There’s been a lot of speculation about how artificial intelligence will revolutionize healthcare. Health and wellness thought leaders are eager to see how AI can minimize healthcare worker burnout and staffing shortages. Others are exploring the potential for AI to support a growing aging population outside of the doctor’s office, reducing the prevalence of chronic disease and improving quality of life.
OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Thrive Global’s Arianna Huffington are teaming up to find AI solutions for the 130 million Americans diagnosed with at least one chronic condition.
On Monday, OpenAI Startup Fund and Thrive Global announced the funding and launch of Thrive AI Health, which will develop an AI health coach that will provide personalized health advice based on people’s biometrics and lifestyle habits. The AI coach will be driven by scientific data and trained on Thrive’s behavior change methodology, which focuses on micro-habit change.
“We usually talk about AI in terms of productivity and taking the heavy lifting out of work, and of course those are very important applications of AI,” said Huffington, founder and CEO of behavior change platform Thrive Global. luck“But ultimately, what matters is how AI can help fundamentally improve our healthspan and lifespan. In the same way that the New Deal transformed the country by revitalizing physical infrastructure and democratizing welfare, AI can serve as part of the critical infrastructure in a much more effective health care system that provides ongoing support for everyday people.”
The company has appointed DeCarlos Love, a former Google executive with experience in wearable technology and product development, as CEO of Thrive AI Health.
“Recent advances in artificial intelligence offer unprecedented opportunities to make behavior change more powerful and sustainable,” Love said in a press release announcing the announcement.
Huffington says she’s optimistic that AI can be “the key to behavior change” by synthesizing large amounts of data, recognizing patterns and making personalized recommendations. Giving people a generic 10,000-step goal or suggesting they follow a Mediterranean diet isn’t enough, she says. “We have an opportunity right now to use the miracle drug of behavior change,” she says. “We need to democratize what the 1 percent know and do.”
The platform’s AI health coach offers personalized recommendations on sleep, diet, fitness, stress management, and social connections. Users can provide the coach with as much health information as they want, including personal preferences like bedtime, favorite foods, and how they relieve stress.
“We know that when people get value, they’re happy to share it in large amounts,” Huffington says.
She believes that as people see the benefits of the product over time, it builds trust and accountability.
“Think about what it’s like for a busy professional with diabetes: They struggle to manage their blood sugar levels and often neglect diet and exercise due to their hectic schedules,” Huffington and Altman wrote in a Time magazine op-ed. “Trained on their medical data and daily habits, a personalized AI health coach could remind them when to take their medication, suggest quick, healthy meal options and remind them to take short breaks for exercise.”
As AI interventions expand, health equity has become a major public concern. Thrive AI Health has partnered with Dr. Gbenga Ogedegbe, professor of population health medicine and director of the Center for Health Equity Research at NYU Langone, to test and iterate on products in underserved populations at high risk for chronic disease.
“You can’t have enough human coaches to reach this demographic. AI gives you the potential for scale and precision,” Huffington said. Still, the company must overcome widespread concerns about data and security breaches.
“The challenge is that many of these AI technologies are new, and appropriate compensating controls to manage emerging risks are only now being constructed,” wrote Dr Hugh Thompson, executive chairman of the largest cybersecurity conference. luckAccording to a press release, Thrive AI Health will have “strong privacy and security guardrails.”
The platform’s initial team is moving quickly to customize and test the product, with hopes that it will become the backbone of healthcare infrastructure in the future. The Alice L. Walton Foundation has invested, and the company is partnering with research and academic institutions, including Stanford University School of Medicine and the Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute at West Virginia University, to help scale the service. The product will be available to Thrive Global’s employer base, and discussions are underway to expand through self-insured employers and pharmaceutical companies.
