“A consumer engagement solution is worth a trillion dollars for our organization,” a health plan executive told me one day. It was obviously a little dramatic with the size of that number, but it’s been a common thread in strategic dialogue across all of health care for a long time — that much of the high cost, waste, and poor clinical outcome that our health care system suffers from is people not engaging with it. Or the opposite, which is the inability of healthcare organizations to engage, broadly and cost-effectively, with their patients and members.
And it’s not just consumer engagement that needs to be resolved – our country’s severe clinical burnout problem, combined with overall high rates of overstaffing, is causing health care organizations to falter in delivering their essential services. One study shows that the average hospital has turned 100.5% of its workforce in the past 5 years!
In this context, when it comes to generative AI, healthcare is an industry that we see as having the greatest potential for tangible and measurable impact. Filling the gap in the shortage of millions of healthcare workers in the next several years, while trying to increase leverage for those already in the workforce, requires much more than traditional paths of training or importing more human labor. We are excited to support the Hippocratic AI Organization as they apply generative AI to implement this set of opportunities.
Imagine a world in which every patient, provider, and administrative staff could interact with an instantly available, fully contextually aware, fully capable, engaging conversationalist to help each individual choose the right path or better perform their job (a form of “perpetual triage,” as we have described in the past). . Imagine that the marginal cost of engaging a patient with sympathetic phone calls was in the order of $0.10 an hour, as opposed to the $50+ it might cost today. The nature of generative AI—conversational, scalable, and accessible to non-technical users—has the potential to solve the shortcomings of previous generations of rule-based chatbots and other products in turning these concepts into reality.
But the applications of AI in healthcare also pose among the highest risks of any industry. AI skeptics might point to the lack of focus on responsibility, safety, and regulatory compliance that many companies in the field have shown. Not to mention the challenge of assembling a multidisciplinary team with deep experience in LLM development, healthcare delivery, and healthcare management to build AI products that actually work.
The Hippocratic name of the AI alone exemplifies the spirit of safety first (referring to the Hippocratic Oath doctors are bound by, the basic principles of which are to “do no harm” to patients and keep patient medical information confidential). They have built a unique framework to integrate a professional degree certification, RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback) by a group of healthcare professionals, and a “bedside style” MSc in managing non-diagnostic language and patient conversation, recognizing that not enough Pass medical board testing to ensure that the model is ready for deployment in a real-world environment.
We’ve known the CEO, Manjal Shah, since he invested in his latest company in 2017 (which was his third, having previously sold an AI company to Google), and so we know he’s gained unique secrets on how to build a company at the intersection of AI and healthcare. . He recently ran a healthcare brokerage firm that included a nationwide call center that made personalized recommendations for seniors based on their individual claims history. There, he led Operational Pains to expand an empathetic and effective consumer engagement platform in the structured healthcare context. We believe these competencies give him and his founding team (made up of individuals with experience in clinical development and an MBA and healthcare operations) an edge in understanding what it takes to bring high-impact, responsible, and safe AI products to market, and considering that it’s an honor to endorse him again. .
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