San Francisco-based startup Oath Surgical is partnering with tech giant Nvidia to enhance Oath’s artificial-intelligence-powered outpatient surgery center operating system.
Oath’s operating rooms will use Nvidia’s AI infrastructure to analyze surgical video and audio in real time, helping deliver “unique insights and efficiencies for surgeons across the full care journey,” Oath Surgical said in announcing the partnership Tuesday, Jan. 27. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Oath describes itself as “the first vertically integrated system combining AI software and tech-first surgical centers.” It owns and operates three outpatient surgical centers in Portland and partners with 20 affiliated centers nationally.
The startup, which launched in May, has raised $35 million to date to build out its “AI-native” ambulatory surgical center model and its proprietary operating system, OathOS.
“Surgery is entering an AI era, but it only works if the underlying systems are rebuilt so clinical knowledge and data can be analyzed and learned from, at scale,” Oath Surgical founder and CEO Oliver Keown, M.D., said in a statement.
He said in traditional healthcare systems, much of those data are either not collected or fragmented. “Our full-stack platform combines the data, the facilities and the workflows where care actually happens,” he said.
Oath’s operating system works in the background—both inside and outside the operating room—to record information before, during and after surgery, according to the company.
OR-mounted smart interfaces enable “real-time visibility into procedures and workflows while automation runs seamlessly in the background, collecting from inputs including surgical video, audio, device data, clinical documentation and operational signals,” the company said.
Those insights are then combined with data captured outside of the OR—including information on scheduling, billing, patient outcomes and follow-up—to create a complete picture of a patient’s surgical care over time.
For surgeons, the system can reduce time spent on administrative tasks, Keown said in an email to Fierce Medtech. For example, the system can automatically generate a detailed operative note for surgeons after a procedure.
“Instead of spending time documenting the case—often just from their own memory—they instead quickly review the note, approve it, and move on to their next patient,” he said.
He said the company aims to use the aggregated data collected by the system to create “a first-of-its kind quality registry for each surgeon partner” which can help “ultimately serve our goal of aligning patients, providers and payors in a high-performance, value-based surgery model.”