I got up super early on a Sunday (in Vegas no less!) to meet Delphine Groll, COO and Alexandre Lebrun, CEO of Nabla. I have heard directly from doctors a lot about their CoPilot product being adopted as a less expensive version than Nuance or Abridge, and wanted to see what the fuss was about. They gave me a demo of their ambient AI medical note taker and it is very impressive–you’ll see a little bit of my demo and the resulting note in the interview. They were a little shy on Sunday to tell me about their relationship with the Permanente group but between Jay Parkinson and Fierce Healthcare, the beans are well and truly spilled now, and they are apparently soon to be available in every Permanente region. I suspect because of that the integration with Epic that Alexandre mentioned will be full speed ahead!–Matthew Holt
Interview with Sonia Milsom, CEO Oxeon
Sonia Milsom is the relatively new CEO at Oxeon, which became the dominant executive search (headhunter) firm in digital health over the past decade or so. The company was built by Trevor Price and team. Sonia discussed the transition, the other things Oxeon does (venture studio, relationship to TownHall Ventures), and the state of the employment market in digital health. TL:DR on that, it’s slowed but they are doing a lot of work and still growing. Matthew Holt
THCB Gang Episode 136, Thursday October 5
Joining Matthew Holt (@boltyboy) on #THCBGang on Thursday October 5 at 1pm PST 4pm EST were delivery & platform expert Vince Kuraitis (@VinceKuraitis); author & ponderer of odd juxtapositions Kim Bellard (@kimbbellard) and policy expert consultant/author Rosemarie Day (@Rosemarie_Day1).
You can see the video below & if you’d rather listen than watch, the audio is preserved as a weekly podcast available on our iTunes & Spotify channels.
Altman, Ive, and AI
BY KIM BELLARD
Earlier this year I urged that we Throw Away That Phone, arguing that the era of the smartphone should be over and that we should get on to the next big thing. Now, I don’t have any reason to think that either Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and Jony Ive, formerly and famously of Apple and now head of design firm LoveFrom, read my article but apparently they have the same idea.
Last week The Information and then Financial Times reported that OpenAi and LoveFrom are “in advanced talks” to form a venture in order to build the “iPhone of artificial intelligence.” Softbank may fund the venture with as much as $1b. There have been brainstorming sessions, and discussions are said to be “serious,” but a final deal may still be months away. The new venture would draw on talent from all three firms.
Details are scare, as are comments from any of the three firms, but FT cites sources who suggest Mr. Altman sees “an opportunity to create a way of interacting with computers that is less reliant on screens.” which is a sentiment I heartily agree with. The Verge similarly had three sources who agreed that the goal is a “more natural and intuitive user experience.”
Continue reading…THCB Gang Episode 135, Thursday September 28
Joining Matthew Holt (@boltyboy) on #THCBGang on Thursday September 28 at 1pm PST 4pm EST are futurist Jeff Goldsmith: author & ponderer of odd juxtapositions Kim Bellard (@kimbbellard); and patient safety expert and all around wit Michael Millenson (@mlmillenson).
You can see the video below & if you’d rather listen than watch, the audio is preserved as a weekly podcast available on our iTunes & Spotify channels.
War — and Health Care — on the Cheap
By KIM BELLARD
Like many of you, I’m watching the war in Ukraine with great interest and much support. For all the fuss about expensive weapons — like F-16 fighters, Abrams tanks, Stryker and Bradley armored fighting vehicles, Patriot missile defense systems, Javelin anti-tank missiles, Himars long range missiles, and various types of high tech drones — what I’m most fascinated with is how Ukraine is using inexpensive, practically homemade drones as a key weapon.
It’s a new way of waging war. And when I say “waging war,” I can’t help but also think “providing health care.” It’s not so much that I think drones are going to revamp health care, but if very expensive weapons may, in fact, not be the future of warfare, maybe very expensive treatments aren’t necessarily the future of healthcare either.
Just within the last two weeks, for example, The New York Times headlined Budget Drones Prove Their Value in a Billion-Dollar War, AP said Using duct tape and bombs, Ukraine’s drone pilots wage war with low-cost, improvised weapons, ABC News reports: Inside Ukraine’s efforts to bring an ‘army of drones’ to war against Russia, and Defense News describes how Cardboard drone vendor retools software based on Ukraine war hacks.
This is not the U.S. military-industrial complex’s “shock-and-awe” kind of warfare; this is the guy-in-his-garage-building-his-own-weapons kind of warfare.
Ukraine’s minister for digital transformation, Mykhailo Federov, says the government is committed to building a state-of-the-art “army of drones.” He promises: “A new stage of the war will soon begin.”
NYT detailed:
Drones made of plastic foam or plastic are harder to find on radar, reconnaissance teams said. Ukraine buys them from commercial suppliers who also sell to aerial photographers or hobbyists around the world, along with parts such as radios, cameras, antennas and motors. The drone units mix and match parts until they find combinations that can fly past sophisticated Russian air defenses.
“The doctrine of war is changing,” one Ukrainian commander said. “Drones that cost hundreds of dollars are destroying machines costing millions of dollars.” The AP discusses how an elite drone unit – “a ragtag group of engineers, corporate managers and filmmakers” — “assembled with just $700,000, has destroyed $80 million worth of enemy equipment.”
Continue reading…The Carenostics Interview
In my other day job of advising companies, I was introduced to Carenostics by my friends at Bayer G4A. This is a super interesting company which is using AI to diagnose serious chronic diseases like kidney disease, asthma, and others much earlier. So far they are working with health systems like Hackensack in NJ and the VA, and have just raised a $5m round. Last week I spoke with father and son team, Kanishka Rao, COO & Bharat Rao, CEO. In particular look out for Bharat’s explanation of what has to go on behind the curtain to make AI become effective.
DNA is Better at Math than You Are
By KIM BELLARD
I was tempted to write about the work being done at Wharton that suggests that AI may already be better at being entrepreneurial than most of us, and of course I’m always interested to see how nanoparticles are starting to change health care (e.g., breast cancer or cancer more generally), but when I saw what researchers at China’s Shanghai Jiao Tong University have done with DNA-based computers, well, I couldn’t pass that up.
If PCs helped change the image of computers from the big mainframes, and mobile phones further redefined what a computer is, then DNA computers may cause us to one day – in the lifetime of some of you — look back at our chip-based devices as primitive as we now view ENIAC.
It’s been almost 30 years since Leonard Adleman first suggested the idea of DNA computing, and there’s been a lot of excitement in the field since, but, really, not the kind of progress that would make a general purpose DNA computer seem feasible. That may have changed.
At the risk of introducing way too many acronyms, the Chinese researchers claim they have developed a general purpose DNA integrated circuit (DIC), using “multilayer DNA-based programmable gate arrays (DPGAs).” The DPGAs are the building blocks of the DIC and can be mixed and matched to create the desired circuits. They claim that each DPGA “can be programmed with wiring instructions to implement over 100 billion distinct circuits.”
They keep track of what is going on using fluorescence markers, which probably makes watching a computation fun to watch.
One experiment, involving 3 DPGAs and 500 DNA strands, made a circuit that could solve quadratic equations, and another could do square roots. Oh, and, by the way, another DPGA circuit could identify RNA molecules that are related to renal cancer. They believe their DPGAs offers the potential for “intelligent diagnostics of different kinds of diseases.”
DNA tracking DNA.
Continue reading…The Times They Are A-Changing….Fast
By KIM BELLARD
If you have been following my Twitter – oops, I mean “X” – feed lately, you may have noticed that I’ve been emphasizing The Coming Wave, the new book from Mustafa Suleyman (with Michael Bhaskar). If you have not yet read it, or at least ordered it, I urge you to do so, because, frankly, our lives are not going to be the same, at all. And we’re woefully unprepared.
One thing I especially appreciated is that, although he made his reputation in artificial intelligence, Mr. Suleyman doesn’t only focus on AI. He also discusses synthetic biology, quantum computing, robotics, and new energy technologies as ones that stand to radically change our lives. What they have in common is that they have hugely asymmetric impacts, they display hyper-evolution, they are often omni-use, and they increasingly demonstrate autonomy.
In other words, these technologies can do things we didn’t know they could do, have impacts we didn’t expect (and may not want), and may decide what to do on their own.
To build an AI, for the near future one needs a significant amount of computing power, using specialized chips and a large amount of data, but with synthetic biology, the technology is getting to the point where someone can set up a lab in their garage and experiment away. AI can spread rapidly, but it needs a connected device; engineered organisms can get anywhere there is air or water.
“A pandemic virus synthesized anywhere will spread everywhere,” MIT”s Kevin Esvelt told Axios.
I’ve been fascinated with synthetic biology for some time now, and yet I still think we’re not paying enough attention. “For me, the most exciting thing about synthetic biology is finding or seeing unique ways that living organisms can solve a problem,” David Riglar, Sir Henry Dale research fellow at Imperial College London, told The Scientist. “This offers us opportunities to do things that would otherwise be impossible with non-living alternatives.”
Jim Collins, Termeer professor of medical engineering and science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), added: “By approaching biology as an engineering discipline, we are now beginning to create programmable medicines and diagnostic tools with the ability to sense and dynamically respond to information in our bodies.”
For example, researchers just reported on a smart pill — the size of a blueberry! — that can be used to automatically detect key biological molecules in the gut that suggest problems, and wirelessly transmit the information in real time.
Continue reading…Shiv Rao, CEO demos Abridge
Abridge has been trying to document the clinical encounter automatically since 2018. There’s been quit a lot of fuss about them in recent weeks. They announced becoming the first “Pal” on the Epic “Partners& Pals” program, and also that their AI based encounter capture technology was now being used at several hospitals. And they showed up in a NY Times article about tech being used for clinical documentation. But of course they’re not the only company trying to turn the messy speech in a clinician/patient encounter into a buttoned-up clinical note. Suki, Augmedix & Robin all come to mind, while the elephant is Nuance, which has itself been swallowed by the whale that is Microsoft.
But having used their consumer version a few years back and been a little disappointed, I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. CEO Shiv Rao was a real sport and took me through a clinical example with him as the doc and me as a (slightly) fictionalized patient. He also patiently explained where the company was coming from and what their road map was. But they are all in on AI–no off shore typists trying to correct in close to real time here.
And you’ll for sure want to see the demo. (If you want to skip the chat it’s about 8.00 to 16.50). And I think you’ll be very impressed indeed. I know I was. I can’t imagine a doctor not wanting this, and I suspect those armies of scribes will soon be able to go back to real work! — Matthew Holt
