AI Is Just the Beginning
Founders, doctors, and industry-shapers cast a vision for exponential progress in health
Preface by Unity Stoakes
There’s a palpable, pulsating energy coursing through StartUp Health’s community of Health Transformers today. As you flip the pages of this edition of StartUp Health Magazine, aptly themed “Exponential Progress”, we hope you’ll sense it too.
Historically, humanity has been defined not just by its achievements but by its aspirations. The audacity to think bigger, to visualize what doesn’t exist, and to carve a path towards it has always set us apart. That’s one of our binding core values and the vision for health moonshots.
Right now, in this era of exponential progress, we urge everyone to ignite their imagination. It’s not merely enough to have powerful tools like AI, big data, and genomics; we must also dream about the myriad ways they can redefine our reality in ways that leap us forward and change health outcomes for all.
And as you dream, remember that the greatest of visions can only be brought to life when shared. Unlimited potential is powered by purpose-driven collaboration. Throughout our journey with StartUp Health, we’ve realized that when passionate minds unite under a single purpose, magic happens. As our world pushes to reinvent the future, it’s not the lone genius but the collective power of diverse minds that will propel us forward faster.
To that end, in this issue, we’ve curated a fascinating assembly of Health Transformers from the StartUp Health community that include patients, scientists, deep thinkers, industry pioneers, and entrepreneurs. We’ve posed to them a simple yet profound question: How can AI be leveraged in new and exciting ways to cure disease, treat illness, open up access to care, and increase equity? The answers, as you’ll discover, are as varied as they are visionary. They paint a vivid picture of a future where AI, harnessed with purpose and creativity, can leapfrog over legacy health problems.
However, just learning from these insights isn’t enough. As you peruse this collection, let it serve as an inspiration. Let it challenge you to think beyond what AI can do and ponder what it should do. Let’s not just be witnesses to this era of exponential progress but be the catalysts who drive it.
Lastly, it’s essential to underscore that technology, in its essence, is a tool. It’s our imagination that breathes life into it, and our collaborations that sculpt its impact. The intersection of these human attributes with exponential technologies presents an unparalleled opportunity — an opportunity to harness our very evolution.
To our readers, thinkers, dreamers, doers — we extend an invitation. Let’s embark on this transformative journey together. Let’s harness our imagination, collaborate with purpose, and use these fantastic tools at our disposal to address the health challenges that have long seemed insurmountable.
It’s time to be audacious in our aspirations, bold in our visions, and relentless in our collaborations. Together, we can and will achieve our health moonshots.
Unity Stoakes
Co-founder, StartUp Health
Question: How can AI be leveraged in new and exciting ways to cure disease, treat illness, open up access to care, and increase equity?
“Generative AI represents a phase change in healthcare delivery and has the potential to revolutionize healthcare by enabling faster and more accurate diagnosis of disease through data analysis and pattern recognition. With the help of generative AI, healthcare providers can improve patient outcomes and reduce medical errors by predicting and preventing potential health issues before they become serious. The use of generative AI in healthcare can also lead to personalized treatment plans for patients based on their unique history and genetic makeup, ultimately improving overall quality of care.”
Toby Cosgrove, MD
Former CEO & President, Cleveland Clinic
Member, StartUp Health Board of Directors
“When it comes to global health innovation, language and communications can keep a great idea from coming to life. AI can help people from more diverse backgrounds to be able to communicate their business ideas concisely and with the right audiences in mind.”
Ole Kjerkegaard Nielsen
CEO & Co-founder, GO-Pen
“One of the least talked about epidemics is loneliness among seniors. Large language models will be able to act as customized “virtual home health assistants” that will talk to thousands of patients a day in a customized, empathetic manner for less than twenty cents an hour. Similarly, what now exists at Amazon, Google, Netflix on the retail side, e.g. monitoring all your viewing and buying habits and immediately guiding you to the next TV show or book based on your history, personality and keystrokes, will now be utilized to keep you healthy. Next step is to make sure that we are selecting and educating humans to be better humans than the robots and not just memorizing formulas that AI will do much better than us.”
Stephen Klasko, MD
Former CEO, Jefferson Health
“Imagine AI as a vigilant ally to human caregivers, together reaching out to our youth in their times of need. In the realm of mental health, this partnership turns data into empathy, silent struggles into shared journeys. It’s not about replacing human touch but amplifying it.”
Daniel Penn
CEO & Co-founder, Tickit Health
“The most obvious, immediate and pragmatic way we can use AI is to automate existing, well-defined processes, leaving the humans in the healthcare system free to fill the roles that only humans can perform: listening and empathizing, asking questions based on shared experiences, and responding to all the complexities and individual idiosyncrasies of the patient or their condition. Ideally, the money saved can be used to improve the pay of the clinicians and caregivers — and the time saved can give them more time to listen and respond.
Long run, AI can help us not just with diagnoses and treatments/cures, but it can help us create and analyze counterfactuals. With those, we can see not just the long-term impact of an intervention (whether a clinical treatment or something outside the healthcare system, such as better child care, housing, a cleaner, safer environment), but to compare it to what would happen otherwise. And that should help us, as a society, to start investing upfront in human health and wellbeing, rather than wait to fix it with expensive, imperfect healthcare that can never undo all the damage of waiting until it’s too late.”
Esther Dyson
Angel Investor & StartUp Health Impact Board Member
“Envision a future where your doctor visits centers more on your mental and emotional health rather than just your physical. With AI streamlining the review of a patient’s physical symptoms we provide more time for doctors to address the nuances of human emotions.”
Jeff McCormack
CEO & Co-founder, Iryss
“A patient awakens with a sharp pain in his shoulder. Rather than panicking, he reaches for his iPhone and opens an app that connects him to a virtual doctor for immediate triage. The AI-driven system quickly assesses his symptoms and connects him to the nearest ER doc. The ER doc evaluates the patient through a secure video call and decides that an in-person examination is necessary. With a simple command, the doctor dispatches a state-of-the-art Tesla ambulance equipped with cameras that continuously monitor and send vital signs in real time. As the patient is transported, the doctor orders an aspirin. A specialized printer in the ambulance prints the pill. At the ER, the LLM swiftly pulls all the patient’s medical records, displaying them in Virtual Reality (VR) for the doctor’s comprehensive review. The doc, now interacting through a robot equipped with visionary technology, can determine the patient’s Hemoglobin A1c and other vital labs merely by looking at him. The patient is thoroughly examined, treated, and sent home with the prescribed medications. As the patient goes about his daily routine the following day, an intelligent urinal analyzes the metabolites in his urine and alerts the doctor to adjust the medication.”
Harvey Castro, MD
ChatGPT Healthcare Advisor
“There are at least 90 nutrients and compounds found in our food supply for which there is substantial research on their impact on various illnesses. To establish helpfulness or harmfulness of a given food item as it relates to an illness we have to execute sophisticated algorithms that will take into account all the relevant nutrients, their role in each illness, quality and quantity of research backing each role. There are hundreds of thousands of unique food-disease interactions. Advancements in AI will allow us to make that data actionable on a daily basis so that food will truly become medicine.”
Mory Bahar
CEO & Founder, Personal Remedies
“In Africa and low-GDP nations, healthcare access grapples with scarcity, compounded by few healthcare professionals amidst rapid population growth. Imagine AI-fueled telemedicine breaching remote care barriers, powered by predictive insights curbing disease and healthcare burdens. AI’s synergy with healthcare holds the promise to level disparities, democratize access, and illuminate a path to health achievements — manifesting health moonshots into reality.”
Ismail Badjie, PharmD
CEO & Co-founder, Innovarx Global Health
“Perhaps the most riveting intersection between AI and healthcare is in the capacity of smart algorithms to mull through datasets at two or more greater orders of magnitude and distill insights about the human condition that are otherwise currently still buried and unexamined, or on the other hand, misplaced and misunderstood. What the next generation of healthcare-based AI promises is in its generative power to see the forest for the trees and the trees for the forest, to understand us to such depths that it can anticipate our needs and prepare the ground with its prognosticative lens to perceive in years, if not decades, to steer us towards our optimum health.”
Amir Bozorgzadeh
CEO & Founder, Virtuleap
“Generative AI is able to summarize important findings, draft notes, and rephrase. Take it a step further and imagine an app for patients to get interpretations of their labs, with the ability to ask follow-up questions. No more barriers for everyone to access top care.”
Yair Saperstein, MD
CEO & Co-founder, AvoMD
“Imagine a future where AI technology helps your doctor truly understand your diabetes in the context of your everyday life rather than in the context of glycaemic control.”
Katharine Barnard-Kelly, PhD
Chief Science Officer & Co-founder, Spotlight-AQ
“AI-powered chatbots, designed for triage and pre-diagnosis, can effectively guide patients to the appropriate level of care. This not only streamlines the healthcare delivery process but also substantially enhances its efficiency and scalability.”
Cristian Pascual
CEO & Founder, Mediktor
“Exercise remains a real challenge for people living with Type 1 diabetes, with fear of hypoglycemia being a major barrier. We envision that AI will help overcome three key challenges related to exercise and diabetes: 1) preventing hypoglycemia during exercise by ensuring safe glucose range to start exercising; 2) predicting hypoglycemia during the post-exercise recovery period; 3) motivating individuals to start and maintain an exercise training program to reach their individual fitness goals.”
Federico Fontana, PhD
CEO & Co-founder, enhance-d
“AI is revolutionizing our capacity to harness massive datasets for personalized care. These models, trained on extensive DNA datasets without pre-set assumptions, unravel intricate patterns from base pairs to higher-order structures and functions. This learning fosters novel insights into DNA-trait associations and potential new biological mechanisms. Generative AI can even synthesize new DNA sequences based on learned patterns, offering a tailored approach to meet the urgent needs of rare disease patients globally.”
Joshua Resnikoff
CEO & Founder, TMA Precision Health
“AI can drive precision health equity for the future by ensuring that greater diversity of clinical trials participants is included in the data aggregation, algorithms that are trained to identify diseases. This diversification of dataset is critical to the digital transformation that will help leapfrog legacy data and inherent biases that currently exist.”
Yusuf Henriques
CEO & Founder, IndyGeneUS AI
“AI in healthcare could lead to AI doctors that diagnose and treat patients remotely, using natural language processing, computer vision, and robotics; AI assistants that can generate personalized health plans, prescriptions, and reminders for patients, using reinforcement learning and data mining; AI researchers that can discover new drugs, therapies, and vaccines, using generative adversarial networks, deep learning, and bioinformatics.”
Howard Rosen
Founder, LifeWIRE
“AI provides new opportunities to actively engage patients as valuable members of the disease research and development cycle. By using intelligent, personalized approaches to monitoring, data analyses, and targeted interventions in all areas of the health journey, we can partner with patients in ways that have never been done before.”
Lynda Brown-Ganzert
CEO & Co-founder, RxPx
“As we delve into the realm of AI, it becomes our compass to navigate uncharted territories, unveiling the intricacies of its components and crafting a future where AI evolves from expert to mentor, nurturing a new generation of experts, human and machine alike.”
Guilherme Berardo
CEO & Co-founder, Sami
“AI holds the promise of re-humanizing healthcare. By handling intricate tasks, it reduces administrative strains, letting providers deeply connect with patients. AI’s prowess in data analysis helps pinpoint health disparities, championing health equity by ensuring tailored care for all, regardless of background. Additionally, AI-driven solutions transcend geographical barriers, democratizing healthcare access.”
Nicole Cook
CEO & Founder, Alvee
“Generative AI chatbots can be used to assist patients in completing the risk assessments associated with their annual wellness visit and providing 24/7 access to healthcare information and assistance. These chatbots will be key to enabling ease-of-use for the older population who we are serving.”
Gail Port
CEO & Co-founder, GeroHealth
“Imagine a world where AI is being used to proactively scan sources like medical records, exercise, and sleep data, as well as information from your smart home and car to gain insights on your health and provide early detection of health or neuro-developmental conditions. And not just for you, but for your children and others in your care.”
Herman Lindvelt
CEO & Co-founder, Augmental Technologies
“AI will help identify the molecular dance of genes, proteins, and metabolites, rewriting the narrative of healthy longevity. AI-powered nanobots can restore health at the cellular level and offer real-time guidance for better health. Health equity research will benefit from predictive analytics regardless of ethnic background and provide the fullness of wellness to all.”
Keshav K. Singh, PhD
Chief Scientific Officer, Yuva Biosciences
“AI can revolutionize cancer patient outcomes. By analyzing vast datasets, AI can uncover hidden patterns, enabling more accurate diagnoses and personalized treatment plans. It empowers oncologists with predictive insights, anticipating disease progression and optimizing interventions. AI-driven algorithms can enhance decision-making, suggesting tailored therapies based on patients’ unique profiles, genetics, and treatment responses.”
Luis Santiago
CEO & Founder, Pegasi
“Imagine a world where individuals, residing in remote regions effortlessly access a “Genomic Guardian” app. With a simple DNA sample, AI-driven analysis swiftly unveils the individual’s genetic landscape, foreseeing risks, and empowering them with personalized recommendations. Health disparities dissolve as this democratized approach extends globally, offering everyone, regardless of location, a chance to proactively safeguard their wellbeing.”
Dipu Patel
Vice Chair of Innovation, Department of PA Studies, University of Pittsburgh
“In addiction treatment we are beginning to see AI-enabled wearable diagnostics that can predict craving episodes before they happen. By pairing this technology with intelligent drug delivery systems we can detect a craving before it occurs, notify the patient to use their inhaler, and in real-time optimize the dose of medicine delivered through the inhaler to match the severity of the craving we’ve detected.”
Dalton Signor
CEO & Co-founder, Miist
“AI has the possibility of informing us about important relationships related to overall health and stands to completely revolutionize how we understand, care for, and even heal people. In terms of caring for loved ones, AI has the potential to correlate information from user interaction and alert us of potentially dangerous conditions that may previously have gone unnoticed for a longer period of time.”
Avanlee Christine
CEO & Founder, Avanlee Care
“We are ushering in a new decade of transformation in health care, one that moves away from siloed data to radical interoperability. This future will be based on three Health IT pillars: digital identity, interoperability and continually-updated, person-centered health records.”
Linda Van Horn
CEO & Founder, iShare Medical
“AI analyzes patient data, predicting disease risk and progression, enabling timely interventions. AI guides treatment decisions by forecasting individual responses to therapies, minimizing side effects. Predictive modeling streamlines clinical trials by identifying ideal candidates, expediting drug development. AI integrates diverse data sources, offering a holistic view of patient health and disease evolution. AI anticipates drug-related risks, facilitating early risk management in personalized treatment plans.”
Christian Dansereau, PhD
CEO & Co-founder, Perceiv AI
“Imagine that as a young adolescent all your personal data has been methodically collected over time and that, presently, seems to have no relationship to any future concern whatsoever. Now imagine that data from millions of individuals whose data patterns are found to “correlate” tightly to yours is examined, with the only difference being they are older than you. Now for the magic of AI… which will engage in “time travel” and return with a prediction of when you might first present with the early symptoms of a disease or disorder — essentially a model of your “future self” — and best of all, what to do and NOT to do to avoid it.”
Kevin Rogers
CEO & Founder, MoodMD
“Mobile medicine — which encompasses emergency medical services, fire services, non-emergency medical transportation, critical care transport, and community paramedicine — is called “safety net medicine” by those among us who support its professionals. The power of artificial intelligence in mobile medicine is to ensure that those who cannot speak for themselves — due to injury, disability, cultural barrier, or even age — are known by those who run toward the crisis and want to provide the most informed care possible. Imagine the impact of arriving at the scene of a crash and already knowing the special health needs of the children who may be in the vehicle, even if his or her parent has been injured and cannot describe their circumstances — then knowing which facility is best suited to care for the child, what their healthcare wishes are (so they can be honored), and who else needs to know what the responders saw and did…and automatically starting the flow of information to the next link in the care continuum.”
Jonathon Feit
CEO & Co-founder, Beyond Lucid Technologies
“The status quo is broken in speciality and primary care. AI can be leveraged to power technology solutions that positively address burnout and turnover for physicians and staff. By promoting transparent pricing and eliminating repetitive tasks, redundant documentation, and overly complex billing, we are just starting to see the ways that AI is contributing to quality care, better access, and patient satisfaction. Imagine the impact when high value use cases are broadly deployed.
Darrell Atkin
VP Marketing, HealthMe
“AI can allow us to objectively assess brain phenomena that were previously only accessible via subjective measures. This advancement puts mental healthcare on even ground with the rest of medicine, and will allow for advancements in mental healthcare that were previously unimaginable.”
Bechara Saab, PhD
CEO & Co-founder, Mobio Interactive
“AI can help address the needs of people 65 and older with Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia by helping us understand their stories and care preferences — without difficulty or delay. It can allow us to automatically interview patients and create a personal bio that helps providers understand the person holistically, beyond their physical medical needs. The person’s story belongs in their care.”
Beth Sanders
CEO & Founder, LifeBio
“Medical imaging powered by AI enables swift and accurate diagnoses, bridging geographical gaps in specialized care. Telemedicine, driven by AI-driven chatbots and diagnostics, provides remote healthcare access to marginalized populations. Predictive analytics anticipate disease outbreaks and resource needs, aiding proactive intervention.”
Alex Guastella
CEO & Founder, Sympti
Page through the digital version of StartUp Health Magazine Issue 12: The Dawn of Exponential Progress here.
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