PIECES TECHNOLOGIES AWARDED $2M FROM NATIONAL CANCER INSTITUTE, PART OF THE NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH, TO ADVANCE USE OF CONVERSATIONAL AI TO IMPROVE THE CARE OF CANCER PATIENTS

Pieces will deploy new conversational AI at MetroHealth that will interact directly with cancer patients and leverage pioneering human oversight platform

DALLAS, Oct. 29, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Pieces Technologies, Inc. (Pieces) announced today that it has been awarded a $2 million Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) within the National Institutes of Health (NIH). With this funding, Pieces will partner with MetroHealth, a premier academic medical center in Cleveland, Ohio, to deploy a new conversational AI agent, “PiecesChat,” designed to allow cancer patients to ask questions in real-time about any aspect of their care, while simultaneously ascertaining information about social determinants of health (SDOH).

“One barrier to advancing cancer care is the material challenge of getting real, actionable data from patients. Having an AI tool that’s able to converse directly with patients, spend the necessary time with them and demonstrate empathy will not only help clinicians obtain SDOH  information, but also  help categorize findings into actionable data,” said R. Douglas Bruce, MD, senior vice president, chief clinical integration officer for MetroHealth System. “MetroHealth has food for medicine programs, transportation and a number of other resources that we can offer if we truly understand what patients need in a nuanced way. We are eager to collaborate with Pieces to leverage the unique capabilities of AI to help clinicians move one step closer to resolving the SDOH disparities that our patients face.”

A key innovation of the project is extending the patent-pending Pieces SafeRead platform to support conversational AI. The Pieces SafeRead system employs highly-tuned adversarial AI alongside human-in-the-loop (HITL) oversight to minimize errors of communication. This project will be one of the first rigorous research demonstrations of HITL-based conversational AI in the healthcare domain.

“We are honored and humbled to receive this major NIH award. The technology being studied has  potentially far reaching implications in multiple domains, including cancer care, SDOH management and patient empowerment. For the first time patients will have broad ability to ask any question or detail about their care to a highly supervised AI,” said Ruben Amarasingham, MD, chief executive officer of Pieces. “We are thrilled to work alongside MetroHealth on this groundbreaking work.”

With a mission to help those who help others, Pieces’ suite of solutions produces autonomous, AI-generated clinical documentation for multi-disciplinary care teams, including inpatient clinical summaries, working progress notes, patient briefings and discharge planning. The company has 12 patents secured or pending worldwide for tools that optimize clinical workflows for health systems and providers. 

Pieces is leveraging both passive and active screening to capture SDOH information during this clinical trial. Working with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Pieces Technologies will use Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that offers a choice of high-performing foundation models (FMs) to responsibly integrate generative AI capabilities. The study will rigorously measure utilization, effectiveness, reliability, accuracy, empathy and patient perceptions of the AI tool. The study also will help expand Pieces’ industry-leading hallucination risk classification framework for use in conversational AI, which the NIH evaluation panels identified as an opportunity to advance AI safety protocols in clinical care delivery.

The highly competitive contract is part of the NIH’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, which focuses on a variety of high-impact technologies ranging from research tools to diagnostics, digital health, drugs, medical devices, and others. Pieces was awarded the prestigious contract after a rigorous peer review process that included successful completion of a Phase 1 award and submission of a detailed technical proposal outlining Pieces’ scientific research methodologies, commercialization strategies, and demonstrated industry expertise and qualifications. This contract has been funded in part with Federal funds from the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, under Contract No. 75N91024C00086.

About Pieces Technologies
Pieces Technologies, Inc. is a healthcare AI research and development firm that applies ensemble AI methods to support the work of healthcare teams. Pieces is cloud-based and specialized in applied clinical generative AI, adversarial and collaborative AI, predictive modeling, and physician-supervised machine learning to streamline clinician workflows and improve patient, financial, and operational outcomes. For more information or to request a demo, visit www.piecestech.com

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