Digital health agents are no longer a futuristic concept. They are here, revolutionising how care is delivered and experienced. Advancements in agentic AI and multi-agent systems are easing administrative burdens, tackling workforce shortages, and managing the escalating cost of healthcare.
Elaborating on digital health agents, Kimberly Powell, vice president of healthcare at NVIDIA, said that the dawn of agentic AI and multi-agent systems will reduce the administrative burden and address the existential challenges of workforce shortages and the rising cost of care.
During an interview with AIM, Powell said, “Digital humans will help take clinician notes and schedule appointments, taking those tasks off the plates of busy practitioners. This will also enable always-on and personalised care services, creating new patient experiences.”
Meanwhile, an interesting conversation has been brewing on social media.
A Reddit user mentioned that the notion of automating healthcare may seem unlikely due to the high liability associated with human lives.
However, another user pointed out, “At first glance, this seems to make sense but at second glance you discover that they’re already AI models that can reliably diagnose physical illnesses, and spot cancers from radiographs better than 99.7% of radiologists.”
Shez Partovi, clinical professor and chief innovation and strategy officer at Philips, in a blog titled ‘Bridging gaps in healthcare: three key takeaways from the 2024 Future Health Index’ said healthcare leaders are embracing AI for clinical decision support across various hospital operations, especially in-hospital patient monitoring, treatment planning, and medication management.
The Journey Towards Digital Humans
Earlier this year, NVIDIA announced the general availability of its Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) generative AI microservices, designed to accelerate the development of digital humans and fuel the next wave of lifelike virtual experiences.
The newly announced technologies include:
- NVIDIA Audio2Gesture — The technology, which will be available soon, generates body gestures based on audio tracks.
- NVIDIA Nemotron-3 4.5B — This is a new small language model (SLM) built for low-latency, on-device RTX AI PC inference.
To help ease presurgery anxiety, Deloitte is upgrading its Quartz Frontline AI, an NVIDIA-powered customer service solution, to introduce AI agents that act as digital, frontline teammates for patients even before they arrive at the hospital.
Developed on the NVIDIA Omniverse platform, Deloitte’s lifelike avatar can respond to complex, domain-specific questions that are pivotal in healthcare delivery.
The Ottawa Hospital is implementing Deloitte’s Frontline AI teammate to deploy AI assistants that enhance patient experiences and alleviate administrative workloads.
At the Oracle Health Summit 2024, Larry Ellison, the company’s chairman and CTO provided a vision for the future of healthcare and made several major announcements related to products and technology.
The announcements included the Clinical AI Agent, a cloud-based AI tool that enhances physician productivity by capturing and enriching patient exchanges, improving documentation accuracy, and simplifying clinical decision-making so more time can be spent on delivering care.
Digital Agents for Indonesia
Indonesia’s technology leaders, in collaboration with NVIDIA and its partners, have launched a program to develop sovereign AI tailored for the nation’s 277 million Indonesian speakers.
Leveraging Indonesian telecommunications company IOH’s sovereign AI cloud, Hippocratic AI ensures patient data remains local and secure while delivering ultra-low latency AI inference for LLM.
According to an NVIDIA blog, Hippocratic AI is among the first to utilise Sahabat-AI. It combines these models with the NVIDIA AI platform and IOH’s sovereign cloud to create advanced digital agents designed to engage in humanlike conversations, exhibit empathy, and build trust and rapport with patients across Indonesia.
Hippocratic AI also employs a role in trillion-parameter constellation architecture, integrating specialised healthcare LLM agents to deliver safe, precise digital agent implementation.
These AI-powered digital agents aim to boost staff productivity by handling time-intensive tasks. This allows nurses and medical professionals to focus on critical responsibilities, ultimately enhancing healthcare accessibility and quality of service.
What’s in Store?
We are on the cusp of a breakthrough moment for physical AI—models that can understand, interact, and navigate the world. Physical AI will embody robotic systems,” Powell said.
“Drug discovery and design AI factories will help techbio and biopharma companies explore the near infinite universe of possible target-drug combinations before conducting time-consuming, expensive wet lab experiments,” she added.
Powell predicts that these AI factories will consume all wet lab data, refine AI models and re-deploy those models, improving each experiment by learning from the previous one. This will shift the industry from a discovery process to a design and engineering process.
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