AI-powered virtual healthcare agents could be on their way

The American healthcare startup Hippocratic AI has announced a partnership with tech giant Nvidia to develop a virtual healthcare agent powered by generative artificial intelligence.

Their aim is to offer an experience that is both reliable and empathetic, with virtual healthcare agents capable of replacing real doctors in certain situations.

The idea is to develop a virtual healthcare assistant that can understand and react to patients' emotions. The goal is to improve the experience for patients by making it seem almost as if they're dealing with a real doctor. The agent takes the form of an animated character, visible on a tablet, who dialogues with the patient remotely.

For now, it's not yet a question of making a diagnosis. Rather than replacing a doctor outright, the AI-powered agent would provide support, communicating with a patient just after an operation, for example, to check that all is well, or delivering and explaining test results to a patient. In discussion with the patient, this agent could also adapt a given treatment, or even change it in the case of an allergy, for example.

In this partnership, Nvidia's role will be to contribute its expertise and resources – particularly with its Clara platform dedicated to the medical field – in order to optimise the performance of the virtual healthcare agent developed by Hippocratic AI. In fact, the startup is continuing to work on improving the accuracy and relevance of its dedicated large language model (LMM).

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates a projected shortfall of some 10 million health workers globally by 2030. Generative AI could fill some of these needs, provided, of course, that it is perfectly reliable and sufficiently secure to protect patients' privacy and data. – AFP Relaxnews