Massachusetts General Hospital Brigham spins off to spawn artificial intelligence startup
The process of accurately identifying patients eligible for clinical trials has been a major bottleneck for decades. Medical records are confusing, and diagnostic codes often reflect billing requirements rather than the patient's true clinical status, making it difficult to figure out who actually meets a trial's inclusion and exclusion criteria.
Last week, the Massachusetts General Hospital Brigham launched a new company to commercialize an artificial intelligence-powered generative screening platform designed to help streamline the process.
The company, called AIwithCare, was officially launched on Friday. It uses large language models to interpret structured and unstructured clinical data to screen trial patients faster and more accurately.
Dr. AJ Blood, a cardiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and CEO of AIwithCare, noted that in most health systems, trial recruitment depends on clinically trained staff dedicating hours a day to manual chart review.
“It’s a time-consuming, labor-intensive, mind-numbing process,” he declared.
He and his research team at the Massachusetts General Hospital Clinical Translation Accelerator began building AIwithCare's generative AI engine in early 2023, when large language models such as ChatGPT were becoming widely popular.
Dr. Blood explained that the platform is designed to interpret the full clinical context of the data rather than rely on unreliable billing codes. The goal is to enable more hospitals to automatically evaluate patients at scale based on complex trial inclusion and exclusion criteria.
Dr. Blood noted that the platform has been validated in peer-reviewed studies—one published in Journal of the American Medical Association This year it was found that enrollment rates using AIwithCare were nearly double those of traditional manual screening.
As it enters the market, AIwithCare now competes with other companies that sell artificial intelligence tools to improve clinical trial recruitment and enrollment, such as Antidote, Tempus and Trialspark, but Dr. Blood emphasized that AIwithCare's platform can expand beyond clinical trial recruitment to applications in safety, quality and clinical operations through fast, accurate medical data.
The company is currently expanding its technology to other health systems, research networks, life sciences companies, pharmaceutical manufacturers and device companies, he said.
Dr. Blood noted that the goal of AIwithCare is not only to streamline clinical trial recruitment, but also to help change the way hospitals and research organizations use artificial intelligence to improve patient care and operational efficiency.
Photo: Huang Yuliang, Getty Images
