Hippocratic AI Co-Founder Munjal Shah on the potential of healthcare LLMs.

Artificial Intelligence

Hippocratic Emerges to Bring LLMs to Healthcare

Although we touched on Hippocratic AI’s emergence from stealth last week, the startup struck all the right chords with its talk of generative AI and large language models so we’re doing a deeper dive to unpack the hype. 

Hippocratic AI debuted with $50M from a massive seed round co-led by the VC power duo of General Catalyst and a16z, giving the company a “triple-digit millions” valuation right out of the gate.

• The company’s mission is to transform healthcare through the power of “safety-focused” generative AI, but potential use cases are still in the works, with early ideas revolving around consumer-facing tasks like diet planning and medication reminders.

• The founders even told STAT that their goals for the funding are only exploratory: developing a LLM that’s fine-tuned for healthcare, heavily testing it against knowledge benchmarks, then measuring its bedside manner. 

If including Hippocratic in the name wasn’t enough of a hint, pressure-testing the model’s accuracy is in the company’s DNA, and it isn’t planning on rushing into clinical care.

• Accuracy is ensured through reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) performed by medical professionals – a strategy that’s apparently outperforming GPT-4 on 105 of 114 healthcare certifications. [Comparison Chart]

• As for bedside manner, Hippocratic is planning on “detecting tone” and “communicating empathy” better than rival models, and developed its own benchmark for behaviors such as “taking a personal interest in a patient’s life.”

The Takeaway

Healthcare hasn’t always been kind to AI-first businesses, with IBM having to let go of its Watson Health division and Babylon recently meeting the end of its road as a publicly traded company. That said, both of those examples paddled too early to catch the current generative AI wave with its mile-long barrel of new tech and excitement. It’s too early to tell whether Hippocratic will buck the trend, but if there was ever a moment to try it – this is it.

Save Time & Minimize Risk with connectRN

connectRN takes the work out of hiring at scale. connectRN’s W2 staffing solution protects you and your business from liability. Plus, their credentialing team handles everything from state licensure to background checks, and you’ll have access to it all via their user-friendly platform. Learn more.

Upgrade Your Prescribing Workflows

Whether you’re a care delivery organization or building products that have prescribers, there’s no need to build your prescribing workflow from scratch. Find out how connecting your prescribers to clinical decision support powered by real-time drug data can help provide the patient-centered insights needed for medication success.

Creating an Exceptional Engagement Experience

With a surge in experience‑oriented disruptors entering the healthcare industry, patient engagement is becoming a crucial competitive differentiator. Get your copy of Nuance’s guide to  delivering intelligent interactions and a better experience at every touchpoint.

The Wire

• Cyber Attack “Regional Disaster”: A study in JAMA Network Open illustrated how hospital cyber attacks can quickly turn into “regional disasters.” After a four-hospital system in San Diego had its EHR and imaging tech knocked out by a monthlong malware attack, two nearby but unaffected EDs saw a spike in their average daily patient count (up 15%), EMS arrivals (up 17%), and patients leaving without being seen (up 96%) – causing the researchers to call for providers to implement “coordinated regional surge planning similar to that conducted for natural disasters.”

• IMO Acquires Melax: Clinical terminology vendor Intelligent Medical Objects announced its first acquisition by picking up natural language processing company Melax Technologies in an effort to more precisely define patient cohorts and phenotypes. For the inside scoop look no further than this highly-detailed depiction from IMO’s former Chief Strategy Officer Dale Sanders. “Every meaningful analytics or AI use case in healthcare and clinical research starts at the grain and precision of the patient type.”

• Synapse + CompuGroup Medical: Medication success platform Synapse Medicine is teaming up with provider software company CompuGroup Medical to accelerate innovation in prescribing and reduce administrative burden for physicians. The collaboration will allow doctors to access natural language processing tools like Synapse Copilot within their practice management software, enabling personalized recommendations based on patients’ unique clinical profile while cutting down on time-consuming tasks like data entry and information searching.

• Lifeforce Series A: Health optimization startup Lifeforce closed $12M in Series A funding, a task that probably wasn’t too difficult with a little help from co-founders Tony Robbins (the motivational speaker) and Serena Williams (the tennis legend). Lifeforce members undergo in-home blood draws performed by phlebotomists every three months, then have a wide range of physical and psychological biomarkers analyzed so that they can receive personalized recommendations for lifestyle adjustments and supplements via a telehealth consultation with a physician.

• Women’s Post-Heart Attack Risks: A new study from last week’s ESC Heart Failure 2023 conference highlighted women’s greater cardiovascular risks following a heart attack. Analysis of 884 patients who were admitted for heart attacks and treated with percutaneous coronary intervention (non-surgical procedure to relieve blockage of coronary artery) within 48 hours of symptom onset found that women were far more likely to die within the following 30 days (11.8% vs. 4.6%) and five years (32.1% vs. 16.9%), while women also had much higher rates of major adverse cardiovascular events at 5 years (34.2% vs. 19.8%).

• Atlantic Health Partners With NeuroFlow: It’s the second health system partnership in as many weeks for NeuroFlow after launching a collaborative care model at New Jersey’s Atlantic Health System to help its behavioral health providers track, assess, and connect with patients between visits. The partnership will initially focus on migrating Atlantic’s workflow to NeuroFlow’s caseload management tool, before launching for adult behavioral health patients in June and younger patients in the following months.

• Epic Keeps Being Epic: Epic just keeps on doing what Epic does, with KLAS Research’s latest EHR market share report showing that the healthcare giant added 83 new acute care hospitals (+14k beds) between 2021 and 2022. The only other vendor to add hospitals was Oracle Health / Cerner (+22), although nearly all of those additions were facilities with fewer than 200 beds, and the loss of several large hospitals resulted in Oracle losing the most beds of anyone included in the report (-4,658 beds).

• Oatmeal Partners With Stigler: Stigler Health & Wellness Center – the largest rural Community Health Center in Oklahoma – is partnering with Oatmeal Health to help preventatively screen its patients for lung cancer through an interesting new model. Oatmeal identifies eligible patients and facilitates local CT scanner logistics without FQHC’s shouldering the burden or cost, then leverages a virtual nodule clinic model and supplemental AI image evaluation to ensure proper care. This allows the care to be covered by improvements in the FQHC’s HEDIS scores / quality measures.

• Zocdoc Adds Urgent Care: Healthcare booking marketplace Zocdoc announced its expansion to urgent care, already allowing patients to instantly book appointments with urgent care facilities across 22 states and hundreds of locations. Urgent care joins over 200 virtual and in-person specialties on the Zocdoc marketplace, the most popular of which include PCPs, dentists, OB-GYNs, dermatologists, and psychiatrists.

• Patient Portal Preferences: Three-quarters of people age 50-80 now use at least one patient portal (up from 51% five years ago), but those in low income households or with poor physical health are less likely to say they’re comfortable with the tech, according to a University of Michigan survey. Preferences lean heavily toward using portals for getting test results (79%) and updating contact info (65%), but phone calls are still the favorite modality for requesting referrals and scheduling appointments. 

• Hello Heart for Menopausal Women: Cardiovascular digital therapeutic company Hello Heart announced the addition of a new feature designed to provide menopausal women with the tools and information necessary for managing their heart health. The new feature combines real-time health data, education on the relationship between menopause and heart risk, and encouragement to advocate for proper care.

Patient-Centered Design for Diabetes Care

Glooko’s recently overhauled Mobile App makes it easier than ever for diabetes patients to organize, log, visualize, and share their data. Head over to this conversation with Glooko’s product and design team for a behind-the-scenes look at how patient-centered design is improving diabetes outcomes.

Medallion Unites Family Care Center’s Credentialing Process

As Family Care Center set out to expand its behavioral health services, it needed a scalable provider credentialing solution so that its staff could keep focusing on patient care. Find out how Medallion’s CAQH-integrated platform helped Family Care Center onboard its providers faster by letting them complete their applications in two days instead of two weeks.

Successful RPM Through End-to-End Support

From needs assessments and program deployment to security enhancements and call center monitoring, Clear Arch Health offers fully customizable support services to help you get the most from your RPM solution.