These technologies use ambient listening to process doctor-patient consultations and generate automatic clinical summaries in seconds. This is a game changer. Physicians spend approximately 90 minutes daily on clinical documentation, and administrative burden is a leading cause of burnout. It’s no wonder that leading players like Epic and Kaiser Permanente have identified AI scribe technology as a top priority. Although adoption in Israel has stalled due to the immaturity of Hebrew-speaking scribes, you can be sure that hospitals and HMOs are already testing solutions.
During my tenure in government and now at a leading hospital, I have vetted hundreds of startups seeking funding or partnerships. I remember the buzz of predictive analytics when to successfully obtain funding, all a startup needed was a data scientist, a good question, and a promising data source. There was the phase where, if you can dream it, it can be a mobile app. There were promises of virtual reality and remote patient monitoring. What comes out of all this? Products that could be financially supported because they enable other health services (e.g., Datos or Tyto), or optimize them (Aidoc, Feel Better), or replace them entirely (Pulsenmore, GynTools).
I can count on my hand the number of startups I’ve encountered over the years that had useful economic ROI data, and I don’t need all five fingers to do it. Healthcare startups, pay attention. You don’t want to find yourself in the infamous quagmire of a mature product but insufficient evidence, doomed to piloting limbo. Collect your ROI metrics early in the game. If you are already investing resources to study the clinical effectiveness of your product, you should also evaluate its economic gains. You should also insist that organizational decision-makers weigh in on the research protocol. Typically, research protocols aimed at validating the benefits of health technologies are written by a clinical manager. Make sure the purchasing managers are also in the room. Ask them: If I had the necessary clinical evidence, would you be a paying customer today? What would convince you to buy?
The FDA has already approved more than 1,000 AI-based health technologies. Bubble or not, the world of health, already strongly influenced by technological progress, is at the dawn of an unimaginable transformation. However, in a system constrained by budgets and burnout, one thing is certain. “Nice to have” is not a sustainable business model.
Rachel Sarafraz is the Director of Innovation at Sheba Beyond Virtual Hospital at Sheba Medical Center.