Launch HN: Parachute (YC S25) – Guardrails for Clinical AI
Hospitals are racing to adopt AI. More than 2,000 clinical AI tools hit the U.S. market last year - from ambient scribes to imaging models. But new regulations (HTI-1, Colorado AI Act, California SB 3030, White House AI Action Plan) require auditable proof that these models are safe, fair, and continuously monitored.
The problem is, most hospital IT teams can’t keep up. They can’t vet every vendor, run stress tests, and monitor models 24/7. As a result, promising tools die in pilot hell while risk exposure grows.
We saw this firsthand while deploying AI at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, so we built Parachute. Columbia is now using it to track live AI models in production.
How it works: First, Parachute evaluates vendors against a hospital’s clinical needs and flags compliance and security risks before a pilot even begins. Next, we run automated benchmarking and red-teaming to stress test each model and uncover risks like hallucinations, bias, or safety gaps.
Once a model is deployed, Parachute continuously monitors its accuracy, drift, bias, and uptime, sending alerts the moment thresholds are breached. Finally, every approval, test, and runtime change is sealed into an immutable audit trail that hospitals can hand directly to regulators and auditors.
We’d love to hear from anyone with hospital experience who has an interest in deploying AI safely. We look forward to your comments!
Next up is just great execution by you all!
That list of logos you all have - are those paying customers today?
Best of luck!
Doesn't look like it. The first list of logos is standards bodies. The second list of logos is integrations.
For example, consider what happens in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZhCYisIQB8&t=2s
Please don't make this mistake of thinking "aha, but you see, a human intervened!" This will never happen in the real world for the vast majority of humans in a similar scenario.
Impossible to deliver
Here are a few questions that should be part of an evaluation of the Parachute platform to pressure test the claims made on the website and this post: 1) How many Parachute customers have passed regulatory audits by CMS, OCR, CLIA/CLAP, and the FDA? 2) What high quality peer-reviewed scientific evidence supports the claims of increased safety and detection of hallucinations and bias? 3) What liability does Parachute assume during production deployment? What are the SLAs? 4) How many years of regulatory experience does the team have with HIPPA, ISO, CFR, FDA, CMS, and state medical board compliance?
We've all seen how powerful language can be in legal defenses surrounding the for profit healthcare industry of the united states.
What new "pre-existing conditions" alike thought, and legal argument, terminating phrases will these large language models come up with for future generations?