ChatGPT owner OpenAI moves into cancer care with new partnership

OpenAI has confirmed a partnership with Color Health to contribute to improved cancer care by accelerating the treatment process for cancer patients.

A company blog update detailed the full extent of the collaboration which has led to the creation of an AI assistant to assist doctors to craft personalized cancer screening and tailored treatment plans, intending to significantly reduce delays in care.

Color Health’s AI copilot, built on GPT-4o, will identify missing diagnostics to help healthcare providers make evidenced-based decisions after testing showed doctors using the copilot identified four times more missing labs and tests compared to those not utilizing the assistant.

Color is aiming to provide AI-generated screening plans for more than 200,000 patients by the end of this year.

We have recently developed a new AI tool—designed in partnership with @OpenAI and powered by GPT-4o—to make access to cancer expertise more equitable. This AI tool will allow clinicians to bring specialized cancer knowledge into primary care, helping them build risk-adjusted…

— Color (@Color) June 17, 2024

Making cancer expertise accessible

The care provider commenced work with OpenAI in 2013 to strive toward improved cancer patient care provisions by scrutinizing inconsistently formatted patient data, analyzing thorough healthcare guidelines, ensuring patient data privacy was protected, and more.

The company was able to use the advances of OpenAI’s Chat GPT-4 and GPT-4o models to perform heavy, complex tasks such as lifting key data from detailed PDFs full of complicated diagrams detailing specific care paths.

GPT-4 Vision proved to be adept when interpreting the elaborate diagrams.

Color Health CEO Othman Laraki, stated, “Color’s vision is to make cancer expertise accessible at the point and time when it can have the greatest impact on a patient’s healthcare decisions.”

He continued, “As a healthcare company, technology that improves access and equity has to go hand-in-hand with technology that supports patient safety and privacy. OpenAI’s HIPAA-compliant data protection standards are key.” 

For cancer patients and the professionals entrusted with their care, every hour and day counts, just as every delay is costly. Patients whose treatments are delayed by just four weeks face a 6–13% higher risk of mortality, meaning Color’s AI copilot and the close partnership with Open AI can go a long way to make a difference to the lives of those who need it most.

Image credit: OpenAI