AI Personal Care Startup k health, which is incorporated in Israel and operates out of Israel and the United States, announced the completion of a $59 million funding round. The company also published a research article comparing the performance of its artificial intelligence platform with that of doctors, and signed a cooperation agreement with Cedars Sinai Hospital in the United States, and cooperated with other leading American hospitals, and with health funds in Israel.
The research for the company was conducted by Dr. John Ebert of the Mayo Clinic in the US and Dr. Dan Zelter, an economist from Tel Aviv University. The comparison was made in the field of family medicine, examining 100,000 medical files that passed through the K Health system. In 84% of cases there was agreement between the clinician and the platform. When there was no agreement, the case was sent for analysis by an independent human arbitrator, and no preference was found for the physician or the platform.
K Health was founded in 2016 by CEO Allon Bloch, Ran Shaul, and Israel Roth along with Taboola CEO Adam Singulda.
The platform is particularly accurate in diagnosing diseases such as: urinary tract infections, eye infections, and upper respiratory tract infections, but it was less accurate in skin diseases such as dermatitis, asthma, bronchitis, and abdominal pain of unknown origin. “We don’t pretend to be good at everything,” says Bloch. “There are areas where it is less good and there are areas that are better.” “In the field of family medicine, we have a huge amount of information and a lot of depth.”
Bloch adds, “Unlike some natural language decoding systems we’ve encountered recently, our model neither guesses nor hallucinates. Like an excellent doctor, it gathers all relevant information, and decides whether a diagnosis can be reached or whether a patient should be sent for tests, to a specialist, or for further follow-up. Our system knows how to say it doesn’t know.”
Bloch adds that the system also learned when there was no need to collect additional information. The platform is also constantly learning to follow developments in the world of medicine, in order to identify new diseases that did not exist before, such as side effects of new drugs, or epidemics.
Due to market conditions, K Health’s current funding round is at a lower valuation than its most recent rounds in 2021, when digital health and telemedicine were at their peak during the Covid pandemic. In early 2021, the company raised $132 million at a valuation of $1.4 billion. And through 2021, it raised a total of $224 million. With the change in market situation, K Health has reduced its workforce from 310 to around 260.
Among the company’s investors are large funds in both the medical and other fields, as well as the Kaiser Permanente Pension Fund, the largest insurance and health services group in the United States, the insurance company Elibility Health, the Mayo Clinic, and Cedars-Sinai Hospital.
Published by Globes, Israel business news – en.globes.co.il – on July 23, 2023.
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