Health included is rolling out a new AI tool that could pit it against Big Tech’s latest healthcare bets.
The healthcare startup has launched an AI-powered personal health assistant, Business Insider has exclusively learned. The technology leverages patient medical claims, benefits information and other data to provide on-demand answers to health-related questions.
Included Health is tapping into a hot area of AI in healthcare, where it competes with other healthcare startups as well as tech heavyweights. Alphabet’s Verily released its own AI-powered app in October that allows patients to connect their medical records and ask a chatbot their health-related questions. OpenAI wants to win in consumer health technologiesalso, and plans to create tools such as its own personal health assistant, Business Insider reported in November.
For more than a decade, Included Health has been built on the principle of personalizing how patients interact with their healthcare. The company, which sells technology to about 300 employers and health plans to help patients better navigate their health benefits, tested its AI assistant for about 18 months to ensure its accuracy in smaller pilots before making it available to its entire employer base, CEO Owen Tripp said.
“It can’t be ChatGPT’s probability level. It has to be precise,” he said.
Tripp is optimistic that patients will receive general health advice from LLM like OpenAI ChatGPT or Claude from Anthropic. These AI tools can help patients learn more about their conditions and prepare for doctor visits, he said. But he stressed that Inclus’ technology goes even further.
“When it comes to actually caring for yourself or someone else, you’re going to need a lot of very secure, specific data and full context to address issues, including the exact medical history of that patient,” Tripp said.
Patient-facing healthcare AI sometimes walks a regulatory tightrope, especially if the technology allows it. personalized advice which effectively replaces the work that clinicians are licensed to perform. Tripp said he doubts most big tech companies trying to get into medical records aggregation want to tackle that complexity.
“I predict that, like many before them, they will pull out. It’s just tough, and often the juice isn’t worth it for these high-profile companies,” he said.
Healthcare AI with humans in the know
Inclus Health’s personal health assistant, called Dot, has become the gateway for its members and the basis for Inclus’ new products, said COO Nupur Srivastava.
Included recently put Dot in front of members during open enrollment to help answer their benefits questions, Srivastava said. The AI agent can also help patients prepare for doctor visits and send the clinician a summary of the patients’ previous visits in advance.
Included Health still employs many clinicians and care advocates that members can speak with if they wish. Srivastava also noted that if a patient mentions the term “suicide” in a conversation with Dot, “in a minute, someone will call you.”
Asked about the ambitions of Big Tech and AI startups to create personalized health AI, Tripp said Inclusive Health is in talks with several potential partners to help them achieve these goals. He did not specify which companies he is targeting, but he suggested that some AI companies focus on acquiring personalized health data that they can anonymize and use to train models.
“But when it comes to providing patient care, we are confident that the companies that succeed will be those that have well-trained, licensed physicians in all 50 states, delivering care on a real-time platform to the mind, body and wallet,” he said.
IPO deadline included
Included Health was due to be made public in 2022. The startup had hired banks for an IPObut pulled out of his scheduled investor meetings when the market began to collapse, Tripp told Business Insider in January.
Tripp declined to share details about Included’s November release strategy. But Included is profitable, so the company doesn’t need to raise money through a public listing, he said. Included has not raised money publicly since its creation in 2021 following the merger of Grand Rounds and Doctor on Demand, and the company has not shared its valuation.
Public markets have not forgiven healthcare startups. Only two digital health companies have gone public this year, Hinge health And Health Omada. And while Hinge and Omada are faring much better than most listed companies in the 2021 digital health IPO wave, healthcare IPO hopes still face high IPO standards and significant volatility risks once they begin trading.
“The last few years in our industry have not been very commercial for a public company,” Tripp said.
However, with so many developments in healthcare AI, Tripp acknowledges that an IPO could create opportunities for Included Health to acquire other companies.
“I think this is a time where there will be exciting capabilities and technologies available in the market that will allow us to provide even more services to our members,” he said. “I have my eyes very open to how I would use capital to execute some of these M&A events. That part is more important to me.”