PatientsLikeMe (PLM), a patient-engagement and activation platform, is announcing the launch of Ella, an AI assistant to help women manage their health, powered by generative AI platform Ema.

PatientsLikeMe is a personalized health network with a patient support community that allows patients to learn from each other's lived experiences. Users can also access education, tools and services to better manage their health.

Ella acts as a personal health assistant, helping women to manage their health and well-being through personalized, evidence-based guidance.

Additionally, Ella provides customized resources and guidance that make medical information attainable and comprehensible. The platform tailors engagements to a person's distinctive health experience, personal history and cultural background. 

According to PLM, Ella also assists businesses in the health sector in enhancing health outcomes by using AI support to offer resource allocation, customized patient engagement and entry into synthesized and actionable data insights.

"We have a 20-year history of patients sharing their experiences with their condition," Chris Renfro, chief operating officer of PLM, told MobiHealthNews.

"What Ella enables us to do is distill that into an intuitive user interface so that people don't have to go slogging through the website. We can actually connect them now with the insights and information they are looking for a lot more easily."

Renfro noted that PLM shares the same drivers, synergies and overlapping missions as the Ema team, including how the companies approach the market.

"What Ema does at her core and what Ella will be doing is she will be helping patients learn how to empower themselves to be a part of their own care team," Amanda Ducach, CEO of Ema, told MobiHealthNews.

Ducach said that Ema is a foundational native generative AI that companies can build their user interfaces on top of, and powers another company's technology to offer capabilities that it probably could not provide without Ema AI.

"[Ema] gives patients the opportunity to become an actual member of their care team because they have something that is helping them learn how to advocate for themselves with their doctors," Ducach said. 

Ducach added that the combination of PLM and Ema helps patients get the resources they need more effectively, such as information on what medicines they need. 

"That's really what ends up happening when you see what Ella does layered on top of such an amazing resource application like PLM," Ducach said.