The excitement about the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to revolutionise medicine and healthcare is palpable. In the UK, for example, former Prime Minister Tony Blair and former Leader of the Opposition William Hague have demanded a 20-fold increase in AI capacity to power initiatives such as cancer scans. In the European Union, EU Health Commissioner Olivér Várhelyi says: “This is the way the whole technology is evolving – it is impossible nowadays not to use AI in the healthcare sector.” In the US, the Food and Drug Administration has in recent months published a series of updates aimed at supporting AI implementations in the healthcare sector with appropriate regulation.
Start-up and scale-up businesses have an important role to play here. British start-up BenevolentAI has raised more than $335 million of funding since its launch in 2013; it uses AI to accelerate drug discovery. Germany’s Ada Health has raised $187 million for a digital health platform that exploits AI technologies and machine learning to assess people’s symptoms.
However, another group of AI-enabled health-focused start-ups are flying below the radar. These are the companies battling to solve one of the biggest problems of all for healthcare providers – the manual processes and mountains of paperwork that slow many countries’ health systems to a crawl. Healthcare operations sucks up huge resources but innovation in this area doesn’t get so much attention.
Some enterprises are focused on the appointments process. In the UK, for example, SPRYT is working in a North London National Health Service partnership, using AI and WhatsApp to automate cancer screening appointment booking and rescheduling. Others are looking at reducing workloads for medical practitioners. US business Augmedix uses audio technology to capture conversations between doctors and patients, and to turn these into structured medical notes. Suki, also US-based, is another voice specialist, with a range of voice tools that support clinicians’ administrative work.
Another start-up beginning to make waves is ReportAId, a Milan-based company which is today announcing its first funding round. Founded last year, the company has already signed up a number of Italian hospitals and healthcare providers for its software, and hopes to expand across Europe with a boost from $2.2 million of new seed funding.
“I had worked in a series of operational roles in health and always felt it would be game-changing if there was a way for technology to extract value from free text,” explains Giuseppe Faraci CEO and co-founder of ReportAId with Claudio Caletti and Luca Foresti. The written medical reports produced by doctors following each patient consultation represent a huge volume of unstructured data, Faraci points out, making it difficult to automate processes such as referrals and prescriptions.
ReportAId’s tools are aimed at solving that problem. They can interrogate a medical professional’s written report in order to identify recommendations for next steps – and launch automated workflows to take those actions. That might mean automatically booking the patient’s next check-up, say, or beginning the referral process for more significant treatment.
ReportAId claims to be able to slash delays in healthcare processes, ensuring patients get treated more quickly; it also promises to save providers money by increasing efficiency – and to boost the revenues of private healthcare providers, who can use its tools to retain their patients and work with larger numbers.
Today’s fundraising is led by the Italian Founders Fund (IFF) with participation from Heartfelt, Exceptional Ventures, 2100 Ventures, Vento, Ithaca, B Heroes, Vesper Holding and a number of business angels. The company plans to use the funding to recruit up to 10 staff and to expand across Europe, with Germany, France and Spain key target markets.
At IFF, principal Irene Mingozzi points to the need to tackle healthcare’s “critical inefficiencies, from fragmented clinical data and gaps in patient management to structural waiting-list issues”.
Paolo Pio, co-founder and general partner of Exceptional Ventures, adds: “Healthcare is the perfect field for AI, and the founders are attacking one of the sector’s biggest inefficiencies.”
Indeed, the potential of such technologies is huge. One recent report suggests the roll-out of automated systems could save between $200 and $360 billion over the next five years – the equivalent of 5% to 10% of global healthcare spending. In areas of healthcare operations ranging from patient scheduling to supply chain management, there is increasing optimism that technology can drive efficiency and free up resources for spending on patient care.
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