Alan unveils AI health assistant for its 680k health insurance members
Alan wants to build a super app for healthcare, so it's rolling out three new product updates, including an AI chatbot that's vetted by doctors.
While Alan is better known as a health insurance company, the French startup has always tried to offer more than insurance coverage. It now wants to build a super app for all things related to healthcare, and announced three new product updates on Tuesday morning, including an AI chatbot that’s vetted by doctors.
Alan has long offered its customers a chat interface that lets them ask a question to a doctor and get an answer within 15 minutes or so. The next logical step these days would be to leverage artificial intelligence for medical conversations, so Alan is adding a virtual assistant called Mo to the chat feature.
“On the one hand, we increasingly want to be in charge of our own health. On the other, our healthcare system is mostly reactive and is therefore under constant strain,” Alan’s AI lead Antoine Lizée said at a press conference on Tuesday.
But given that AI chatbots tend to hallucinate, healthcare professionals may not want to rely on inaccurate information or risk misdiagnosing a patient. This issue has come up in the news lately with AI-based medical transcriptions — eight out of ten audio transcriptions exhibited some level of hallucinated information, according to a study by a University of Michigan researcher.
Alan said it has put in place guardrails to prevent this. First, using the AI chatbot is entirely optional. “Mo rephrases my question, introduces itself and asks if I want to start with Mo or if I want to talk to a doctor,” Lizée explained.
Second, Mo’s answers are checked by a doctor within 15 minutes. They can either confirm the medical advice or correct what has been said in the conversation. Patients will then receive a message explaining how the doctor feels about the AI’s answers.
Article
It seems to me that healthcare has become a major focus for AI companies. With AI they can definitely create a super app that'll do way more than apps do today. AI can process data of a patient more I think