AuxHealth interviews patients automatically, anywhere, anytime, and delivers an up-to-date medical note to clinicians.
Funding will be used to further develop AuxHealth’s technological capabilities and efficiency, in part by fine-tuning custom large language models (LLMs).
The pre-seed funding by the Steele Foundation for Hope aligns with the startup’s mission to help clinical teams everywhere focus on delivering the best care possible, including careful consideration and design for future applications in low resourced settings.
Carlsbad, CA, June 28, 2023 — AuxHealth, Inc., a healthcare generative AI company co-founded in February 2023 by an experienced healthcare machine learning scientist and a Harvard medical student — has announced a $2M pre-seed round to accelerate the development of its conversational AI platform for low-cost, high-quality collection and documentation of patient information. AuxHealth enables a future where physicians, nurses, and other healthcare professionals begin patient visits better informed, save time on documentation, and can follow up or check in with patients autonomously.
Pre-seed funding was issued as a SAFE by the Steele Foundation for Hope. The Foundation seeks to improve quality of life around the world and makes program-related investments in high-potential new technologies consistent with its mission. Harvard Innovation Labs and the Harvard Business School Rock Center for Entrepreneurship also provided non-dilutive support.
“Generative AI is revolutionizing many industries by enabling automated yet human-like interactions,” said Ilya Valmianski, PhD, CEO and co-founder of AuxHealth. “In healthcare, a sector where the persistent scarcity of medical professionals has left countless patients underserved, these breakthroughs are particularly critical. Generative AI stands poised to greatly extend the capabilities of physicians, nurses, and other healthcare workers, in part by interacting directly with patients. By empowering both traditional and digital health providers, we can enhance patient access, boost care quality, and significantly decrease costs.”
Ilya began working at the intersection of healthcare and AI as a senior machine learning engineer at Kaiser Permanente, where he proposed and led development of an AI-driven patient intake and clinical decision support tool that is now used by thousands of doctors and millions of patients. At Curai, Ilya built a conversational patient intake system that leveraged Large Language Models to provide a human-like experience. Having built patient intake systems for two healthcare organizations, Ilya wants to bring the power of these technologies to all clinicians.
Auxhealth’s other co-founder, William Shen, realized during his clinical training at Harvard Medical School that the immense imbalance between patient needs and limited availability of quality healthcare, both in the United States and globally, cannot be affordably resolved under current paradigms of care delivery. Prompted by his Harvard College experiences designing new models of care alongside healthcare leaders at NHS England, Partners in Health, and Massachusetts General Hospital, William began conceptualizing how clinicians could safely offload work to AI. He began coding his own program before joining forces with Ilya.
The startup is advised by Russ Phillips, MD, the Director of the Harvard Medical School Center for Primary Care. Russ formerly served as Chief of General Medicine and Primary Care at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and is a nationally recognized leader in primary care innovation, including virtual-first models of care.
About AuxHealth
AuxHealth is pioneering methods of safely harnessing large language models (LLMs) to directly interact with patients and support clinicians. Relative to previous language AI approaches, LLMs have an unprecedented ability to mimic human-like language understanding and generation, but also have a tendency to deviate from instructions and “hallucinate” inaccurate information. By decoupling the language understanding and generation capabilities of LLMs and inserting ontology-anchored dialogue managers, AuxHealth is able to guardrail LLM-powered conversations while preserving human-like conversational quality.
Have a comment? Email our co-founder, Ilya, at ilya@mdme.ai
