Behavioral Healthcare Voice AI Startup Eleos Health Raises $20M
Voice AI for behavioral health startup Eleos Health has raised$20 million in a Series A funding round led by F-Prime Capital and Eight Roads Ventures. Eleos provides a voice assistant to transcribe and analyze patient sessions for behavioral health clinicians, integrating with electronic health records (EHRs) to track treatment progress and streamline administrative tasks.
Eleos AI
With patient permission, Eleos records and transcribes sessions with their therapist or other behavioral health providers. The AI identifies common topics and frequently used words in each session and tracks how they change over time. The analysis extends to the clinician as well, with Eleos marking when they interrupt a patient, how much of the session they spend talking, and what kinds of even what kinds of techniques they appear to be using, as seen in the image above. All of the data is organized and automatically included in the patient’s EHR so the clinician doesn’t have to manually type it in anymore, which can cut the time spent documenting a session by 40% on average, according to Eleos.
“Behavioral health practitioners deserve advanced technology representative of and equal to the role they play in caregiving and healing,” Eleos Health CEO Alon Joffe said. “In behavioral care, the conversation is the treatment. For the first time, Eleos is making it possible to digitize and manage the unstructured nature of behavioral health conversations, lending psychotherapists a new line of sight into patient needs, progress and outcomes.”
Healthy Demand
Eleos has raised $28 million in total funding and plans to leverage the new investment to further scale in the U.S. The startup has seen skyrocketing demand, fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic. Paperwork is often cited as a reason for quitting by all physicians, and with psychiatries self-reporting a 78% burnout rate, tools like Eleos are increasingly sought out by healthcare provider networks. Several thousand clinicians use Eleos through its health plan clients already.
Clinical voice AI is rapidly becoming a standard aspect of healthcare. Eleos’ focus on behavioral health and session analysis stands out, but it is only the latest startup offering these services to receive significant funding. In January, ambient medical voice AI startup DeepScribe raised $30 million, while doctor voice assistant startup Suki raised $55 million the previous month, just after Notable picked up $100 million for similar tech. Specialized medical services are also a part of the trend, as the investment dollars picked up by dental voice AI startup Bola and veterinarian-centered Talktoo attest. On the acquisition side, Oracle’s $28.3 billion purchase of health technology developer Cerner overshadows everything else in healthcare voice AI as Oracle explicitly described its plans to expand Cerner’s clinical voice assistants. Even Nuance’s $19.7 billion acquisition by Microsoft happened only after it acquired medical voice AI startup Saykara.
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