“Color Health, which was founded as a genetic testing company in 2013, has developed an AI assistant or ‘copilot’ using OpenAI’s GPT-4o model. The copilot helps doctors create cancer screening plans, as well as pretreatment plans for people who have been diagnosed with cancer…

Color’s copilot uses OpenAI APIs, or application programming interfaces, which are how developers access the OpenAI models to use in their applications. The startup, like most developers, pays OpenAI based on usage of tokens, or word segments, that are sent to its models and back, Laraki said.

By ingesting patient data such as personal risk factors and family history, and using them alongside clinical guidelines, the copilot creates a virtual, personalized cancer screening plan that tells doctors the diagnostic tests a patient is missing. 

‘Primary care doctors don’t tend to either have the time, or sometimes even the expertise, to risk-adjust people’s screening guidelines,’ Laraki said.

The copilot also assists with putting a cancer pretreatment ‘work-up’ together, after a doctor has made a diagnosis. The work-up can consist of specialized imaging and lab tests, plus prior authorization from health insurance to order the tests, all of which can take weeks, or months, before a patient sees an oncologist. Studies show a month’s delay can increase mortality by 6% to 13%, Laraki said.”

From Wall Street Journal.