Companies are expanding their reach with artificial intelligence almost daily through acquisitions, investments and government approvals. These are just some of the AI health technology announcements we’re seeing happening this week.
HEALWELL AI acquires majority stake in Pentavere
HEALWELL AI debuted last month after partnering with WELL Health Technologies, which provides a digital platform for healthcare operations, to launch AI-based decision support to promote early diagnosis of diseases and improve preventive care.
The addition of Pentavere’s data abstraction and structuring capabilities will broaden the HEALWELL therapeutic and disease indication spectrum offered to WELL healthcare providers, the company said in its announcement Wednesday.
Pentavere is according to Dr. Alexander Dobranowski, CEO of HEALWELL, a leader in AI in healthcare.
“The advanced DARWEN platform uses artificial intelligence and large language models to process complex, unstructured clinical data into easily searchable and reference-oriented structured data, addressing a critical need in modern healthcare technology,” he said in a statement.
Aaron Leibtag, co-founder and CEO of Pentavere, added that the partnership with HEALWELL will further its mission to improve patient outcomes. Pentavere collaborates with hospital networks in the field of data abstraction and structuring.
The majority of healthcare data is unstructured or conversational data, including radiological images, physician notes, and more. AI can play a key role in turning unstructured data into actionable insights in patient care, according to healthcare leaders at HIMSS22.
To perform analytics at the scale and speed healthcare needs AI and machine learning technology, says Sally (Embrey) Omidvar, vice president of Life Science Research Success at Truveta, an electronic health record analytics company.
HEALWELL AI said it is acquiring a majority stake in Pentavere on a non-diluted basis in a combined primary and secondary transaction with an option to purchase the remaining stake over the next three years.
Forward Health launches CarePods without staff
Forward Health, which launched its AI-powered medical concierge service in 2017, announced that it will soon bring physician-built CarePods – self-contained medical diagnostic rooms – to major cities like San Francisco, New York and Chicago.
The company, founded by Google AI division veteran Adrian Aoun, shared its plans to expand beyond direct-to-consumer primary care as it announced $100 million in investments on Wednesday to produce and deploy the pods.
“Once you step in, CarePods become your personal gateway to a wide range of health apps designed to treat today’s problems and prevent tomorrow’s problems,” the company said on its website.
Forward CarePods, which cost healthcare consumers $99 per month to access, include disease detection, biometric body scans, blood tests and more. Data is sent to Forward’s platform and can be accessed via the mobile app.
The company also said it will continue to develop self-service tools for “prenatal care, advanced cancer screening and polygenic risk assessment.”
Aoun said when he founded Forward Health he focused on AI that can predict adverse health events.
“We still have a long way to go to make what we do affordable for everyone, not just the kind of people who are lucky enough to spend money for better health,” he said at the time.
“Fortunately, the same technologies that make the system smarter also make it cheaper in the long run.”
FDA approves Lunit algorithm for breast cancer screening
Lunit, a provider of AI-powered solutions for cancer diagnostics and therapy, announced Tuesday that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved its 3D Breast Tomosynthesis algorithm to enter the U.S. breast screening market.
Lunit INSIGHT DBT analyzes 3D images to increase the accuracy of breast cancer diagnoses.
Many studies have shown that AI, compared to radiologists alone, improves cancer detection.
In 2020, Lunit, together with Korean teaching hospitals, published findings from a study of 170,000 mammogram exams from five institutions in South Korea, the US and the UK, showing that AI helps improve accuracy in breast cancer detection.
Not only was AI better at detecting masses, distortions or asymmetry and invasive and node-negative cancers at early stages, but it is also less affected by interpreting images of dense breasts, according to the study’s findings, thus improving interpretations of radiologists of dense breasts be improved. mammograms by 11%.
Andrea Fox is editor-in-chief of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.