From left: Axios reporter Erin Brodwin moderates a panel with Lux Capital's Deena Shakir, Frist Cressey's Navid Farzad and General Catalyst's Holly Maloney at the Aspen Ideas Health Festival. Image: Courtesy of Aspen Ideas Health
Generative AI's leapfrog potential in health care rivals that of its promise in other industries, per General Catalyst managing director Holly Maloney.
Why it matters: Health care's continued dependence on tools as basic as the fax has made it all the more ripe for sudden transformation via genAI, Maloney said.
- "You actually may leapfrog from fax to genAI in a way that you won't see [in] almost any [other industry]," Maloney told Axios on a panel at the Aspen Ideas Health Festival last week.
The big picture: AI-driven tools have captivated industry observers for their ability to streamline mundane tasks such as note-taking but continue to hold untapped promise, Maloney and investors at Frist Cressey Ventures and Lux Capital said.
What they're saying: Another lucrative future application of AI lies in insurance, said Maloney.
- "You might actually see net new insurance products or an entire re-imagination of an insurance category that is leveraging first-of-their-kind data sets that have been unstructured," Maloney said.
- "You figure out a way to actually structure those and use them and create real proprietary advantage," she added.
State of play: The sector is already seeing AI applied to arenas such as prior authorization, documentation and billing, and voice transcription.
- "As unsexy as it is, I think there's a multibillion-dollar opportunity ... to simply reduce paperwork, to make things more efficient," said Lux Capital general partner Deena Shakir.
- "There's an abundant swath of opportunities in terms of how you can help crack what is a workforce crisis," said Maloney, who mentioned Hippocratic AI's creation of "a foundational model that can interact with and communicate discrete, non-clinical activities" of value to health systems and insurers.
Reality check: When it comes to substantiating the claims of AI-powered startups, venture firms and regulatory agencies have a long way to go.
- "This category we're talking about is moving so quickly that by the time you think you understand it, you've got to understand it again," said Frist Cressey Ventures partner Navid Farzad.
- Responding to a question about how his firm runs due diligence on such companies, Farzad said, "The short answer to that right now is nothing" — which is why they have yet to invest in the category.
- "We like to think about the training of these models and using AI in [a] build-and-iterate, build-and-test .... continuous testing motion," said GC's Maloney.
The intrigue: Maloney shared some updates on how GC's portfolio companies are behaving in the wake of the firm's unprecedented agreement to purchase Summa Health in Ohio.
- "Companies have proactively started to engage with each other and integrate their solutions and jointly take something to market so that there's a single product, a single implementation process and a single pricing model," Maloney said.
