The Healthcare Co-Pilot
Why We Invested in GenHealth
By Kahini Shah and Vishal Vasishth
It’s no secret that the U.S. healthcare system is broken. Americans spend $4 trillion on healthcare annually, but the U.S. has some of the worst health outcomes in the Western world. Some of these challenges could be overcome with better data and analytics. Physicians spend about 35% * of their time documenting patient data, leaving less time for patient care, especially during consultations. A McKinsey report estimated that a quarter of healthcare costs, equaling about $1 trillion *, come from administrative burdens alone.
At Obvious, we invest in products that deliver better patient outcomes at a lower cost. That is why we were drawn to GenHealth.
GenHealth is building a large transformer model based on claims and clinical data. It includes a foundational model, an API, and user applications that can generate and predict future sequences of health events using historical data.
Transformers exhibit great potential in addressing data-related challenges. They can extrapolate data into hypothetical future scenarios, like ChatGPT for text and Midjourney for images. Transformers possess the capacity to generate substantial volumes of data and handle a wide variety of applications.
GenHealth feeds patient healthcare and financial data into a large transformer model. With this, GenHealth is able to give insurers, providers, and pharma realistic glimpses of what their patients’ futures might be based on their past. Working together as co-pilots, human and machine, humans can review these insights and provide real-time feedback that AI can learn and improve from. For example, GenHealth can help insurance providers with risk adjustment, care management, and financial benchmarking. Other use cases include helping pharmacy companies identify potential side effects and identifying diseases or patient types that require more research.
GenHealth was founded by Ricky Sahu, an industry veteran who previously started 1upHealth, a platform that hosts tens of millions of patient records and allows payors to connect, compute, and control this data. Sahu spun GenHealth out of 1upHealth after receiving Series C funding. He has a deep understanding of healthcare data and how to use it to help patients and the payer and provider systems that support them. He is focused on building opportunities for transformer AI models in the healthcare data space. Joining him are co-founders Ethan Siegel and Eric Marriott, who bring deep expertise and passion for the problem.
We could not be more thrilled to partner with GenHealth and welcome them into the Obvious Ventures portfolio.
If you’re building a world positive company that is using AI, please reach out to kahini@obviousventures.com.
