for medical advice is that you can come away thinking that you either have a headache or a brain tumor – but the reality is you probably just have a headache. With K Health, Allon Bloch is creating an antidote to “Dr. Google” that ingests your symptoms and medical history via an AI-powered chatbot, sifts through the data of millions of patients and suggests a medical condition based on how you compare to other people like you.
After creating a national footprint, the next step in K Health’s strategy is to go local: working with hospital customers to serve as an entry point for new and existing patients to be looped into a bigger system of care. K Health closed a partnership deal with southern California-based health system Cedars-Sinai last week to use its technology for virtual urgent and primary care services.
Melmed says any use of artificial intelligence at Cedars-Sinai is reviewed by an internal committee to examine all of the ethical implications. And with this partnership, like all the others, he says the ultimate decision to diagnose and treat will remain with the clinician. Melmed says he can’t predict how many patients will end up using it but is optimistic: “There are 25 million people in Southern California and we have difficult access to primary care, so the potential is huge.
A retrospective study of K Health patient visits found that the human doctors and nurses agreed with one of the AI-recommended diagnoses 84.2% of the time. Since the symptom checker was first launched, Bloch says more than 10 million people have interacted with K Health’s AI, and 3.1 million of them have elected to have a chat with a doctor or nurse. He says nowadays around 70% of people who start a conversation with K Health’s AI complete a chat-based medical visit.