By Hamed Shahbazi
WELL Health Technologies Corp. has announced that its wholly owned subsidiary, WELL Ventures, has made a significant minority investment in Tali.ai, an AI-powered virtual assistant. Tali.ai enables doctors and other healthcare providers to easily retrieve essential information from their EMR software and issue voice commands using Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms.
This means that a healthcare provider can vocally request information or action from their EMR and Tali.ai will search/present or action the request automatically.
“We are excited to closely collaborate with Tali.ai to create a transformative healthcare productivity and efficiency tool. Tali’s technology allows doctors to have a voice conversation with their EMR and quickly retrieve information at the point of care,” said chairman and CEO of WELL, Hamed Shahbazi . “This investment is a continuation of WELL’s efforts to support doctors and be at the frontier of innovative healthcare technology.”
Tali.ai uses cutting edge NLP algorithms and AI-powered voice capabilities to allow doctors and healthcare providers to retrieve essential information, including medical and drug search, within their EMR software, navigate and initiate key EMR tasks such as prescriptions or labs, and automate the time-consuming task of clinical documentation. Tali.ai’s technology is voice enabled, evidence-based, and compatible with any professional EMR that provides for programmatic integration.
“We’re thrilled to join the WELL ecosystem through this investment and strategic partnership,” said founder and CEO of Tali.ai, Mahshid Yassaei. “WELL’s position as the Canadian leader in digital patient engagement aligns extremely well with our mission to enhance and support the day-to-day tasks of doctors and healthcare providers through technology solutions.”
This partnership enhances both Tali.ai and WELL’s overarching mission to positively impact patient-first health outcomes by leveraging pioneering technology to empower and support doctors and other healthcare practitioners. WELL Ventures has a mandate to invest in exceptional leaders, entrepreneurs and businesses supporting the global digital health ecosystem, with an emphasis on advancing innovative digital health initiatives in Canada. WELL Ventures has a defined focus on all aspects of the digital health ecosystem with a keen focus on practitioner enablement tools and technologies.
WELL’s chief operating officer Amir Javidan commented, “Leveraging voice as a new modality for interacting with the EMR can significantly magnify the output and impact of practitioners. This is a very exciting addition to WELL’s practitioner enablement platform, in supporting both our own outpatient medical clinics and for our network of EMR customers’ clinics.”
An investment from WELL Ventures generally includes a strategic alliance or collaboration agreement that provides portfolio companies with access to WELL’s own substantial technology and healthcare assets; as such, WELL and Tali.ai have established a five-year strategic alliance with the ability to cross license, resell and commercialize Tali.ai AI’s technology across WELL’s EMR portfolio.
Tali.ai is the latest application to join WELL’s apps.health ecosystem which enables more than 15,000 healthcare providers in over 2,800 clinics across Canada in WELL’s EMR portfolio to connect and access new and pioneering solutions, like Tali.ai, which integrate securely and seamlessly into a clinic’s EMR software.
WELL’s app marketplace, apps.health, is a part of WELL’s Digital Health Apps business unit, which is focused on the development of and investment in digital health applications. Its mission to connect healthcare professionals with technology solutions in digital health, allows technology companies and third-party application developers to work with WELL to promote and accelerate digital health innovation globally.
WELL has already started beta testing early versions of the technology in WELL’s own primary care clinics in British Columbia.
