Nvidia (NVDA), a pioneer in the semiconductor and artificial intelligence space, is increasingly looking to leverage those skills toward transforming healthcare.

“We are determined to work with you to advance this field,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said during a chat at the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference in January. “We deeply believe that this is going to be the future of the way that drugs will be discovered and designed.”

Nvidia’s determination to establish itself in the healthcare industry actually predates recent successes with generative AI, according to Huang, having been in the works for over 15 years.

“A medical instrument is never going to be the same again. Ultrasound systems, CT scan systems, all kinds of instruments — they’re always going to be a device, plus a whole bunch of AIs," Huang added. "The value that you’ll create, the opportunities you’ll create are going to be incredible. So I think this is going to be one of the world’s great future industries; it’s going to be a technology industry, and we’re here to serve you.”

Pandemic forced healthcare 'into the virtual'

The COVID-19 pandemic laid a backdrop for companies like Nvidia to push forward and create value in the healthcare sector.

“I see [the pandemic] as the catapulting of healthcare into the virtual and digital transformative spheres, if you will, because it happened very quickly and with very little to no choice," Mutaz Shegewi, senior research director and digital strategist at IDC, told Yahoo Finance. "Companies like Nvidia and others, Microsoft, and Oracle and whatnot, have a lot to contribute in propelling that journey forward, and that’s what I think we’re seeing.”

Nvidia works closely with businesses like Johnson & Johnson MedTech (JNJ) and Microsoft (MSFT), and its clientele utilizes over a billion dollars in Nvidia GPU computing annually.

“There's no one vendor that can do it all, and I think the ecosystem is very important in terms of wanting to leverage different strengths of the vendors that are out there," Shegewi added. “[Nvidia] is democratizing the access, so it's both a technological play and there's a democratization of access to the tools through their software platforms and their partnerships.”

Nvidia recently partnered with Hippocratic AI, a company developing generative AI healthcare agents that offer a range of services from pre-op care to assisted living care. These agents conduct conversations independent of healthcare providers — in other words, between only the AI agent and the patient. Hippocratic AI claims that "no other technology has the potential to have this level of global impact on health."

Because these agents are being designed to conduct patient interactions, their ability to emulate human tendencies is key to their success. That's where Nvidia comes in.

“Voice-based digital agents powered by generative AI can usher in an age of abundance in healthcare, but only if the technology responds to patients as a human would,” Kimberly Powell, vice president of Healthcare at Nvidia, stated in a March press release. “This type of engagement will require continued innovation and close collaboration with companies, such as Hippocratic AI, developing cutting-edge solutions.”

Currently in the midst of its "rigorous testing program," Hippocratic AI has already seen the importance of minimizing latency.

The company found that each half-second increase in interference speed caused a 5%-10% increase in patients' ability to connect with the AI agents emotionally. Nvidia's technology helps them meet this need for speed, according to Hippocratic AI's co-founder and CEO Munjal Shah.

“With generative AI, patient interactions can be seamless, personalized, and conversational — but in order to have the desired impact, the speed of inference has to be incredibly fast," Shah stated in the press release. “With the latest advances in LLM inference, speech synthesis, and voice recognition software, Nvidia’s technology stack is critical to achieving this speed and fluidity. We’re working with Nvidia to continue refining our technology and amplify the impact of our work of mitigating staffing shortages while enhancing access, equity, and patient outcomes.”

Hippocratic AI declined requests from Yahoo Finance to discuss the technology further.

Jennifer Eaton, the research director for value-based healthcare IT transformation strategies at IDC, told Yahoo Finance that she was impressed by the AI agent's ability to replicate a human-to-human interaction and personalize care recommendations.

"Organizations like Hippocratic AI are offering a solution that, if done correctly, can have a heavy downstream impact related to ... accessibility to a consistently accurate, positive, and personalized experience for patients," Eaton said. "To me, that's really powerful."

Nvidia, for its part, is aiming to provide the underlying computing power for what IDC's Shegewi called an "ecosystem" of healthcare providers creating similar services.

Jeff Cribbs, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner Healthcare, told Yahoo Finance that Nvidia's position enables the hardware juggernaut to serve the growing market of AI in healthcare.

“The nice thing about Nvidia’s position is that the compute and inference needs are going to be there regardless of who does the work," Cribbs said. "And so their strategy is quite resilient in the sense that if we can make our inference and training as accessible as possible, it doesn't matter which one of those organizations does the building. And that is an advantage that the other sort of folks in that value chain don't have.”

Maya is an intern at Yahoo Finance.

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