NASHVILLE, Tennessee—Executives at UPMC Enterprises are coming to Nashville ready to take conversations about artificial intelligence in healthcare to the next level.
The organization, the innovation, commercialization and venture capital arm of Pittsburgh-based UPMC, recently launched a virtual environment to evaluate and refine AI models.
The product, call Ahavi, will debut at ViVE 2025 as part of a soft launch, according to executives. The platform incorporates real-world insights from UPMC's patient population.
“This is a platform that ultimately allows us to assess and validate the efficacy of AI models and solutions against our patient population prior to them ever being deployed against our patient population,” Jeff Jones, UPMC Enterprises senior vice president of product development, told Fierce Healthcare. “For organizations who are looking to strategically partner, how can UPMC take insights that are derived from our population to help improve these models? And I think it's the intersection of companies who are on the precipice of the deployment or creation of new models in patient care that we're really going to latch on to, so long as those solutions align with the needs of UPMC.”
Ahavi provides primary-source-verifiable, de-identified, real-world healthcare data to researchers, scientists and developers. The platform is designed to serve pharma and clinical trial enablement partners, AI developers, academic research partners and hospital systems.
According to Jones, UPMC Enterprises' platform offers third-party certified data pipelines and comprehensive patient data.
Through the platform, organizations have access to data from 5 million patients and 24 hospitals. The platform incorporates structured and unstructured data linkable from 2019 and 2012, respectively. It creates a controlled environment where AI models can be tested and fine-tuned before implementing them in the real world.
"We want to make sure that the solutions that we put in place have been validated in a granular fashion. We're really deploying ethical models within our organization, free, to the extent that we can, of any bias that may be introduced. The platform Ahavi allows us to do just that, and it's mutually beneficial, not only to UPMC, by providing us these insights, but also allows our partners to accelerate their R&D efforts in a broader market," Jones noted.
Ahavi's secure environment and access to a breadth of de-identified real-world data can accelerate an AI-focused organization's R&D efforts, shortening timelines from years to months, according to Jones.
As AI adoption grows, large health systems are increasingly creating secure environments to test out and validate AI models.
"It becomes a necessity to have a secure environment that is removed from the day-to-day operations of your organization, to assess these models, to enhance them, to detect bias that may exist within that model based on what data informed it, all of these things are going to become increasingly crucial as it pertains to AI governance within healthcare," Jones said.
He added, "It is a safety net that protects both UPMC and our patients while simultaneously advancing that R&D."
Real-world data also are paramount to advancing AI models, he noted.
"We have to utilize real-world data and the insights derived from that to truly make more informed, data-driven decisions as to how and where we utilize these technologies," he said.
UPMC is a 40-plus hospital academic medical center with an insurance arm, an international arm and a relationship with the University of Pittsburgh. Its enterprise arm debuted 10 years ago and now has a portfolio of over 40 companies in various stages of development; the organization added three more in just the first three weeks of the year, according to executives.
UPMC Enterprises executives came to ViVE ready to spread the word about Ahavi and also evaluate the latest digital and AI innovations.
“The overarching goal here is to be in front of all things healthcare and tech. As an integrated delivery system and an academic medical center, we have access to our clinicians, insurance specialists, our researchers, by way of our partnership with Pitt, we have access to a myriad of subject matter experts who share with us the problems that they face on a day-to-day basis,” Jones said. “When we’re attending conferences, we’re really looking for organizations that we can partner with us that are going to help us solve very specific problems that we face within the UPMC system.”
He added, “More recently, over the last several years, a lot of that comes by way of AI technologies. We ultimately want to utilize the collaborative subject matter expertise that we have here to make sure that we identify companies that are a strong fit to the problems we, as an organization, face.”
UPMC Enterprises is on the lookout for companies that can help the organization improve access and quality as well as care coordination and innovation in medicine, according to Kathryn Heffernan, senior director at UPMC Enterprises.
“We're looking at all of these things, really, with the ultimate goal of figuring out how to benefit our patients,” she said.
Ambient AI is having its moment in healthcare with the technology designed to capture medical notes during doctor visits. Abridge is one of UPMC Enterprises’ portfolio companies, and the health system also has deployed Abridge’s AI medical scribe technology.
“At the end of the day, we want to do everything we can to make the lives of our clinicians easier so that they can remain focused on what they do best. Technologies that provide the ability to streamline the day-to-day activities, removing the burden of our clinicians from a documentation perspective, play a big role in that. I don't think it's shocking that within our industry, transcription scribe technologies are leading the pack from an AI perspective,” Jones said.
Health system executives are looking for comprehensive digital health and AI solutions that enable the organizations to do more with less and provide valuable return on investment, he noted.
"It's the natural evolution of where these technologies are going within healthcare, the ongoing operational need to monitor these solutions. They're not 'set it and forget it' solutions. They need to continue to be monitored. You need to continue to enhance these solutions to ensure that they're delivering as expected against your population. As an organization introduces more and more of these solutions that operational burden increases," Jones said. "It seems like a natural evolution that organizations like UPMC that cover such a large spectrum of patient care are going to look for solutions that are more encapsulated at a broader, call it AI platform, as opposed to singular point solutions."
Conferences like ViVE also represent an opportunity to connect with other health system executives to touch base on top priorities, Heffernan noted.
"I'm also looking forward to talking to other venture firms so we can share focus areas, deal flow and continue to build up those relationships and all of that, collectively, will help us better to evaluate the opportunities that we're looking at and find things that are going to move the needle," she said.
"Streamlining operations, reducing administrative burden, anything that's going to allow our clinicians to focus on the patient to the utmost degree is going to be of interest here. Organizations that are ready to strategically partner with us to enhance their offering and meet our needs, we're ready to listen," Jones added.