SignalFire’s big bet on Qualified Health: Transforming healthcare with responsible AI

"We are navigating one of the most important moments in the history of US healthcare with the advance of AI. Even if the rate of technical progress decelerated or stopped today, current AI innovations are already so powerful that we have more than a decade ahead of us of ROI refinement and application that will alter economy-wide GDP. Qualified Health's team is uniquely positioned to safely unlock the value of Generative AI in the healthcare industry."
- Eric Larsen, President, TowerBrook Advisors and President Emeritus, Advisory Board Company

The healthcare industry stands at a critical juncture, poised to harness the transformative power of generative AI, while grappling with the inherent risks and challenges of its implementation. As health systems face mounting financial pressures and workforce challenges, the need for AI-driven solutions to boost productivity and efficiency has never been more urgent. Yet, only ~6% of health systems currently have a Gen AI strategy in place, highlighting a significant gap between potential and execution. 

Meet Qualified Health, a startup that has emerged to close this gap. I’m thrilled to join the board of Qualified Health and lead their $30 million seed round alongside incredible partners at Healthier Capital, Frist Cressey Ventures, Town Hall Ventures, Flare Capital, Intermountain Ventures, and prominent angels such as Frank Williams (former CEO of Evolent), Justin Kan (CEO/Founder of Twitch), Bill Veghte (former SVP Microsoft, EVP Hewlett Packard), and Varsha Rao (CEO, Nurx). Qualified Health is pioneering the leading infrastructure to enable safe and responsible AI adoption in healthcare. 

The Gen AI challenge in healthcare

Despite the incredible potential of Gen AI, healthcare executives have been rightly cautious about rapidly deploying Gen AI at scale, given patient lives are at stake. After all, it’s one of the reasons the healthcare industry has been one of the slowest to adopt other transformative technologies (e.g., mobile, cloud) in recent decades. During our listening tour with healthcare leaders on why they have been hesitant and what they need to safely partake in the AI revolution, we consistently heard these major concerns:

1. Lack of transparency into algorithm performance: Health systems are unable to evaluate the objective risk or performance of Gen AI-based applications on their specific population and cannot monitor updates to AI deployments over time. 
2. Point solutions make governance and data security untenable: The proliferation of disconnected AI tools makes consistent management of these applications to safe standards nearly impossible. 
3. No systematic way to scale: Health systems are flush with ideas and pilots for new Generative AI uses, but they lack the tools and resources to reliably scale development and usage.‎

The Qualified Health advantage

The startup’s platform serves as the missing infrastructure that healthcare organizations desperately need to get started with Gen AI and deploy many use cases safely by offering the following capabilities:

• Enforceable governance: Equipped with role-based access controls, risk alerts, data privacy protections, and safeguards against AI hallucinations, the platform allows healthcare organizations to convert their AI guidelines into enforceable policies.
• Healthcare agent creation: By leveraging safety infrastructure, the platform enables healthcare teams to rapidly create and deploy AI agents to automate workflows. Customers are deploying these agents to drive cost savings, generate revenue, and improve care quality.
• Post-deployment monitoring: Qualified Health offers complete observability into application performance and usage and provides human-in-the-loop evaluation and escalation systems. This infrastructure allows healthcare organizations to scale deployments confidently, track ROI, and provide audit trails for compliance.

Qualified Health’s platform is tailored specifically for healthcare to secure protected health information, mitigate AI bias, and ensure safe interactions with LLMs. Today, the platform is deployed at leading health systems. 

The perfect founder-market fit 

When we first heard the Qualified Health pitch, it was clear that what truly set them apart was the team’s thought leadership and nuanced understanding of the unique solutions required to enable health systems to maintain control while accelerating innovation. The founding team of Qualified Health brings together a unique blend of expertise in healthcare, AI, and entrepreneurship drawing from decades of healthcare transformation experiences:

• Justin Norden, MD, MBA (CEO/Co-founder): Stanford Medicine faculty member and former CEO/Co-founder of Trustworthy AI (acquired by Waymo/Google)
• Shantanu Phatakwala (CCO/Co-founder): Former Chief Data Science Officer at Haven (Amazon/JP Morgan Chase/Berkshire Hathaway venture) and VP of R&D at Evolent
• Beau Norgeot, PhD (CAIO/Co-founder): Former VP of AI at Elevance and Chief AI Officer at Lucid Lane
• Nirav R. Shah, MD, MPH (Co-founder): Stanford Medicine faculty member and Former COO of Kaiser Permanente SoCal and NY State Health Commissioner
• Kedar Mate, MD (CMO/Co-founder): Former President and CEO of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) 

This blend of technical prowess and healthcare acumen uniquely positions Qualified Health to tackle the complex challenges of AI adoption in the industry. Justin’s previous experiences building a similar platform for self-driving cars, another market where the risk of AI deployment mistakes has life-or-death consequences, provide a solid foundation for addressing the safety-critical infrastructure needed in healthcare as well.

The market for healthcare AI is projected to grow significantly, with estimates suggesting it could reach $164.16 billion by 2030. Qualified Health is entering the market at a crucial time when health systems are struggling to implement AI solutions at scale as they face potential risks of AI hallucinations, PHI leaks, and biased outputs with major implications for patients. As the healthcare industry increasingly adopts AI in the coming years, there's a clear need for a comprehensive platform that addresses these challenges while unlocking the potential of Gen AI in healthcare, and the demand for robust safety & evaluation infrastructure will continue to grow. 

Qualified Health is poised to play a pivotal role in ensuring that this powerful technology is implemented safely, effectively, and responsibly. I’m excited to leverage SignalFire’s Beacon AI platform and our extensive AI and healthcare advisor network to supercharge Qualified Health’s journey ahead as it shapes the future of healthcare delivery.

I’ll be at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference with the Qualified Health team next week. If you’re interested in joining this world-class founding team, learning more about their platform, or simply exploring opportunities to learn alongside a remarkable community of Health x AI leaders, I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to reach out to me at sooah@signalfire.com.