Healthcare is at a tipping point. Providers are overwhelmed, patients struggle to access care, life expectancy is declining, and U.S. healthcare quality metrics lag behind other developed nations. Meanwhile, healthcare costs continue to skyrocket, threatening the country’s economic stability. Despite the urgency, healthcare has been notoriously slow to change. We are launching Qualified Health with $30M in seed funding to partner with health systems to solve these problems.

Against the backdrop of these healthcare challenges, we’re witnessing groundbreaking technological advancements that are transforming industries worldwide. Since the launch of ChatGPT two years ago, fields like customer service, software development, and corporate productivity have seen extraordinary improvements:

Corporate productivity:
Harvard and BCG show 40% time savings in various tasks
Customer Service:
20x reduction in interaction volumes
Software development:
Google reports more than 25% of code is now AI-generated

Results like these could fundamentally improve healthcare for the better and revolutionize patient care. Imagine every patient having an AI healthcare assistant, every clinician having tools to automate all administrative tasks, and everyone getting personalized medical care.Yet, despite the promise of Generative AI in healthcare, a limited number of solutions have been deployed at scale in the past two years. So, why is this the case?

Fundamentally, there is a lack of trust in Generative AI tools today, and people are rightly cautious when patient lives are on the line. Through extensive conversations with healthcare leaders we heard concerns in three main categories:

1. Lack of transparency into algorithm performance: Health Systems are unable to evaluate the objective risk or performance of Generative AI-based applications on their specific population, and they cannot monitor updates to AI deployments over-time.
2. Point solutions make governance and data security untenable: The proliferation of disconnected AI tools make consistent management of these applications to safe standards nearly impossible.
3. No systematic way to scale: Health systems are flush with ideas and pilots for new Generative AI uses but lack the tools and resources to scale development and usage reliably.

Addressing these concerns will require an AI infrastructure for healthcare that has previously been missing. Without robust infrastructure to govern and monitor AI systems, healthcare organizations are forced to choose between innovation and risk, leaving potentially life-saving advances trapped behind a wall of justified caution.

We founded Qualified Health to be the trusted partner to safely unlock the value of Generative AI in healthcare. Our infrastructure solution provides guardrails for active AI governance, healthcare-specific agent creation, and continuous monitoring of algorithm performance. We are fortunate to have raised $30M in capital from leading healthcare and technology investors: SignalFire, Healthier Capital, Town Hall Ventures, Frist Cressey Ventures, and more. Together, with our leading health system partners, we are transforming healthcare in America.

The Core Elements of Qualified Health‍

1. Deep Partnership with Providers: Qualified Health is a mission-driven Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) dedicated solely to serving providers in America. We are re-imagining how Generative AI and first principle thinking can improve healthcare delivery. Unlike other AI vendors or technology companies, we focus exclusively on the unique and complex risks and regulatory challenges faced by healthcare providers. Why does this focus matter?

• Leading organizations innovate together: We believe collaboration and mutual learning among organizations foster greater trust in AI and accelerate progress.
• The last-mile of technology delivery is the hardest: Value is only created when data and workflow integrations are fully in place for users.
• Workforce support: Custom training, education, and change management processes are essential to ensure the workforce is ready and confident to use these tools effectively

2. The Qualified Health Team - Healthcare and AI Excellence: We are a world class team with hundreds of years of experience leading healthcare organizations and scaling AI systems. We are clinicians, AI engineers, policy experts, and healthcare operators who have - built 0 to 1 healthcare technologies, scaled companies from $0 to $1B in revenue, managed multi-billion dollar healthcare budgets, crafted healthcare policy, and pioneered AI safety systems inside and outside healthcare. Our leadership team includes:

• ‍Justin Norden, MD, MBA (CEO/Co-founder): Stanford Medicine faculty member and former CEO/Co-founder of Trustworthy AI (acquired by Waymo/Google)
• Shantanu Phatakwala: (CCO/Co-founder): Former Chief Data Science Officer at Haven (Amazon/JP Morgan Chase/Berkshire Hathaway venture)
• Beau Norgeot, PhD (CAIO/Co-founder): Former VP of AI at Elevance and Chief AI Officer at Lucid Lane
• Nirav R. Shah, MD, MPH (Co-founder): Stanford Medicine faculty member and Former COO of Kaiser Permanente SoCal and NY State Health Commissioner
• Kedar Mate, MD (CMO/Co-founder): Former President and CEO of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI)

3. Our Solution: Infrastructure for Generative AI in Healthcare: We deliver the technology, training and support to get started with Generative AI and scale it safely across healthcare organizations. Tailored to healthcare’s unique needs, our platform simplifies implementations, expedites measurable ROI, and centralizes the orchestration, evaluation, and governance of AI solutions. More specifically, our products provide:

• Enforceable Governance: Equipped with role-based access controls, risk alerts, data privacy protections, and safeguards against AI hallucinations. These tools allow healthcare organizations to convert their AI guidelines into enforceable policies.
• Healthcare Agent Creation: By leveraging our safety infrastructure, we make it possible for healthcare teams to rapidly create and deploy AI agents to automate workflows. Our customers are deploying these agents to drive cost savings, generate revenue, and improve care quality.
• Post-Deployment Monitoring: We provide complete observability into application performance and usage, and provide human-in-the-loop evaluation and escalation systems. This infrastructure allows healthcare organizations to scale deployments confidently, track ROI, and provide audit trails for compliance.

The Road Ahead:
Healthcare is in the early innings of deploying Generative AI. The underlying model technologies are being updated every two weeks, the rules and regulations in healthcare AI are evolving, and most healthcare Generative AI deployments are in pilot stages. Nonetheless, it’s clear to us that Generative AI tools will play a crucial role in how the future of healthcare is delivered. We are committed to delivering the foundation and infrastructure to advance the positive impact of Generative AI in healthcare for and with our partners. Together, we stand at the threshold of a healthcare revolution where AI will help create a world with better outcomes, reduced costs, and more personalized care for everyone.