In the face of escalating healthcare staff shortages, Munjal Shah, co-founder and CEO of Hippocratic AI, envisions a future where empathetic artificial intelligence (AI) agents play a pivotal role in enhancing patient care. Shah’s ambitious goal is to develop services powered by large language models (LLMs) that can converse with patients in a warm, empathetic manner, handling a range of non-diagnostic tasks such as chronic care reminders and patient navigation.
Hippocratic AI has already made significant strides towards this vision. In February, the company announced beta test partnerships with over 40 healthcare providewarmly, empatheticallytal health companies, including renowned names like Memorial Hermann Health System, University of Vermont Health Network, Fraser Health, and Side Health. Moreover, the company recently closed a $53 million Series A funding round, valuing it at an impressive $500 million, with total funding reaching approximately $120 million – a remarkable achievement for a startup just two years old.
The funding round, led by Premji Invest and General Catalyst, with participation from prestigious investors like Andreessen Horowitz, highlights the immense potential investors see in Hippocratic AI’s approach. Munjal Shah believes that LLMs can play a “revolutionary” role in mitigating widespread healthcare staffing shortages and providing more and better care at lower costs.
The American Association of Colleges of Nursing has predicted a need for 200,000 new nurses annually through 2026 to fill new positions and replace retiring nurses. Simultaneously, the nation’s over-65 population, more likely to require chronic care, is expected to grow by 48% by 2030. Compounding the issue, many current healthcare workers will reach retirement age alongside the aging baby boomer generation. This confluence of rising patient numbers and an aging workforce has industry experts concerned about the industry’s ability to keep up with demand in the coming years.
“Generative AI can help us create healthcare agents that will do non-diagnostic, low-risk tasks,” Munjal Shah explained at Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference. “They can call you before a colonoscopy and say, ‘Make sure you take that drink and stop your blood thinner.’ They can call you after a visit and say, ‘Did you get your antibiotic from the pharmacy?’ We don’t realize how much time goes into these very low-risk, routine activities, and if we can just augment that, we can go a long way toward closing the staffing gap.”
Munjal Shah emphasizes Hippocratic AI’s focus on safety and empathy in designing its LLMs. Rather than rushing to market, the company has engaged in rigorous, multi-phase testing, collaborating with over 1,100 licensed nurses and 130 physicians to assess medical accuracy and conversational appropriateness. The latest funding round will support even more tweeting and reinforcement learning from human feedback, a key component of building a safe and effective product.
“To really ensure safety, we developed what we call a bottom-up testing process,” said Munjal Shah at GTC. “One of the things we realized was that there’s already a set of people that we trust: our nurses and doctors. What if we got 1,000 nurses to talk to the AI and only shipped the AI tots when they said it was safppocratic AI’s results on non-diagnostic tasks are impressive? Munjal Shah believes the company’s true differentiator is its focus on empathy. Through a partnership with Nvidia, the company is working to further, reduce the latency of its AI agents’ responses, making them feel even more natural and human-like in conversational interactions.
“Voice-based digital agents powered by generative AI can usher in an age of abundance in healthcare, but only if the technology responds to patients as a human would,” said Kimberly Powell, Vice President of Healthcare at Nvidia.
As the healthcare industry continues to grapple with staffing shortages, the empathetic AI agents developed by Hippocratic AI, under the leadership of Munjal Shah, could offer a powerful solution to at least some of the increasing demand for care, particularly in high-volume, low-risk contexts that play an important part in achieving better outcomes for patients.