With healthcare shifting toward at-home solutions, Vaalia Health is building on SRI’s AI innovations to make sure that efficient care is also effective care.
As healthcare goes digital, the patient experience is changing rapidly. For many patients, the care experience is becoming more efficient. Others find themselves lost in the shuffle, struggling to interact with their healthcare provider’s virtual channels. If this digital transformation is going to benefit all patients, says Vaalia Health founder Jani Ahonala, we need to find every opportunity to build human-centered health technologies that reliably improve patient outcomes both in healthcare facilities and at home.
An experienced health tech entrepreneur with two previous startups under his belt, Ahonala founded Vaalia Health to transform individualized healthcare with “causal AI.” By building a new AI-driven healthcare platform on top of SRI’s AI innovations, Vaalia Health aims to play a crucial role in the new era of healthcare.
How care is changing
“If you had cancer, you used to be treated at the hospital,” observes Ahonala. “That was your safe place. You went there every three weeks. They gave you the infusion, and they asked you to stay there for one hour just to make sure you were okay. That’s where you met with your care team, with your nurse, and with other patients. You created connections.”
It’s a very different experience, he explains, for cancer patients who are benefitting from the recent wave of effective oral medications. The medication will be mailed to your home. You will interact with your care team mainly online or over the phone. For many patients, that’s a valuable tradeoff — avoiding long trips to care facilities makes it much easier to keep up with work and family responsibilities. And this move toward at-home care isn’t limited to oncology — it’s becoming a through-line across the broader healthcare system.
But Ahonala is clear-eyed about the potential downsides of this new (and admittedly efficient) approach. “The care teams are still doing their very best to support you, but the connection is different,” he observes. “You might visit the physician every three months and you don’t have a lot of time to interact with your team. You may need to take much more responsibility in managing your medication.”
AI’s role in improving medication adherence
While Vaalia Health sees numerous opportunities to influence health outcomes through the lens of AI, the company’s initial target is improving medication adherence for oncology patients. This is no small problem. Currently, data from community oncology practices suggest that a full 20-40% of patients discontinue their oral cancer medication within 100 days.
“Whenever we get a data update, the algorithms are trained to identify which patients have a high risk of early discontinuation. And our algorithms also explain why this is the case and what you can do.” — Jani Ahonala
Given AI’s increasing aptitude at prediction, Ahonala was optimistic about finding an AI-driven solution that could, based on healthcare data, predict which patients were most at risk for discontinuing treatment and identify the most impactful interventions. Identifying high-risk patients, of course, is the first step toward making clinical decision that keep them on the optimal care trajectory. A fellow entrepreneur recommended that Ahonala speak to SRI, given SRI’s particularly long track record working with AI. Ahonala soon connected with Yi Yao and Ajay Divakaran in SRI’s Center for Vision Technologies, who shared the team’s recent work on causal AI.
“I was blown away when they showed us the work they have done in causality and what causal AI can do,” Ahonala comments.
Causal AI, Ahonala points out, is what allows consumer platforms like Netflix and Airbnb to serve up hyper-targeted recommendations. By customizing SRI’s next-generation approach to causal AI for healthcare use cases, Vaalia Health aims to bring this same level of precision to the interventions that hospitals and clinics provide for their patients.
Putting a new care paradigm into action
After painstakingly building custom AI models with SRI’s research team, Vaalia Health has recently begun deploying those models in the real world, onboarding a set of patients undergoing treatment for breast cancer.
“We are connected with the provider’s IT systems, including the electronic medical records that hold all the patient data,” Ahonala explains. “Whenever we get a data update, the algorithms are trained to identify which patients have a high risk of early discontinuation. And our algorithms also explain why this is the case and what you can do. We provide these insights to care teams and coaches who can then enroll these patients into virtual medication coaching programs that are tailored to their needs.”
Here, Vaalia Health emphasizes a human-in-the-loop approach, ensuring that all AI-generated patient instructions are rigorously validated by clinicians. One key elements of SRI’s contribution is the ability to engage in “counterfactual analysis”: essentially, the model allows clinicians to ask precise “what if” questions about the likely outcome of any proposed intervention.
As data from this initial implementation come in, it will provide a critical opportunity to validate Vaalia Health’s approach. “The next year is all about implementing the models and being able to demonstrate that this has a big impact in patient care,” Ahonala says.
When it comes to an issue like medication adherence, Ahonala points out, there are numerous complications for patients: affordability, payment plans, drug side effects, drug interactions, lack of education or motivation, and behavioral supports as simple as proper hydration and diet. A personalized approach to care would consider all of these factors. If that personalization can be aided by causal AI, it would be a win for the entire healthcare system, from patients and providers to insurers and pharmaceutical developers.
As he scales this potentially groundbreaking healthcare platform, Ahonala adds, SRI’s ventures team has been indispensable. “SRI has such a successful history of launching new technologies and productizing technologies,” he observes. “It’s just awesome.”
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