Clinical AI platform Aidoc now deployed in dozens of University Hospitals' inpatient and outpatient facilities

Ohio-based University Hospitals Health System (UH) has teamed up with healthcare AI company Aidoc to catch conditions like pulmonary embolism, coronary artery calcification and intracranial hemorrhage expediently.

Aidoc’s platform has more than 30 care pathways and the company has 17 FDA-cleared algorithms, which it claims is the most clinical algorithms of any company. By partnering with Aidoc, hospitals and health systems can rapidly ramp up the use of AI in their practices, so it can make a large-scale impact.

This is what UH has done. The health system has deployed Aidoc’s AI platform, aiOS, across 13 hospitals and dozens of outpatient facilities.

“When a patient arrives at a UH facility and undergoes a CT scan for an injury or pain, Aidoc's AI analyzes the scan using its comprehensive algorithms,” a press release by Aidoc says. “The technology identifies both expected and unexpected findings, helps physicians prioritize urgent cases and ensures all flagged conditions are reviewed by the care team.”

"Today's care delivery is incredibly complex with numerous moving parts," Donna Plecha, M.D., chair of radiology at UH, said in a statement. "Aidoc’s AI technology assists our radiologists in evaluating various patient images, allowing our clinicians to access precise, actionable data quickly. The AI technology enables our care teams to be more accurate and efficient leading to even more exceptional care for our patients.”

Elad Walach, founder and CEO of Aidoc, said that from the get-go, UH had a vision for AI to make a big impact on clinical care. Walach said the health system wanted to be strategic in picking an AI partner that would solve more than one problem at a time. With Aidoc, UH has been able to launch over a dozen AI solutions in a matter of months.

“UH has been very strategic in how they looked at the AI space because a lot of health systems … they run after one shiny point solution at a time,” Walach said. “But because of the adoption time and scaling time, it takes them, let's say, one year to adopt one AI solution, and then another year to adopt the second.”

UH thought about AI acceleration from the get-go, which Walach said is unique.

Scalability is one of the goals of Aidoc, but it also focuses on outcomes. For example, in the partnership with one of UH’s clinical innovation centers, Aidoc will study how the deployment of its platform affects quality and cost of care.

One of UH’s goals in bringing in an AI partner was to solve the long wait times for outpatient and ambulatory visits. In time-critical cases, waiting weeks to visit a doctor after a chest CT could have major adverse consequences. With Aidoc, existing chest CT scans, for example, can instantly be evaluated by an algorithm that can detect a pulmonary embolism. A patient can then be elevated to the proper level of care and be saved from waiting weeks for a diagnosis.

Aidoc said the deployment of its AI solutions is expected to markedly enhance patient safety and care quality.

Walach said about half of hospitals and health systems are using some type of AI in their radiology practices. Aidoc accounts for a large portion of them. Aidoc is partnering with more than 150 hospitals and health systems in the U.S., which Walach said is about 25% of the market. Aidoc is also used by the top three radiology practices in the U.S., he noted.

“The biggest problem of the AI space today is fragmentation, right? Because if you fix one problem, you create three others because you create even more siloes with data,” Walach explained.

Walach said AI has the potential to solve interoperability challenges in healthcare, but the deployment of one AI solution isn’t going to fix health IT. Health systems need a platform that can bring data silos together rather than create yet another data silo, he noted.

Founded in 2016, Aidoc has raised $264 million to date, according to Crunchbase, including a $110 million series D round in 2022. Its backers include TCV, Alpha Intelligence Capital and CDIB Capital.