Highlighted startups Inato and Prenosis showcase AI 'best practices' – Healthcare Blog
Michael Millenson
Thinking of artificial intelligence as an ingredient in a recipe for successful business is an important topic at Medcity Invest 2025, and this AI “best practice” recommendation manifests itself as high-profile startups Inato and Prenosis.
“You need to build a meaningful business model and then use AI,” warned Raffi Boyajian, head of Cigna Ventures.
VNS Health's New Ventures vice president Aman Shah and Valeo Ventures' managing partner Dipa Mehta agree and stressed. Both sides stressed the need to find a “burning platform” in a difficult economic environment that can immediately improve the bottom line of customers.
In separate panels, high-profile startups Inato and Prenosis highlight the AI approach.
Customers need innovation
inato is named Fast Company Magazine is one of the most innovative companies of 2024 and was selected by Fierce Healthcare as one of its 15 fierce companies the same year. The Paris-based company connects drugmakers to other patients who are struggling to enroll, attracting an AI-based platform through an AI-based platform that attracts more than 3,000 community research sites in over 70 countries. In the company’s words, by conducting clinical trials “easier to access, inclusive and efficient”, breaking the shocking pattern, with 96% of trials not including representative populations, Inato has established partnerships, with more than a third of more than 30 pharmaceutical companies.
Describing its technology, Inato said: “It assembles AI agents to de-identify patient records, quickly determines which trials are relevant to each patient, and conducts evaluation and exclusion criteria for assessing eligibility for accuracy and mass assessment of eligibility. However, the phrase “assembly AI agents” obscures a delicate process.
Liz Beatty, co-founder and chief strategy officer of Inato, described it using “off-the-shelf” big-word models such as Chatgpt and Claude, and then used a specific process to optimize the algorithms performed on each model. With the emergence of the new model, the company made corresponding adjustments. Although Beatty doesn't offer an analogy, it's obviously similar to the chef's choice among the right ingredients to ensure the success of the recipe.
“I heard, ‘Let’s apply AI to everything.’ That’s not the right answer,” Beatty said. According to PitchBook, investors are convinced that Inato does have the right answer, and they have poured $38.2 million.
Artificial intelligence is also the core of the success of nurturing diseases. The company’s Sepsis Immunization Department is the first to use AI to approve the Food and Drug Administration-approved tool to predict the onset of emergency disease called sepsis. Integrated into clinical workflows by time The magazine is “one of the best inventions of 2024” and Prenosis co-founder and CEO Bobby Reddy was subsequently named Time100 Health List to recognize influencers in global health.
Chicago-based Prenosis describes itself as an artificial intelligence company that adjusts therapies for individual patients as part of a “new era of precision medicine.” But, like Inato, AI titles hide a more complex reality.
Sepsis is a heterologous syndrome that may have nearly 200 different symptoms. “AI put them together, so we can understand the degradation process,” Reddy said. The company uses machine learning to develop and validate a complex algorithm. New England Journal of Medicine study.
But the right AI is just a product ingredient. Prenosis has also assembled a database of thousands of patients and established a “wet lab” to find sepsis biomarkers and used for other conditions based on the current 120,000 blood samples as the company expands its products. Adding biomarkers to EHR data allows companies to position themselves as a more accurate real-time supplement to SEPIS tool EPIC for free to use its EHR to hospitals.
“It’s our competitive advantage,” Reddy said.
Focused AI
Just as Inato focuses on AI for specific purposes, nurturing diseases is focused on key goals. Reddy said AI was “first and also suitable for the FDA model.”
Sepsis is caused by an overactive response to infection. According to the Prenosis website, it costs billions of dollars a year in the U.S. healthcare system while capturing at least 350,000 lives, which is more than all cancers combined. According to a 2022 study, the World Health Organization has labeled sepsis as a threat to global health, and the economic impact of this situation accounts for an average of 2.7% of a country’s health care costs.
What Reddy did not mention at the investment conference was that U.S. hospital performance in preventing and effectively treating sepsis was a factor in value-based payments in hospital patient safety scores published by Medicare and LeapFrog Group. Indeed, the “burning platform”.
For nurturing and dependent, AI best practices are based on practicality. As Reddy said, AI is “just a tool” in product development.
Michael L. This first appeared in his column Forbes
