Healthcare AI Guy Weekly | 6/11

Our Picks ✨

Highlights if you’ve only got 2 minutes…

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Apple launches AI

Apple just had its super anticipated WWDC 2024 event yesterday. The updates included the company’s new ‘Apple Intelligence’ AI strategy, a partnership with OpenAI, and several other new AI integrations and features coming to devices. The two notable updates as it relates to AI for health/wellness are Apple Intelligence and the new Apple Watch app called “Vitals”.

• Apple Intelligence: 1B+ users just got an AI agent in their pocket. Apple just announced 'Apple Intelligence' that allows Siri to understand icons, widgets, and text on a screen and take actions via apps. You can ask Siri to summarize notifications, texts and emails, meeting notes, voice memos, etc. Essentially, Apple Intelligence will enable Siri to have on-screen awareness so that it can understand and take action with things on your screen. This could be useful for folks trying to schedule and navigate health appointments for example.

• New “Vitals” App: The new Vitals app in watchOS 11 monitors users' overnight health metrics, including heart rate, blood oxygen levels, and respiratory rate. It provides notifications for unusual readings and offers a comprehensive view of trends over time. This app aims to enhance health awareness by alerting users to potential issues early and encouraging proactive health management. This is essentially what WHOOP provides users

The next big step for Apple is finally here, although it can’t train its own foundation model and needs to partner with OpenAI to catch up… Nonetheless, given Apple’s scale, this will tie billions of users closer to artificial intelligence, or “apple intelligence” as they like to call it. (link)

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Sword Health raises $130M, rolls out new AI tech

Sword Health, the digital physical therapy platform, just raised a $30M primary and a $130M secondary funding round, bringing its valuation to $3B. That's a 50% increase from its November 2021 Series D valuation… Sword grew revenue 3x in the past year and expects to be profitable before 2025, and said it didn’t need any financial help to get there. Aside from the valuation boost, Sword wanted to give its employees some long-awaited liquidity. That’s why $100M of the funding was secondary (shares from employees) and the other $30M is reportedly locked away “generating nice interest.”

More importantly, Sword is making a bigger push into AI and unveiled Phoenix, a conversational AI physical therapist capable of delivering clinical analysis independently before review from a licensed professional.

• As patients move through the exercises, Phoenix factors in medical history and verbal feedback to deliver optimal sessions within the human clinician’s pre-set parameters.

• It then summarizes the performance data to identify trends and surface actionable insights, making it easier for clinicians to optimize patient progress

Sword Health seems to be in top shape and proving that virtual MSK solutions can be an effective alternative to in-person care — now boosted by AI! (link)(video)

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AI predicts nearly 1M new antibiotics

Researchers from MIT and McMaster University just published a new study detailing the use of AI to predict close to 1M new antibiotics hidden within tiny microbes all over the world, uncovering new potential treatments against bacteria and superbugs. Here are the main highlights:

• Researchers used AI to analyze publicly available data on over 100,000 different genomes and meta-genomes.

• The AI then predicted which parts of the microbial genomes could potentially produce antibiotic compounds, generating a list of nearly one million candidates.

• 100 of the AI-predicted drug candidates were tested in the lab, with 79 of them being a potential antibiotic.

• The paper’s author Cesar de la Fuente said the findings are “the largest antibiotic discovery ever”, accelerating the process from years to just hours.

As the world faces growing threats from antibiotic-resistant bacteria, AI’s ability to unlock millions of new potential treatments could be a lifeline toward staying ahead in the race to outsmart superbugs responsible for millions of deaths every year. (link)

Tools & Partnerships 🔧

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

TOOLS

• UW Health AI pilot generates 3,000 patient messages: Madison, Wis.-based UW Health's has a collaboration with Microsoft and Epic aimed at facilitating the drafting of physician messages to patients. The AI is used to draft responses to patient inquiries and messages within MyChart, UW Health's patient portal. Subsequently, clinical team members, including nurses, review and edit these draft messages for accuracy, tone and relevance before sending them to patients. (link)

• Baptist Health to open autonomous pharmacy: Baptist Health is slated to open one of the nation’s first autonomous pharmacy center. The high-tech central pharmacy services center features a robotics-assisted warehouse capable of filling up to 14,000 prescriptions daily. (link)

• AI tool Apricot aims to boost home health care: Oklahoma-based company, Accentra Home Health and Hospice, has launched a startup called Apricot which uses generative AI to drastically reduce documentation time for home health nurses by over 85%. The AI, which for months was used exclusively within Accentra, was made available to other providers following positive feedback about its time-saving benefits. (link)

• LIVEMED unveils AI communication tool: Tech-enabled physician services company LIVEMED Telehealth unveiled its Virtualis clinical communication solution to help providers filter through the noise in their messages. Virtualis leverages AI to prioritize messages based on medical urgency, ensuring critical information can be acted upon swiftly. (link)

PARTNERSHIPS

• Providence + Microsoft: Microsoft developed a foundation model for pathology, called GigaPath, in partnership with Providence and the University of Washington. GigaPath, the first whole-slide foundation model for digital pathology that has been pre-trained with real-world data. (link)

• Epic + AWS: Epic and AWS continue to expand their partnership. AWS increased the size of its global references per second for Epic on AWS customers in February to 75 million, and modernized APIs. Organizations using Epic’s Chronicles Operational Database in single server mode saw an increase of up to 47.3 million global references per second. (link)

• AvaSure + CLEW: AvaSure is teaming up with clinical surveillance company CLEW to drive early detection of critical care patient deterioration and ensure timely interventions can prevent complications from escalating. AvaSure’s open Virtual Care Ecosystem allows partners to leverage its audio/visual infrastructure to quickly deploy new solutions, such as CLEW’s AI predictive analytics that anticipate deterioration based on real-time patient physiology. (link)

Deal Desk 💸 

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

FUNDING

• Sword Health, an AI-powered virtual physical therapy startup, has raised $30M and let employees sell $100M worth of equity to new and existing investors, including Khosla Ventures. (link)

• Eko Health, a CA-based developer of digital stethoscopes and AI for heart and lung disease detection, raised $41M in Series D funding from ARTIS Ventures, Highland Capital Partners, NTTVC, and Questa Capital. (link)

• Anterior, (formerly Co: helm), a company that uses AI to expedite health insurance approval for medical procedures, has raised a $20M Series A round led by NEA. Sequoia, Neo, and a host of angel investors also participated. (link)

• Sware, a provider of a software validation solution for life sciences companies, raised $6M in Series B funding. The round was led by First Analysis, which joins a syndicate of existing investors that includes LRVHealth, New Stack Ventures and Insight Partners. (link)

• Eyebot, a Boston-based developer of automated, self-serve vision testing terminals, raised $6M in seed funding. AlleyCorp and Ubiquity Ventures led the round and were joined by Humba Ventures, Ravelin, Spacecadet, and existing investors. (link)

  

IPO

• Waystar, healthcare payment software maker Waystar debuted on the public market Friday, raising $967.5M, and marking the biggest health tech IPO since 2022. In May, Waystar announced it was working with Google Cloud to use generative AI technology for revenue cycle capabilities. (link)

• Tempus AI, an AI precision-medicine startup filed an updated prospectus for its long-awaited IPO, and will be looking to raise $400M instead of $100M previously reported. Since 2015, Tempus has reportedly built the world’s largest library of clinical and molecular data, as well as an operating system that allows providers and life sciences orgs to surface insights from the data. (link)

Other Relevant News 🔍

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

• Consumers optimistic about genAI in healthcare but have concerns (link)

• “Google for Startups AI Academy” will offer participants hands-on training from AI experts in areas like healthcare (link)

• Options for AI reimbursement (link)

• GenAI falls short for chest x-rays (link)

• AI conversational chat market map (link)

PS: Someone tweeted out a video of what it looks like to refer a friend to this newsletter. This could be you! All you have to do is… share this link

Visuals of the Week 📸

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