Release date: 2017-07-07
On July 5th, according to Buzzfeed, Omada Health, a well-funded medical startup, recently cut a number of human staff and focused on health coaches with artificial intelligence (AI) support. Whether or not this strategy works, it helps us understand the future of digital health.
Omada Health's health coaches can prevent diabetes by teaching people healthy eating and exercise knowledge. They don't have to communicate face-to-face with customers, but communicate through the Internet. These coaches are also increasingly getting help with machine learning software that provides them with clues to interact with patients.
Since its inception in San Francisco in 2011, Omada Health's coaches are a mix of full-time and part-time employees. But by November of this year, all part-time coaches will be fired, and the rest of the coaches will rely more on AI software. The company's chief executive, Sean Duffy, insists that his long-term goal is not to replace people with very smart software, but to help people.
Like many other high-tech health care services, Omada Health connects patients with experts (including coaches, therapists, nurses, and doctors) through video chats, emails, and texts to try to help achieve fundamentals in this area. change. Compared to automated, data-driven chat bots, the cost of human experts is quite high. Chatbots can also provide advice and diagnose diseases, and they don't require a salary or a college degree.
But chat bots are hardly good at words, perceptions, and subtexts, and are not good at euphemistically interpreting sensitive information, such as cancer. If they want to grow faster, startups must figure out whether their patients and businesses are combined by people, machines or both to provide the best possible service. Mike McCormick, head of Comet Labs, a venture capital firm that specializes in investing in AI startups, said: "Some places can rely entirely on autonomous machine learning systems, while others are entirely human-powered. It is a gray area between the two."
Omada Health made small layoffs last year, with only 10 to 12 part-time coaches being fired. The company has 60 to 70 full-time coaches and 250 employees. Duffy said that the new layoffs have nothing to do with this, and about 20 employees were fired last week. The company said it will focus on Omada Health's core business and experience, and pay more attention to the company's long-term success. Omada Health has raised $125 million in venture capital, including $50 million in financing that health insurance company Cigna led this month.
Duffy said that as Omada Health treats more patients and collects more data, it trains algorithms to detect important behavioral changes. For example, if someone weighs the weight on a digital scale every day and then stops for three days, the system will notify the coach. It then advises the instructor to send a notice to the patient asking about the possibility of this outcome. In this case, we need to understand what this person is doing and why they skip weighing.
Duffy also pointed out that there is no pre-written information in these machines, only the tips are passed. He said that users can know when the nominal human written messages were generated, which would make them lose trust in the system. The coach can also reject the AI's advice. Duffy said: "If we have enough coaches to reject these suggestions and say 'this violates my instinct as human beings', then it will train the system better and better, and propose Better advice."
Duffy said that part-time workers have the opportunity to use the technology, but the company has more full-time employees to participate and help it improve.
Omada Health is not the only company that explores how to use AI to improve health care. Startups such as Babylon Health, HealthTap, and Remedy are developing chat bots to assess patient symptoms. Big Health has an automated program called Sleepio, a cartoon professor star designed to help people with severe insomnia. But these new technologies are still in their infancy, and it is impossible to prove that machines can improve health better than humans.
Liz Rockett, chairman of Kaiser Permanente, who has invested in Omada Health and Big Health, says that in order to survive, any virtual medical service must prove that it can engage people and truly improve their health. . Now, more “person-to-person†telemedicine services are emerging. Ginger.io initially attempted to infer behavioral patterns and mental health issues from passively tracked smartphone data, but now instead communicates with human therapists through text and video chat modes.
So in the next 5 to 10 years, is it more likely that patients will chat with humans or open health applications? McCormick believes that this will depend to a large extent on the risk of their status. For cancer diagnosis, you may want to hear well-trained expert instructions because they are extremely accurate and emotionally sensitive. However, issues such as nutrition guidance may now be ready to accept the services of chat bots, after all, they have been able to provide nuanced guidance.
Source: NetEase Technology Report
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