In a groundbreaking demonstration at NVIDIA’s GTC conference, Munjal Shah, the visionary behind Hippocratic AI, unveiled one of the first real-world deployments of large language models (LLMs) in the healthcare domain. Hippocratic AI, armed with over $120 million in funding from prominent investors like General Catalyst, Andreessen Horowitz’s Bio + Health, and Premji Invest, has been diligently working for over a year to create “empathetic” artificial intelligence agents capable of engaging in nuanced voice conversations with patients.
The primary objective of Munjal Shah’s brainchild is to safely deploy these AI agents to perform a wide array of non-diagnostic tasks, with the potential to significantly improve patient outcomes. These AI agents are designed to provide preoperative or postoperative guidance, gently encourage patients to adhere to their care plans, and answer questions about medications while exhibiting a friendly, familiar, and caring demeanor.
Munjal Shah emphasized the significance of low-latency response times in fostering a seamless, personalized, and conversational patient experience. “Every half-second of reduced latency increased patients’ sense of emotional connection by up to 10%,” he stated, underscoring NVIDIA’s critical role in achieving the desired speed and fluidity through its powerful AI chips.
In a recent interview, Munjal Shah contrasted Hippocratic AI’s advanced agents with the limitations of traditional interactive voice response systems. “You have to think about the old chatbot as having an IQ of 60, while this one has an IQ of 130. It’s a very different level of comprehension,” he explained, highlighting the remarkable progress in speech synthesis and comprehension capabilities.
Hippocratic AI’s mission is two-fold: to increase healthcare access and to significantly alleviate staffing pressures. By offloading routine tasks to generative AI agents, the company aims to address the staffing shortages straining the healthcare system, a key concern for investors, while enabling human nurses and doctors to focus on more nuanced, face-to-face interactions that require their expertise.
Munjal Shah’s approach to training Hippocratic AI’s LLMs emphasizes safety considerations, as reflected in the company’s motto of “do no harm.” This involves creating a constellation of LLMs trained solely on authoritative, evidence-based medical sources, and subjecting them to rigorous reinforcement learning and testing by human medical professionals. Hippocratic AI is currently conducting extensive testing with over 40 hospital systems and payers to ensure the safety and effectiveness of its LLMs before commercial deployment, providing a strong sense of security and trust in the system.
While a single, specialized LLM addresses part of the safety challenge, Munjal Shah’s company layers additional safeguards atop its model, implementing task-specific support models in areas like drug interactions and pre-operative guidance to supervise responses for accuracy and tone.
The demand for Munjal Shah’s “empathetic agents” is significant. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, an additional 275,000 nurses will be needed from 2020 to 2030 to meet the care needs of an aging population. Automating time-consuming tasks could reduce burnout among overworked nurses while elevating the human aspects of their roles, such as urgent care, emotional support, counseling, and addressing more complex diagnostic and treatment questions.
