Nvidia (NVDA), a pioneer in semiconductors and artificial intelligence, is increasingly looking to use these skills to transform healthcare.
“We are committed to working with you to advance this field,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said during a chat at the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference in January. “We truly believe this is the future of how drugs are discovered and designed.”
According to Huang, who has been working on it for more than 15 years, Nvidia’s determination to gain a foothold in the healthcare sector actually predates its recent successes with generative AI.
“A medical device will never be the same. Ultrasound systems, CT scan systems, all kinds of instruments — they will always be a device, plus a whole lot of AI,” Huang added. “The value you create, the opportunities you create, will be incredible. So I think this is going to be one of the biggest future industries in the world; it’s going to be a technology industry, and we’re here to serve you.”
Pandemic forced healthcare ‘virtual’
The COVID-19 pandemic has laid the foundation for companies like Nvidia to persevere and create value in the healthcare sector.
“I see [the pandemic] “It was the catapulting of healthcare into the virtual and digital transformational spheres, if you will, because it happened very quickly and with very little to no choice,” Mutaz Shegewi, senior research director and digital strategist at IDC, told Yahoo Finance. “Companies like Nvidia and others, Microsoft and Oracle and the like, have a lot to contribute to propelling that journey, and that’s what I think we’re seeing.”
Nvidia works closely with companies like Johnson & Johnson MedTech (JNJ) and Microsoft (MSFT). Its customer base uses Nvidia GPU computing worth more than $1 billion annually.
“There is no single vendor that can do everything, and I think the ecosystem is really important in terms of wanting to leverage the different strengths of the vendors that are out there,” Shegewi added.[Nvidia] is democratizing access, so it’s both a technology play and a democratization of access to the tools through their software platforms and their partnerships.”
Nvidia recently partnered with Hippocratic AI, a company developing generative AI healthcare agents that provide a range of services, from pre-surgery care to assisted living. These agents conduct conversations independently of healthcare providers — in other words, only between the AI agent and the patient. Hippocratic AI claims that “no other technology has the potential to have this level of global health impact.”
Because these devices are designed to perform patient interactions, their ability to mimic human tendencies is key to their success. That’s where Nvidia comes in.
“Voice-based digital agents powered by generative AI could usher in an era of abundance in healthcare, but only if the technology responds to patients as a human would,” Kimberly Powell, vice president of Healthcare at Nvidia, said in a March press release. “This type of engagement requires continuous innovation and close collaboration with companies, like Hippocratic AI, that are developing advanced solutions.”
Hippocratic AI, which is currently in the midst of its “rigorous testing program,” has already recognized the importance of minimizing latency.
The company found that every half-second increase in interference speed resulted in a 5%-10% increase in patients’ ability to emotionally connect with the AI agents. Nvidia’s technology helps them meet this need for speed, said Munjal Shah, co-founder and CEO of Hippocratic AI.
“With generative AI, patient interactions can be seamless, personalized, and conversational, but to have the desired impact, the speed of inference must be incredibly fast,” Shah said in the press release. “With the latest advancements in LLM inference, speech synthesis, and speech recognition software, Nvidia’s technology stack is critical to achieving this speed and fluidity. We are working with Nvidia to continue to refine our technology and scale the impact of our work to reduce workforce shortages while improving access, equity, and patient outcomes.”
Hippocratic AI has declined a request from Yahoo Finance to discuss the technology further.
Jennifer Eaton, research director for value-based healthcare IT transformation strategies at IDC, told Yahoo Finance she was impressed with the AI agent’s ability to mimic a human interaction and personalize care recommendations.
“Organizations like Hippocratic AI are providing a solution that, if done correctly, can have a profound downstream impact on … accessibility to a consistently accurate, positive, personalized patient experience,” Eaton said. “To me, that’s really powerful.”
Nvidia, in turn, wants to provide the underlying computing power for what IDC’s Shegewi calls an “ecosystem” of health care providers creating similar services.
Jeff Cribbs, vice president and analyst at Gartner Healthcare, told Yahoo Finance that Nvidia’s position positions the hardware giant to serve the growing market for AI in healthcare.
“The beauty of Nvidia’s position is that the compute and inference needs are going to be there regardless of who’s doing the work,” Cribbs said. “And so their strategy is pretty resilient in the sense that if we can make our inference and training as accessible as possible, it doesn’t matter which of those organizations is building it. And that’s an advantage that the other sorts of people in that value chain don’t have.”
Maya is an intern at Yahoo Finance.
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