The AI assistant will see you now

Welcome to Runtime! Today: How Houston Methodist is using a generative AI assistant to check in on discharged patients, why AI coding assistants might soon be billion-dollar properties, and the latest enterprise moves.

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Technology companies have been trying to overhaul the health care industry for decades only to run into the enormous complexity involved in making tools that work across dozens of different medical specialties, the literal life-and-death stakes of getting something wrong, and the sensitivity of the data involved. Tech leaders at Houston Methodist, however, have embraced generative AI to help improve how they care for patients outside their sprawling campus.

There are nine hospitals, around 1,000 beds, and 8,000 physicians in the Houston Methodist system, said Roberta Schwartz, executive vice president and chief innovation officer at the hospital, which serves about one-third of Houston's 7 million people. Managing all the technology across a generalized hospital is a daunting task given that each department requires specialized software to run the equipment needed for everything from surgery to cardiac care, as well as the fact that it still needs all the tech regular businesses use to manage payroll, inventory, and data security.

"Everyone thinks they can come in and very simply fix healthcare, and then they get into healthcare and realize how complicated it is," Schwartz said in a recent interview with Runtime. "There are thousands of different pieces of equipment and technologies that need to have information flowing in a variety of directions."
But healthcare organizations like Houston Methodist also need to find ways to serve patients when they're not physically on the campus, which became even more important during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns.
"I'm going to discharge about 200 people a day," Schwartz said. "Every one of those people has different needs; some of them are going to nursing facilities and some of them are going home, and I don't have enough staff to check up on every single one of them."

In 2019 Houston Methodist began working with a company called Lena Health to help provide services to "socially isolated seniors," said Zach Menn, vice president of population health. The original idea was to connect senior citizens in the Houston area so they could get together and form their own support networks to check up on each other, but 2020 quickly became a year during which getting a bunch of senior citizens together in a room was a really bad idea.

At the time Lena offered a service that provided "coaches," people who would call seniors in order to check in and make sure they had access to the services they needed with help from an AI assistant.
Over the last few years, that AI assistant has become capable of doing those routine check-ins and escalating issues as needed on its own, Menn said.
For example, Lena AI can call pharmacies with questions about medications and sit on hold for as long as it takes, rather than forcing the patient to navigate the phone tree or one of Houston Methodist's employees to intervene.
"It's been a huge kind of leap forward," Menn said. "Now they have this friend that is actually an AI digital-health assistant, and that's beneficial for the patients and it's beneficial for reducing that staff burden of paying somebody to sit and wait on hold to try to get through the hoops that you need to jump through just to get somebody what's necessary for their care."

Needless to say, putting an AI model at the center of health care outcomes is a tricky business. Companies that wanted to build generative AI applications struggled last year to get those apps into production over concerns about accuracy, which is a paramount concern for any health care organization.

But Houston Methodist is using AI to serve patients in ways it wasn't doing at all before the technology became available, or in ways that previously required doctors and nurses to spend less time with patients and more time with records, Menn said.
"We don't want AI making the clinical decisions, right?" he said. "There's got to be a line, but we don't want doctors sitting on hold."

Read the rest of the latest edition in our "How We Built It" series here on Runtime.

Catching a wave

So far, generative AI-powered coding editors and assistants have seen some of the strongest adoption of anything released since the debut of ChatGPT, and it seems pretty clear that software development tools will never be the same. As OpenAI searches for a way to live up to its incredibly lofty valuation, it could do worse than bringing one of the several startups working on those tools into its orbit.

Bloomberg reported Wednesday that OpenAI is "in talks" to acquire Windsurf, formerly known as Codeium, for $3 billion. On Thursday, CNBC reported that OpenAI had discussed a takeover with Anysphere, the company behind rival coding editor Cursor, before turning its attention to Windsurf.

Microsoft's GitHub owned the AI coding experience for the first couple of years of the generative AI boom, but the so-called "vibe coders" appear to prefer tools like Windsurf and Cursor. If either startup is actually interested in a takeover, it would be a little surprising if big, deep-pocketed enterprise tech players like AWS, Google Cloud, and maybe even Salesforce or ServiceNow didn't get in on the action.

Enterprise moves

Nadeem Asghar is the new chief technology officer of SingleStore, a promotion from his previous role as senior vice president and chief of product engineering at the database management company.

Oliver Tuszik is the new executive vice president of global sales at Cisco, after several years leading sales and operations in Cisco's Europe, Middle East, and Africa region.

Ryan Mac Ban is the new chief revenue officer at Confluent, a promotion after several years of sales leadership roles at Confluent, UiPath, and VMware.

Joanna Chen is the new CISO at Dashlane, joining the password-manager company following security leadership roles at Copado and Salesforce.

Jenny Decker is the new CFO at Tempo, joining the project-management software developer after finance leadership roles at Engine, Front, and Atlassian.

Kimberly Storin is the new chief marketing officer at Zoom, following similar roles at Zayo Group and RapidDeploy.

The Runtime roundup

CISA renewed its contract with MITRE to maintain the CVE database, hours before it looked like federal funding for a vital cybersecurity tool was about to be cut.

Zoom was down for several hours Wednesday after GoDaddy mistakenly cut off the zoom.us domain following "a communication error," according to The Register.

Databricks acquired Fennel, "a modern incremental compute engine" that helps companies build data pipelines, for an undisclosed amount.

Thanks for reading — Runtime is off for the weekend, see you Tuesday!