FRI AM News: WisBusiness: the Podcast with Sal Braico, Pivotal Health; UW Health taking cautious approach to AI

August 30, 2024

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— This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: the Podcast” is with Sal Braico, CEO and co-founder of Pivotal Health.

This Madison company offers at-home health care services, with a team of clinicians that make house calls for patients. It first launched in 2021 and has since expanded to parts of northeastern Wisconsin.

“Pivotal Health providers go to the patient — to their home, apartment, dorm room, office, job site, soccer field — wherever that the patient is, for our providers to provide urgent care and family practice type of services,” Braico said.

He discusses the “non-consumer friendly” nature of the health care industry, noting “it’s always been so difficult to get appointments, to be seen quickly, and then when you are at the doctor’s office, you have to wait … and then you have no idea how much things cost.”

The idea for the business arose in 2020 when Braico and other co-founders saw that other companies were doing clinician house calls, though he says “these other companies were not really leveraging tech in a smart way.”

“We saw an opportunity to really use tech in smart ways, to again, make the whole process easier for the consumer and our provider,” he said.

Pivotal Health has a smartphone app for patients that handles scheduling, submitting medical information and payments. On the provider side, the company has automated much of the charting and administrative work, Braico said.

“We have a very lean team here, a very small team, with the bulk of the team being providers,” he said.

Braico discusses the company’s expansion to more of the state and plans for future growth, fueled by a crowdfunded investment effort. The company has separately raised more than $3 million from venture capital groups and individual investors.

“We’ve got a lot of very happy patients, and we believe that this model can really scale very, very well,” he said. “We’ve put in a lot of time, effort, capital into making this tech platform, such that we can very cost-effectively scale this platform.”

Listen to the podcast and see the full list of WisBusiness.com podcasts.

— UW Health is taking a cautious approach to implementing AI while exploring how it can help doctors.

That’s according to Frank Liao, senior director of digital health and emerging technologies for the health system in Madison. He spoke yesterday during a Green Bay meeting of the Legislative Council Study Committee on the Regulation of Artificial Intelligence in Wisconsin.

Liao discussed a UW Health partnership that began in spring 2023 using AI to draft patient replies for doctors, to help reduce the workload on the health system’s workforce.

“They get lots and lots of messages, so the idea is, give them a draft so that either one, it saves them time, or two, it reduces their cognitive burden,” he said. “If you think about a physician in a clinic, moving from appointment to appointment, and meanwhile they’re getting more and more messages … we thought giving them a starting point to start the message would really reduce the cognitive load.”

UW Health has found the biggest benefit for the technology is addressing “writer’s block” for doctors, Liao said, noting the health system isn’t seeing a major time-savings impact. Still, he described AI as an “investment in our workforce.”

“We’re finding that it actually sometimes takes providers to do the response, but it helps with that cognitive load, and they like it a lot better,” he said.

To ensure doctors aren’t simply glancing at the template response before sending it off, UW Health has deployed a “similarity measure” to see how many changes they’re making to the AI version. Liao noted the AI system creates its response based solely on the patient’s message, and doesn’t pull from the medical record, though he said the scope of the system could be expanded over time.

Liao also sought to assuage concerns about the role of AI in summarizing complex medical information, noting UW Health is in the early stages of exploring this application and isn’t using it yet. The health system earlier this month highlighted a recent study showing patients’ medical records have grown 30-fold over the past two decades or so, suggesting AI could help doctors parse these increasingly dense files.

UW Health has an oversight committee focused on the use of AI, and Liao said the health system is being “very, very careful” about the technology. He referenced the possibility of AI “hallucinations,” where the system produces false or misleading information, as well as deploying a method for tracking the information doctors use.

“Is there an audit trail that will be able to show what summary the provider looked at? We’re asking questions on, does the summary become part of the legal medical record or not?” he said, adding “summarization … really scares us in a lot of ways, and that’s why we’re going to do it with a lot of guardrails.”

He also said UW Health would start using this AI application with a small group of doctors and closely monitor the process as it’s being tested.

Watch the committee meeting video and see a recent story on AI.

— Madison-based EnsoData has announced a partnership with patient monitoring device maker Nonin, combining its own sleep apnea testing software with wearable technology.

Through the new partnership, Minnesota-based Nonin’s wrist-worn device can be used with EnsoData’s AI algorithm for at-home sleep testing for patients who are at risk of developing sleep apnea, according to the release. Nonin’s devices can track oxygen saturation and pulse rate continuously, helping sleep labs monitor patients while they’re at home.

“As a trusted manufacturer of high-quality pulse oximetry solutions, Nonin’s devices provide more innovative hardware options for our customers to use,” EnsoData CEO Justin Mortara said in a statement.

See more at Madison Startups.

Top headlines from the Health Care Report…

— Two state residents have died due to the West Nile virus and one person has been hospitalized, the state Department of Health Services announced.

For more of the most relevant health care news, reports on groundbreaking research in Wisconsin, links to top stories and more, sign up today for the free daily Health Care Report from WisPolitics and WisBusiness.com.

Sign up here.

— Madison has been ranked No. 1 among “Rust Belt” cities for its economic performance between 2017 and 2022 by CommercialCafe, an online real estate industry resource.

The city’s population grew 6.9% during that period, reaching 272,907 as of 2022. Its unemployment rate had fallen by 0.6 percentage points to reach 2.2% over the study period. That’s far below the rates of other top cities in the report — all of which had 4.1% unemployment or greater.

“The city also boasted the highest median income per household across cities in this population bucket — $74,000 per year, outranking runner-up Chicago — as well as the most active housing and commercial real estate pipeline with a lot of activity focused around Madison’s downtown area,” report authors wrote.

Madison’s household income rose 13.2% over the study period, as the percentage of residents below the poverty line declined 1.5 percentage points to reach 17.2%.

As with most other cities on the list, median home values shot up between 2017 and 2022, with Madison seeing a 49% increase to reach $358,500. Madison also had by far the largest increase in the share of new housing units with 15.7% during this period, a full 5 percentage points higher than the next highest, Philadelphia.

See the full study and the data table.

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