Things & Thinks-Issue XLIII
In this 43rd edition of my newsletter, some interesting research in digital health, the usual news round up and the monthly Longread, Tweet and Chart of the Month sections. Happy Reading!
Research Digest
Benefits, Limits, and Risks of GPT-4 as an AI Chatbot for Medicine
This perspective by Lee et al captures some essential insights about the use of GPT-4 and in general of using large language models in medicine. It illustrates the applications of GPT-4 in the following areas-
- Medical Note Taking
- Innate Medical Knowledge
- Medical Consultation
Digital therapeutics from bench to bedside
This review of digital therapeutics provides a good overview of the development of the field, regulatory approaches, comparison with biopharmaceuticals and future prospects.
Digital Healthcare News
Tech in Digital Health
Google provided several updates on its healthcare work, including Med-PaLM 2, expert-level medical LLM, AI-assisted ultrasound, AI for cancer treatment planning with Mayo Clinic and AI assisted tuberculosis screening.
Google also released Open Health Stack, a suite of open source components and developer resources designed to help accelerate development of interoperable digital health solutions with a focus on standards, security, and advanced analytics.
Microsoftās Nuance Communications announced Dragon Ambient eXperience (DAX) Express, a new clinical documentation tool that uses the latest version of OpenAIās artificial intelligence language model, GPT-4.
Regulatory/Policy Brief
UKās MHRA announced that Large Language Models (LLMs) maybe considered as software as a medical device and will be regulated under the Medical Device Regulation 2002 (as amended) when they are placed on the market.
US FDA published the āFramework for the Use of Digital Health Technologies in Drug and Biological Product Developmentā.
Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) released āEthical Guidelines for AI in Healthcare and Biomedical Researchā.
NeuroRPM obtained USFDA 510(k) for monitoring of Parkinsonās disease on Apple Watch.
Funding, Deals, Mergers & acquisitions
HeartFlow, a company that uses artificial intelligence to provide information on coronary artery disease by analyzing CT scans, raised $215M.
AI medical coding company CodaMetrix raised $55M
Zus Health, a shared health data platform bringing distributed patient data directly to the point of care, raised $40M.
Vital raised $24.7M in Series B funding for its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered healthcare solutions.
Florence, an innovator in healthcare enablement software, raised $20M in seed funding.
Inato raised $20M to expand clinical trial site matching platform.
Pear Therapeutics filed for bankruptcy, having reported $4.1 million in revenue and a $30.7 million net loss in the third quarter.
Other News
Medtronic and NVIDIA announced partnership to accelerate the development of AI in the healthcare system and bring new AI-based solutions into patient care.
Medtronic also announced a partnership in India with Qure.ai for their stroke care initiative to provide AI solutions to comprehensive stroke centres and primary stroke centres
Telehealth company Amwell is partnering with digital chronic condition management platform DarioHealth to add a cardiometabolic program to its suite of digital offerings.
Longread of the Month
This McKinsey & Company report about consumer centricity in healthcare gives some great insights into how to shape solutions using consumer centricity principles.
Tweet of the Month
Chart of the Month
According to Bessemer, for the median health tech business, it takes roughly 10ā11 years to reach $100 million in ARR, which is over three to four years longer than their cloud counterparts.