As hospitals face increasing budgetary and workforce pressures, increasing health systems are turning to clinical decision support tool providers to reduce the workload. We examine five upcoming players using artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline patient care.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare systems around the world were stretched to the limit, resulting in widespread burnout in hospital staff and increasing challenges in patient care. Even now, many systems face under-investment and a lack of staff, with the World Health Organization predicting a shortfall of 10 million health workers by 2030.
Clinical decision support (CDS) systems are designed to reduce the workload of healthcare professionals by automating tasks such as preparing the relevant information from published literature, handling patient data, and predicting potential treatments. They can also provide support to patients directly by providing alerts and education about their condition.
The market for CDS systems was valued at $2.5 billion in 2024 and is predicted to grow to more than $4 billion by 2029, according to a report from Mordor Intelligence. The growth is being driven by rising demand in healthcare with rapidly advancing information technology in hospitals. The growing market is also seeing consolidation with notable deals including the acquisition of Avhana Health by Amalgam Rx in 2021 in addition to Beckman Coulter Diagnostics’ takeover of StoCastic and Dedalus Group’s acquisition of ExpertDoc, both in 2022.
Some of the biggest players in the market include Siemens Healthcare, Koninklijke Philips, and IBM, per the report. There are also many emerging players gunning to lighten the load of hospital staff with approaches such as generative AI. Check out the following private companies that have attracted major investor cash to fuel the development of their CDS tools.
1. HDAI
Founded: 2016
Headquarters: Dedham, Massachusetts
Nassib Chamoun had a difficult life as a teenager during the Lebanese civil war that ended in 1990, and was eventually able to study in the U.S., where he met mentors that would inspire him to co-found Health Data Analytics Institute, or HDAI.
HDAI’s HealthVision technology is designed to analyze clinical information about a patient, including unstructured notes and administrative data, and then generate a patient profile for health professionals. It can also use a range of information including billing, census, and national Medicare data to forecast health risks for patients and practises up to the regional level. This way, healthcare services can know where to prioritize their limited resources.
All of these capabilities are made possible with a cloud computing platform tailored to AI and analytics. HDAI designed the technology to seamlessly integrate data from disparate sources and be capable of working in an electronic medical record system or as a stand-alone web-based solution.
To finance its technology development, HDAI raised a $15 million Series A round in 2021, followed up by a Series C round worth $31 million in 2023 to scale its technology. It is also collaborating with medical centers such as Cleveland Clinic, Houston Methodist, and New England Baptist Hospital to test its platform in clinical decision-making and patient outcomes.
2. K Health
Founded: 2016
Headquarters: New York, New York
Allon Bloch was inspired to co-found K Health five years after his father, who took medication for a heart condition, suffered from a stroke and was subsequently provided equipment to guide his drug dosing. “It blew my mind that my dad’s stroke had earned him access to better information that could have helped us detect, and perhaps prevent, his stroke in the first place,” writes Bloch on the company website.
K Health’s AI-driven app is designed to connect patients with healthcare professionals digitally and more quickly than the traditional method of visiting a clinic. The company is developing a chatbot that can process data from millions of patients and suggest potential diagnoses to the user based on their inputs.
Delivered as part of a paid subscription, the app can be used to get primary care digitally from a medical professional 24/7 and receive advice and treatments. The tool also lets patients seek urgent care more quickly, with healthcare providers using its algorithms to personalize their approach to the patient. K Health also offers specific services to patients looking for mental health support and personalized treatments for weight loss.
The firm raised $59 million in a funding round in 2023 with participation from investors including southern California-based health system Cedars-Sinai and existing investors such as Valor Equity Partners. Earlier this year, K Health also partnered with Mayo Clinic to deploy AI in the mission to personalize the treatment of patients with cardiac conditions.
3. OpenEvidence
Founded: 2021
Headquarters:Cambridge, Massachusetts
OpenEvidence was founded by Daniel Nadler, whose previous company, the AI-powered trading tool developer Kensho Technologies, was sold to S&P Global for $550 million in 2018.
OpenEvidence aims to tackle the soaring quantity of medical research, which is doubling every five years and making it difficult for the medical community to keep up. To do this, the firm is developing an AI-driven program called ClinicalKey that can summarize medical research in accessible formats to support clinical decisions at the point of care.
ClinicalKey and its generative AI-based add-on are designed to extract data from publicly available sources including journal abstracts, medical references, and government documents, providing a summary in response to a prompt from medical professionals. It can also tailor its response based on a patient’s health status and current treatment regime, and its AI technology has been tested by more than 30,000 doctors in the U.S. so far.
OpenEvidence raised a Series B funding round worth $27 million in 2022, with participation from previous investors in Kensho. In early 2023, the company joined the Mayo Clinic’s 30-week startup accelerator program to get experience with the modern clinical workflow, and partnered with Elsevier Health earlier this year to launch its add-on.
4. RapidAI
Founded: 2012
Headquarters: San Mateo, California
RapidAI has its roots in an automated image processing platform called Rapid Processing of Perfusion and Diffusion (Rapid), which was developed in 2009 by a group including company co-founders Roland Bammer and Greg Albers. The majority view in the field at the time was that strokes can only be treated within a few hours after the event—the group aimed to demonstrate that, given the right technology, some patients could be helped beyond this time limit.
The Rapid platform is designed to automatically analyze brain scans from noninvasive imaging approaches such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and predict for medical professionals which stroke patients are most likely to benefit from thrombectomy treatments. The tool can also be used in clinical trials to speed up patient screening and enrolment.
In 2020, RapidAI expanded beyond its stroke focus when it acquired the company EndoVantage, whose technology is geared to assist doctors with the management of patients with cerebral aneurysm. In the same year, RapidAI bagged $25 million in a Series B round to finance its development, along with another $75 million in a Series C round in 2023. The C round, led by Vista Credit Partners, was earmarked for developing its technology to support more disease states and functions, with the aim of expanding to new geographies and verticals.
So far, RapidAI’s technology has analyzed more than 12 million scans and has been deployed in more than 2,000 hospitals around the world.
5. Vital
Founded: 2017
Headquarters: Claymont, Delaware
Vital was set up by the physician Justin Schrager and Aaron Patzer, the founder of financial management tool Mint.com, with the goal to improve patient care in hospitals, which are facing financial challenges with rising wages of contract staff.
To address this gap, Vital is developing an AI-based platform to cut the time required from hospital staff by providing automated communications to patients, real-time feedback, and even an AI-generated translation of their doctor’s sometimes cryptic notes. The firm’s personalized ERAdvisor product lets emergency department patients check their phone for wait times and provide feedback, while CareAdvisor helps inpatients see their personal goals, receive information about their test results and share their progress with family.
Vital raised $24.7 million in a Series B funding round in 2023 to finance its expansion and to bankroll the development of new features to boost CDS and patient care. The round was led by Transformation Capital with support from investors including Patzer himself. And earlier this year, the company partnered with Children’s Hospital Los Angeles to deliver an app that visiting patients can use as a digital companion.
The company’s software is used in more than 100 hospitals in 19 U.S. states with more than a million users so far.
Jonathan Smith is a freelance science journalist based in the U.K. and Spain. He previously worked in Berlin as reporter and news editor at Labiotech, a website covering the biotech industry. Prior to this, he completed a PhD in behavioral neurobiology at the University of Leicester and freelanced for the U.K. organizations Research Media and Society of Experimental Biology. He has also written for medwireNews, Biopharma Reporter and Outsourcing Pharma.
