The Times Entrepreneurs Network asked a select group of founders for real-world examples of how artificial intelligence is driving results for their business.
In the second of our five-part series, a health tech company that claims to save the NHS around £1.5 million every day, by intercepting avoidable hospital admissions, attributes part of its success to its AI agents.
Cera, a digital-first home healthcare company founded by a former doctor Ben Maruthappuhas made such progress in recent years that it has been able to license its software to other companies.
Maruthappu said: “We decided to focus the vast majority of our resources and efforts on AI agents because of the prospects we saw and the rapid pace of change in the world of AI. more generally and the traction we’ve seen with some of our tools.
Healthcare is a notoriously difficult industry in which to innovate quickly, but Cera had the advantage of holding data on people being cared for at home. Caregivers used the company’s app to record key observations, such as blood pressure, temperature, sleep and heart rate, during each visit.
“This gave us data that could be analyzed and that could serve as the basis for an algorithmic tool,” he said.
• Health startup Cera achieves unicorn status after raising $150 million
Cera began developing its first AI tool in 2018, to detect common health problems such as the flu or cold before symptoms appear. A “Predict-Prevent” tool was launched in 2020, and Maruthappu realized it would be a success after spotting a patient at risk of developing a urinary tract infection. The patient received antibiotics before his condition worsened.
“It’s probably one of my proudest moments,” he said. “I remember a time when I was in the emergency room and saw someone come in too late with a urinary tract infection.
“They were receiving home care at the time. We gave them intravenous fluids, very strong intravenous antibiotics, but the patient died. It was a tragedy. If we had spotted this person earlier or had antibiotics at home, they would still be alive.”
A study by the London-based AI consultancy, published in September this year, found the tool potentially saved the NHS more than £1.5 million a day by halving hospital admissions.
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The process of creating Cera software was long, requiring two years of development and several data scientists. “Once we had this plan and showed it to be very effective, subsequent algorithmic tools took a fraction of the time,” Maruthappu said.
It took two data scientists just three months to go from initial concept to launching a falls-specific algorithm in 2023. The company reported that the tool reduced the number of hospitalizations due to falls among the people in its care by 20%.
The timeline has accelerated even further with Cera’s “Ami,” an AI agent designed to interview applicants for care services. Maruthappu said Cera had received more than a million applications from caregivers and nurses in the past two years, making recruitment an area it wanted to focus on.
“It has radically improved almost every aspect of how we recruit,” he explained. “We’re able to respond to people almost immediately, instead of making them wait days or weeks for an interview. Ami can recruit people at any time of the day and recruit hundreds of thousands of people at the same time – and because it’s an AI tool, it’s much more cost-effective for us.”
Once the application is submitted, Ami phones an interviewee for a screening call assessing their eligibility and giving them a score out of 100. If the application is successful, the candidate is then called for an interview with a human recruiter.
Cera said the tool reduced the company’s recruiting screening costs by two-thirds, allowing every human recruiter to use it two days a week.
Maruthappu said that within days of launching Ami, he had saved “thousands of euros” and that his company had licensed the software to other companies within months. Cera continues to develop more AI agents that are still in the pilot stage.