An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: AI, specifically generative AI, has the potential to transform healthcare. At least, that’s the sales pitch from Hippocratic AI, which emerged from stealth today with a whopping $50 million in seed financing behind it and a valuation in the “triple-digit millions.” The tranche, co-led by General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz, is a big vote of confidence in Hippocratic’s technology, a text-generating model tuned specifically for healthcare applications.
Hippocratic — hatched out of General Catalyst — was founded by a group of physicians, hospital administrators, Medicare professionals and AI researchers from organizations including Johns Hopkins, Stanford, Google and Nvidia. After co-founder and CEO Munjal Shah sold his previous company, Like.com, a shopping comparison site, to Google in 2010, he spent the better part of the next decade building Hippocratic. “Hippocratic has created the first safety-focused large language model (LLM) designed specifically for healthcare,” Shah told TechCrunch in an email interview. “The company mission is to develop the safest artificial health general intelligence in order to dramatically improve healthcare accessibility and health outcomes.”
Shah emphasized that Hippocratic isn’t focused on diagnosing. Rather, he says, the tech — which is consumer-facing — is aimed at use cases like explaining benefits and billing, providing dietary advice and medication reminders, answering pre-op questions, onboarding patients and delivering “negative” test results that indicate nothing’s wrong. […] Shah claims that Hippocratic’s AI outperforms leading language models including GPT-4 and Claude on more than 100 healthcare certifications, including the NCLEX-RN for nursing, the American Board of Urology exam and the registered dietitian exam. Hippocratic aims to have its LLM detect tone and communicate empathy better than its rivals — in part by “building in” good bedside manner, says Shah. They have designed a benchmark to evaluate their model’s humanistic qualities, and it scored higher than other models, including GPT-4.
As for whether or not it can replace a healthcare worker, Hippocratic argues that their models, trained under medical professionals’ supervision, possess high capabilities.
“We’re only releasing each role — dietician, billing agent, genetic counselor, etc. — once the people who actually do that role today in real life agree the model is ready,” Shah said. “In the pandemic, labor costs went up 30% for most health systems, but revenue didn’t. Hence, most health systems in the country are financially struggling. Language models can help them reduce costs by filling their current large level of vacancies in a more cost-effective way.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Hippocratic Is Building a Large Language Model For Healthcare