AI could help healthcare providers serve patients much more efficiently
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The race is on to transform the US’s notoriously bureaucratic healthcare sector with artificial intelligence (AI) tools that deliver a better patient experience. A string of start-ups and scale-ups have raised tens of millions of dollars in recent weeks as they battle for market share in this huge market.
These early-stage businesses are largely focused on patient communications, offering AI agents and chatbots – including voice solutions – that are able to answer patient’s queries and calls without human intervention. The technology potentially solves a huge problem for hospitals, clinics and other healthcare providers, which struggle to recruit and retain staff to manage patients’ needs; the result has been frustration and delay for many patients.
Investors spy a massive opportunity. Confido Health will today announce it has raised $10 million in a Series A round led by Blume Ventures, with participation from new investors such as Schema Ventures and Vicus Ventures, as well as existing investors Together Fund, DeVC and Medmountain Ventures. Strategic healthcare operators including Innovaccer and Memora Health also took part.
The announcement is the latest in a string of recent fund-raisings from similar businesses. In August, Assort Health said it had raised around $50 million in a Series B round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Elsewhere, Hello Patient has just unveiled the details of a $22.5 million Series A round led by Scale Venture Partners. And EliseAI, a larger organisation with a presence in several industries, has raised $250 million in recent months.
I first interviewed Confido Health last December, when the New York-based start-up announced its $3 million seed funding round. Today, Chetan Reddy, the company’s co-founder and CEO, says competition is hotting up. “Our round will fund the development of new use cases and enable us to pursue growth as quickly as possible,” he says. “It almost feels like a landgrab out there right now.”
At stake is the opportunity to offer much better patient service. If automated agents can handle most of the work of dealing with routine patient inquiries – whether by phone, chatbot or another channel – the healthcare sector’s hard-pressed workforce will have more time to deal with more complicated issues. Patients will no longer waste time waiting for calls to be answered – and will be able to resolve often stressful issues more quickly and easily.
Confido Health started out by specialising in calls related to patient scheduling, which it reckons account for 30%-40% of all enquiries that healthcare providers receive. Its autonomous voice agents are now able to deal with 95% of all calls, Reddy says, with human operators then available to sort out problems that the AI has not been able to resolve.
The next step for Confido Health – and its competitors in the sector – is to ensure voice agents can also deal effectively with other issues. The company’s agents can now handle many care management calls, requests for prescription refills, and payment collections, Reddy adds.
For healthcare providers, this technology can prove transformative. Srinivas Danda, COO of Dallas Renal Group, one Confido Health customer, says wait times for patients calling it have dropped from several minutes to just 15 seconds; autonomous agents also make outbound calls about appointments, with more than two-thirds of patients confirming immediately. “[Voice agents] have helped make access faster, smoother and far less stressful for everyone,” says Danda.
The growth potential for start-ups is significant. Confido’s revenues are up 10-fold this year, with the company now serving more than 1 million patients, compared to 150,000 last December.
Hence the determination of so many other investment-backed start-ups and scale-ups to compete in this market. Recent research from Nova Advisor put the value of the AI voice agents market in healthcare at $468 million last year but predicted this figure would reach almost $11.6 billion by 2034 – pointing to growth of 38% a year.