Medical AI Startup Plans At-Home Care Chatbots to Address Nursing Shortages
• Medical startup Hippocratic AI and Nvidia plan to deploy voice-based "AI healthcare agent" chatbots for at-home patient care. Examples include post-op check-ins and medication instructions.
• Hippocratic claims the chatbots could handle nursing tasks for under $9 per hour, saving providers money compared to hiring registered nurses at $38 per hour on average.
• The chatbots' "empathy inference" engine aims to build patient trust through personalized, conversational interactions, enabled by Nvidia H100 GPUs.
• Details are vague on the models' training data and ability to avoid biases. Hippocratic cites high satisfaction ratings from beta testing healthcare workers.
• The plan aims to address nursing shortages without improving working conditions. But the energy costs of powering many AI chatbots on energy-hungry H100 chips could be substantial.