A Rhode Island based artificial intelligence company is helping predict future health.
It’s called Delorean AI. That name is by design — as the car in the “Back to the Future” movies was a Delorean.
The idea is this: to bring the future of health care to the present.
The CEO, Severence Maclaughlin, was born and raised in Rhode Island.
“Friends sometime use the example in the AI market of, ‘Do you want to get on a plane that’s flown by the captain or by the computer of both?'” said MacLaughlin. “We can actually predict the onset of a disease.”
Kidney disease, he said, is one.
“There are 37 million Americans currently that have chronic kidney disease. 30 to 40 percent of those individuals don’t know they have it in the early stages,” said MacLaughlin. “We can predict not only if they have the disease now or they will have it, but how do you stop the transition from early stages to later stage.”
What Delorean AI does is it works with health insurance companies. MacLaughlin said his AI has been available the last 12 months and is being used by 12 health insurers.
This is how it works: “So, we mathematically model these individuals and their medical history,” said MacLaughlin “It sends a signal to them to tell the family physician to actually have the blood test to check it and then schedule an appointment with a nephrologist and then it keep learning, so once that’s done, it tells what the next best action is, okay, we need to extend this medication, change their diet.”
In the past year, one tenth of the 17,000 chronic disease patients who were analyzed, MacLaughlin said, were flagged for medical intervention saving more than $25 million.
“We are partnering with Microsoft, Google, AWS, Sombanova, Teradata — these are big names — and they trust their medical AI to Delorean,” said MacLaughlin. “The consumer wants to know that their insurance company has this AI to make sure that major diseases are predicted, and they’re cared for.”
MacLaughlin said he’s hoping to bring his medical AI to New England insurers soon.