Special Series Part 3: AI Could Transform Medical Imaging — So Why Don’t We See It More?

Keerthi Vedantam — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 13:30:23 +0000

Editor’s note: This story is Part Three of our series on artificial intelligence startups and their impact on multiple sectors. In Part One, we analyze VC investment in AI over the last decade. Part Two looks at the billions of dollars rolling into AI-enhanced cybersecurity. Part Four spotlights some creative ways startups apply AI to their sectors.— Special Projects Editor Christine Kilpatrick

There are simply too few doctors in the U.S., and too many patients who need them.��

Amid doctor burnout and long waitlists to see specialists, a niche in technology that saw slow adoption rates was suddenly in high demand: medical imaging AI used to aid in diagnostics. Such technology could help prescreen patients or work alongside physicians to scan images and help find problems that may have gone unnoticed by the tired, overworked human eye.

Funding for startups with this technology jumped from $348 million to over $1 billion between 2020 and 2021, per �� data. Though that number has dipped to $883 million so far in 2022, it’s still the second-largest year of funding for AI in diagnostics to date.��

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“[Adoption] was pretty slow up until COVID,” said , a biotech investor at . “Now, I think there’s been a renewed focus on anything that fixes physician or clinician burnout.”

And yet, despite its inherent advantages, doctors are still apprehensive about this new technology.��

“It really requires a quite nuanced understanding of: How is this going to fit into a doctor’s workflow?” said , a health care-focused investor at . “How does it fit into the incentives of different people in the system?”

An answer to doctor burnout

America’s doctor shortage has effectively turned every clinic, doctor’s office and care organization into need-based systems where only the most urgent patients could see a physician in a timely manner.��

“Humans are missing a lot of diseases because there is an inherent mindset where they’re thinking, ‘Can I treat this patient tomorrow?’” said , CEO and founder of medical imaging AI startup . “And that’s not the preferred threshold.”

Doctors are juggling large patient panels every day, unable to spend enough time with each patient to better treat them. This leads to burnout, which in turn translates into low-quality care. Most importantly, patients who can’t see a doctor frequently are treated for problems that could have been avoided if caught early.��

That’s where companies like Eyenuk come in. The 12-year-old California-based company’s platform can autonomously diagnose diabetic retinopathy, a disease that quietly grows behind the eyes and can worsen without immediate medical intervention. It was granted clearance in 2020 and has processed around 2 million images to date. Eyenuk raised $26 million in Series A funding in October led by , according to �� data.��

Eyenuk’s platform prescreens patients and allows ophthalmologists to prioritize who to see based on need. But the goal is to one day put the device in hospitals and primary care offices so doctors can check patients’ eyes instead of referring them to a hard-to-find specialist.��

“This could be operated by anybody with a high school diploma and produce an actionable report that can define next steps for the patient, whether they are referred to an ophthalmologist or an eye care specialist, or they would be seen next year for repeat screening,” Solanki said.

This type of medical imaging technology is used in a slew of other sectors as well. , a venture-backed dentistry startup based in California that has raised $11 million, has a platform called Second Opinion (can you guess why?) that scans teeth imaging to point out a variety of tooth ailments to doctors. Israel-based offers radiology-focused artificial intelligence tools to customers that scan radiology images to look for potential issues. The company has raised over $237 million.

Adoption still lags

While adoption spiked during the pandemic, rollout of medical imaging AI is yet to be as widespread as its visionaries would have hoped.

“It’s actually not a problem of the technology not being sophisticated enough,” said Choi. “It’s an adoption problem, and really proving out the use cases to convince providers that there’s business value as well as clinical value to these solutions.”

Provider buy-in is paramount for almost any kind of health care offering, but running through a packed schedule of patients makes it difficult to learn and embrace a new technology that may impede workflow, especially if they don’t think it will add much value.

There’s good reason for that skepticism. The , calling into question the accuracy of these platforms. The doesn’t have consistent qualifications for how big or diverse the training data set ought to be.

“We need these models to work transparently and be explainable. And that’s the difference that clinicians are looking for — because a doctor deserves to know how these machine-learning models are reading their patients,” said William Padula, an assistant professor of pharmaceutical and health economics at the . “The fear here is that while the programmer knows what they’ve done to create the model, it’s unclear how exactly it’s looking at the patient.”

But the promise of AI can’t be understated. In a post-pandemic health system, easy-to-access diagnostic resources are going to be important. Public health officials are pushing for more at-home or accessible diagnostic tests for all sorts of illnesses. And diagnostics accounts for 70% of all health care decision-making.��

“We believe that the technology has to be good enough to work on its own. And that actually creates value for the system,” Solanki said. “Now there’s one less thing that the specialists have to worry about, which is routine screening.”

Illustration:

Augmedix Raises $19M To Streamline Physician Services With Automated Note-Taking

Mary Ann Azevedo — Thu, 24 Oct 2019 21:43:52 +0000

A common complaint about doctor’s visits is that patients feel rushed or that their doctor isn’t focused on them personally.

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One healthtech startup aims to help address those problems with a platform it claims gives clinicians more time to focus on their patients, rather than taking notes. That company, , which describes itself as a medical note documentation startup, it has raised $19 million in a Series B round to help it achieve its mission.

, , , and others participated in the financing. The funding brings San Francisco-based Augmedix’s since its inception in 2012 to $82 million, according to �� data.

Using augmented reality, the company turns natural clinician-patient conversation into medical documentation in real time. The Augmedix platform is powered by a combination of proprietary natural-language-processing technology and medical documentation “expert teams,” according to the company.

Augmedix provides clinicians with hardware, smartphones or Google Glass, “to securely stream the clinic visit” to its cloud-based platform. Then, tech-enabled remote specialists use proprietary automation modules to generate medical documentation that Augmedix claims “is accurate, comprehensive and timely delivered.” The service currently works with over 25 specialties and supports most electronic health records (EHRs).

Augmedix has partnered with 15 health systems (including Sutter Health, CommonSpirit Health, and US Oncology) with the goal of decreasing clinician burnout while increasing productivity. Those systems employ well over 100,000 physicians, or about 10 percent of the U.S. total in aggregate, according to the company.

, CEO at Augmedix, said the startup is “addressing the serious and growing problem of doctor burnout.”

And, he said, it’s doing it differently than its competitors because the note taking is performed in real time. The benefits of this, according to Krakaris, are that a physician feels that his/her documentation specialist is an “extension of the care team.” The specialist observes what is taking place (both visually and audibly) “in a completely passive manner,” he added.

“That allows the doctor to have a completely normal interaction with the patient, which translates into a higher level of patient care and higher patient satisfaction,” Krakaris said. Also, “it yields the greatest time savings for them (up to three hours each day), which they can bank into quality of life enhancement or convert into increased patient volume.”

The company said it will use the new capital “to accelerate product development, including automation capabilities, and to strategically scale its technology-enabled service across health systems and private clinics nationwide.”

Looking ahead, Krakaris told �� News the company is specifically working to “further improve operating efficiency” with tools that will use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning “to harness the vast amounts of audio and text data we generate each week.” It currently employs just over 400 people worldwide as well as enlisting the services of about 800 contractors.

Augmedix has seen its compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) “comfortably exceed 50 percent” since 2015, when it launched its commercial service “in earnest,” the CEO added.

I asked if the company was HIPAA compliant and it told me that its entire system satisfies HIPAA data security standards.