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Nablaa French startup building an AI copilot to speed up the way doctors work with patients announced today that it has raised $24 million in a Series B funding round.
The investment comes from Cathay Innovation and Zebox and will be used to grow Nabla’s offering and accelerate its rollout to the US market. The funding brings the company’s total capital raised to $44.6 million.
There have been many copilots, although their adoption in healthcare has been slow due to the concerns of doctors and clinicians. With its AI co-pilot, Nabla appears to have broken that barrier, giving doctors an assistant that sits at their desk and produces the desired results.
What exactly does Nabla help with?
Nabla Copilot sits as a web app or Chrome extension on a doctor’s computer and listens to their consultation with patients. Then, using the encounter and the magic of artificial intelligence, it creates clinical notes almost instantly, saving doctors the trouble of documenting the information manually.
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These notes contain all the necessary information from the visit, from the patient’s subject to their medical history and medications/tests prescribed. This information can then be reviewed/edited by the physician and entered into an electronic health record. The platform is also on track to have a feature that uses conversation and testing to create a set of instructions for the patient, on behalf of the doctor. This letter can be saved as a PDF and printed for the patient.
To bring these features to life, Nabla uses real-time speech-to-text AI. The model, a combination of Microsoft’s unavailable speech-to-text API and the enhanced Whisper model, generates the conversation transcript. This transcript is converted into a clinical summary note using the GPT series of large language models (LLMs).
Nabla says all personally identifiable information (PII) is masked when the LLM processes the transcript and disclosed once the output is produced. In addition, neither the speech nor the summary notes are saved, unless express consent is given by the doctor and the patient.
Significant impact in less than 10 months
Historically, doctors had to spend up to 40% of their day documenting consultations. With Nabla, the problem just disappeared. In just 10 months since its launch, copilot has been adopted by more than 20,000 providers. The company also claims that it will soon achieve three million consultations.
“With Nabla, I’m finally getting my weekends back. What used to take 8-10 hours now takes maybe 3-4 hours. Even better, because I no longer have to be a scribe, I actually get to be a psychologist and focus on my patients! After only two months, I can’t imagine my practice without Nabla,” M. Tursich, a psychologist in Houston, said in a statement.
The company claims the improved models provide highly accurate outputs, with only 5% of notes requiring adjustments. Our tests at web app also provided similar results. This is expected to get even better as the models improve in the near future.
Nabla plans to use this funding to expand its co-pilot’s reach in the US, but its ultimate goal is to build an AI-driven future for doctors. The company aims to create the “most intuitive and reliable ambient AI” to support them across the clinical spectrum to medical decision support. It will also use the new chapter to launch additional language options for the assistant.
Currently, Nabla Copilot can be accessed with any email, not just the provider’s official email, and supports three languages: English, Spanish and French.
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