The CB Insights Database has been tracking the most funded AI startups in the United States for 2017, and these startups are in a variety of industries. 2016 saw a record number of AI startups with 658 AI startups, compared to 2012’s 160.
CB Insights has outlined Flatiron Health, WellTok, and Lucina as the top 3 AI startups in Healthcare, when examining the funding given to startup companies. These startups are located in New York, Colorado, and Kentucky.
Flatiron Health is the top funded artificial intelligence (AI) startup in the U.S. with $313 million in funding. Flatiron Health operates the Oncology Cloud platform and integrates the entire clinical data spectrum, to provide oncologists with a fuller understanding of clinical and business intelligence.
Next at $225.6 million is WellTok, which seeks to use social networking as a means for improving health via its platform, Cafewell. This platform allows members to compare themselves with others in a group analytics view, or to look at only their own individual analysis.
Lucina Health has designed products that prevent incidents and costs related to pre-term births and has $19.4 million in funding, making it the 3rd highest funded AI startup in health care. Lucina can identify high risk populations and provide clinicians the opportunity to minimize those risk.
There are startup companies focusing on other applications of AI to healthcare, such as genetic research and improved imaging technology. AI offers the benefit of allowing patients to be seen at home or other location that is not the doctor’s office, and this may allow patients to seek care sooner preventing more serious health problems.
These companies represent a new frontier in digital health, as they seek to find the best approaches to combining AI applications into innovative healthcare solutions, that solve patient issues and allow for a meaningful healthcare visit. AI companies can help healthcare by applying machine learning processes to medical situations. A human doctor will always be required, but the AI can assist the human doctor with finding better answers, faster to get better results within healthcare environments.
Regulation of AI is a continual challenge for those wishing to use it in digital health solutions. Other challenges include getting consumers interested in products that may appear strange and finding funding. AI research often comes at a higher investment cost.
AI technology has the potential to revolutionize healthcare delivery and drug development if it can gain the trust of the providers, researchers, patients, and regulatory agencies. Some applications AI technology can be used for are:
- Improved reading of X-rays and other imaging studies.
- Reduction of Medical mistakes.
- Use of social media to diagnose mental illness.
- Study genetics of a particular medical condition (Autism, depression, etc.)
- Detection of Cancer
- Improved diagnostics for pulmonary function testing.
- Precision medicine, allowing for the best treatments for individual patients.
- Increased speed of diagnostics and treatment of medical conditions.
- Electronic Health Records can assist with improvements to diagnosis and medical knowledge on patients.
- Improved efficiency of Cancer treatments.
- Mapping for diseases.
- Development of artificial organs (Pancreas)
- New drug therapies for Huntington disease.
- Wearable technology
- Genetic editing
These solutions are just a sampling of what AI technology can do for patients with real life health issues, and the system trying to find solutions to those issues.