AI in Healthcare: Filling the Gaps, Not Replacing Heroes

Soul Machines
4 min readApr 2, 2024

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The healthcare and pharmaceutical industries are facing unprecedented challenges. Staff shortages and burnout are rampant amongst healthcare workers, leading to a decline in patient outcomes. Accessibility to quality medical professionals, facilities and medicine remains a significant hurdle, particularly for low-income and developing nations. Further compounding the issue, a mental health and loneliness crisis is unfolding, highlighting the need for improved emotional support systems.

Technology has the potential to be a powerful solution in this complex landscape.

Here at Soul Machines, we believe in harnessing the power of Biological AI to address these critical issues and support and amplify our amazing human healthcare workers, not replace them.

Our Soul Machines Studio platform empowers this industry to create Digital People and Workforce solutions specifically designed to augment human capabilities. These solutions include:

  • Administrative Assistants: Freeing up valuable time for medical professionals by automating repetitive tasks.
  • Product Experts: Providing patients with 24/7 access to accurate and up-to-date information on the latest medical products and guide patients through product instructions, benefits and questions.
  • Health Coaches & Onboarding Coaches: In partnership with their medical professional, a coach can provide personalized guidance and support on their health journey.
  • Nurse Educators: Delivering consistent and scalable training for a more informed workforce.
  • Digital Trainers: Creating instructors that can upskill staff with the latest healthcare knowledge, products and administrative policies.

Beyond efficiency gains, Soul Machines Biological AI offers a patented approach to humanizing AI. Our solutions extend the world of generative AI to create a uniquely engaging and empathetic Digital Person that can provide 24/7 personalized, interactive support, including emotional well-being tools to combat feelings of isolation and loneliness. This is particularly crucial for geographically isolated populations or those facing chronic illness.

A Global Example: The World Health Organization’s S.A.R.A.H.

Soul Machines is proud to partner with leading organizations around the world. A prime example is our work with the World Health Organization (WHO) on a project called S.A.R.A.H., which stands for Smart AI Resource Assistant for Health and is powered by Soul Machines’ Biological AI. S.A.R.A.H is designed to provide culturally appropriate information and education on a variety of health topics, including mental health and emotional well-being. This project highlights the potential of AI to bridge the gap in healthcare access, particularly in underserved communities around the globe.

“The future of health is digital and supporting countries to harness the power of digital technologies for health is a priority for WHO,” said WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. “S.A.R.A.H. gives us a glimpse of how artificial intelligence could be used in the future to improve access to health information in a more interactive way. I call on the research community to help us continue to explore how this technology could narrow inequities and help people access up–to-date, reliable health information.”

Ethical AI is paramount in this field. Soul Machines is a strong advocate for:

  • Data privacy and security
  • Minimized bias and discrimination
  • Increased transparency and explainability
  • Accountability and liability for actions
  • Most importantly, access and equity for all

Recent headlines raise concerns about AI replacing healthcare workers. We firmly believe the future lies in collaboration. AI should be a tool to empower and support skilled medical professionals, enabling them to focus on complex diagnoses, patient relationships, and delivering the best possible care.

We are committed to developing technology that improves access to quality care, reduces burden on healthcare workers, and fosters a more connected and compassionate healthcare experience for all. Our goal is to fill the gaps in the healthcare system, not replace the skilled professionals that lead it.

Biological AI is our patented approach to humanizing AI.

At Soul Machines, we believe a human-centric approach is fundamental to achieving superhuman intelligence. Our pioneering Biological AI technology is the latest AI advancement that extends the world of generative AI in its ability to produce more accurate and relevant outcomes, and creates a uniquely engaging and empathetic system you can interact with, just like you would a real person.

Creating a more human-like and truly interactive user experience with an embodied agent is the real differentiator in Biological AI. Our embodied agents, or Soul Machines Digital People™, have the ability to understand and react to the real world. They can interact with a real human, expressing their personality in response to what they see and hear. They can even understand what the human is looking at (in both the real and digital world) as part of a complete multimodal, verbal and non verbal exchange. They can also work with any data set to retrieve, remember, reason and plan information.

We achieve this through:

Cognitive Modeling (Teaching AI how to think)

We leverage cognitive modeling to achieve Artificial Intelligence that learns and develops like humans do, not like machines. Current LLM training uses datasets and mathematical probability to produce an outcome. But humans use both data, interaction and experience to learn and develop. Our approach incorporates the “why” of human knowledge — the experiential context that makes it relevant. We believe this results in more accurate, relevant outcomes than relying on crunching datasets alone.

Embodied Cognition (Teaching AI how to interact)

Our Biological AI approach also acknowledges the substantial role of the human body in cognition and intelligence. Human biology and neuroscience are a feedback loop that take in stimuli, synthesize it, and react to it. The way our heart races and eyes widen when we feel fear, for example, or the way we use our eyes to observe fear in others and adjust our facial expressions and tone to offer comfort. Current generative AI models mimic the surface appearance of fear or empathy, but at Soul Machines we mimic the underlying biological and neurological systems that create reactions, allowing for authentic, spontaneous, human-like responses.

This is a call to action. Join us in shaping the future of healthcare, where technology empowers humans to deliver exceptional care.

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