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AI Healthcare Gold Rush, Google’s New Tool, and Becoming EHR-Agnostic

Unpacking How AI is Changing Healthcare

Author

Patrick Figures
November 01, 2024

The AI Clinic Weekly Pulse #4 | Subscribe

Happy Post-Halloween!

Hope you and yours had a productive and safe evening strolling through the neighborhood or handing out candy to kids destined to be up at least an hour past their bedtime. It was our coming out party as a family of four and we made the most of it with our two dinosaurs (while spectacularly failing to get our little dinos into bed before 9pm).

We’re not even 12 hours past the evening’s festivities and somehow it already feels like it’s time to plan Thanksgiving, put up the holiday lights, and get our Christmas lists together. We’re in the part of the year where deductibles are met, each month feels like it’s missing a week, and we’re sprinting towards the new year.

With the holiday whirlwind almost upon us, the healthcare AI landscape is equally energized, delivering news and fresh insights to begin the run-up to 2025.

Today We’re Covering:

  • Google’s Vertex AI Search: Google’s new AI search tool for healthcare is now broadly available, promising to ease documentation burdens with “grounded” AI responses, though some experts caution against “automation bias.”

  • OpenAI’s Whisper Faces Criticism: Researchers flag OpenAI’s Whisper for high error rates and “hallucinations” in medical transcriptions, spotlighting risks in clinical accuracy.

  • HCA and Commure’s EHR-Agnostic AI: HCA’s partnership with Commure aims to deploy an ambient AI platform across its sites, a move toward reducing reliance on specific EHR vendors and offering greater interoperability across health systems.

  • Bessemer’s Health Tech Report: AI healthcare investments are surging, with a shift toward “AI Services-as-Software” promising productivity gains, yet raising questions about valuation sustainability and efficacy as scrutiny increases.

Google Launches Vertex AI Search for Healthcare

Google Cloud has officially released Vertex AI Search for Healthcare, a tool designed to help healthcare providers and payers sift through patient data with greater ease and accuracy. Initially launched on a limited basis, the tool is now broadly available, promising an efficient search experience across medical records and documents.

Key Takeaways:

  • Administrative Relief: Vertex AI Search aims to address the heavy administrative burden that healthcare staff face. Google estimates clinical and claims staff spend up to 36 hours a week on documentation.

  • Generative AI with “Grounding”: Using large language models like Gemini 1.5 Flash and MedLM, Vertex AI Search includes “grounding,” a feature that cites sources directly from records, reducing the risk of AI hallucinations—incorrect or misleading information output.

  • Security and Validation Concerns: While “grounding” is a meaningful safeguard, industry experts worry that such AI might tempt clinicians to trust the tool over their judgment, a risk known as “automation bias.”

Why This Matters

Google (like Microsoft) is making major moves to create a splash in healthcare. Expect both giants to keep pushing into the $3 trillion healthcare industry, but without wading directly into EHRs. These systems are deeply complex and highly regulated, so big tech is focusing instead on strategic tools that support—rather than overhaul—existing workflows. By offering solutions like Vertex AI Search, Google positions itself right on the edges, where they can still gain market presence without tackling the entrenched challenges of EHR management.

A second point of interest is the industry-wide effort to combat “hallucinations” in AI applications, which can present inaccurate information—a top concern for AI in healthcare. Google’s “grounding” technique, where every AI-supplied answer links directly to its source data, aims to address this barrier by offering safer, more reliable AI assistance. As safety concerns hold back many potential healthcare applications for AI, grounding could be a promising way to reassure providers of the technology’s dependability. Full Article

AI Transcription Tool Whisper Under Fire for Inaccurate, “Hallucinated” Transcriptions

Researchers are raising concerns about OpenAI’s Whisper, an AI transcription tool increasingly used in hospitals. Whisper is prone to "hallucinations," or invented text, which can appear in patient consultations and other sensitive contexts. Reports describe errors like imagined medical treatments and false racial descriptors, posing risks of misdiagnosis and miscommunication.

Key Takeaways:

  • High Hallucination Rate: Engineers found hallucinations in as much as 80% of Whisper’s transcriptions, including fabricated sentences or commentary added during pauses or background sounds.

  • Clinical Risks and Privacy Concerns: Hospitals are using Whisper to transcribe patient visits, but its high error rate could have significant clinical implications. Compounding the issue, some tools, such as a Whisper-based tool built by Nabla, erase original recordings, making error detection difficult.

  • Growing Debate Over AI Regulation: Experts are calling for stricter AI regulations, with former OpenAI engineers and medical professionals expressing concern over the technology’s reliability in clinical use.

Why This Matters:

These findings beg an important question: How do these AI transcription tools hold up against human scribes? Do we expect AI tools in healthcare to be error-free, or should we simply expect them to outperform humans in accuracy? These questions sit at the heart of the debate around AI transcription tools like Whisper. Much of the criticism around AI in healthcare points to its errors, but a more honest benchmark might be to ask how often it outperforms human transcription, not whether it is perfect.

In the case of driverless vehicles, a somewhat apt analogy given the human safety risks involved, society seems to have accepted that zero-error performance is unrealistic, focusing instead on comparative safety and reliability. Applying this same perspective to healthcare AI could open the door for a fairer evaluation of its potential. AI’s capacity to streamline complex workflows is compelling—but that promise depends on our collective expectations and willingness to manage, rather than eliminate, inevitable errors. Full Article

Commure Partners with HCA Healthcare for Ambient AI Platform

HCA Healthcare has selected Commure to develop an ambient AI platform, aiming to streamline clinical documentation across emergency, hospital, and outpatient settings. This partnership builds on Commure’s acquisition of Augmedix, an ambient AI company, and is intended to reduce clinicians' documentation burden, allowing them to focus more on patient care.

Key Takeaways:

  • Focus on Practical Workflow Support: The platform is EHR-agnostic and will integrate into various care settings, focusing on automating and optimizing critical documentation processes without a full-scale EHR overhaul.

  • Collaborative Development: Commure and HCA’s Care Transformation & Innovation team, along with clinicians, are co-developing the platform to ensure it meets real-world needs in clinical documentation.

  • Expected Outcomes: Both companies suggest the platform will increase physician productivity and improve patient care (though details on specific targets are not disclosed).

Why This Matters:

Healthcare providers nationwide face a pressing question when it comes to AI adoption: Are there meaningful ways to leverage AI and reap its benefits independently of what legacy EHR vendors offer? Or will providers be limited to whatever AI tools their EHR vendor happens to make available?

One of the primary reasons EHR vendors have such strong market dominance is the high switching cost for hospitals and providers, which locks them into specific systems. By making tools like Commure’s AI platform compatible across different EHRs, HCA signals a growing interest in reducing dependency on any single EHR provider. HCA is one of the largest healthcare companies in the country, and many will be watching their movements to see 'where the puck is going'. Press Release

A Quick Aside: State of Health Tech 2024

Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP), a VC firm active in the healthcare arena, put out their annual State of Health Tech for 2024, and it’s worth the read. Known for identifying and nurturing tech giants from LinkedIn to Shopify, BVP has backed several digital health leaders, including Qventus, Innovacer, and WellSky.

This year’s report outlines the key trends, investment dynamics, and emerging technologies that are shaping the digital health space. Here’s some of the biggest takeaways:

AI Healthcare is a Booming Business

BVP makes it clear: AI-driven healthcare is a force to be reckoned with. Record-breaking growth in the AI health sector signals a sector-wide embrace of machine learning, automation, and predictive analytics. Nearly 40% of new healthcare investments are AI-focused, driving up valuations and allowing companies to achieve market traction at unprecedented rates. As noted in the report, AI health companies that have quickly hit $10 million in ARR are leading the charge, providing tools from automated clinical note generation to quality audits in complex medical claims​​.

So, what’s fueling this boom? Put simply, health tech companies are leaning into the “AI Services-as-Software” model, where AI solutions autonomously perform tasks traditionally done by humans. For healthcare, this is especially impactful because of healthcare’s overreliance on human labor. But as demand skyrockets, healthcare AI companies will face an undeniable pressure to continue delivering meaningful, measurable value. The boom is real, but it comes with strings attached.

It's Only Going to Get More ‘Frothy’

If 2024 has been a record-setting year for AI healthcare investments, BVP anticipates the trend to grow even “frothier” in the coming years. Higher valuations are being placed on AI health tech companies, many of which have seen 30-50x multiples based solely on their use of AI. These valuations, in many cases, far surpass those of non-AI counterparts, highlighting the enormous investor appetite for AI-powered innovation in healthcare. This shift is reflected in the report’s findings, with BVP noting that “AI-first” companies are commanding massive valuations, outstripping traditional SaaS counterparts​​.

However, such investment intensity comes with risk. As valuations inflate, there’s a growing concern that hype could overshadow real-world efficacy. Investors and companies alike may soon grapple with the sustainability of these high valuations, especially as new AI tools flood an already competitive market. If the “frothy” AI healthcare boom continues, we could see an environment where only the most resilient and rigorously tested AI applications rise to the top—a situation that could thin the herd of unproven solutions.

There's Obvious Obstacles Ahead

With high valuations and soaring growth expectations, AI health tech companies will inevitably face the crucible of regulatory and operational scrutiny. Bessemer’s report underscores this point, highlighting that regulatory requirements are likely to intensify, especially around transparency and measurable efficacy. This dynamic is expected to drive the adoption of initiatives like the Coalition for Health AI’s “AI Nutrition Labels,” designed to give health systems and providers a standardized way to evaluate AI tools. For the unprepared, the regulatory landscape could become a major obstacle to scalability​​.

Reading between the lines, the message is clear: sustainability will separate AI health tech’s winners from its also-rans. As scrutiny builds, health tech startups must prove their worth beyond theoretical value and glossy pilots. Healthcare AI tools will need to integrate seamlessly, demonstrate measurable outcomes, and align with increasingly stringent regulatory expectations.

Keeping an eye on the venture capital community is crucial because these investors are often the driving force behind healthcare’s most disruptive companies. With hundreds of millions poured into startups aiming to transform everything from clinical workflows to patient engagement, venture capital not only fuels the most ambitious visions for the future, but also provides signals for where the healthcare industry may be heading. By tracking the companies gaining momentum and funding in this space, we can better understand the external forces shaping our industry’s future—and potentially gain early insight into the next wave of health tech solutions. Full Report Here

Other Things Worth Checking Out

Here are some other developments that might be worth your time.

That’s it for now. We’ll catch up again next week.

-Patrick

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