Babylon founder Ali Parsa is launching a beta version AI assistant for clinicians, as his secretive new healthtech emerges from stealth.
Quadrivia — a UK and Jersey-registered company — has also secured pre-seed investment from Swedish investor Norrsken, as Sifted reported last week.
Parsa’s new venture comes just over a year on from the collapse of once-unicorn healthtech Babylon, as he enters a frothy market of well-funded startups building clinical assistants with large language models (LLMs).
“[The AI assistant] is just at the beginning of its journey and we know the huge amount it still has to learn and get right,” he says in a statement. “Our hope is to create an affordable personal clinical assistant with comprehensive capabilities across the care spectrum to help all clinicians and their patients.”
AI assistant
Quadrivia’s AI assistant will help with admin tasks, patient interactions, decision-making, chronic and post-operative care and continuous monitoring, in multiple languages.
It says it will look to sell into provider and payor organisations — which can typically include public healthcare systems, insurers and private healthcare providers — and pharmaceutical companies.
“Qu [the AI assistant’s name] is still in its infancy and while developing fast, needs further improvements before deployment,” the startup says in a press release. Quadrivia is currently signing up clinicians from around the world to help test its beta version.
A crowded market
Parsa is looking to tap into an increasingly crowded market.
In recent times, a number of European startups have raised funding to build AI assistants for clinicians, as healthcare systems increasingly grapple with staff shortages and ageing populations.
In 2023, Denmark’s Corti raised $60m and earlier this year France’s Nabla picked up $24m — both are building for an AI assistant for doctors and nurses. Sweden’s Tandem Health also raised $9.5m to scale its healthcare copilot in June.
Healthtech giant Doctolib launched an AI assistant in February this year.
There are signs that healthcare providers are warming to the idea of augmenting their healthcare professionals with AI assistants.
UK startup Tortus is currently trialling a GenAI note-taking tool at an NHS hospital in the UK and Nabla inked a deal with US healthcare provider Kaiser Permanente to roll out Copilot to 10k physicians across Northern California around a year ago. In 2023, Corti told Sifted its tech was being used by hospitals and other healthcare institutions in Scandinavia, the UK and the US in about 100m patient encounters per year.
All of this shows the early appetite for AI tools in healthcare. The question will be whether Parsa is late to the party.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/babylon-ali-parsa-launches-ai-assistant-healthtech-news/
