AI personalized care startup K Health, which was founded in Israel and operates from Israel and the US, has announced the completion of a $59 million financing round. The company also published a research article comparing the performance of its AI platform to that of doctors, and signed a cooperation agreement with Cedars Sinai Hospital in the US, and collaborations with other leading US hospitals, and with health funds in Israel.
The research was conducted for the company was by Dr. Jon Ebbert from the Mayo Clinic in the US and Dr. Dan Zelter an economist from Tel Aviv University. The comparison was conducted in the field of family medicine, and examined 100,000 medical files that passed through the K Health system. In 84% of cases, there was agreement between the doctor and the platform. When there was no agreement, the case was sent to be analyzed by an independent human arbitrator, and no preference was found for the doctor or the platform.
K Health was founded in 2016 by CEO Allon Bloch, Ran Shaul and Israel Roth together with Taboola CEO Adam Singolda.
The platform is particularly accurate in diagnosing diseases such as: urinary tract infections, eye infections and upper respiratory tract infections but was less accurate on skin diseases such as dermatitis, and with asthma and bronchitis and abdominal pain of unknown origin. “We don’t pretend to be good at everything. There are areas where we are less good and there are better areas,” says Bloch. “In the field of family medicine, we have both a breadth of information and a lot of depth.”
Bloch adds, “Unlike some of the natural language decoding systems we have encountered recently, our model neither guesses nor hallucinates. Like an excellent doctor, it collects all the relevant information, and decides whether it is possible to reach a diagnosis or whether the patient should be sent for tests, to a specialist or for further follow-up. Our system knows how to say that it does not know.”
Bloch adds that the system has also learned when there is no need to gather additional information. The platform also constantly continues to learn to follow developments in the medical world, in order to identify new maladies that did not exist before, such as side effects of new drugs, or epidemics.
Reflecting market conditions, K Health’s current financing round is at a lower valuation than its recent rounds in 2021, when digital health and remote medicine were at their peak during the Covid pandemic. In early 2021, the company raised $132 million at a valuation of $1.4 billion. and throughout 2021 raised a total $224 million. With the change in the market situation, K Health has reduced its workforce from 310 to about 260.
Among the company’s investors are large funds both in the medical field and other fields, as well as Kaiser Permanente pension fund, the largest insurance and health services group in the US, the insurance company Elevance 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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