve only got 2 minutes…

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Promising areas for AI in healthcare

A recent substack post by Dr. Ambar Bhattacharyya did a great job highlighting nascent areas of opportunity for AI to improve the patient journey in hospitals. The report reimagines the care delivery journey with a ‘jobs-to-be-done’ approach to generative AI, identifying processes with the most potential across pre-hospital tasks, in-hospital tasks, and post-hospital tasks.

One example highlighted is patient no-shows. Before the pandemic, medical practices saw a 40% increase in median patient no-show rates, costing the medical system an estimated $150 billion annually. This disproportionately affects lower-income patients. The report argues a generative AI agent personalized to a high-risk patient's health data and social situation could help them navigate resources and the complex healthcare system to better address their social determinants of health and access to care.

Overall, the report does a great job summarizing the areas with the most to gain, while providing a useful framework for thinking about genAI use cases in relation to their complexity and ease of adoption — all displayed nicely in the chart below. (link)

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AI companions are the new normal

In this new era, AI companions are becoming a new normal. Companion mobile apps have unusually high engagement and the retention of these apps is truly insane. The character ai app sees nearly 300 sessions per user per month!

We’ve covered before how AI and companion bots such as Replika have proven to be a true ally in mental health — serving as a loyal friend, therapist, or "personal mirror," — helping deliver real results and improved outcomes.

We are just getting started in the companion space too. Just this week, Hume AI, a conversational AI that claims to be properly ‘emotionally intelligent’ just raised $50M in Series B funding. The demo was getting a lot of buzz online. One of the investors in Hume was Northwell Health, proving that health systems also believe in the ability of this technology to help in care delivery. These products can scale infinitely and fill a real gap and given the technology itself is only getting better and better, AI companions are surely here to stay. (link)

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Enterprise AI usage, budgets surging

A new report from leading VC Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) surveyed Fortune 500 and top enterprise leaders on AI adoption, finding that both attitudes and investments have shifted dramatically in the past six months. The key points from the report are below:

• Enterprise spending on LLMs averaged $7M in 2023, with 2-5x budget increases planned for 2024.

• In one case, an enterprise justified an 8x AI budget increase after seeing ~90% cost savings.

• While 80-90% utilized closed source models in 2023, 46% of leaders now prefer open source.

• Internal uses (coding assistants, text summarization) are moving faster than external apps (chatbots) as enterprises navigate hallucinations and public perception.

An inflection point seems to be coming for enterprise AI — with massive budget increases and expanding use cases set to drive explosive growth. While consumer-focused AI garners all the hype, enterprise-tailored solutions in healthcare and other industries are entering their growth phase. (link)

Tools & Partnerships 🔧

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

TOOLS

• AI robotic system can help feed those in need: A robotic system that enables safe and successful feeding for people with severe mobility limitations was nominated for best paper at this year’s Human-Robot Interaction conference. (link)

  

• Nabla releases ‘Magic Edit’ feature: Nabla rolled out a new ‘Magic Edit’ feature on Nabla Copilot that allows providers to quickly customize their notes to match their preferences. The AI-driven edit function streamlines the documentation process by letting providers regenerate notes by typing custom directions or selecting from a menu of preset options instead of manually editing them. (link)

• AI to accelerate drug development: Insilico Medicine published a new study on AI’s ability to accelerate drug development, with its experimental drug becoming the first AI-developed drug to reach phase 2 clinical trials. (link)

PARTNERSHIPS

• Sutter Health + Abrige: Sutter Health announced it will launch Abridge’s AI medical documentation platform in early April with various doctors, nurse practitioners and physician assistants from both primary and specialty care. (link)

• Stanford Health + Microsoft’s Nuance: Stanford Health Care is expanding DAX Copilot from Microsoft’s Nuance across the organization to thousands of physicians to lighten their ‘cognitive load.’ (link)

• Curai Health + Tufts: Curai Health, an AI-enabled virtual primary care startup, announced its partnership with Tufts Medicine. The partnership will integrate Curai Health’s services into the Tufts patient portal and provide patients across Massachusetts and New Hampshire access to virtual care via Tufts. (link)

Deal Desk 💸 

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

FUNDING

• Profluent, a Berkeley, CA-based developer of AI models and data sets designed for biomedicine applications, raised $35M in funding. Spark Capital led the round and was joined by existing investors Insight Partners and Air Street Capital and angel investors. (link)

• Hume AI, a NYC-based startup and research lab building AI optimized for human well-being, raised $50M in Series B funding. The round was led by EQT Ventures, with participation from Union Square Ventures, Nat Friedman & Daniel Gross, Metaplanet, Northwell Holdings, Comcast Ventures, and LG Technology Ventures. (link)

• Tennr, an NYC-based platform designed to automate referral processing, payment posting, claims auditing, medical record management, and more for the healthcare industry, raised $18M in Series A funding. a16z led the round and was joined by Foundation Capital and The New Normal Fund. (link)

MERGERS & ACQUISITIONS

• Syllable+ Actium, Process automation company Syllable acquired Actium Health, whose AI-powered platform combs through EHR data to predict patients’ likelihood of needing specific medical services, including care gaps and risk for progression. (link)

Other Relevant News 🔍

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

• The Economist: AIs will make health care safer and better (link)

• AMA wants Congress to address AI medical malpractice concerns (link)

• Questions raised about AI’s potential to transform healthcare (link)

• AI garnered attention across sessions of SXSW conference (link)

• Opinion: Integration of AI can transform medical claims processing (link)

• Humana files motion to dismiss class action lawsuit over AI claims (link)

• OpenAI & Microsoft are planning a $100B supercomputer for AI (link)

• Talks from Sequoia’s AI Ascent 2024 (link)

Visuals of the Week 📸

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