Could AI provide a prescription to treat an overtaxed health-care system? – CTV
Dec. 17, 2024
Back in early 2020, Mahshid Yassaei found herself deeply worried about the burnout levels of health-care workers — and this was before COVID-19 even hit. She’d just spent six months helping the Public Health Agency of Canada with an information platform, and she’d heard plenty of stories of exhaustion from physicians and nurse practitioners. “It was shocking to me that they were spending 15 hours a week just on data entry,” Yassaei says. “These are some of the most intelligent, passionate people in the country, and they’re losing so much of their time to admin tasks.”
That realization spurred a new invention: Tali AI, an AI assistant that can record and summarize doctor-patient conversations, facilitate medical searches and send off prescriptions. (Think of it as a personal secretary, quietly handling all of the details.) Four years ago, when Yassaei, as CEO, first approached investors about Tali, she tended to hear back: “Sure, the problem is obvious, but can you actually do this?” But improvements in generative AI — the model of artificial intelligence that can produce a boatload of content from fairly basic commands — have been fast, and they’ve been considerable. Now, Yassaei says investor response is more likely to be: “OK, how are you different from the 100 other companies doing this?”
