Hippocratic AI has teamed up with the global healthcare consulting practice of KPMG to help clients deploy its patient-facing AI agents and shore up the international workforce.
KPMG will counsel its clients on how to deploy Hippocratic AI’s clinical agents in cases where there are severe workforce shortages or the agents could dramatically improve access to care. While KPMG will mostly be advising health systems, it also works with governments, which could deploy the agents for population-level interventions.
Hippocratic AI was founded in March 2023 by Munjal Shah, Vishal Parikh, Meenesh Bhimani, Subho Mukherjee, Saad Godil, Alex Miller and Kim Parikh. They sought to create healthcare AI agents that could interact with patients on a clinical level, but not diagnose conditions or prescribe medications. While other companies are using AI to target the backend operations of healthcare, Shah saw an opportunity to automate patient interactions.
The company has been growing rapidly since launching out of stealth in May 2023, armed with $50 million. It raised a $53 million series A in March 2024 along with a $17 million follow-on investment from chipmaker Nvidia. Hippocratic banked a $141 million series B round in January backed by Kleiner Perkins, General Catalyst, Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia, UHS and WellSpan Health.
Hippocratic AI’s agents have been customized for almost 100 use cases to date and have automated 2.5 million patient calls, Shah said in an interview. The approach works especially well for value-based care, Medicare Advantage and single-payer healthcare systems.
“Generative AI brings the cost of intervention down so low,” Shah explained. “It's almost an order of magnitude cheaper that you basically can now do what I call low acuity, high volume interventions and and you see this not only in Medicare Advantage and things that are at risk in the U.S., but you also see in these single-payer programs just lots of need to do that.”
Not only does the AI have unlimited time and empathy for the patients it calls, it costs a fraction of the cost of human call centers while being able to accomplish more. Hippocratic AI is particularly focused on applying the technology to address the provider workforce shortage crisis that is worsening each year.
The vision of using AI to supplement an aging population and workforce is what attracted KPMG International’s Global Head of Healthcare, Anna van Poucke, to work with Shah and Hippocratic AI.
“The WHO (World Health Organization) is saying by 2030 we will have a shortage of 11 million healthcare workers, and that's not just in the high-income countries, that's everywhere in this world,” van Poucke said in an interview. “So we think that this is a necessity in healthcare to start moving in this direction.”
While KPMG recommends a variety of cutting-edge solutions to its healthcare clients, it recommends they use Hippocratic AI when they are facing future provider shortages. Van Poucke spoke of one health system KPMG works with that expects half of its clinicians to retire in the next 10 years.
Countries around the world are struggling with clinician shortages and aging populations. In Japan, the aging population outpaces the U.S., and a higher proportion of the population is over 65. Shah said that only AI can fix problems of this magnitude of structural human resource issues.
“Almost every country in the world is suffering a staffing shortage in healthcare at the moment,” Shah said. “I mean, the pandemic really burned out a lot of healthcare workers, not just in the U.S., but all over the planet. So there's just a lot of need to fill that gap.”
Hippocratic AI is already working with organizations in the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, Japan and Singapore. Shah expects the collaboration with KPMG to further grow clients internationally.
Hippocratic AI’s agents can speak a multitude of languages and dialects so they can be deployed around the world. Local clinicians will also help oversee the deployment of the product in their areas to flag any pertinent language or cultural issues.
“Most of the time, when you build a health tech startup, you focus on the U.S. first because it's such a big market, and you only go international years later, but we're seeing that really what you want to do is something a little bit different,” Shah said. “You want to focus on really the forward-thinking, AI glass-half-full systems that really do want to be on the forefront of deploying AI technologies within healthcare.”
Hippocratic AI will not be focusing on expansion in Europe, Shah said, because of the passage of the EU AI Act, which classifies Hippocratic AI’s agents as a high-risk category. Shah asserts Europe moved too fast to regulate AI, and the law stifled business.
KPMG comes with resources like consultants to help health systems implement the technology and teams of lawyers to ensure Hippocratic AI is staying compliant with each country’s AI laws.
Hippocratic AI has a small team, Shah said, and its focus is on creating technology. KPMG, though, has thousands of employees that regularly help health systems, governments and payers create digital strategies and reorganize workflows.
“If you just start randomly plugging in AI agents, that's not going to work,” van Poucke said. “We need to do the whole digital transformation and the transformation that goes with it. What we do in KPMG, we're very known for our transformation capabilities."
KPMG will help clients find the most useful areas for agentic AI and help upskill clinicians to work with agentic AI.
“Sometimes we talk to governments and say, 'If you want to stabilize, if you want to keep your healthcare system sustainable, this is what you can do',” van Poucke explained. “For example, especially in smaller jurisdictions like Island Healthcare, you can have an approach to all diabetic patients on this island, or an approach to all COPD patients. So it's mainly healthcare systems [that we’re working with], but it could also be larger-scale transformations.”
KPMG also works with insurance companies on preventive care measures. In one example, Hippocratic AI’s agents called thousands of individuals during a heat wave to do heat stroke screenings, give them advice and coordinate transportation to a cooling center, if needed.
“We want to be a frontrunner firm,” she continued. “So we want to provide our clients the best, the newest tested [products] … The combination of the two firms is going to lead the healthcare sector to the solution of being able to provide equitable, accessible care.”