Revolutionizing healthcare: How are AI-driven startups transforming patient care?

Europe is facing a critical healthcare worker crisis that has led to a shortage of nurses, and general practitioners, overcrowded hospitals, and long surgery waiting times, the ever-increasing need for affordable and accessible healthcare is more critical than ever. A growing number of healthcare companies are harnessing the power of AI to revolutionize patient care, diagnosis, and treatment. While artificial intelligence is not (yet) fully able to replace human medical professionals, it offers tremendous potential to enhance productivity and efficiency within the healthcare sector. This article explores the transformative impact of AI on the healthcare sector, the extent of its adoption in Europe, and the innovative companies that are at the forefront of revolutionizing the industry with solutions that address the current healthcare challenges. 

How is AI transforming healthcare?

AI holds the promise of transforming healthcare in many ways. From improving diagnostic accuracy to personalizing patient care. Machine learning algorithms that power these solutions can analyze massive amounts of data, including genetics and medical history while also taking into account lifestyle factors and subsequently identify patterns and generate insights that are very difficult to spot for humans. Equipped with such insights, doctors can create personalized treatment plans reflecting each patient's unique condition. AI is also able to assist radiologists with early disease detection or anomaly detection, such as identifying cancerous cells in medical imaging (e.g. MRI) or predicting heart diseases. With many diseases, timely intervention is crucial to ensure better treatment outcomes, potentially saving lives and reducing healthcare costs. 

Another application that is gaining popularity in the medical field is AI-powered virtual assistants that provide patients with immediate medical advice, help them assess their symptoms, and direct them to the appropriate level of healthcare. Available 24 hours 7 days a week, medical virtual assistants improve accessibility to healthcare, particularly to individuals in remote or underserved areas. 

Furthermore, AI is helping within the drug discovery field. By analyzing extensive compound databases, AI can predict interaction with target proteins, accelerating the discovery of groundbreaking treatments for various diseases. 

Moreover, AI's predictive analytics capabilities prove to be useful in anticipating disease outbreaks, patient readmission rates, and hospital resource utilization. For example, a team of scientists in Cambridge was able to develop a tool that was able to forecast ventilator and ICU bed capacity requirements for COVID-19 patients. Besides optimized resource allocation, AI is also capable of automating certain administrative tasks and thus, freeing up healthcare professionals to spend more time with patients. 

AI healthcare companies to watch

The adoption of AI in Europe´s healthcare sector is growing at an unprecedented rate. While countless companies are advancing AI in the healthcare sector, we have selected XY European AI-driven healthcare companies, each tackling a different challenge that the healthcare sector faces, that raised funding and offered innovative solutions. 

1. Kheiron Medical Technologies 

Our first pick is Kheiron Medical Technologies, a London-based company founded by Peter Kecskemethy and Tobias Rijken. With backgrounds in Computational Statistics and Machine Learning, both coming from medical families, the two met in 2016 and thanks to their shared belief that AI can change healthcare for the better, founded Kheiron Medical. Their very first solution is an AI platform that assists radiologists in breast screening. Kheiron Medical utilizes deep learning technology to detect breast cancer earlier, thus increasing the chances of survival for women around the world. The company is currently working on developing solutions for the detection of other types of cancer. So far, they raised over €28 million and also announced a collaboration with Microsoft, leveraging Microsoft’s Azure Cloud to enable the global reach and impact of its technology.

2. Corti AI

Danish company Corti AI, founded in 2016, is developing a voice-based AI platform for the analysis of patient interviews. Corti is an AI guide that augments, automates, and analyzes virtual care and face-to-face patient engagements. Their solution aims to reduce the administrative burden of healthcare professionals by assisting dispatchers through AI-powered patient triaging, assisting medical call takes by listening to the interviews making suggestions in real-time, and analysing patient encounters to identify training opportunities for medical staff. In total, Corti AI raised around €80.9 million in total, out of which €56 million was raised in the latest series B funding round in September 2023. 

3. Healx 

There are approximately 10,000 ŕare diseases affecting 300 million people worldwide. However, considering that traditional drug discovery is slow and costly with only a 5% success rate, the majority of pharmaceutical companies focus on developing drugs targeted to large populations. Therefore, as much as 90% of rare diseases have no treatment. Healx is pioneering an AI-powered discovery of novel treatments for rare diseases. By analyzing millions of drug and disease data points, Healx AI platform looks for novel connections that could be turned into new treatments. The company was founded in 2014 by Tim Guilliams with a background in Biophysical Neuroscience and David Brown with a background in chemistry and over 40 years of experience in medical research in the pharmaceutical and biotech industry. So far, UK-based Healx raised more than €77 million in funding. 

4. Teton.ai 

Danish company Teton.ai, founded in 2020, develops a patient monitoring platform using deep learning, trained using hospital data and feedback from nurses, as well as computer vision technology. This AI assistant provides an overview of what is happening in the hospital ward and alerts nurses when care is needed. Using computer vision, the cameras analyze the patient's condition, pass on important information to the staff, and provide features such as sleep tracking, bed ulcer alerts, mobilization reminders, fall warnings, and activity documentation to ease the nursing workload. To this day, Teton.ai raised a little over €7.8 million in three seed funding rounds. 

5. Aiosyn 

Aiosyn, a Dutch company founded in 2021 as a spin-off from the Computational Pathology research group of Radboud University Medical Center, develops a medical analysis platform designed to accelerate the adoption of AI in pathology diagnostics. So far, Aiosyn raised €3.3 million which will be used to further develop its AI-powered platform. 

AI is advancing our healthcare system

As the world continues to grapple with a healthcare workers crisis and as technology continues to advance, AI's impact on healthcare is only set to grow, ushering in a new era of innovative and patient-centric healthcare solutions. While not a substitute for human medical professionals, AI offers transformative potential in enhancing productivity and addressing current healthcare challenges, marking a significant step toward a more accessible, efficient, and technologically advanced healthcare system in Europe.