K Health CEO Allon Bloch

Artificial Intelligence

K Health Introduces First-of-its-Kind AI Knowledge Agent

Clinical AI is stepping up to the big leagues, and K Health is the team that’s taking it there.

In an exclusive interview with Digital Health Wire, K Health CEO Allon Bloch took the lid off his company’s new AI Knowledge Agent, a first-of-its-kind GenAI system purpose-built for the clinical setting.

On the surface the AI Knowledge Agent looks and feels like a familiar medical chatbot, with a simple search bar interface for the user to ask natural language questions about their health. It isn’t until you see the responses that you realize you’re looking at something entirely unique.

The AI Knowledge Agent is about as far away from a rules-based chatbot as you can get. The agent is composed of an array of large language models enhanced by K Health’s own algorithms, carrying several major differentiators from today’s standard AI applications:

• It incorporates the patient’s medical history grounded by their EHR to provide highly tailored responses, enabling a level of personalization that’s impossible to match for standalone models (i.e. a diabetic and a heart failure patient will see different answers to the same question, using their own history, potential adverse drug interactions, etc.).

• It will be embedded into health systems to serve as a digital front door that intelligently routes patients to the right place to resolve their needs, reaching everything from primary care and specialists to labs and tests within the same interface.

• It’s optimized for accuracy by using curated high-quality health sources, then leverages multiple specialized agents to verify the answer matches the sources and the EHR data is appropriate. It will even tell you that it doesn’t know the answer rather than hallucinate.

In head-to-head testing against top tier foundation models, K Health’s multi-agent approach led to answers for sample medical questions that were 9% more comprehensive (included clinically crucial statements from the “gold standard” answer) and had 36% fewer hallucinations than its closest benchmark, GPT-4. 

• Strong results, especially considering that the AI Knowledge Agent shines brightest in real-world situations where it can personalize its answers using EHR context.

For possibly the first time ever, GenAI has reached the point where it can support actual clinical journeys, delivering answers personalized to the patient’s medical history while connecting them directly to required care. The era of Googling symptoms then calling your doctor feels like it’s finally coming to an end.

The Takeaway

We’re very much in the opening act of clinical AI, and understandably cautious providers are only just beginning to test the waters. That said, it’s easy to imagine that we’ll one day look back at launches like K Health’s AI Knowledge Agent as key moments for building trust and confidence in the AI systems that reshaped care delivery.

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The Wire

• Blackwell Security Secures $13M: Blackwell Security secured itself $13M in fresh funding from General Catalyst and Rally Ventures after the VC firms helped incubate the company. The funds will be used to expand Blackwell’s Managed Healthcare Extended Detection and Response (MHXDR) offering, which safeguards patient data against true cybersecurity threats while cutting down on the number of false alarms for security teams. The timing of the round coincidentally arrives as Ascension begins diverting patients due to “an unspecified cybersecurity event.”

• PCP Relationship Key for Patients: A US News and World Report survey of 2,000 US patients showed that trust and communication are top priorities for those assessing primary care relationships. Of the 73% that reported getting an annual physical in the last year, a large majority (81%) saw their usual physician, and 90% reported trust and comfort with their provider. On the flip side of that coin, a quarter of those without a recent PCP visit said they don’t like going to the doctor, 12% said they haven’t found a PCP they like, and 10% said they have previously felt shamed or judged by doctors.

• Are Doctors Responsible for AI? The Federation of State Medical Boards recently took the stance that doctors are responsible for their use of AI and accountable for any harm stemming from that use. The report states that physicians shouldn’t depend on AI and must always be able to explain why they followed a tool’s advice, a view that the American Medical Association agrees with despite holding a different opinion on liability. States are currently considering their medical boards’ input on regulating AI, with final decisions expected in the coming months.

• AI Health Policy Tracker: In other AI regulation news, Manatt Health’s updated AI Health Policy Tracker showcases the speed at which the legal landscape is evolving. The map highlights the 28 states either introducing or passing new legislation related to the use of healthcare AI, while also providing helpful overviews of the actual laws. The majority of legislative activity relates to creating AI task forces / research teams to inform future policy making, as well as states introducing laws focused on transparency between those who develop AI tools and those who deploy them.

• Livara Lands $15M: Specialty value-based care startup Livara Health landed $15M in Series B funding to expand to more payors and providers looking to improve outcomes for musculoskeletal patients. Livara matches patients with coaches and in-network providers that oversee personalized treatment plans, delivered either virtually or at locations like its own SpineZone clinics in California. The platform then optimizes risk stratification and reduces unnecessary utilization from avoidable procedures.

• Worsening Mental Health for Seniors: A new FAIR Health analysis shows that the share of US patients with a mental health diagnosis spiked 40% from 2019 to 2023 (13.5% to 18.9%), with seniors seeing the largest jump. Mental health diagnoses among those 65 and older increased 57% (from 9% in 2019 to about 14% in 2023), compared to relatively smaller increases for patients aged 23 to 30 (19% to 28%) and aged 31 to 40 (18% to 25%). Although the data reflects pandemic era stressors among all age groups, it’s also a reminder that the mental health crisis is far from contained to just younger populations.

• Veda Validation: Data integrity startup Veda received a third-party AI validation from the Erdős Institute to help address one of the top concerns in a healthcare landscape that’s increasingly wary of relying on opaque algorithms. Veda specializes in tackling the inaccurate and outdated provider directories rampant among commercial and Medicare Advantage plans, and its proactive validation by an independent institute should help set it apart in a crowded market of other tools promising to fix these “ghost networks.”

• Best Buy + St. Luke’s: Best Buy Health joined forces with Pennsylvania-based St. Luke’s University Health Network to treat post-discharge congestive heart failure patients using the Current Health remote monitoring platform. The home care partnership follows a few weeks behind the debut of Best Buy Health’s Lively Mobile2 medical alert device with enhanced fall-detection features and around-the-clock support at the touch of a button.

• Alaffia Series A: Alaffia Health added $10M in Series A funding (total raised now $17.6M) to expand commercial operations for its health plan claims solution and support ongoing R&D. Alaffia’s flagship Ask Autodor tool is a generative AI co-pilot that automates complex manual tasks for payors (e.g. medical record reviews, clinical policy document assessments, adjudication), and reportedly allows up to 20x faster claims processes.

• Text-based Virtual Care Limits: New research in JAMA Network Open found that automatic text message check-ins following post-hospital discharge didn’t reduce ED visits or readmissions. Researchers analyzed the efficacy of a 30 day intensive text support program compared to a nurse phone call check-in within two days of discharge, finding no significant difference in terms of ED visits, readmissions, or primary care follow-ups scheduled. The authors noted there’s still “potential value in an automated texting approach, given that call-based programs are operationally burdensome.”

• Automated Sick Notes: The UK government is planning a major overhaul to the current sick note system, revealing a new NHS algorithm that allows patients to self-issue the documents in an effort to reduce the workload of GPs. The algorithm enables an online triage service to be the first point of contact for obtaining a sick note, giving users tailored support based on the severity of the symptoms they input, including an automated sick note without the need for a doctor’s appointment.

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