Nvidia (NVDA), a pioneer in semiconductors and artificial intelligence, is increasingly looking to leverage those skills to transform healthcare.
“We are committed to working with you to move this field forward,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said during a chat at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in January. “We believe this will be the future of drug discovery and design.”
Nvidia’s determination to establish itself in the healthcare industry actually predates its recent success with generative AI, and has been working on it for more than 15 years, according to Huang.
“Medical devices are never going to be the same. Ultrasound systems, CT scan systems, any kind of equipment, they’re always going to be devices, and then you add a ton of AI to it,” Huang added. “The value you create, the opportunity you create, is going to be incredible. So I think this is going to be one of the leading future industries in the world. This is going to be a technology industry, and we’re here to serve you.”
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang speaks during the Computex 2024 exhibition in Taipei, Taiwan, June 2, 2024. (AP Photo/Chiang Ying-ying) (Associated Press)
Pandemic makes healthcare “virtual”
The COVID-19 pandemic has created the backdrop for companies like Nvidia to move forward and create value in the healthcare sector.
“I see [the pandemic] “This has kind of thrust healthcare into the realm of virtual and digital transformation, so to speak, because it’s happened so rapidly and with almost no choice,” Mutaz Shegewi, senior research director and digital strategist at IDC, told Yahoo Finance. “Companies like Nvidia and others, Microsoft, Oracle, are instrumental in driving that journey forward, and I think that’s what we’re seeing.”
Nvidia works closely with companies like Johnson & Johnson MedTech (JNJ) and Microsoft (MSFT), whose customers use more than $1 billion of Nvidia GPU computing annually.
“There is no one-size-fits-all vendor, so I think the ecosystem is really important in that we want to leverage the different strengths of the vendors that are in the market,” Shegewey added.[Nvidia] We’re democratizing access, so it’s a technology initiative, but we’re also democratizing access to tools through our software platforms and partnerships.”
Nvidia recently partnered with Hippocratic AI, which is developing generative AI healthcare agents that will provide a range of services from pre-op care to assisted living care. These agents will operate independently of healthcare providers, meaning conversations will only take place between the AI agent and the patient. Hippocratic AI claims that “no other technology has the potential to have such a global impact on health.”
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Because these agents are designed to interact with patients, their ability to mimic human tendencies will be key to their success. This is where Nvidia comes in.
“Voice-based digital agents powered by generative AI can usher in an era of healthcare abundance, but only if the technology responds to patients in the same way humans do,” Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of healthcare, said in a March press release. “This kind of work requires continuous innovation and close collaboration with companies like Hippocratic AI that are developing cutting-edge solutions.”
Currently in the midst of a “rigorous testing program,” Hippocratic AI already understands the importance of minimizing latency.
Hippocratic AI is currently running a testing program of generative AI agents.
The company found that for every half-second increase in interference speed, patients’ ability to emotionally connect with their AI agent increased by 5% to 10%. Hippocratic AI co-founder and CEO Munjal Shah said Nvidia’s technology can help meet this need for speed.
“Generative AI makes patient interactions seamless, personalized and conversational, but the speed of inference must be extremely fast to have the desired effect,” Shah said in a press release. “With the latest advancements in LLM inference, speech synthesis and speech recognition software, Nvidia’s technology stack is essential to enable this speed and fluidity. Working with Nvidia, we will continue to refine our technology to increase the impact of our efforts to improve access, equity and patient outcomes while mitigating staffing shortages.”
Hippocratic AI declined a request from Yahoo Finance to further discuss the technology.
Jennifer Eaton, research director for value-based healthcare IT transformation strategies at IDC, told Yahoo Finance she was impressed with the AI agents’ ability to replicate human interactions and personalize care recommendations.
“Organizations like Hippocratic AI are providing solutions that, if executed correctly, can have a huge downstream impact in terms of accessibility to a consistently accurate, positive, personalized experience for patients,” Eaton said. “To me, that’s really powerful.”
Nvidia, meanwhile, aims to provide the underlying computing power for healthcare providers that will create what IDC’s Shegewi calls an “ecosystem” of similar services.
Jeff Cribbs, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner Healthcare, told Yahoo Finance that Nvidia’s position allows the hardware giant to serve the growing market for AI in healthcare.
“The nice thing about NVIDIA’s position is that the need for compute and inference is there regardless of who’s doing the work,” Cribbs said. “So our strategy is very flexible in that as long as we can make inference and training as accessible as possible, it doesn’t matter which organization builds it. That’s an advantage that other kinds of people in the value chain don’t have.”
Maya is an intern at Yahoo Finance.
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