Meet your GP’s new best friend – artificial intelligence (AI).

Lavaa Health, an Israeli startup, watches over all patient data, ready to spot early signs of potential health issues, and uses its vast medical database to identify hard-to-diagnose or rare illnesses.

It’s a virtual assistant that works in the background to offer help and alerts, but leaves the physician very much in the driver’s seat, from making the diagnosis to drawing up a treatment plan.

The company was founded after a family tragedy. 

Adam Amitai, Lavaa’s CEO, watched helplessly as his 55-year-old mother-in-law succumbed to ovarian cancer. It had taken a year for the doctors to correctly diagnose her, by which time it was too late. She died eight months later.

Amitai doesn’t blame the physicians and says they provided excellent care. But he realized they weren’t exploiting the power of AI to get quicker and more accurate insights.

And so he interviewed 200 physicians in the United States, to fully understand how AI could best help them. And he drew on his seven years’ experience as an “offensive cyber officer” in the IDF – where a key challenge was sifting vital details from masses of data.

Amitai had also continued to work in intelligence afterwards, and had set up an automated trading platform for institutional investors.

So he wasn’t from the world of healthcare, but he recognized that it could benefit from advanced systems that had been developed elsewhere.

Handling data more efficiently

“I understood there was a big problem with data handling in the healthcare industry,” he tells ISRAEL21c. 

He saw it when each of his three children were born. Every time, the doctor asked for the family’s medical history. 

And he saw it with the death of his mother-in-law. He believes AI would have suggested ovarian cancer as a diagnosis much sooner.

“It’s not the physician’s fault, it’s not the care team fault, they’re doing their best, but they just don’t have the tools,” he says.

“The main problem is in primary care, the people who are in charge of your health on a daily basis. They’re reactive instead of proactive. They’re trying to solve a single problem, not your whole health.” 

And they generally lack the resources to understand what the problem is and to diagnose it correctly.

Lavaa’s AI-powered Preventive Care Engine Platform assists the physician by offering evidence-based insights. 

“We are not allowing the computer to try to automatically detect the conditions. We’re using the accepted worldwide care protocols, but we’re using AI to extract the data,” says Amitai.

“Physicians cannot go through all of this data by themselves in the amount of time that they have. It’s just impossible, so this is giving them a huge backup.

“The number of parameters for a physician to check and the number of possible diseases is infinite, and time is limited. But computers are really good at matching parameters to diseases.

“I realized that technology from the intelligence world already did this, so it was a question of applying it to healthcare.” 

Prevention, intervention

Lavaa is all about prevention and early intervention. 

Its AI platform can generate questions for a particular patient based on what it sees in their records. It may, for example, ask if a female patient remembers the age at which she had her first period – something that’s relevant for breast cancer, but is never recorded in an EMR (electronic medical record). Or it may send targeted messages, questionnaires, or notifications.

It acts as an early warning system, designed to prevent the development of chronic or psychological diseases, and cancer. 

Lavaa currently looks after over 700,000 patients, all in the US, though the company has plans to expand globally. Amitai estimates the technology has so far saved 1,500 lives.

“These are people who had a condition that could have been terminal but caught it on time and we managed to alert the physician, which meant the patients got either the right or better drugs, and better treatment, or a referral to the right place,” he says.

Lavaa is not the only such AI solution, but Amitai says the healthcare market is big enough for everybody. Some other companies use AI to both inform and to diagnose – unlike Lavaa – or as a “black box” providing a diagnosis but no explanation of its “thinking.”

The company has 12 staff members at its offices in Ra’anana, central Israel, and a team working in the US. Lavaa was founded in 2021, has attracted $5 million in investments. A Series A funding round will be launched later this year.

 “We want to go global,” Amitai says. “Our solution can work anywhere, and we believe it can improve healthcare around the world.”

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