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Health records giant Epic this week released its first open-source tool meant to help health systems test and monitor the performance of EHR-integrated AI models.

Why it matters: As AI-powered health care tools proliferate, a lack of uniform standards could result in a mottled landscape of various unproven systems, Erin and Claire write.

How it works: Epic says its software automates the most time-consuming piece of AI model validation: data collection and mapping.

The suite has a reporting dashboard with demographic analyses, a common monitoring template and data schema to make it easier to use the suite for new AI models in the future.

The tool lets health care organizations apply demographic-based population filters to see how well a given model is working across various patient cohorts.

The Health AI Partnership (HAIP), a collaboration of health systems designing best practices for AI in health care, says two of its sites — Duke Health and University of Wisconsin Health — will use Epic's AI trust and assurance software to conduct a study to locally test and monitor AI tools.

Zoom in: Epic's tool is free and available on GitHub for health systems to download to their health record systems, Corey Miller, Epic's vice president of R&D, told Fierce Healthcare.

Epic claims health systems can use the tool to validate any EHR-integrated AI model, whether developed by Epic or another entity.

Caveat: The current version of the tool doesn't validate the performance of generative AI models, though Epic plans to expand it to more AI models in the future.

Between the lines: Adoption of generative AI, particularly for use cases like clinical documentation, remains stifled by lack of interoperability.

What they're saying: "We've been speaking to a lot of founders in the space and one thing we hear is until there's a change in infrastructure — who's using Epic, who's using Cerner — it's really hard to implement the level of accuracy needed to have an impactful inflection point," Montage Ventures VP Nia Patel said at Axios' BFD Expert Voices roundtable this month.

"You've got not only these models as moving targets, but their whole stack and other interactions and the ways the tools might integrate," said Brightside Health CEO Brad Kittredge, also speaking at the event.

"The market's likely to need some kind of assessment vehicles and some kind of performance benchmarks to get people over that hump, to be ready to take a new tool and integrate it into a stack and add to a sensitive system that's already working," Kittredge added.

Editor's note: This story has been corrected to note that just two of the sites in the Health AI Partnership will be using Epic's software suite, not the entire HAIP.

1 big thing: Epic releases open-source AI tool

Illustration of a stethoscope tied in knots around binary numbers.

Atropos Health, an AI clinical decision support company, raised a $33 million Series B led by Valtruis, an investment platform focused on value-based care (VBC).

Why it matters: Atropos claims its ChatRWD technology can eliminate hallucination risk, a primary concern for generative AI applications, Aaron writes.

What they're saying: "We are in the teenage years of value-based care; all the low-hanging fruit is swallowed up," says Brigham Hyde, CEO of Atropos.

"You need new evidence for sub-populations and we can generate that with our partnerships," he says, noting its partnership with Arcadia.

With fresh funds, Atropos is doubling down on channel partnerships, as well as digging deeper into life sciences, Hyde says, noting it's working with "seven of the top 10 companies in the space."

Zoom in: Alongside Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe-backed Valtruis, Breyer Capital, Emerson Collective and Presidio Ventures participated.

The round also included new investors Cencora Ventures, McKesson Ventures and Merck GHI Fund.

How it works: ChatRWD is in beta mode and is based on Atropos' operating system, Geneva OS, which is designed to generate observational studies quickly and at-scale.

Leveraging data from electronic medical records and other data sets (including Arcadia's), the company's technology runs analyses using statistical methods and formats a final result into a study report within minutes — a task that can otherwise take months, Hyde says.

Atropos' technology is designed to quickly answer clinical questions, such as which drug is most effective for certain cancer patients.

Atropos says it's a clinician-friendly interface and doctors don't need a data scientist in the loop to translate.

ChatRWD is an LLM-independent framework and it's built to eliminate hallucination risk, according to Hyde.

What's next: ChatRWD will officially launch sometime this summer, Hyde says.

"This could be the last time we fundraise," Hyde tells Axios, adding that profitability is "on the horizon in the next few years."

Between the lines: Atropos plans to publish a study next month that further outlines its approach, though Hyde declined to disclose where it will be published or whether it's peer-reviewed.

Within the study, 75 users asked questions and 100 of those questions were run through Atropos' system, ChatGP4, Gemini Pro and others.

The study records which models were able to answer, which models answered partially and which ones hallucinated.

"All the LLMs have one fundamental flaw and that is that not every question has a study out there," Hyde says.

Catch up quick: The company collected $14 million in a 2022 Series A and has raised $53.8 million to-date.

The company had a post-money valuation of $93 million as of September 2023, per PitchBook.

Editor's note: This story has been corrected to note Valtruis is a value-based care focused investment platform, not a value-based care provider.

2. The BFD: Atropos raises $33M Series B

an illustration of a circuitboard with a red-cross-shaped section illuminated 

Want more health tech deals? Check out the Axios Pro Deals Tracker.

• Welbe, a Mexican enterprise-facing occupational health management services provider, raised a $7m Series A led by Volpe Capital and the International Finance Corporation with participation from Nazca, Kortex, GreenRock, Marathon and Parceiro Ventures. axios.link/3Kc3lsa

• OncoveryCare, a Boston virtual cancer survivorship care startup, raised a $4.5m seed led by .406 Ventures and the McKay Institute for Oncology Transformation. axios.link/3QWNGB8

• HoundDog.ai, an SF data security and privacy startup focused on personal and protected health information, raised a $3.1m seed from E14 Fund, Mozilla Ventures and Ex/ante. axios.link/3wP5UNZ

• Med Learning Group, an NYC DW Healthcare Partners-backed medical education provider, acquired Connecticut medical education provider Talem Health. axios.link/3WSJJBa 

• TE Connectivity (NYSE: TEL), a Swiss electronics components company, is seeking to sell its medical contract manufacturing unit, which could fetch more than $2b, per Bloomberg. axios.link/4bTpJmh

3. Deals o' the day

• Chris Schaefer, former SVP at PharMerica, joined CAQH as CFO. axios.link/4dFTdWe

• Tony Perrotta, former EVP of finance at Rhapsody, joined MacroHealth as CFO. axios.link/3WVGF7c

• Craig Fox, former managing director and head of fintech at HSBC Innovation Banking, joined Trinity Capital as managing director based in London. axios.link/3UTnb0p

• Cal Callaway is leaving RBC, where he is global head of health care investment banking, per Bloomberg. axios.link/4bLSroX

4. It's Personnel

💵 CA pays meth users to get sober — KFF News

🪓 Tufts Medicine lays off 175 — WCVB

👮 CT doctor gets prison for health care fraud — Hartford Courant

5. Your daily dose

Illustration of a prescription with a handwritten note saying "daily dose."

❌ Situational awareness: At-home test maker Cue Health is laying off all of its employees and stopping operations as of tomorrow — about a week after the FDA warned consumers not to use its COVID-19 test kit. 

🥎 Aaron is looking forward to Axios' first game in the NYC media softball league tomorrow night!

Thanks for reading, and extra thanks to newsletter editor Claire Rychlewski and copy editor Egan Millard. Please ask your colleagues, friends and family to sign up.

May 23, 2024

1 big thing: Epic releases open-source AI tool