Artificial intelligence company Knowtex launched a frontier AI lab for healthcare, aimed at developing and rigorously evaluating clinical AI tools for accuracy, auditability and clinician trust.
The company initially focused on oncology, a specialty that demands exactness in coding, staging and longitudinal history that general-purpose AI was not built to deliver, according to executives. The Knowtex platform now extends across more than 200 specialties at more than 300 organizations nationwide, executives say.
“Knowtex's founders are Stanford AI scientists who met studying AI and linguistics,” said Caroline Zhang , Knowtex CEO and co-founder, in a statement. “When we founded Knowtex in 2022, we spent a combined year in scrubs as medical scribes, working forward-deployed alongside clinicians during the day and building the product at night. That remains how Knowtex operates.”
Zhang told Fierce Healthcare she and co-founder Jocelyn Kang, who also serves as Knowtex’s CTO, recognized that clinical AI needs its own models, harnesses and evaluation benchmarks. “Knowtex has built all three,” she said. “The lab launch formalizes that work and commits us to publishing it.”
Knowtex develops proprietary specialty-specific models and AI harnesses, according to Zhang, and has “anti-hallucination safeguards” in place to ensure record accuracy. There is also evaluation science via embedded evaluators that “judge clinical AI the way a clinician would.”
Knowtex’s benchmark—dubbed KnowBench—measures effort reduction across clinician administrative tasks, with its platform scoring 97.99%, according to Zhang.
“The clinician's role becomes review and signature rather than authorship,” Zhang said. “Errors are built into the measure, because anything the system gets wrong has to be fixed by the clinician and registers as effort. Knowtex is publishing the full methodology so any system can be measured the same way.”
KnowBench is the first of a continuing series, Zhang said, and the company plans to release more “public, clinician-grounded evaluation benchmarks” to “raise the standard of evidence the entire industry is held to.”
In October, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) awarded Knowtex a $15 million contract to deliver commercial, cloud-based, ambient scribe tools to transcribe clinical encounters and generate notes.
Knowtex is now live across 79 VA medical centers for more than 7,000 clinicians, Zhang said.
“VA clinicians have saved over 450,000 hours of documentation time, with an average satisfaction rating of 4.5 out of 5 across more than 5,100 ratings,” Zhang said. “Sustained clinician adoption is 88%, which is extraordinarily high for healthcare technology; most tools in this category struggle to reach a third of users.”
The VA published an assessment of the Kansas City evaluation, a 90-day review involving 18 primary care providers. According to the VA's reporting, all 18 participating clinicians wanted to continue using ambient scribe technology after the evaluation period, and most reported saving one to two hours of after-hours work. Patient experience scores at the site also rose nearly three percentage points, to 95.8%, over the same period.
“Ambient scribe has enhanced my patient visits as I can be more focused on my interaction with the Veteran,” one Kansas City VA provider said. “More time talking to patients, more eye contact, more time to use other resources while patients are talking.”
Knowtex is experiencing rapid growth as Zhang notes the company is cash-flow positive with 10X revenue growth and 100X customer growth since the beginning of the year.
“Documentation is where Knowtex started, but our mission has always been to maximize intelligence per patient encounter,” Zhang said. “Which means that when a clinician walks into a room, the full weight of that patient's history, the relevant evidence, and the right next steps are already working on their behalf, and when they walk out, the encounter has been captured completely and correctly so that the next clinician inherits that same intelligence.”