|
Babylon’s Back, Forward Shuts Down, and RFK Takes Aim at NIH
November 14, 2024
|
|
|
|
|
Together with
|
|
|
|
“We must focus on our needs, and not the means. It’s not the technology that is the issue, it’s how we apply it to solve the root cause of a problem.”
|
|
Quadrivia CEO Ali Parsa
|
|
|
|
Babylon founder Ali Parsa is rising from the wreckage with a new startup – Quadrivia – and he’s certainly hoping that his second AI wonder app works out better than his first.
A LinkedIn post from Parsa laid out Quadrivia’s vision of using customizable AI agents to tackle “the main challenge” in healthcare: the structural imbalance between the elastic demand from our communities and the constrained supply of our clinicians.
- Quadrivia’s undisclosed amount of seed funding was enough to kick off beta testing for Qu, a clinical assistant with “wide-ranging capabilities across the care spectrum.”
- Qu’s agents have the lofty goal of assisting clinicians across the full stack of routine clinical and administrative tasks, patient interactions, decision-making, chronic and postoperative care, and continuous monitoring.
Qu’s ambitious scope is reportedly made possible by its dual architecture: “System 1 includes tasks that rely on quick decision-making, such as answering direct questions. System 2 involves more complex tasks, like assessing patient symptoms and considering multiple diagnoses.”
- These capabilities are supported by the patient’s EHR data (still working out the details), natural language conversations (but not real time), and a large clinical knowledge base (unclear from where).
The backstory of Quadrivia is inextricably linked to the backstory of Babylon, which has been called everything from the “future of the NHS” to “the Madoff of digital health.”
- The grand promises of Babylon’s AI chatbot rhymed with the goals Qu outlined above, which was enough to fuel a $4.2B public market debut in 2021.
- By this time last year, what we’ll call “difficulty living up to those promises” had Babylon shares trading at pennies, and it filed for bankruptcy in the U.S. after an odd takeover from digital therapeutics developer MindMaze turned out to be too good to be true.
The Takeaway
If Quadrivia is to succeed where Babylon failed, it’ll need a strategy that shores up the holes in its predecessor’s approach. That means peer-reviewed research, independent validation, and consistent messaging about Qu’s capabilities… and limitations.
|
|
|
Bridging Care Gaps for Underserved Populations
Is your health system, rural health clinic, or federally qualified health center struggling to reach patients with obstacles to receiving in-person care? This Clear Arch Health whitepaper explores how combining RPM with VBC can help facilitate proactive interventions, address social determinants of health, and get the most out of new CMS reimbursement pathways.
|
|
Level Up With BPM Pro 2
Withings Health Solutions is leveling up remote monitoring programs with BPM Pro 2 – the first cellular blood pressure monitor to collect Patient Insights and streamline provider operations. Discover how BPM Pro 2 is giving time back to care teams by delivering the context behind each measurement.
|
|
Overcome Your Credentialing Challenges
Data inaccuracies and lengthy verifications can turn provider credentialing into a strategic barrier. Don’t let this be your bottleneck. Medallion presents 11 actionable tips to refresh your approach. Download the e-book today for smoother sailing in healthcare credentialing.
|
|
- Forward Goes Backwards: Doc-in-a-box pioneer Forward is shutting down operations after an eight-year run and over $650M in total funding. It’s never fun to cover companies that couldn’t reach their vision of improving healthcare, and in this case it sounds like Forward underestimated the human element of treating patients while overestimating what today’s tech can accomplish on its own. Last November, Forward announced plans to launch 3,200 CarePods within a year, but the clean up shouldn’t take too long since only five locations ever debuted.
- Lab Testing Disparities Limit AI: New research in PLOS Global Public Health showed that lab testing inequities could be creating racial biases in AI model training data. An exact-matched cohort study of ED patients at two teaching hospitals demonstrated that white patients were tested significantly more frequently than Black patients for complete blood count (+1.7%) and metabolic panels (+1.5%), which the authors pointed out is likely making AI algorithms underestimate illness in Black populations and exacerbating health disparities.
- Health Catalyst Acquires Intraprise: Health Catalyst acquired cybersecurity provider Intraprise Health to protect its clients from cyberattacks and manage follow-on liability in the event of an incident. Intraprise will advance Health Catalyst’s information security and risk management strategy, while also marking HC’s second acquisition of the year after picking up oncology analytics vendor Carevive in June.
- Sword Cuts Clinicians Ahead of IPO: Sword Health cut 13 physical therapists – apparently 17% of its clinicians – as it ramps up plans to manage more patients using AI ahead of an upcoming IPO. During its recent $130M raise, Sword debuted its new Phoenix AI care specialist that chats with patients during sessions to assess how they’re feeling and provide real-time feedback, which the layoffs seem to suggest has been working out well. Rival digital MSK provider Hinge Health is notably prepping its own public market debut for early 2025.
- Healthcare PE Slowdown: Private equity dealmaking in healthcare services fell yet again in the third quarter, with PitchBook counting a dropoff to 148 transactions, down from 185 in Q2. Though this year’s transaction total is on track to decline 15% compared to 2023, Pitchbook remains confident that we’re poised for a turnaround, with PE firms waiting on the sidelines to try and time the market as their pipelines start to fill with increasingly attractive valuations.
- Rula Joins Amazon: Rula Health is now the latest behavioral health provider to join Amazon’s Health Condition Programs, which gives the e-commerge giant’s customers accessible routes to essential mental healthcare. Through its wide range of payor partnerships and network of over 10k providers, Rula is in-network for 120M+ individuals that can use its provider matching platform to find therapy or psychiatric services that aligns with their specific needs.
- Innovaccer Healthcare Experience AI: Cured by Innovaccer bolstered its Healthcare Experience Platform with the launch of its fittingly named Healthcare Experience AI, new generative AI capabilities designed to enable proactive care experiences. The AI suite includes (1) propensity scoring to identify high-value audiences for targeted care needs, (2) subject line generation and send time optimization to scale personalized care journeys, and (3) an Access Center CoPilot that suggests next-best actions to support first-call resolution while reducing service costs.
- PACS Gets Canceled: Hindenburg Research destroyed the post-IPO run for PACS Group with a damning short report alleging that the skilled nursing facility operator is “systematically scamming taxpayers.” The accusations revolve around PACS’ use of pandemic waivers to fraudulently boost per-patient income, a scheme that has since been replaced by falsifying documentation for respiratory treatments. The market is on Hindenburg’s side, with PACS shares already axed in half as the company kicks off an external investigation.
- Innovation at the VA: The Veterans Health Administration’s State of Innovation report underscored the agency’s progress in using digital health solutions to combat challenges in areas like patient access and chronic condition management. An interesting highlight was that the VA has eliminated $196.7M in missed appointment costs through its VHA-Uber Health Connect program, which allows VA staff to book transportation for patients and has provided 263k rides to 38k veterans since launching in January 2022.
- How Will Trump Change AI Regulation? PricewaterhouseCoopers breaks down the answer, noting that one major priority will be to “shift AI oversight to focus more on self-governance,” which could affect the FDA’s developing initiative on AI oversight. Sure to be on the chopping block is the Biden Administration’s AI executive order, which included a number of directives for regulating the technology within healthcare.
|
|
Carle Health Goes All-In on Nabla
Nabla Copilot is rolling out at Carle Health after a successful pilot saw a majority of participating clinicians slash their documentation time by over an hour. The full case study has everything you need to know about how Nabla’s customization features, Epic integration, and ease of use are bringing joy back to medicine for Carle’s clinicians.
|
|
Curate, Create, & Share at the Point of Care
It’s hard to find a more unique vantage point on AI than Playback Health co-founder Dr. Langer, whose role as the Chair of Neurosurgery at Lenox Hill allows him to actually use the platform he helped create. Head over to Dr. Langer’s latest blog to see how Playback is helping him spend more time caring for patients and enabling providers to “Curate, Create, & Share” at the point of care.
|
|
Top Systems Scale Primary Care With K Health
Leading health systems are turning to K Health’s AI-driven primary care solution to give their patients access to high-quality care with wait times measured in hours, not months. Find out why K Health is the only clinical AI company partnering with top systems to scale fully integrated primary care experiences.
|
|
|
|
|
