Sep 19, 2023

Glass Health recently announced a $5 million seed round led by Initialized Capital for the company’s AI-powered clinical decision support platform. And the new funding round will accelerate our mission to empower clinicians with generative AI tools to help end the clinician burnout epidemic and improve patient outcomes worldwide. The company is also counting prominent healthcare founders as mentors and investors in this round, including Tom Lee, founder of One Medical, Epocrates, and Galileo Health; Connor Landgraf, founder and CEO of Eko Health; and Heather Hasson & Trina Spear, the co-founders of FIGS. Even though large language model applications like ChatGPT have encoded impressive medical knowledge as evidenced by their ability to pass the medical licensing exam, they believe that these powerful models must be fine-tuned by physicians and utilize up-to-date, evidence-based, and peer-reviewed clinical recommendations to be truly useful in the clinical environment. And the company uses a technique called retrieval augmented generation to connect a large language model to the database of clinical guidelines created and maintained by the Glass Health Clinical Team of academic physicians. Glass Health’s approach is different than others in that they have specifically designed Glass to be doctor-facing rather than patient-facing so that the clinician can closely supervise and review the LLM’s outputs before applying them. And at this early stage of development and implementation of AI in healthcare, they have designed Glass to produce options that a clinician can consider along with other clinical reference resources rather than directives that would replace a clinician’s judgment. Notably, the retrieval augmented generation strategy also gives the company an opportunity to have physicians continually edit and review the clinical guidelines used by our AI system. And this gives the company the power to keep the recommendations used by the AI system up-to-date and reflective of state-of-the-art management practices. And it also allows us to review the guidelines provided to the AI system for bias. Consistent with the commitment to achieving health equity, shared with the broader medicine community, Glass Health currently filters out social identifiers that should not be considered in clinical reasoning. In the future, Glass Health plans to offer health equity alerts in the outputs that tell a clinician when healthcare disparities might affect their patients. Glass Health is engaged in efforts to expand the frontiers of generative AI in healthcare through integration with electronic medical records and health system-specific guidelines. And their team is working tirelessly to deliver value to clinician users and several new features that will deliver tremendous value for clinicians around the world are actively in development. KEY QUOTES: “Glass Health is leading the way on how artificial intelligence can be leveraged to augment physicians, create unprecedented value, and transform our healthcare system for the better.” – Parul Singh, Partner, Initialized Capital “We’re backing Glass Health because of our shared values: a commitment to empowering healthcare providers, a drive to disrupt the status quo, and a dedication to the highest standards of excellence.” – Heather Hasson & Trina Spear, Co-founders, FIGS Trending on Pulse 2.0