Google Chief Health Officer Karen DeSalvo

Artificial Intelligence

Hippocratic Raises $53M, Showcases AI Staff Marketplace

Less than a year after emerging from stealth with little more than a vague mission to transform healthcare through the power of “safety-focused” generative AI, Hippocratic AI took the stage at NVIDIA’s GTC conference to announce the close of its $53M Series A round.

When Hippocratic debuted last May, it hadn’t yet decided on its first use case, despite closing more seed funding than any company we’d ever covered ($50M). 

• In July, it raised an additional $15M and partnered with 10 healthcare providers for model evaluation, including Cincinnati Children’s, HonorHealth, and SonderMind.

• Now, Hippocratic found its use case, as well as a $500M valuation.

The first product Hippocratic is rolling out for phase 3 safety testing: a staffing marketplace where healthcare orgs can “hire” generative AI agents that complete low-risk, non-diagnostic, patient-facing tasks.

• Initial roles for the AI agents include chronic care management, post-discharge follow-up for specific conditions (congestive heart failure, kidney disease), as well as SDOH surveys, health risk assessments, and pre-operative outreach.

• The agents won’t be allowed to speak with patients unsupervised until phase three testing is completed, which involves its 40+ partners and 5,500 licensed clinicians interfacing with the agents as if they were patients.

Shareholder hero and NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang demonstrated a care manager agent named “Diana” on stage at GTC, and this video of the demo will tell you everything you need to know about the look and feel of Hippocratic’s first product. 

• NVIDIA also announced that it’ll be working alongside Hippocratic to develop “super-low-latency conversational interactions,” which will reportedly cost about $9/hr to run on the company’s hardware.

Critics are hard to avoid when you hit a half-billion valuation before launching a product and start throwing around terms like “Health General Intelligence (HGI).” Most critics seem concerned about medical device classifications, venture capital mania, and some past lawsuits, but time will tell which critiques (if any) can stop Hippocratic’s momentum.

The Takeaway

Despite all the talk about whether a general purpose healthcare AI is possible or safe, Hippocratic has an elite roster of VCs and provider partners that are willing to help it find out. Hippocratic definitely has the talking points nailed, now we’ll have to wait and see whether it has the operational chops to back them up.

Bolster Your Workforce With W2 Classification

As we navigate the biggest nursing workforce shortage of our time, understanding the nuances of clinician classification and protecting your community from risk is more important than ever. Even for the most flexible schedules, assigning 1099 status to nurses could be leaving your organization vulnerable to lawsuits. Find out how connectRN’s W2 staffing solution protects you and your business from liability.

Better Diabetes Management With Glooko

Glooko’s diabetes management platform transforms the way patients connect with their providers, driving better engagement, adherence, and ultimately outcomes. Take a look at Glooko’s latest clinical studies to see how their platform is driving sustained improvements for people with diabetes.

Unlock Revenue Potential in Payor Enrollment

Tune into Medallion’s Webinar on April 4 to delve into the intricacies of managing providers’ CAQH profiles during payor enrollment and learn the best practices to prevent any lapses. They’ll be walking through the end-to-end process, as well as the solutions that can help elevate your credentialing workflow.

The Wire

• Google Health Check Up: Google Health revealed some big plans for healthcare AI at its annual The Check Up event. While last year was all about the debut of MedLM, this year focused on expanding the model to diagnose heart and lung conditions in chest X-rays, as well as giving Google’s Gemini chatbot a healthcare-tuned version with more guardrails. Other news included the release of a photo library containing diverse skin colors and conditions to help design AI dermatological tools, and a sneak peek at an upcoming LLM that will give Fitbit and Pixel users a personalized health coach based on their own data.

• Does Intermittent Fasting Kill You? Shocking research from the AHA sparked a wave of media coverage after suggesting that intermittent fasting might significantly increase people’s risk of death. After analyzing two 24-hour dietary recall questionnaires from 20k US adults, researchers found that people who only ate within an eight hour window had a 91% higher risk of death due to cardiovascular disease. Those findings prompted plenty of criticism, which pointed out that the results conflict with better-designed RCTs showing intermittent fasting improves cardiometabolic outcomes (without relying on unreliable self-reported data).

• Artera Referrals Launch: Patient engagement infrastructure company Artera enhanced its Harmony platform with Artera Referrals, designed to optimize conversions and reduce in-system leakage. Artera Referrals embeds referral outreach with real-time responses (plus self-scheduling capabilities), and automates pre-visit communications to make sure patients and staff are prepared for the appointment. Referral outreach can be customized based on criteria like schedule, authorization, and referred location, with throttling queues that let providers define the time and pace of referral messages to avoid overloading staff.

• Arcadia Teams Up With Vim: Health data platform Arcadia is teaming up with Vim to streamline its ability to deliver insights to payors and providers within their existing workflows. By leveraging Vim’s middleware to inject AI into the EHR, Arcadia will be able to increase the visibility of tools like its SageAI copilot (patient summaries, care plans, social service recs) and recommendation engine (next best actions to support whole person care, such as addressing risk and quality gaps).

• CodaMetrix Series B: Revenue cycle service provider CodaMetrix hauled in $40M of Series B funding to help providers cut time wasted on coding while improving the operational efficiency of “as many specialty areas as possible.” CodaMetrix contracts with health systems to automate specific specialties (radiology, pathology, surgery, gastroenterology), combining machine learning and natural language processing to turn clinical notes into billing and diagnostic codes.

• The Cost of an Email: KFF put out a great report on providers charging for patient messages, which included most metrics that you could ever ask for on the topic. Some of the key takeaways included that less than 20% of messages incur a cost to patients, and the average cost for those that do now stands at about $25. Another interesting stat was that 43% of patient messages take less than 10 minutes of provider time, compared to 36% that take 11-20 minutes and 20% that take over 20 minutes.

• First AI Psychedelic Seeks FDA Nod: The first psychedelic drug selected by AI for its promise to precisely target mental illness could secure FDA approval for clinical trials within the next few weeks. Mindstate Design Labs trained its AI on over 70,000 trip reports pulled from online forums, books, and clinical trials before the model landed on 5-MeO-MiPT (AKA moxy) as the best candidate for targeting conditions like depression or anxiety. If it gets the greenlight, the Phase 1 trial could mark a major milestone for not only mental healthcare, but also AI-assisted drug discovery.

• PocketHealth Raises $33M: Medical image sharing startup PocketHealth closed a $33M Series B round, bringing its total funding to $56M. Founded in 2016, the company now manages images for 1.5M patients at 775 healthcare providers across the US and Canada. PocketHealth’s most recent product launches include MyCare Navigator and Follow-Up Navigator, and it plans to leverage AI to create personalized experiences for each patient.

• Change Fallout: A survey from the American Hospital Association found that 94% of hospitals are feeling a financial impact from the Change Healthcare cyberattacks, with over half reporting a “significant or serious” impact. Of those feeling an impact, almost two-thirds reported that the revenue impact is over $1M daily, and 44% expect this to continue for two to four more months. That $22M ransom seems modest by comparison.

• Oracle AI Updates: Oracle announced updates to Oracle Health Data Intelligence – formerly Cerner HealthIntent – that include a generative AI solution that summarizes patient histories for care managers. The expanded suite includes new analytics tools and clinical quality content geared toward helping healthcare orgs address regulatory requirements and increase data security, regardless of whether or not they’re using an Oracle EHR.

• CDS Less Effective on Silent Mode: In a randomized study involving 2,026 CKD patients with hypertension, primary care physicians using clinical decision support with alerts saw more improvement in their patients’ systolic blood pressure than clinicians practicing with the CDS on silent mode (-14.6 mm Hg vs. -11.7 mm Hg), and were more likely to treat per CDS recommendations (49.9% vs. 34.6%). However, overall BP control was similar in both groups (50.4% and 47.1%).

Alleviating Documentation Burden With Nabla

Is EHR time getting in the way of your providers and their patients? Head over to NEJM Catalyst to see why the largest medical group in the US turned to Nabla Copilot to reduce documentation burden for their providers and pave the way for more personal, effective patient interactions.

The New Standard for Prescription Safety

Synapse Medicine’s quick-deploy Prescription Assistance API and components can be up and running in less than a day and instantly connect your HCPs to real-time drug data and prescribing support. Find out how easy it can be to equip your providers with the tools they need to ensure prescription safety and precision for their patients.

Clear Arch Health Reduces Readmissions at Altru

When Altru Health System set out to reduce hospital readmissions, it turned to Clear Arch Health to find the solution. Learn how Clear Arch Health’s complete RPM platform and clinical monitoring system helped Altru lower readmissions while improving post-acute care quality.