Elea AI is chasing the healthcare productivity opportunity by targeting pathology labs’ legacy systems

Elea’s initial AI tool is designed to overhaul how clinicians and other lab staff work. It’s a complete replacement for legacy information systems and other set ways of working (such as using Microsoft Office for typing reports) — shifting the workflow to an “AI operating system” which deploys speech-to-text transcription and other forms of automation to “substantially” shrink the time it takes them to output a diagnosis.

After around half a year operating with its first users, Elea says its system has been able to cut the time it takes the lab to produce around half their reports down to just two days.

Step-by-step automation

The step-by-step, often manual workflow of pathology labs means there’s good scope to boost productivity by applying AI, says Elea’s CEO and co-founder Dr. Christoph Schröder. “We basically turn this all around — and all of the steps are much more automated … [Doctors] speak to Elea, the MTAs [medical technical assistants] speak to Elea, tell them what they see, what they want to do with it,” he explains.

“Elea is the agent, performs all the tasks in the system and prints things — prepares the slides, for example, the staining and all those things — so that [tasks] go much, much quicker, much, much smoother.”

“It doesn’t really augment anything, it replaces the entire infrastructure,” he adds of the cloud-based software they want to replace the lab’s legacy systems and their more siloed ways of working, using discrete apps to carry out different tasks. The idea for the AI OS is to be able to orchestrate everything.

The startup is building on various Large Language Models (LLMs) through fine-tuning with specialist information and data to enable core capabilities in the pathology lab context. The platform bakes in speech-to-text to transcribe staff voice notes — and also “text-to-structure”; meaning the system can turn these transcribed voice notes into active direction that powers the AI agent’s actions, which can include sending instructions to lab kit to keep the workflow ticking along.

Elea does also plan to develop its own foundational model for slide image analysis, per Schröder, as it pushes towards developing diagnostic capabilities, too. But for now, it’s focused on scaling its initial offering.

The startup’s pitch to labs suggests that what could take them two to three weeks using conventional processes can be achieved in a matter of hours or days as the integrated system is able to stack up and compound productivity gains by supplanting things like the tedious back-and-forth that can surround manual typing up of reports, where human error and other workflow quirks can inject a lot of friction.