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How Nvidia is trying to revolutionize healthcare
Nvidia (NVDA), a pioneer in the semiconductor and artificial intelligence space, is increasingly looking to leverage these skills to transforming healthcare.
“We are committed to working with you to advance this space,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said during a chat. at the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference in January. “We deeply believe that this will be the future of how drugs are discovered and designed.”
Nvidia’s determination to establish itself in the healthcare sector actually predates recent successes with generative AI, according to Huang, having been developed more than 15 years ago.
“A medical device will never be the same again. Ultrasound systems, CT systems, all kinds of instruments — they’ll always be a device, plus a bunch of AI,” Huang added. “The value you’ll create, the opportunities you’ll create will be incredible. So I think this is going to be one of the great future industries in the world; it’s going to be a technology industry, and we’re here to serve you.”
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang delivers a speech during the Computex 2024 exhibition in Taipei, Taiwan, June 2, 2024. (AP Photo/Chiang Ying-ying) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
Pandemic forced healthcare to ‘go virtual’
The COVID-19 pandemic has created conditions for companies like Nvidia to step up and create value in the healthcare sector.
“I see [the pandemic] “It’s kind of like catapulting healthcare into the virtual and digital transformative spheres, if you will, because it happened so 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, Oracle and others, have a lot to contribute to driving this journey forward, and that’s what I think we’re seeing.”
Nvidia works closely with companies such as Johnson & Johnson MedTech (JNJ) and Microsoft (MSFT), and its clientele uses over a billion dollars in Nvidia GPU computing annually.
“There’s no one vendor that can do it all, and I think the ecosystem is really important in terms of wanting to leverage different strengths of the vendors that are out there,” Shegewi added. “[Nvidia] is democratizing access, so it is both a technological move and a democratization of access to tools through its software platforms and its partnerships.”
Nvidia recently partnered with Hippocratic AI, a company developing generative AI healthcare agents that provide a range of services from pre-operative care to assisted living. These agents conduct conversations independent 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 impact on healthcare.”
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Because these agents are being designed to conduct interactions with patients, their ability to emulate 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,” said Kimberly Powell, vice president of Healthcare at Nvidia. stated in a March press release. “This type of engagement will require continuous innovation and close collaboration with companies, like Hippocratic AI, developing cutting-edge solutions.”
Currently in the midst of its “rigorous testing program,” Hippocratic AI has already realized the importance of minimizing latency.
Hippocratic AI is currently conducting a testing program for its generative AI agents.
The company found that every half-second increase in the speed of interference caused a 5%-10% increase in patients’ ability to connect emotionally with AI agents. Nvidia’s technology helps them meet that need for speed, according to Hippocratic AI co-founder and CEO Munjal Shah.
“With generative AI, patient interactions can be seamless, personalized and conversational — but to have the desired impact, the speed of inference has to be incredibly fast,” Shah said in the press release. “With the latest advancements in LLM inference, speech synthesis and voice recognition software, Nvidia’s technology stack is essential to achieving this speed and fluidity. We are working with Nvidia to continue refining our technology and amplify the impact of our work to alleviate workforce shortages while improving access, equity and patient outcomes.”
Hippocratic AI declined Yahoo Finance’s requests to discuss the technology further.
Jennifer Eaton, research director of value-based healthcare IT transformation strategies at IDC, told Yahoo Finance that she was impressed by the AI agent’s ability to replicate a human-to-human interaction and personalize care recommendations.
“Organizations like Hippocratic AI are offering a solution that, if done right, can have a huge downstream impact related to … accessibility to a consistently accurate, positive and personalized experience for patients,” Eaton said. “To me, that’s really powerful.”
Nvidia, for its part, aims to provide the underlying computing power for what IDC’s Shegewi called an “ecosystem” of healthcare providers creating 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 growing AI market in healthcare.
“The beauty of Nvidia’s position is that the compute and inference needs are going to be there regardless of who does the work,” Cribbs said. “And so their strategy is quite resilient in the sense that if we can make our inference and training as accessible as possible, it doesn’t matter which of these organizations builds it. And that’s an advantage that the other types of people in that value chain don’t have.”
Maya is an intern at Yahoo Finance.
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