Knowtex launches frontier healthcare AI lab

Artificial intelligence firm Knowtex has inaugurated a frontier AI laboratory dedicated to healthcare, with the goal of crafting and thoroughly assessing clinical AI tools for precision, traceability, and clinician confidence. Initially concentrating on oncology, a field that necessitates exactness in coding, staging, and longitudinal medical histories, Knowtex's platform now spans over 200 specialties at more than 300 institutions across the nation.

"Our founders, Stanford AI experts, met while studying AI and linguistics," stated Knowtex CEO and co-founder Caroline Zhang in a press release. "When we established Knowtex in 2022, we spent an entire year working as medical scribes, collaborating with clinicians during the day and developing the product at night. That practice continues to define Knowtex's operations."

Zhang and co-founder Jocelyn Kang, who also serves as Knowtex's Chief Technology Officer, observed that clinical AI requires its own models, frameworks, and evaluation metrics. "Knowtex has developed all three," she affirmed. The lab's establishment formalizes this work and commits to publishing the findings. Knowtex creates bespoke specialty-specific models and AI harnesses, and incorporates "anti-hallucination safeguards" to ensure record accuracy.

The firm also employs evaluation science through embedded evaluators who "assess clinical AI as a clinician would." Knowtex's benchmark, named KnowBench, gauges time savings in clinician administrative duties, achieving a 97.99% score, according to Zhang. "The clinician's role shifts from authorship to review and signature," explained Zhang.

"Errors are factored into the measure, as any mistake made by the system must be rectified by the clinician and counts as additional effort." KnowBench is the inaugural of a series of "clinician-grounded evaluation benchmarks" that Knowtex intends to disclose, aiming to elevate the standard of evidence across the industry. In October, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) granted Knowtex a $15 million contract to supply cloud-based, ambient scribe tools for transcribing clinical encounters and producing notes.

As of now, Knowtex's platform is operational in 79 VA medical centers, serving over 7,000 clinicians. Zhang reported that VA clinicians have saved more than 450,000 hours of documentation time, with an average satisfaction rating of 4.5 out of 5 based on more than 5,100 ratings. Sustained clinician adoption stands at an impressive 88%, a remarkable figure for healthcare technology, as most tools in this category typically fail to engage more than a third of users.

The VA conducted a 90-day evaluation, known as the Kansas City evaluation, involving 18 primary care providers. According to the VA's report, all 18 clinicians wished to continue using the ambient scribe technology post-evaluation, with most citing time savings of one to two hours of after-hours work. Patient experience scores at the site improved by nearly three percentage points, reaching 95.8%, during the same period.

"Ambient scribe has improved my patient visits, allowing me to focus more on interaction with the Veteran," remarked a Kansas City VA provider. "It provides more time for conversation, eye contact, and utilizing other resources while patients are speaking." Knowtex is witnessing rapid expansion, as Zhang notes that the company is now cash-flow positive, with 10 times revenue growth and 100 times customer growth since the beginning of the year.

"Documentation is where we began, but our mission has always been to maximize intelligence per patient encounter," Zhang concluded. "When a clinician enters a room, all relevant patient history, pertinent evidence, and appropriate next steps should be at their disposal, and when they leave, the encounter must be fully documented and accurate for the next clinician who will inherit that intelligence."