Pieces Technologies has secured a $2m Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract from the National Cancer Institute (NCI), a part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
As part of the contract, the company will partner with MetroHealth, a public health system based in Cleveland, Ohio, to deploy its new conversational AI agent, PiecesChat.
PiecesChat allows cancer patients to ask questions about any aspect of their care in real time, while simultaneously ascertaining information about social determinants of health (SDOH).
Also, Pieces will extend its Pieces SafeRead platform to support conversational AI.
The Pieces SafeRead system employs highly tuned adversarial AI alongside human-in-the-loop (HITL) oversight to minimise errors of communication.
MetroHealth System senior vice president and chief clinical integration officer Douglas Bruce said: “One barrier to advancing cancer care is the material challenge of getting real, actionable data from patients.
“Having an AI tool that’s able to converse directly with patients, spend the necessary time with them and demonstrate empathy will not only help clinicians obtain SDOH information but also help categorise findings into actionable data.
“MetroHealth has food for medicine programs, transportation and a number of other resources that we can offer if we truly understand what patients need in a nuanced way.
“We are eager to collaborate with Pieces to leverage the unique capabilities of AI to help clinicians move one step closer to resolving the SDOH disparities that our patients face.”
Pieces said its solutions produce autonomous, AI-generated clinical documentation, including inpatient clinical summaries, notes, patient briefings and discharge planning.
The company has 12 patents secured or pending worldwide for tools that optimise clinical workflows for health systems and providers.
It leverages both passive and active screening to capture SDOH information during clinical trials and partners with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to leverage Amazon Bedrock.
Amazon Bedrock is a fully managed service that provides high-performing foundation models (FMs) to responsibly integrate generative AI capabilities.
The project will measure usage, effectiveness, reliability, accuracy, empathy, and patient perceptions of its conversational AI solution.
It will also help expand Pieces’ hallucination risk classification framework for use in conversational AI to advance AI safety protocols in clinical care delivery.
Pieces CEO Ruben Amarasingham said: “We are honoured and humbled to receive this major NIH award. The technology being studied has potentially far-reaching implications in multiple domains, including cancer care, SDOH management and patient empowerment.
“For the first time, patients will have a broad ability to ask any question or detail about their care to a highly supervised AI. We are thrilled to work alongside MetroHealth on this groundbreaking work.”