Phare Health raises £2.5m pre-seed for development of AI products

AI start up Phare Health has raised £2.5m in a pre-seed funding round led by General Catalyst – with the money raised being used to develop AI products for healthcare back offices to deliver intelligence on costs and cashflow.

Founded by ex-DeepMind, Google Health and Stanford alumni, Phare Health is using AI for non-clinical administrative tasks, in order to help free up staff and budgets.

According to NHS England, over a third of integrated care systems are facing a deficit this year, at a time when healthcare systems are already under immense pressure.

Phare Health’s initial product securely leverages large language models to support hospitals to capture high quality data about the care they deliver. This will help hospitals to better manage their resources and support them to recover their costs efficiently. The data will also deliver a more accurate understanding of patient care to help drive up standards.

Using AI, it does this by reviewing all patient notes and transforming them into structured, useable data for administration, operational and finance teams.

Dr Martin Seneviratne, co-founder and co-CEO of Phare Health, said: “As a young doctor working in hospitals in Sydney and London, the most frustrating thing was having to spend time on admin, at the expense of patient care. While there is much discussion of the potential use of AI for clinicians, there is a much more urgent need for AI in the back office – doing low-risk, manual, administrative tasks that will free clinicians up to spend more time caring for patients.

“AI in healthcare should be invisible – it should help behind the scenes to make healthcare more efficient and safe without getting in the way of doctors and nurses.”

The company will be using the seed funding to support the development of its AI system, through the recruitment of AI and healthcare experts in key markets. With time, Phare Health hopes to develop a real-time, action-oriented intelligence engine for healthcare systems built on structured data.

As well as General Catalyst, strategic backers, KHP Ventures and Bertelsmann Investments also joined the funding round.

Two of the Phare Health co-founders are Dr Martin Seneviratne and Lee Kupferman, who were both part of the DeepMind Health and Google Health teams working with the NHS on projects like the AI-powered chatbot MedPaLM.