Investment in artificial intelligence medical note-taking apps doubled in 2024, as Big Tech giants including Microsoft and Amazon and start-ups race to grab a share of the $26bn AI healthcare market. AI start-ups focused on creating digital “scribes” for health professionals raised $800mn in 2024, compared to $390mn in 2023, according to data from PitchBook.
Start-ups such as Nabla, Heidi, Corti and Tortus raised money last year, with backers including Khosla Ventures, Entrepreneur First and French tech billionaire Xavier Niel. The rise in funding comes as groups rush to launch AI-powered products that aim to make it quicker for doctors to take medical notes and improve patient interactions, as health becomes a key growth area in the AI boom. Microsoft, which owns AI speech recognition company Nuance, as well as Amazon and Oracle have launched so-called AI co-pilots for physicians that use large language models and speech recognition to auto-generate transcripts of patient visits, highlight medically relevant details and create clinical summaries. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything more transformative in 15 years of healthcare than this,” said Harpreet Sood, a primary care physician in South London, who has been trialling French start-up Nabla’s app for the past 15 months. Sood, a former adviser on tech and innovation to the chief executive of NHS England, said that in a full-day clinic of about 40 patients, traditional note-taking can take at least two hours of typing time. “It’s been remarkable, easily saving 3-4 minutes of every consultation and really helping to capture the consultation and what it’s about,” he added. Nabla’s note-taking app uses Whisper, a transcription tool from ChatGPT maker OpenAI, and has been used to transcribe about 7mn medical visits as of October last year. Hospitals and general physicians across the UK’s National Health Service are trialling AI note-taking as a way to save time and improve doctor-patient interaction