Wilmington-based Predicate AI Labs Inc., a healthcare technology company, has received a patent for its artificial intelligence platform. 

The patent marks a significant milestone for the company as it seeks to license its flagship product, OpenDx, and pursue patents for its additional products.  

OpenDx is the AI software platform designed to use data to help health care providers diagnose critical illness. It is the underlying infrastructure for Predicate's Sentinel and Insights product lines, and the platform collects data from patients’ wearable devices as well as insights from conversations with a digital health assistant. 

"This patent protects the central idea behind OpenDx: understanding what the body is showing us together with what the patient is telling us," said Morris Nguyen, founder and CEO of Predicate, in the press release. "Most healthcare technologies do one or the other — they collect physiological measurements, or they process patient-reported information. We invented an architecture designed to reason across both, and to keep reasoning across both as a patient's condition evolves over time."

OpenDx analyzes real-time physiological data in addition to historical symptoms, patient-reported data and patterns and continuously updates its assessments. Last year, the company announced it had entered into an agreement with Mayo Clinic to advance Predicate’s early detection of sepsis. 

The patent covers the architecture behind OpenDx, rather than being limited to a single disease, device or care setting, making the technology applicable to different scenarios, “including remote patient monitoring, Hospital-at-Home, post-discharge care, concierge medicine, chronic-disease monitoring, virtual care and decentralized clinical trials.”

According to the release, the patent strengthens Predicate’s ability to license OpenDx as an intelligence layer into healthcare organizations’ existing systems. The software is designed to work with cloud, edge and embedded environments. 

Nguyen said rejection rates are high, particularly for AI patents. He added that Predicate received its patent a little over two years after filing the application.

"Within our own Wilmington startup ecosystem, there are other AI‑based companies that have started two or more years ago, filed their patents or applications before we did, and they're still waiting," he said.

The company has begun the process of writing additional patent applications, Nguyen said. 

"Now we commercialize that patent," he said, "and because of what it is, it allows us to… kind of strategically (find) partners that can see kind of the benefit of what it is that we do."