With the aim of building a suite of AI-powered health care solutions, Los Angeles-based HealthTensor, a startup software creator, recently raised $5 million in a round of financing focused on scaling up operations.
The company’s founders, three longtime friends previously headed to medical school, is focused on facilitating the growing role of technology in healthcare. Their initial product will be algorithms to help analyze doctors’ notes and lab results with an eye toward diagnosing patients.
One feature of the solution reviews historic patient data to determine where diagnoses and documentation might be missing, and the platform can also be used in outpatient settings to automate the diagnosis and documentation of chronic conditions. Algorithms continuously monitor patients, providing physicians with “data-driven” notes.
“HealthTensor works with a team of physicians from leading institutions to ensure that bias is not introduced into any algorithms. This is done by a thorough six-step development process, where the data used to build the models is taken from a large and randomized pool and is then always manually vetted by the team of physicians,” CEO Ben-Joseph said in a statement. “Any algorithm that is in production has hit an accuracy level of at least 90%. Furthermore, HealthTensor has developed unique features that ensure the physician does not blindly copy over any suggested information. All information must be approved by the physician before it can be added into the medical record.”
According to the company, the software was designed with the physician workflow in mind, enabling frictionless adoption of the product by users.
"HealthTensor makes me a better doctor because it allows me to spend less time in front of the computer and more time in front of the patient," said Dr. Tasneem Bholat, an early user of HealthTensor's software. "HealthTensor synthesizes all the data from the patient's chart, saving me from doin g chart biopsy and surfacing diagnoses I might have otherwise missed.”
The company's software currently is integrated within several hospitals and will expand to more in the coming months, the vendor reported.
“We think of HealthTensor as an AI-powered medical resident that is focused specifically on the tedious, data-driven aspects of medicine, which is what computers do best,” Ben-Joseph said. “Many doctors are forced to spend a majority of their day focused on data aggregation from medical records, which leads to missed diagnoses, patient dissatisfaction, and physician burnout. HealthTensor frees up the physician to focus on the conceptual and emotional aspects of medicine, which is what humans do best.”