AI-assisted healthcare app addresses hospital malnutrition

The clinical assistant helps to tailor diets to patient needs

Spotted: Malnutrition is a common condition in hospitals, and this is a problem – both for individual patients, and in terms of the cost to healthcare systems. Hospital malnutrition creates a $300 billion annual economic burden, and has a significant impact on mortality, morbidity, length of hospital stay, and quality of life.

San Francisco-based health tech startup HealthLeap is taking on the malnutrition epidemic, raising funds to build AI-assisted tools that help healthcare professionals better address the issue.

HealthLeap’s AI clinical assistant—called NutriLeap—comes in the form of a mobile app that provides hospital dietitians with automated clinical calculations and research-backed suggestions to tailor specific nutritional diets for patients.

The app incorporates the ability to prescribe daily quantities of oral, tube, and IV feeding to patients. It is also intended to help dietitians continue treating patients after discharge. NutriLeap is currently being trialled by 50 dietitians, and has a waitlist of 1,000 dietitians, pharmacists, and physicians.

“It’s a tragedy that so many die needlessly because they don’t get the nutrition they need while in the hospital,” explains Seth Bannon, founding partner of Fifty Years, HealthLeap’s lead investor. “By addressing hospital malnutrition in a scalable way using machine learning, HealthLeap will save dietitians time, save healthcare providers money, and most importantly save patients’ lives.”

Other recent health tech innovations spotted by Springwise include a browser-based solution that tracks health via selfies, and video technology that protects the elderly from falls.