Hippocratic AI
Hippocratic AI
Series A funding is a good sign for Hippocratic AI - A safety focused large language model (LLM) for the healthcare industry.
Hello Everyone,
One of my favorite AI startups specifically in Generative AI in healthcare has to be Hippocratic AI.
I wrote about them back in May, 2023:
They recently announced a partnership with NVIDIA to co-develop super low-latency “Empathy Inference.” Empathy inference will help patients to naturally build an even deeper emotional connection with Hippocratic’s voice-enabled AI agents—a vital component of the patient-provider experience.
Do No Harm
Munjal Shah, Hippocratic AI’s co-founder and CEO, emphasizes its safety-centric approach. On March 18th, at Nvidia’s GTC, NVIDIA Healthcare launched Generative AI microservices to advance drug discovery, MedTech and digital health and I was happy to see Hippocratic AI was involved.
Their Series A raised $53 million in funding with a valuation of $500 million.
The round was co-led by Premji Invest and General Catalyst with participation from SV Angel and Memorial Hermann Health System as well as existing investors Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) Bio + Health, Cincinnati Children’s, WellSpan Health, and Universal Health Services (UHS).
Hippocratic has raised $120 million to date, including the $50 milion last may.
Nvidia Connections here are Strong
Munjal Shah, a serial entrepreneur, founded Hippocratic AI along with a group of physicians, hospital administrators, healthcare professionals and artificial intelligence researchers from El Camino Health, Johns Hopkins, Washington University in St. Louis, Stanford, Google, and Nvidia.
Sandesh Patnam, Managing Partner at Premji Invest, praised Hippocratic AI’s safety-first stance, aligning with the Azim Premji Foundation’s ethos of societal value creation. He expressed optimism about their potential to revolutionize healthcare with a secure LLM.
Autonomous Telehealth Nurses?
Importantly Nvidia announced a collaboration with Hippocratic AI recently, in digital nursing. Hippocratic mentions how much cheaper this might be. In the area of one tenth of the cost, where its cheap AI agents that offer medical advice to patients over video calls in real-time. This received some criticism from the press. However I find it very intriguing.
Reducing healthcare costs is crucial as populations age with a lack of nurses and poor doctor to patient ratios in many places. $9 instead of $90 an hour in some cases.
“Voice-based digital agents powered by generative AI can usher in an age of abundance in healthcare, but only if the technology responds to patients as a human would,” said Kimberly Powell, vice president of Healthcare at NVIDIA in a press release recently.
This means Hippocratic AI is swinging big in some areas and has some potential in the Telehealth industry.
Hippocratic AI is hugely ambitious here if it’s seeking to automate some of the tasks that Nurses might do. However the TAM of automation in healthcare is also high, even to alleviate some of the burden on clinicians like nurses. Nurses are dealing with worker shortages, that predate the covid-19 pandemic, which Hippocratic seeks to address.
Nurses may not actually make us much as Hippocratic AI has stated in its marketing material, but I think we get the point. Clinicians and especially physicians and nurses do need help and some AI tools might help in an era of more digital friendly Telehealth interventions.
Hippocratic AI’s LLM is trained on evidence-based content and utilizes a unique “constellation architecture” with multiple models working together to improve accuracy and minimize errors. Additionally, human supervision is built-in when necessary.
Per the company, this platform enables health systems, payors, and other stakeholders to "hire" AI agents capable of completing low-risk, non-diagnostic, patient-facing tasks.
Its product of AI agents is actually fairly pragmatic: This marketplace is part of the company’s vision around how generative AI can provide super staffing and healthcare abundance and equity for the first time in history.
Initial roles include chronic care management, post-discharge follow-up for specific conditions such as congestive heart failure and kidney disease, as well as wellness and social determinants of health surveys, health risk assessments, and pre-operative outreach. However, these agents won’t be allowed to speak with patients unsupervised until phase three of the safety testing is completed.
This is also a profitable pragmatic approach to improving patient-care with AI. I don’t find the media criticism fully justified when seniors in more developing countries are going to be rapidly aging with fewer bodies to take care of them than ever before in human history.
Early Use Cases
AI agents for chronic care management
Post-discharge follow-up
Congestive heart failure management
Kidney disease management
Pre-operative outreach
Can this technology one day take some of the tasks of nursing assistants or medical office assistants? For sure. But that might allow them to focus on more person facing tasks. The point is to reduce healthcare costs that risk spiraling out of control in the next decades.
Hippocratic AI to me seems like solutions built for the real world.
Co-founded by CEO Munjal Shah, alongside a group of physicians, hospital administrators, healthcare professionals, and artificial intelligence researchers from El Camino Health, Johns Hopkins, Washington University in St. Louis, Stanford, Google, and Nvidia, Hippocratic AI is advancing a safe focused Large Language Model (LLM) for healthcare.
Generative AI-powered staffing marketplace
When you think of a company like Teladoc, you wonder why they never invented something like this. Hippocratic AI is truly a pioneer now.
That Nvidia is backing them also just adds credibility.
Hippocratic AI says:
These AI healthcare agents will augment the human staff of various health organizations—from health systems to payors to digital health companies to pharma—to complete complex, patient-facing, yet non-diagnostic tasks over the phone. They will be able to deliver seamless, personalized, and conversational patient interactions, working to mitigate staffing shortages while enhancing access, equity, and patient outcomes.
For a lot of seniors, Telehealth interventions make more sense than phone calls. Especially as the Digital AI agents become more sophisticated and empathetic.
The startup also has a handful of health system investors-- Memorial Hermann Health System, Cincinnati Children’s, WellSpan Health, Universal Health Services (UHS), HonorHealth and OhioHealth. So Hippocratic AI is rooted in the actual industry it’s trying to serve.
Testing, Transparency and Pilots
The company has already completed the first two phases of safety testing, involving over 1000 nurses and 130 physicians who interacted with the AI agents and assessed them on various safety measures. The results, published in a paper titled “Polaris: A Safety-focused LLM Constellation Architecture for Healthcare”, show promising outcomes. For instance, nurses rated the AI’s ability to educate patients about their condition at 89.82%, compared to a human nurse’s average score of 80.64%.
The scope for Hippocratic AI’s products is actually fairly broad.
The series A round was significantly oversubscribed, allowing the company to select lead investors who were patient enough to allow the company to prioritize safety over short-term revenue and profit, according to executives. That they have managed to get $120 million so fast is a credit to their diligence and network.
Hippocratic said it will use the new capital to fund these safety tests and to accelerate further product development, executives said. The discrepancy between their rigorous emphasis on safety and the criticism in the media for “automating” or “undercutting” nurses is truly fascinating to me. Nursing burnout is a real problem and AI agents can help more than they can hinder.
Polaris: A Safety-focused LLM Constellation Architecture for Healthcare
It looks like their paper came out just hours ago (5 hours to be exact):
Polaris
The Hippocratic AI agent was even part of Jensen Huang’s Keynote, can you see the snippet of video here.
In terms of automating routine patient interactions I think their framework has a lot of potential.
According to the company, subjective measures, assessed against human nurses, revealed high levels of comfort and effectiveness in interacting with Hippocratic AI's agents.
On Autopilot?
The staffing marketplace enables health systems, payers, and others to “hire” auto-pilot generative AI-powered agents to conduct low-risk, non-diagnostic, patient-facing services to help address the massive shortage of healthcare nurses, social workers and nutritionists in the U.S. and worldwide.
Do people feel more comfortable interacting with AIs? Sometimes the answer is yes.
Nursing
Social Work
Nutritionist
Does it lessen the repetitive task burden on these professionals? Probably yes.
Generative AI and agents certainly will become a bigger part of our healthcare systems in the decades ahead and Hippocratic AI may contribute something to the field it appears. They believe they have the evidence to prove it.
Their variety of specialist support agents is very impressive! See page 17 of the paper.
Study participants rated the AI agent on par with U.S. licensed nurses on multiple dimensions. And their systems will only get better over time and with more experience. It’s not clear if this could lead to any job losses in medical administration or nursing assistants or other roles, but as Generative AI gets more involved in the healthcare industry of course it could eventually.
It’s incredible to see how far they have come in such a short time, ten months ago here is an interview the CEO did with Bloomberg:
Suffice to say that Hippocratic AI have a lot more to be confident about heading further into 2024.
The healthcare industry as a whole has been more reluctant to adopt the emerging AI trend due to patient safety concerns. Eventually is has to welcome emerging tech to off-set rising Healthcare costs and clinician staffing concerns and automate some of the admin involved. This is really important as Boomers and GenX are retiring and the population pyramids of the world change radically.