The proof, published and checked.
To our knowledge, HealthLeap is the only commercially available, peer-reviewed AI malnutrition screening tool. Here is the evidence, and where each number comes from.
Read the peer-reviewed study- $16.1M
Annualized financial impact at one site (Penn Medicine HUP).
- 88%
Higher sensitivity than the modified Malnutrition Screening Tool (MST).
- 166,000+
Admissions in the peer-reviewed validation.
- 39%
More malnutrition diagnoses at the same staffing (Cedars-Sinai).
- 1:1
Contractual ROI floor on hard reimbursement.
Peer-reviewed validation study
Bernstein et al., Applied Clinical Informatics, 2025. The model was studied across 166,000+ admissions from 106,000+ patients over 3.75 years, and validated against dietitian documentation and discharge coding, the clinical reference standard for malnutrition.
- Area under the ROC curve (AUROC), a standard measure of how well a model separates cases from non-cases: 0.92 on day one, 0.95 across the stay.
- 88% higher sensitivity than the modified MST.
- Patients identified a median of 1.3 days earlier (mean 4.0 days) than the first dietitian documentation.
- Checked for bias by race and sex.
Penn Medicine (HUP)
$16.1M annualized impact at one site: $6.3M in hard reimbursement collected, plus $9.8M in finance-modeled length-of-stay opportunity. Validated by Penn finance.
Source: Penn Medicine HUP Case Study, April 2026.
Cedars-Sinai
$11M in annual impact from hard reimbursement and cost savings.
Source: Cedars-Sinai deployment outcomes.
1:1 contractual ROI floor on hard reimbursement. If the program does not pay for itself in incremental reimbursement, HealthLeap pays back the difference.
Cedars-Sinai
39% more malnutrition diagnoses at the same staffing. 1.1-day length-of-stay reduction for patients with malnutrition.
Penn Medicine
21% year-over-year increase in registered dietitian malnutrition diagnoses. 2.18-day risk-adjusted length-of-stay reduction.
Accepted for presentation at the Vizient Connections Summit (September 2026), Penn Medicine's analysis reported improvements in risk-adjusted length-of-stay outcomes (observed-to-expected, or O/E) for flagged patients: 18.5% across all flagged patients, and 22.6% for patients whose malnutrition was present on admission.
We hold HealthLeap to the clinical standard, not to its own scorecard. The model is measured against what dietitians actually documented and how cases were coded at discharge, not against a made-up benchmark. The published study reports accuracy across the full stay, not just the easy day-one cases, and checks whether the model performs evenly across race and sex. Financial results are reviewed by each health system's own finance team before we report them.
- the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics; their Chief Science Officer advises HealthLeap.
- Richard Riggs, MD, former Chief Medical Officer of Cedars-Sinai.
- Cedars-Sinai, Emory, Houston Methodist, Intermountain, Northeast Georgia, Penn Medicine, and UMass Memorial.
- Sequoia Capital and First Round Capital.
- SOC 2 Type II. HIPAA-compliant. AWS infrastructure.
The strongest evidence is your own.
Run a retrospective on your historical inpatient data to see how many patients manual screening missed, and what earlier identification would have been worth. Execute the Business Associate Agreement (BAA) the same day, have one IT person run a pre-built query, and review the results with your finance, clinical, and informatics leaders in about two weeks.