Since its founding nine years ago, Israeli clinical decision support startup Aidoc has grown into a major player in healthcare AI, raising $370 million and signing more than 150 contracts with health systems such as Mount Sinai, Yale New Haven Health and Sutter Health. These providers use the company’s platform to help radiologists quickly identify critical findings in medical scans, as well as to ensure those findings are acted on.
Timing has been a key contributor to Aidoc’s success, noted Tom Valent, the company’s chief business officer, during an interview earlier this month at the Radiological Society of North America’s annual conference in Chicago.
He said Aidoc benefited from entering the market as a “second generation” healthcare AI company, after earlier startups like Arterys and Zebra Medical had already gotten providers somewhat familiarized with the technology.
The Power of One: Redefining Healthcare with an AI-Driven Unified Platform
In a landscape where complexity has long been the norm, the power of one lies not just in unification, but in intelligence and automation.
This allowed Aidoc to focus more on innovation and product delivery rather than educating the market from scratch, Valent explained.
“The first generation started creating the awareness and the openness to AI, and we were able to ride that and focus more on the execution,” he declared.
The other main reason for Aidoc’s success was its early focus on acute clinical use cases, which allowed the startup to demonstrate its value quickly and build credibility with providers, Valent said.
“These conditions are oftentimes life or death, so the immediate clinical outcome is very clear, versus something that’s long term and needs deep clinical studies to prove out,” he remarked.
Enhanced Direct Enrollment: Georgia Access and the Power of Partnership
Across the nation, state-based health insurance exchanges are searching for ways to better serve their communities while making enrollment easier, more personal, and more accessible for everyone.
He also highlighted Aidoc’s R&D-first culture as a differentiator.
Valent pointed out that the company’s emphasis on research and development — rather than aggressive marketing — has enabled Aidoc to build AI tools that integrate smoothly into clinical workflows and address the real-world complexity of healthcare environments without creating additional burden.
As the startup continues to develop new AI models, patient safety and quality will remain a core priority, he noted, adding that accuracy is a key factor.
“We need to ensure that our products have high levels of accuracy. Why? Because if they have low sensitivity, it means they will miss important things — and if doctors start relying on it for actually triaging their workflow and we have low specificity, it means that we could create many false positives, which lead to, effectively, physicians ignoring the AI,” Valent explained.
Transparency is an important part of AI safety as well, he pointed out. He said transparency is critical both before and after deployment, with tools like model cards that clearly explain how Aidoc’s algorithms are trained, where they may fall short and what clinicians should expect.
He also noted that ongoing monitoring of real-world usage and performance helps ensure the AI tools are being used appropriately for clinical decision support.
Looking ahead, Valent thinks Aidoc’s commitment to patient safety and transparency will be key to the company’s ongoing success.
Photo: Tom Werner, Getty Images