Healthcare AI Guy Weekly Newsletter | 9/26

Our Picks ✨

Highlights if you’ve only got 2 minutes…

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Sequoia Capital: Bringing generative AI to healthcare

Sequoia, one of the world’s leading VCs, is bullish on AI in healthcare. Stating that of the $4T in annual US healthcare spend, $300B of that is administrative opex, mostly in repetitive, labor-intensive processes. Generative AI is especially well suited to attack the labor costs of this services-heavy industry. They brought together a landscape highlighting companies they are tracking across front and back office operations that are tackling one of six broad categories in the care process — patient engagement, documentation, care decision-making, prior auth, coding, and revenue cycle management. (link)

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Commercializing AI in healthcare: The jobs to be done

a16z released another solid piece on the most viable use cases for AI in healthcare. AI has numerous opportunities in enterprise healthcare, particularly in tasks that involve complex data and labor-intensive processes. They classify opportunities for AI in healthcare based on task complexity, cost of mistakes, and whether they are clinical or non-clinical, and consumer or professional-facing. Criteria for determining viable AI opportunities in healthcare include areas with high labor costs, potential for significant performance improvement, low adoption of software, well-understood regulatory risks, and established revenue rails. We, along with a16z, remain firm believers that AI can help improve growing labor shortages, increasing burnout, and ballooning costs. (link)

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‘Big Pharma’ makes big bet on AI in healthcare

A recent report by Reuters shows Global pharmaceutical companies are looking to AI to expedite clinical trials and drastically reduce the drug development timeline. Highlights from the report:

• Companies like Amgen, Bayer, and Novartis are using AI to identify potential trial participants, significantly reducing recruitment time

• Bayer utilized AI to decrease the participant count in a crucial trial, linking mid-stage trial data with real-world data to evaluate long-term risks

• The FDA reported around 300 AI-incorporated healthcare applications from 2016 through 2022, with 90% of these coming in the last two years

• While developments are largely positive, the reliability of the data used in training AI is concerning, as only ~25% of health data is publicly accessible for research

Using AI to transform clinical trials, enabling quicker and more cost-effective delivery of lifesaving drugs to the market is clearly a booming trend. Zuck also wants in on that action, as the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, is set to develop an AI-driven computing system specifically designed for life sciences research. AI in life sciences and drug discovery is poised to be profound. (link)

Miscellaneous 🔍

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

• TIME: How the AI revolution will reshape the world (link)

• Musk’s Neuralink nears human trials (link)

• Oracle joins other HCIT companies offering AI tools (link)

• UK health system using AI tools to help screen for mental health conditions (link)

• Google Health Chief Clinical Officer: AI won’t replace physicians (link)

• Ochsner Health testing AI draft responses from workers to patients (link)

• Healthcare adoption of AI to help with EHR raises privacy concerns (link)

• Opinion: Digital tools, AI can improve healthcare (link)

• Opinion: AI can accelerate progress into human biology (link)

• Duke Health focused on the development of ‘trustworthy’ AI (link)

• Amazon agrees to invest up to $4B into Anthropic (link)

• ChatGPT goes multi-modal (link)

• OpenAI introduces DALL-E 3, October release (link)

• 40 AI founders discuss current AI tech (youtube)

• Unicorn market cap distribution 2023 (link)

Deal Desk 💸 

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

📈 CMR Surgical: a developer of surgical robotics based in the UK raised $165m from insiders SoftBank, Ally Bridge Group, Cambridge Innovation Capital, Escala Capital, LGT, Lightrock, RPMI Railpen, Tencent and Watrium. (link)

📈 Writer: an AI platform for enterprises raised $100M in Series B funding. ICONIQ Growth led with participation from WndrCo, Balderton Capital and Insight Partners, Aspect Ventures, and Writer customers Accenture and Vanguard. UHC is a customer. (link)

📈 Corti: an AI assistant for health care clinicians based in Copenhagen, DK raised $60M in Series B funding. Prosus Ventures and Atomico co-led, and were joined by Eurazeo, EIFO, and Chr. Augustinus Fabrikker. (link)

📈 Vivante Health: a digital medicine startup focused on gut health with AI-driven personalized care plans based in Houston, TX, raised $31m in Series B funding. Mercato Partners led, and was joined by Health Catalyst, Intermountain Ventures, SemperVirens, 7wireVentures, Human Capital and Distributed Ventures. (link)

📈 Diligent Robotics: a developer of robotic automation for health care based in Austin, TX raised $25 million. Canaan Partners led and was joined by True Ventures, DNX Ventures, Next Coast Venture and Northwestern Medicine Innovation. (link)

📈 JURA Bio: a biotech using ML and synthetic biology to develop new therapeutics based in Boston, MA raised $16.1M in funding. (link)

📈 Briya: a patient data exchange platform based in Israel, raised $11.5m in Series A funding. Team8 led, and was joined by Insight Partners, Amiti Ventures and Innocare Health Investments and the George Kaiser Family Foundation. (link)

📈 Medeloop: a health data platform based in Palo Alto, CA raised $8m in seed funding. General Catalyst led and was joined by Maven Ventures, Ovo Fund, NV Investments, Ken and Linda Grais. (link)

📈 Awell: a provider of clinical task automation solutions based in Belgium, raised $5m in seed funding led by Octopus Ventures. (link)

📈 Simmunome: an AI software solution provider for clinical trials based in Montreal raised $2M. (link)

Tool Box 🧰

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

🔧 Google + Department of Defense: Google has teamed up with the Department of Defense to build an AI-powered microscope. The AR Microscope overlays cancer detections onto the viewfinder to assist pathologists. (link)

🔧 Meditech + Suki: EHR vendor Meditech is adding ambient listening and generative AI to its EHR software. Meditech is teaming up with Suki to integrate its Suki Assistant into Meditech Expanse. (link)

🔧 Arcadia: Data analytics company, Arcadia, debuted its own AI assistant geared toward improving care team efficiency. The assistant combs through longitudinal patient records curated within Arcadia’s data platform to cut down on the time required for tasks like risk factor documentation or utilization reporting. (link)

🔧 Google DeepMind: Google DeepMind has developed an AI—AlphaMissense—that predicts whether genetic mutations are harmful or benign by focusing on missense mutations in DNA. (link)

🔧 Daily: AI-powered clinical notes API for telehealth. (link)

AI Images of the Week 📸

Funny memes and pics from around the web…