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John Brownstein, chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s Hospital
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Greetings from Los Angeles, where health industry executives, startup founders and investors gathered at the ViVE conference. Unsurprisingly the implications of artificial intelligence in healthcare were top of mind for everyone, especially the battle heating up for customers in the AI medical scribe market. Before the conference kicked off, Abridge announced a $150 million Series C round at an $850 million valuation (check out the story below).
Harjinder Sandhu, CTO of Health and Life Sciences Platforms at Microsoft, which has a competing product called DAX Copilot (via its $18.8 billion acquisition of Nuance Communications in 2022), said Microsoft encourages its customers to think about a value versus risk grid when incorporating large language models into healthcare settings. Microsoft invested $10 billion into OpenAI, the makers of the models that power the viral ChatGPT. He describes AI scribes as sitting in the “high value, low risk” quadrant, during a conference presentation, since all of the output will be reviewed by doctors. “You have a qualified human that’s in the workflow, assessing what the AI system is doing and is able to detect errors,” he said.
The next use case that everyone is clamoring for but is at higher risk is using AI models to summarize a patient’s entire medical record history before they see a doctor. “It’s really difficult in that context to decide whether or not the system has given you false information,” Sandhu said. “It’ll be mostly correct and there may be one thing that is thrown in there that’s hallucinated or something that is omitted to tell you.” He predicted that chart summarization tools are probably a “year or two out.”
Another big concern for healthcare customers is data privacy and security. Sandhu described the LLMs as “memory-less,” meaning they don’t remember the prompt you type. “What it does remember what you’ve done is that software layer on top that’s mediating your interaction with the language model,” he said.
John Brownstein, the chief innovation officer of Boston Children’s Hospital, told Forbes that they wanted hospital staff to be able to experiment and use GPT for different tasks but also needed to guarantee that no protected health information would be sent back to OpenAI via that software layer on top. “We worked with Microsoft to essentially create a separate cloud instance of Azure that allows people in our organization to access GPT in a way that is sectioned off,” he said. “It wasn’t trivial,” he added.
Brownstein said Boston Children’s created a web portal for people in the hospital to essentially access their own instance of ChatGPT and tracks logins, tokens and usage. So far they’ve found people are using it for a variety of tasks. For example, asking questions and getting answers about certain hospital protocols or drafting patient handoff documents between nursing teams.
Abridge Raises $150 Million To Make AI Medical Scribes Even Smarter
Abridge
Lightspeed Venture Partners and Redpoint Ventures have co-led a $150 million Series C investment in Pittsburgh-based startup Abridge, which uses AI to transcribe patient conversations with doctors and automatically transform them into medical notes. The company’s post-money valuation is $850 million, according to a person familiar with the deal.
This round comes just four months after Abridge closed a $30 million Series B that valued the company at $200 million. “This is really on the back of the commercial momentum,” Abridge cofounder and CEO Shiv Rao told Forbes. In the past few weeks, he said Abridge has started deployments in 10 different health systems. In total, Abridge has contracted more than 10,000 clinicians to use the software with the latest addition being Yale New Haven Health.
The new funding will be used to help the company boost sales into more hospitals, as well as invest in technical research and development.
Read more here.
Pipeline & Deal Updates
Vaccines: Baseimmune, which aims to use deep learning to predict future mutations to pathogens in order to develop new vaccines for them, announced that it has raised a $11.3 million series A led by MSD Global Health Innovation Fund and IQ Capital.
Precision Medicine: Frontier Medicines, which aims to develop new therapies against previously undruggable targets, announced it has raised an $80 million series C round co-led by Droia Ventures and Deerfield Management Company. The financing is geared towards advancing its pipeline drug candidates into clinical trials.
Synthetic Biology: Ginkgo Bioworks announced that it is acquiring three companies: Reverie Labs, which has developed AI and machine learning software for drug discovery, Patch Biosciences, which has developed an AI platform for genetic sequence design, and Proof Diagnostics, which has developed tools for diagnostics and therapeutics using genome engineering.
Microsurgery: Medical Microinstruments, a robotics surgery startup, announced that it has raised a $110 million series C round led by Fidelity, which is aimed at commercializing the company’s surgical systems.
Back Pain: Mainstay Medical Holdings announced an equity financing worth $125 million aimed at supporting commercial growth of its neurostimulation product which is used to treat lower back pain.
AI Drug Discovery: Absci, which is developing generative AI tools for drug discovery, has announced the pricing of a new public offering of stock shares that puts the total amount the company will raise at $75 million.
Viking Weight Loss Drug Targets Ozempic And Mounjaro Makers’ Supremacy — What To Know
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U.S. biotech Viking Therapeutics marked itself as a serious competitor in the growing weight loss drug market this week after revealing promising data suggesting its therapy rivals—and outperforms—blockbusters from industry giants Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, which dominate the diabetes and obesity sector with medications like Ozempic, Mounjaro, Zepbound and Wegovy.
Read more here.
Other Healthcare News
Medicare Advantage provider Alignment Healthcare reported a net loss in its fourth quarter of $47.2 million as it experienced a 21% increase in health plan members.
The United States is currently on track to have the biggest number of reported measles cases since 2019, due in part to the increasing number of unvaccinated children.
Elon Musk’s lack of transparency in updates about his brain implant company Neuralink flouts scientific and ethical norms, raises questions about patient safety and risks setting back the entire field of neurotechnology, experts told Forbes.
The number of abortions carried out in the U.S. each month is “similar if not higher” than the abortion rate before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, according to a new study.
Organ collection groups in at least five states are being investigated for fraud by federal attorneys, following years of scrutiny of deficiencies plaguing the nation’s organ transplant network.
Across Forbes
TikTok’s Lawyers Repeatedly Warned Executives It Could Be Breaking Data Laws
Here’s Who Could Loan Trump $540 Million
This $4 Billion Car Surveillance Startup Says It Cuts Crime. But It Likely Broke The Law.
What Else We are Reading
U.S. Opens UnitedHealth Antitrust Probe (The Wall Street Journal)
Cholera vaccine shortage reaches worst point yet, with experts fearing deadly outbreaks (Stat)
International panel calls for tighter oversight of risky pathogen studies (Science)