Visitors check out Nvidia’s AI technology at the 2024 Apsara Conference in Hangzhou, China, on September 19, 2024.
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Nvidia, Google, Microsoft and dozens of other tech companies are descending on Las Vegas next week to showcase artificial intelligence tools they say will save doctors and nurses valuable time.
Sunday marks the official start of a health-care technology conference called HLTH, which is expected to draw more than 12,000 industry leaders this year. CNBC will be on the ground. Based on the speaking agenda and announcements leading up to the conference, AI tools to conquer administrative burdens will be the star of this year’s show.
Doctors and nurses are responsible for mountains of documentation as they work to keep up with patient records, interface with insurance companies and comply with regulators. Often, these tasks are painstakingly manual, in part because health data is siloed and stored across multiple vendors and formats.
The daunting administrative workload is a major cause of burnout in the industry, and it’s part of the reason a nationwide shortage of 100,000 health-care workers is expected by 2028, according to consulting firm Mercer. Tech companies, eager to carve out a piece of a market that could top $6.8 trillion in spending by the decade’s end, argue that their generative AI tools can help.
Alex Schiffhauer, group product manager at Google, speaks during the Made By Google event at the company’s Bay View campus in Mountain View, California, Aug. 13, 2024.
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Google, for instance, said it’s working to expand its health-care customer base by tackling administrative burden with AI.
On Thursday, the company announced the general availability of Vertex AI Search for Healthcare, which it introduced in a trial capacity during HLTH last year. Vertex AI Search for Healthcare allows developers to build tools to help doctors quickly search for information across disparate medical records, Google said. New features within Google’s Healthcare Data Engine, which helps organizations build the platforms they need to support generative AI, are also now available, the company said.
Google on Thursday released the results of a survey that said clinicians spend nearly 28 hours a week on administrative tasks. In the survey, 80% of providers said this clerical work takes away from their time with patients, and 91% said they feel positive about using AI to streamline these tasks.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks at a company event on artificial intelligence technologies in Jakarta, Indonesia, on April 30, 2024.
Dimas Ardian | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Similarly, Microsoft on Oct. 11 announced its collection of tools that aim to lessen clinicians’ administrative workload, including medical imaging models, a health-care agent service and an automated documentation solution for nurses, most of which are still in the early stages of development.
Microsoft already offers an automated documentation tool for doctors through its subsidiary, Nuance Communications, which it acquired in a $16 billion deal in 2021. The tool, called DAX Copilot, uses AI to transcribe doctors’ visits with patients and turn them into clinical notes and summaries. Ideally, this means doctors don’t have to spend time typing out these notes themselves.
Nurses and doctors complete different types of documentation during their shifts, so Microsoft said it’s building a separate tool for nurses that’s best suited to their workflows.
AI scribe tools such as DAX Copilot have exploded in popularity this year, and Nuance’s competitors, such as Abridge, which has reportedly raised more than $460 million, and Suki, which has raised $165 million, will also be at the HLTH conference.
Dr. Shiv Rao, the founder and CEO of Abridge, told CNBC in March that the rate at which the health-care industry has adopted this new form of clinical documentation feels “historic.” Abridge received a coveted investment from Nvidia’s venture capital arm that same month.
Source: HLTH
Nvidia is also gearing up to address doctor and nurse workloads at HLTH.
Kimberly Powell, the company’s vice president of health care, is delivering a keynote Monday that will explain how using generative AI will help health-care professionals “dedicate more time to patient care,” according to the conference’s website.
Nvidia’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, are used to create and deploy the models that power OpenAI’s ChatGPT and similar applications. As a result, Nvidia has been one of the primary beneficiaries of the AI boom. Nvidia shares are up more than 150% year to date, and the stock tripled last year.
The company has been making steady inroads into the health-care sector in recent years, and it offers a range of AI tools across medical devices, drug discovery, genomics and medical imaging. Nvidia also announced expanded partnerships with companies such as Johnson & Johnson and GE HealthCare in March.
While the health-care sector has historically been slow to adopt new technology, the buzz around administrative AI tools has been undeniable since ChatGPT exploded onto the scene two years ago.
Even so, many health systems are still in the early stages of evaluating tools and vendors, and they’ll be making the rounds on the HLTH exhibition floor. Tech companies will have to prove they have the chops to tackle one of health care’s most complex problems.
Bluesky has surged in popularity since the presidential election earlier this month, suddenly becoming a competitor to Elon Musk’s X and Meta’s Threads. But CEO Jay Graber has some cautionary words for potential acquirers: Bluesky is “billionaire proof.”
In an interview on Thursday with CNBC’s “Money Movers,” Graber said Bluesky’s open design is intended to give users the option of leaving the service with all of their followers, which could thwart potential acquisition efforts.
“The billionaire proof is in the way everything is designed, and so if someone bought or if the Bluesky company went down, everything is open source,” Graber said. “What happened to Twitter couldn’t happen to us in the same ways, because you would always have the option to immediately move without having to start over.”
Graber was referring to the way millions of users left Twitter, now X, after Musk purchased the company in 2022. Bluesky now has over 21 million users, still dwarfed by X and Threads, which Facebook’s parent debuted in July 2023.
X and Meta didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Threads has roughly 275 million monthly users, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in October. Although Musk said in May that X has 600 million monthly users, market intelligence firm Sensor Tower estimates 318 million monthly users as of October.
Bluesky was created in 2019 as an internal Twitter project during Jack Dorsey’s second stint as CEO, and became an independent public benefit corporation in 2022. In May of this year, Dorsey said he is no longer a member of Bluesky’s board.
“In 2019, Jack had a vision for something better for social media, and so that’s why he chose me to build this, and we’re really thankful for him for setting this up, and we’ve continued to carry this out,” said Graber, who previously founded Happening, a social network focused on events. “We’re building an open-source social network that anyone can take into their own hands and build on, and it’s something that is radically different from anything that’s been done in social media before. Nobody’s been this open, this transparent and put this much control in the users hands.”
Part of Bluesky’s business plan involves offering subscriptions that would let users access special features, Graber noted. She also said that Bluesky will add more services for third-party coders as part of the startup’s “developer ecosystem.”
Graber said Bluesky has ruled out the possibility of letting advertisers send algorithmically recommended ads to users.
“There’s a lot on the road map, and I’ll tell you what we’re not going to do for monetization,” Graber said. “We’re not going to build an algorithm that just shoves ads at you, locking users in. That’s not our model.”
Bluesky has previously experienced major growth spurts. In September, it added 2 million users following X’s suspension in Brazil over content moderation policy violations in the country and related legal matters.
In October, Bluesky announced that it raised $15 million in a funding round led by Blockchain Capital. The company has raised a total of $36 million, according to Pitchbook.
Alphabet shares slid 6% Thursday, following news that the Department of Justice is calling for Google to divest its Chrome browser to put an end to its search monopoly.
The proposed break-up would, according to the DOJ in its Wednesday filing, “permanently stop Google’s control of this critical search access point and allow rival search engines the ability to access the browser that for many users is a gateway to the internet.”
This development is the latest in a years-long, bipartisan antitrust case that found in an August ruling that the search giant held an illegal monopoly in both search and text advertising, violating Section 2 of the Sherman Act.
The potential break-up would include preventing Google from entering into exclusionary agreements with competitors like Apple and Samsung, part of a set of remedies that would last 10 years.
POLAND – 2024/11/13: In this photo illustration, the NVIDIA company logo is seen displayed on a smartphone screen. (Photo Illustration by Piotr Swat/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
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Nvidia shares dropped in U.S. premarket trading Thursday after the tech giant’s third-quarter earnings failed to impress investors.
Shares of the chipmaker slumped 3.21% at around 5:03 a.m. ET, following the Wednesday release of Nvidia’s quarterly results, which beat on both the top and bottom lines.
Revenue came in at $35.08 billion, up 94% year-on-year and exceeding the $33.16 billion forecast by LSEG analysts. Earnings per share was 81 cents adjusted, also above analyst expectations.
Other chipmakers fell on the back of the market reaction to Nvidia’s third-quarter results. Shares of Intel, Qualcomm and Micron Technology all lost 1% or more in value, while AMD declined 0.6%.
The slump in Nvidia also had a knock-on effect on European semiconductor firms. ASML, a key chip equipment supplier, dropped 0.9%, while compatriot Dutch chip firm ASMI fell 0.5%. Chipmakers BE Semiconductor, STMicroelectronics and Infineon slipped 0.8%, 0.7 and 0.6%, respectively.
Several notable chip names were also in negative territory in Asia. TSMC, which makes Nvidia’s high-performance graphics processing units, eased as much as 1.5%. Contract electronics manufacturer Foxconn dropped 1.9%.
Why are Nvidia shares falling?
Nvidia has largely cornered the market for the high-powered chips powering the world’s most advanced artificial intelligence models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Despite nearly doubling sales year-on-year, Nvidia’s third-quarter results showed a slowdown from previous quarters. Nvidia previously reported growth of 122% in the second quarter, 262% in the first quarter, and 265% in the fourth quarter of 2023.
Derren Nathan, head of equity research at Hargreaves Lansdown, said in emailed comments Wednesday that the dip in Nvidia’s share price “suggests even outstanding isn’t enough for some investors,” adding that he expects the stock to bounce back once markets open.
“NVIDIA’s generated stellar gains for shareholders over many years now, and right now it’s pretty hard to see any major holes in the investment case,” Nathan added.
Analysts are looking ahead to the much-anticipated launch of Nvidia’s next-generation chip called Blackwell. On the firm’s earnings call, CEO Jensen Huang said that demand for the chip is exceeding supply.
