Nourish, a virtual nutrition counseling startup, is doubling down on tech with several new artificial intelligence features for patients and providers.
Over the past several months, Nourish rolled out custom AI tools to streamline workflows, help patients track their meals and surface data insights to providers. So far, the feedback has been very positive, executives say.
Nourish’s goal, according to co-founder and CEO Aidan Dewar, is to “make care smarter, more human … and more engaging for patients.”
Nourish, which reportedly hit a $1 billion valuation following its series B round earlier this year, connects patients with registered dietitians virtually to help manage nutrition-related conditions. The company works with commercial, Medicare and Medicaid payers, with a total of 150 million lives covered. As a result, 94% of its patients pay nothing out of pocket, Nourish claims. Today, Nourish serves hundreds of thousands of patients across all 50 states and employs more than 3,000 registered dietitians.
The following is an exclusive look at the new suite of AI tools and a glimpse of ideas the startup is considering introducing in the future.
AI-powered meal logging
One of the new tools is an automated way for patients to log their meals. Nourish previously offered manual meal logging, but this can be cumbersome for patients. That type of logging is “extremely manual and hard to stick with,” Dewar explained.
The goal of AI meal logging is to remove key barriers like manual entry and external costly tracking apps. This way, it is easier both for patients to maintain healthy habits and for providers to tap into granular data.
Nourish’s new tool analyzes a photo of a meal in seconds, generating estimated macronutrients. Patients have the option to add written context to their photos or forgo the photo feature entirely if they prefer written tracking. The AI will still estimate macros from a written note without a photo. Users can have the AI recalculate any inaccuracies or if they ate a different amount than they originally logged. Patients can also save common meals in the app for quick reuse.
After this feature launched, there was a notable bump in use among those already manually logging with Nourish. “There was a 30% increase in how much they were using it,” Nick Bookout, Nourish’s product manager, told Fierce Healthcare. Overall, Nourish saw a 50% jump in how many patients use the meal logging feature. Today, nearly three-quarters of Nourish patients are actively using the new meal logging tool.
In recent peer-reviewed research, Nourish found that a combination of appointments plus active use of its mobile app—including outcomes tracking and meal logging—yielded the highest weight loss in users.
“It’s especially meaningful that we’re getting folks to increase engagement with this tool that we know leads to better outcomes,” Bookout noted.
The AI meal logging tool is 90% to 95% accurate relative to what a dietitian would input based on a photo, the company says.
AI-powered insights for clinicians
While the patient is logging their meals, those data are being surfaced to their provider with additional insights. Registered dietitians can see an AI-powered summary of a patient’s meal trends, areas for improvement and condition-specific considerations. Data graphics are also an option.
This feature was trained on reports written by dietitians as well as meal-logging data. The model was piloted with dietitians and fine-tuned before the official launch. “There are several steps where we have humans in the loop. We’re not just blindly exposing this to patients,” Bookout noted.
The provider-facing tool also features a breakdown of where a patient’s calories are coming from by macronutrient. Nourish dietitians have been especially responsive to a feature chronicling a user’s meal times.
“This is all stuff that if Nourish hadn’t built this, a lot of dietitians would do manually in spreadsheets,” Bookout said, or they wouldn’t do it at all. “So it’s the kind of thing that I think is saving them hours of time.”
Most (95%) of these insight reports have been marked as helpful by Nourish clinicians. They have said AI-powered insights help them spot patterns and prep faster, leading to better conversations in sessions, Nourish claims.
AI scribe for charting
Nourish clinicians already use a custom-built EHR. Because Nourish owns the full tech stack, building in an AI scribe made sense. By automating note-taking, the tool aims to save providers time and layers in recommendations based on what was discussed in a session.
The scribe helps sessions feel more engaging and human, per Dewar: “What you can focus on instead of the notes burden is delivering amazing care.” Registered dietitians have seen between a 50% and 75% reduction in time spent on documentation, Nourish claims.
Transcribing sessions can also capture key details that help with reimbursement. Because every clinician has a unique charting style, they can customize the level of detail the scribe includes from each session. The scribe can also translate from multiple languages, including Spanish, Portuguese and Russian, and help flag social needs like potential food insecurity.
For the future, Nourish is eyeing fitness and hydration logging, AI-supported recipes and meal plans and an AI research assistant for clinicians.