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Deep Learning with PolyAI
PolyAI's CEO/co-founder Nikola Mrkšić and team invite guests to candidly discuss trends and tech in AI, voice throughout the enterprise, and nailing the customer experience.
Deep Learning with PolyAI
What happens when AI takes over healthcare admin?
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In this episode of Deep Learning with PolyAI, your host Nikola Mrkšić chats with Alex Brown to unpack what happens when AI takes over the administrative work that quietly defines modern healthcare. Instead of replacing doctors and clinicians, AI is reshaping everything around them: from documentation and scheduling to the workflows that consume hours of time.
The conversation explores why healthcare resisted automation longer than other industries, why AI’s fastest wins are operational rather than clinical, and how removing administrative friction could improve experiences — for both providers and patients.
Tune in to hear:
- Why healthcare’s biggest AI gains are operational, not clinical
- How admin-heavy workflows shape both provider burnout and patient experience
- Why “AI replacing doctors” misses the real opportunity
- What efficiency actually looks like in a healthcare context
- Where empathy still matters — and where automation clearly helps
If you’re curious about where AI is quietly reshaping healthcare today, tune in, and let us know what you think.
I think people underestimated how much of healthcare's employee time is spent on admin. And that's why it's like they saw Ambience Web and they were like, oh my God, what else can we do? And that's why they've all turned around. I think we get interest from like one practice, one physician running their own clinic to thousand clinics, right? They hate the admin side of things, and that's what we're helping to alleviate. And I think in other industries, you've made incremental changes to alleviate admin, right? In healthcare, you really haven't.
SPEAKER_01Alex, welcome to the podcast.
SPEAKER_00Thank you so much for having me.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so we didn't really have a big plan here other than not to turn the episode into just propaganda around healthcare being our fastest growing vertical and there being, I'll stop. But the general kind of like thing that I thought we could start with is just like you were an investor and then kind of like joined Poly AI to kind of help us grow out our healthcare vertical. What is working with like healthcare and technology and AI today? Like what is the most exciting thing?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And this is probably a little bit biased because now I'm at Poly, but also when I was investing in healthcare, I looked a lot into AI and technology in the clinical space. So how do we kind of not replace doctors, but how do we kind of support the clinicians and the physicians as much as possible and takeovers what they're doing? And I think what I really came to notice was like, it's a long journey. Doctors, physicians, they're very busy and it's very hard for them to change on kind of the way that they're doing things. However, what we could actually help with is everything before and everything after that they need to do. All that layer of kind of administration, everything that's sucking up their time that isn't actually treating or interacting with the patient.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So I mean, I think like one of the biggest uses of speech recognition technology historically was nuance, trigon, like the software for kind of like taking, well, transcribing the doctor visit and then kind of like summarizing that, I guess, came a bit later. But that's I guess that post call wrap-up.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And I would say like if you look at ambient scribes, the goal is that they're transforming how clinicians need to interact with patients, right? If something's taking notes for you, we see it like on Zoom. You actually can spend more time listening and less time typing notes.
SPEAKER_01Yep, yep, yep.
SPEAKER_00What I will say now is what we're seeing is like, how then do you take that information that's transcribed and actually use it to then write a prescription or go downstream, right? Do a bill. I think that is what we're seeing right now is the wave of like, okay, we've got the information. How do we actually go take action on that information?
SPEAKER_01Okay. So I mean, a lot of people when they kind of just like look at AI both taking over jobs and that whole fear. Well, the opportunity, I guess, on the other hand, is that we all get infinitely scalable, high-quality healthcare that is the best it could be for anyone, right? And I guess that those appointments where, say, you're the doctor and I'm telling you why or whatever, about my foot problems and you know, it learns from that data and everyone else's data, in the end it would probably be like the best doctor in the world because it's seen all that data, right? But would that kind of like issuing the prescription all that action that it's performing, would that be like the training data effectively? Or is that how people are thinking about it?
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell Are people thinking about it that way? I think to your point, like, oh, we could replace the doctor completely. Actually, I don't think we as humans want that within healthcare. So yes, to that point, it would train, it would know what to prescribe. And potentially when a doctor says, oh, this biologic is the best for you, it could give a nudge and say, hey, just based on other patient data, these actual other biologics are also at record or could be provided or could have better effects. And so then you kind of give a recommendation engine to the doctor to improve maybe their practices.
SPEAKER_01Right, right, right. So then basically it would serve to accelerate them a bit, give them other ideas, maybe improve their accuracy. But I guess importantly, we leave the criminal responsibility to the doctor.
SPEAKER_00Yes. I mean, depends on how futuristic you look at this. No, no, no, not at all. But like depending on how futuristic the tech fiends will say, like, no, we can actually, we're more accurate than doctors, like we can actually probably replace them completely. I think, and we do a lot of this, right, with our dialogue designers or speech, right? There's an empathy layer that we're not yet there with or that people expect that like they want from their doctor that is not, it doesn't have to do with accuracy. It doesn't have to do with efficiency. It has to do with warmth. And I don't know, at least what we've seen and what we're working on, we're not there yet. So we can improve it, but I wouldn't say we can replace it completely.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I mean, I guess there's more than just to play the technical tech fiend a bit, right? But even if it was human and you knew that it wasn't human, you probably wouldn't be able to relate, well, to feel the empathy, because you would know that I mean this gets philosophical. I don't know. People seem to be spending inordinate amounts of time talking to Chat GPT about their, you know, life problems, health problems as well, right? I think you you told me that it's like but definitely top three use cases.
SPEAKER_00Top three use cases.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah. So I guess we'll evolve as humanity. I don't know.
SPEAKER_00Which is also a little scary, right? Because we know better than anyone, guardwells around LLMs, right?
SPEAKER_01Yep.
SPEAKER_00If your GPT is trained to confirm everything you're saying or bias against, right, and it's not medical device or able to give diagnosis, you enter a little bit of a scary territory when all of your pre-thoughts, right, you disclose only what you think your doctor should know. And for example, if you don't want to necessarily say that you are overweight or obese, and so you don't tell your GPT that, it has no visual way currently of seeing that. So it's a missed symptom or a missed indication on what it's actually going to recommend to you.
SPEAKER_01Mm-hmm. Okay.
SPEAKER_00Eventually maybe we'll get rid of it. Like with wearables and connected technology, maybe it will have a full view of who you are as a human and your family history. But right now, I think what I've seen is it's missing a lot of inputs to be able to give a very accurate prediction.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I mean, like I it's fascinating, right? Because much like and probably more so than in other things we do, like your retail history with Office Depot is probably less of an interesting item than our medical well, medical histories of our families, plus then like your kind of like whole kind of like file. I mean, to get that best doctor, they would have to know everything about you, right?
SPEAKER_00And about your parents and about your grandparents. And I guess people underestimate how recent digitalization within healthcare has been. So it's like, okay, you might have an electronic health record if you're lucky enough, right? I guess in the US it is way more than a lot of people.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so I think that's interesting for for kind of like the audience, because this was new to me. And I mean, having moved around a lot, you moved around a lot as well, right? It's kind of like you set up with a new doctor in a new country. It's like like Canvas. It's like, who are you up? My name is Nicola, right? And like a doctor looking at the medical history, especially with like patients being so like transient and like in and out, and like, you know, we don't really have our own doctor. I mean, people do, I guess, but most people don't if they've moved around a lot.
SPEAKER_00Less and less, I would say.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So then like, HUD, in practice, like how prevalent is it that a doctor has actually considered the full medical history?
SPEAKER_00I would say almost to none. When I, for example, I moved over here, I had my doctor write like 10 bullet points on a piece of paper about like everything I've been through, and that's what I gave my doctor here. There's 50 things that were left out. So when they prescribe me all my new medications, because what's paid for here is not what's paid for at home.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00They're missing a plethora of data, but they're doing the best that they can.
SPEAKER_01Hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think this is where like, you know, you look at it. I mean, I I feel like every other Serb is a complete, like, you know, hobbyist pharmacist in like, you know, people overabuse, antibiotics, and all sorts of things just because like you have a cold, might be pneumonia, why don't you hit it, right? And I I feel like they're like in the UK, you look at it, and it's like there's a much higher threshold of like prescribing things. And it's very interesting to just kind of like think of that like feature vector of a human being and like how you act on it. Because I guess different systems act on it very differently, right? But when you think of like just the promise of technology, and as an investor looking at this before before polyat, like what are the most exciting things that are being transformed? Like is it is it longevity, is it kind of like preventative health care? What is it like?
SPEAKER_00I would say so. I'm a biochemical engineer by background. And when I first started investing, I was so excited about like the possibility of like technology and AI, we were gonna find new proteins, find new drugs that were gonna increase us to 200. Like it was so possible. And I think over time, what I realized, while still exciting, the things that actually take market, right? Remember, I think you just quoted where it's like, oh, in in testing, all the models do great, but where's the impact on GDP?
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that that was Ilya's Marker's podcast where I think he goes very like A to B, like, if the models are so good at evals, why is the economy not growing faster? And it's like, okay, I think we gotta like delineate the factors in between. And I guess similarly here, right?
SPEAKER_00Same in healthcare, right? Like the models are great in these test environments, right? Like we should have predicted so many new life-saving drugs or completely almost replaced the doctor. And yet here we are. Right? Here we are, not necessarily living longer or living better or healthier, right? If anything, a lot of like chronic diseases are on the rise. So it's kind of like what is the missing gap of bringing that AI into actual well, it depends on what you think the goal is, but if the goal is healthier living, sometimes where's it falling short?
SPEAKER_01I see, I see. So then kind of like in terms of the investments being made, I guess if you invest, you expect to get returns, right? So if we followed the money, then like what is going on here? Like what are we investing for? What is the, you know, kind of a cost function that we're optimizing for? Is it longevity like when or is it just really completely chaotic?
SPEAKER_00Depends on the health system. I would say a lot of the large returns are actually with efficiency.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_00Right? Like, how can we do more with less? And that's where kind of a lot of the big wins, at least in the the we'll call it the digital health side, have been, right? How can we serve more people with less humans?
SPEAKER_01Yep. Yep.
SPEAKER_00You have seen some great wins in the biotech space. All the large pharma companies and medical device companies are heavily investing. But I would say, yeah, if you're looking at digital health and services side, it's a lot in efficiency in open banking in Europe. All your data is kind of available and they've got great prediction on kind of like what you're gonna spend, target marketing, everything like that. If you don't even have an electronic health record, so it's in a paper file.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Where like open banking is predictive modeling, AI, the innovation that you're thinking about in other industries is light years away. Because nothing is yet digitized.
SPEAKER_01Yep, yep, yep.
SPEAKER_00Um, so we're probably only coming up to the cusp of the other ver industries now.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. You know, I think they like have a very naive understanding of this and also colored, I think, by like different countries and what we've seen through poly AI there. And I mean, maybe talk a little bit about just like EHRs and like how is America so much more advanced, given that, you know, I think to me, like the high-level numbers and you know much more about this, but what 17% of American GDP is spent in some shape or form, like healthcare and RD. I know part of that is like the fact that they're really fronting RD development, right? When you think of like that part, and then you look at just kind of like the fact that it's not like freely available and stuff, like it is fascinating to me that public systems like Canada or the UK, where like there are very kind of like loved health systems that are public and they're like the pride of the nation.
SPEAKER_00I would say there's no every country has tried a different model of healthcare in terms of the incentives and the payers. No country is perfect, right? Some can move faster. However, if you look at population health outcomes, right, necessarily that doesn't correlate. Why hasn't the UK or s these kind of like government run succeeded in moving faster? I mean, Palantir, I think it was three, four years ago now, got contracted by the UK government to build this like federated lake of data, patient data, that they would then commercialize to pharma companies and it would be a revenue stream for the UK.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00I don't think never happened, right?
SPEAKER_01Is it in progress?
SPEAKER_00So they say.
SPEAKER_01Okay. I mean, right?
SPEAKER_00And it's because the data is so parsed and then everyone who you talk to actually knows what's in an electronic health record. Data shit.
SPEAKER_02Really?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. You have doctors. Okay, perfect example. We are talking to one of the largest RCM companies, uh revenue management companies. And the use case that they gave us is a doctor does shorthand notes in Epic, right? And then a nurse or practitioner calls up the patient if the if the notes are if all the blood tests came back okay. And they tell the patient, good news, here are your test results, everything is positive, but your cholesterol is within normal but a little bit high, so do this nutritional, you know, try to eat more chicken. Yeah. That's kind of the thing. We're trying to read the clinician's notes. RAI is trying to read the clinician's notes. It's having a hard time because you have 10 letters, right? And if RAI, and we're spending a lot of time and effort on this, it's not a lot of things.
SPEAKER_01Were these handwritten notes?
SPEAKER_00These are type notes.
SPEAKER_01But like, oh, and they're still doctors like handwriting being completely impossible to read. That's like the oldest joke.
SPEAKER_00But they're like exactly. But think of that in an electronic health system, unstructured data.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell Okay. Okay. So it's just shorthands and things that people know. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_00And so you can put it all in a data lake, but if it's not structured, it's I guess it's becoming better, but it's a little bit hard to do things with.
SPEAKER_01So really then you have that iterative thing where you have to like impose structure, wait ten years for people to start following that a bit, and then you got slightly better data, you see what you missed, you fix it, you wait another 10 years. Okay. Is there a way to disrupt this by like, I don't know. I'm thinking like, you know, Apple Health is supposed to be like a mini medical record on your phone, right?
SPEAKER_00I mean, I've not populated any fields, maybe like height weight, but like Anthropic just announced it too, that they're gonna go into kind of the health side where it's gonna maybe eventually replace an EMR, right? And they'll be able they'll they'll structure it that way. I think what you're saying. We know ModMed. But then you look at something like ModMed, we've had this discussion, right? Like they are end-to-end. So they do everything from kind of the intake to the revenue and the billing, right? And what they're doing is they're trying to do it so that when their ambient scribe doesn't just put a text in that copy-pastes, it actually structures the data so that it's reusable later downstream, right? So yes, it's doable and it's a way to innovate, but you have to almost like own the entire patient journey or work with partners to really make sure that the data flows between.
SPEAKER_01And again, my healthcare notation is out, but this would be like service kind of like or Yeah.
SPEAKER_00The yeah, it would have to span like across service to the digital side, to almost the administration of like therapies and things like that and connected devices.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00So you almost need to connect like all three realms of healthcare.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Which is hard enough.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. But I mean when you when you then think of kind of like just the ability of AI to help with different things, like we forget about the analysis. Because in theory, it should be able to like look at that medical history. And I think one of the oldest examples of kind of like people saying that AI can be beneficial was radiologists, right? And I think one thing was like it is more accurate than humans. But in any case, it would like a false positive is not such a big deal, because you'll check anyway, and like, well, I mean, if it detects something that is a false negative for the human, then it saved a life, right? But I guess that's just another example of like more cost for better performance rather than actually like democratizing scaling it too. Although I guess you could use it for people who don't know.
SPEAKER_00I think that was the investment case. So I've got AI rad, right? And it's the efficiency use case is why all the investors put so much money into A AI for radiology. It makes complete sense. You could do it faster, you're more accurate, why not? The challenge is, and I'll speak for the UK specifically, is we didn't remove the humans for the process. They are double checking the AI rad. So while it's more accurate, right, we are not seeing the cost savings that would kind of trigger mass, mass distribution and revenue that we wanted to see.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell But if you kind of like follow and I mean it's another thing we touched upon earlier, but you look at just like investments and returns. I think what's fascinating right now, I mean, okay, the current kind of like health fad is like what GLP1s and the whole kind of like that is, I guess, preventative medicine, right? If people regulate their weight, you'll have less health problems and long-term less, I guess what cardiac arrest, strokes, and other things that would that be like a more kind of like traditional. I mean, it's definitely paid off handsomely for the companies, right? And is that like then a better example of where technology can help? Is that even technology? Or it's definitely an ARI model, right?
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01But it's also, I mean, it's fascinating how it's basically our current revenue model, where basically these things become software subscriptions that people buy to.
SPEAKER_00Well, that's the whole I think biologics couldn't have been the first, but like I'm thinking to Blockbuster bugs, Humara. Once every two weeks, you're injecting yourself. A couple thousand dollars. It's what you would call it software, they era model, but for pharma. Yeah. They love that is how we we do drugs. I guess I personally think that's why selling cell engine therapy was this breakthrough cure for cancer almost. Yeah, right. It never took off to the scale that we needed it to because we couldn't figure out the pricing model. And it's difficult to deliver, and there's a whole other things. But I worked on a project specifically on how we were going to price this for government.
SPEAKER_01So what are we pricing?
SPEAKER_00We are pricing this drug, which is supposed to be kind of a more wonder drug, not an ARR model.
SPEAKER_01And it's wonderful for what? Like preventing cancer. Curing cancer.
SPEAKER_00Let's say. Cell therapies, yeah. Oncology.
SPEAKER_01So would this then not be like just a public good rather than a stuff, yeah.
SPEAKER_00How do you That's the problem, right? Okay. I can't charge an ARR model, so I have to charge all the profit up front.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Right? No government wants to pay for that.
SPEAKER_01Really?
SPEAKER_00Though at least in the UK, it'll bankrupt them.
SPEAKER_01I guess because you can't say why you're over time.
SPEAKER_00So then the pharma company says, okay, you can pay for it all up front. But if this person lives, right, you'll pay for it kind of over time, right? Like they'll be like milestones. If they live six months, you'll pay X. If they live 12 months, you'll pay Y. Challenge there, which was really interesting, was government said, okay. Not the UK government, but but what happened was then they knew was going to be so expensive. They were only giving it to the sickest where nothing else worked, right? It wasn't tier one defense. And then farmers said, Well, these people are dying anyhow because they're the sickest. They're not make even making it to the sixth month. We're not making our money back. Selling jeans. Yeah, we can't pay it back. Which I know.
SPEAKER_01Well, okay. But then I guess the this leads to a whole, I mean, outcome-based pricing is, you know, kind of like the Which we're struggling with before say I. Well, I mean, uh, yeah, I don't know. I mean, like he, you know, it's there are many hot takes on it. One is like that it doesn't really work because it's really hard to define up front, you know, what that outcome is. The other one, the facts on the ground that I've seen play out many times when we did have outcome-based pricing is that someone's paying you a mil, it scales, they're paying you five. And then, you know, they do the math of where it will lead us. Like, they don't want to pay 25 mil. So they're like, I'm gonna do on my own. And then maybe they can, maybe they can't. And it leads to like a really awkward situation where maybe they can't do it short term. Maybe you really have advanced technology and you're the only one who can. At that point, you can kind of like hold them over a barrel if there is ROI, but eventually it'll catch up, and then you've not really been a great partner in that you've charged them a lot. Now, if you've fronted the development of it, it's actually very similar to Fireman. I think in Fireman Medicine, we at least understand that the cost upfront is such that it otherwise wouldn't be done. Whereas I think with technology that is a bit more mundane, like say customer service automation, you kind of go like, even though it is a very sophisticated piece of software and models and all that, it's not all that different in terms of RD. By the time it's commoditized, then it looks like you've just overcharged for what then looks like trivial picks or shovels.
SPEAKER_00And well, then there's the whole if you take like software outcome-based pricing, you go to healthcare, right? Like value-based care, right? So that's not fee for service. It's Kaiser does kind of some of these models, right? Like I will pay you for kind of the outcomes of how healthy this person is, readmission rates, things like that.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_00Right? So then you're supposed to be looking over everything this patient does. And if they are healthier, you will make more money.
SPEAKER_01I see.
SPEAKER_00As a provider. There's pros and cons to both.
SPEAKER_01I would think that's pretty good if it can be.
SPEAKER_00But then you need a little bit, maybe like a Kaiser or an integrated care network, where the payer also has the provider, right? You need that, you need to be able to prove both ends, right? Yeah. This person is healthier because of what we're doing.
SPEAKER_01Rather than they've got good genes. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Because then you just curate, oh, I'm just going to serve these patients that have good genes, right?
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell, which global healthcare systems are like the best at like both having the control of that and then kind of like also the ability to curate the data and iterate on this. Is it is it in the US mostly? Or okay. Yeah. But when we look at longevity, I guess America is pretty good.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Small, I guess the challenge with the US, and I'm not, I would say, like a US population health expert or anything, is you would need to sub-segment it, right? Who has access to the kinds of permanented support? And then once you go with that group, then you can see kinds of trends.
SPEAKER_01I'm surprised you don't see ads of like work with us because our people live longer than like that network's people. Because that would be a real like Yeah.
SPEAKER_00But that's how they get that's how they get the best doctors, right? And physicians. So it's an interesting thing. Every country I think has that healthcare incentive program that's a little bit different.
SPEAKER_01Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Because I think that okay, I mean UK, Canada have like public healthcare. That's like Canada has only public, right?
SPEAKER_00Yes. They're transitioning. I believe there's now I'm originally from Quebec and there's a there's a private wave coming up.
SPEAKER_01Is Quebec more hardcore on it being that like non-private or in line with the rest of Canada or less?
SPEAKER_00The French Canadians. I think we're probably moving a little bit faster in the private space. Okay.
SPEAKER_01Okay. Okay. Interesting. Okay. And then when we look at just kind of like other uses of AI in healthcare, like what else is interesting?
SPEAKER_00What else is interesting? I would say like all the to me, like all the connected predictive things that are going on where I could get a notification to But I'm also I I like to do health, right? To do something before my GP has to see me. That to me is interesting.
SPEAKER_01So hasn't it like what, like a blood test before you go or that's mundane?
SPEAKER_00You mean more like No, even a blood test or perfect example is like I used to always have to go in, let's say, a mole test, right? Now they send it to your house, you hook it up to your iPhone, you're able to scan yourself, you send that in, you get a text back next day, you're good to go, or please come in.
SPEAKER_01Oh, okay. Like to me, that's well, that's like mass healthcare. That's mass healthcare.
SPEAKER_00I think that's personal just because I have a passion for it. I think democratized healthcare is most exciting to me. Although if you if you ask a healthcare, like a healthcare purist, they would say a little bit more around the innovation of like drug discovery and longevity is more interesting to them, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. But I guess it goes hand in hand just in terms of like if you can at mass scale, even like from like Fitbits and like Apple Watches gather like these signals, you should in theory be able to go like, you seem fine, don't come in. Something's off, something's changed with you, come in. How do you feel about these like companies like Neko and like others where it's like full body scans and you know all the way to like Brian Johnston and his like, you know, measuring everything, everything.
SPEAKER_00Tracking.
SPEAKER_01Like yeah.
SPEAKER_00I think I actually, as a healthcare person, I love it, right? I do think that the follow-through, it's great to go get an echo scan. What are you doing with that information, right? Are you going back into the NHS, right? Are you waiting another two years to get the elective surgery? So I think once you have that information, that they call it like the referral gap or whatever. How do you actually getting the treatment that you need is where kind of that crack still falls through.
SPEAKER_01I see. I see. Okay.
SPEAKER_00But I guess if you're if we're talking about voice AI and we're talking about poly, what's exciting me there is we are really good at doing, as I say, like that administration layer. We are relieving healthcare staff of kind of that burden so that they can actually have that empathetic conversation. But if you're looking at the frontier of voice AI, people are diagnosing or working on, they're not yet there, diagnosing mental health, insomnia, they're trying to do diabetes through voice, right? Yeah. We're talking about manifest. They're using biomarkers in your in your voice. So we're talking to companies right now.
SPEAKER_01Do you need to have like the voice like sample before and after? Or yeah.
SPEAKER_00So they track it over time. We're talking to a company right now that's thinking about building on poly to do, right? Where they would they would use our platform to track those samples.
SPEAKER_01Oh, wow. Okay.
SPEAKER_00And then be able to spit out a diagnosis.
SPEAKER_01Wow. So the voice does come contain like okay. That's the theory. Okay. Okay. That's really cool.
SPEAKER_00Which could be a next frontier, right? You're calling in to make an appointment and at the same time you detect that they have insomnia.
SPEAKER_01Up sale opportunities. Did you know you need to do that?
SPEAKER_00Okay, capitalism.
SPEAKER_01Okay, okay, okay. Okay. Okay. No, that's that's really fascinating. Yeah, I mean, like just you know, I hear everything you're saying about like the need for like digital transformation so like you can get more benefits, but I've been really incredibly positively surprised by the uptake in healthcare, right? Because, you know, I think a year and a half ago, healthcare wasn't in our like top four verticals. And now it's number one, right? It went from like one to ten million in a year. And I'm like, the appetite and the innovativeness. And like, I don't know, there's something I mean, with Gen AI, I feel like what what's kind of like flipped around is that enterprises are more aggressive than you know, people who maybe have a low risk factor and are able to. There's a lot of top-down pushing. But I think when you look at verticals, like healthcare has just been so forward. And we're not the only ones. There's so many people in different pockets of this growing to look really, really substantial figures. Why do you think it why do you think healthcare has like become like the actual like number one adopter?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I would say if you asked me probably like seven years ago, like healthcare and AI, I was like, oh, don't even try, right? It's so like it's a mess. But I think at the time, at least as an investor, we were looking at healthcare in the clinical space, right? Right. And it took so long. And I think might have started with the Ambient Scribe, to be honest, right? That was the probably the first time when we were like, oh, it actually doesn't need to be AI radiology making a diagnostic. Yeah, it's not that serious. But like it's not that serious, but it's transformational. I think people underestimated how much of healthcare's employee time is spent on admin.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00And that's why it's like they saw Ambient Scribe and they were like, oh my God, what else can we do? And that's why they've all turned around. I think we get interest from like one practice, one physician running their own clinic to thousand clinics, right?
SPEAKER_02Yep.
SPEAKER_00They hate the admin side of things. Yeah. And that's what we're helping to alleviate. And I think in other industries, you've made incremental changes to alleviate admin, right? In healthcare, you really haven't. So it's kind of making that massive leap where they're super excited.
SPEAKER_01So it's catching up in terms of that. Oh, okay. And because of the regulation, the whole like paperwork has always been important and mandated, even though it's not. And now it's even more. I know it's maybe incomprehensible, but they have to be left there, right? Correct.
SPEAKER_00Especially with how the the incentives work around payers and fee for service. If you're going to change to value-based care, you really need to document everything.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yep, yep, yep. Do you think like I mean, like I guess like one theory and one of our investors, Gnot Kozla, I mean, he's always talked about just kind of like the abundance of healthcare that you could provide, for example, in India, just the scale in places where you're just not providing adequate healthcare right now. I mean, the other place I think of naturally is like Serbia and Eastern Europe, more broadly, where you know the demographic pyramid is completely screwed, and that on top of that, all qualified labor is leaving disproportionately, leaving such a shortage of doctors relative to the population. Do you think some of these places will then end up having to kind of like not necessarily be more progressive, but through sheer need, they might have to kind of like say, hey, tier one triage is AI first. And then in theory, like while it may have some catastrophic effects early on, it should in theory lead to kind of like a better healthcare model, more data.
SPEAKER_00It well, so I have so many varies on that. Yeah, and I don't know how dangerous and uh it's a little controversial. I don't know how dangerous and unethical it is anymore. So there's a PhD, he's fantastic, and all he does is healthcare AI. He's at Kinks. He tried to raise money in the UK to do exactly that. An AI first clinic, as like a think of it like a smart clinic. I unfortunately couldn't invest, but he couldn't get the traction here, and he's going to do it in a developing country because the regulation is lust, and he wants to prove it out and then bring it back here. And he's designed this head to toe where it's all either AI, virtual. There is like not a human at the clinic. And he's predicting, I don't know how far he is, I should probably touch base with him, but like that the quality of care that they're gonna get might be better than like what we're seeing here.
SPEAKER_01Well, I mean, a hundred percent. I mean, I, you know, just kind of like when you when you think of all the kind of like DIY healthcare and everything, uh, I remember my father had COVID. He had refused to go into a hospital because he was like, I won't make it out alive. Very irrational. But I remember my cousin who's a doctor, and I like just from like the general notes that were global, looked at like corticosteroid like amounts, everything, et cetera. And it was very possible and you know, like it was fine. Again, not proved that we did a good job. He might have been fine anyway.
SPEAKER_00It's a pretty I I would like to think it's a pretty accepted truth that staying out of the hospital is actually healthier if you can. It's why the UK government's trying to push everyone out. US is trying to care at home. US, I would say too, if they can find a way to pay for it, right? Because sometimes they get paid on beds, but care at home is better as long as you can make a diagnosis without seeing the person, which then some people have questions about.
SPEAKER_01Oh wow, that's really fascinating. It does make sense anecdotally, but again, I have no data. Okay.
SPEAKER_00Doctors visiting you at home. I mean Sarah care, which does exactly that. Like nurses, I think they'll eventually IPL. They're kind of one of the Europeans' big success stories.
SPEAKER_01Okay, and that's what like visits at home? Visits at home.
SPEAKER_00By nursing and yeah, like medical staff.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell Okay. So I guess that's an efficiency play, but still like the quality comes from our being in a hospital.
SPEAKER_00Correct. And more people choosing to not go to hospitals if they don't have to.
SPEAKER_01And then I guess because of that reducing the burden of them getting medical help for something that they might have ignored. Yeah. Okay. Wow. It's interesting. Well, because there is like a lot of potential here that is happening right now.
SPEAKER_00Yes, there is. And I would say in the I definitely do think in the developing countries. I remember when I was studying healthcare, there was a teacher that was kind of talking about here, we do cataract surgery one by one. It's like a 30-minute whatever process. You would never I think it was in India where there was an innovative doctor that said, line everyone up in one room, 15 people, right? Just make sure it's sterile, and we'll do them all at once. I'll move from bed to bed.
SPEAKER_01No problem.
SPEAKER_0015 people in and out, right? And it was super efficient, everyone was fine. And then those 15 people started a support group, because I think there's like post-surgery adherence that you have to adhere to, right? And they were bonded and they showed that, like, actually, not physio, but like they were keeping to a better schedule than those people that just got operated along. Really? Because it built a sense of community.
SPEAKER_01That is fantastic.
SPEAKER_00Like to me, that's innovation too.
SPEAKER_01Oh no, 100%.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. But it's so against what we would probably do in the West. You never don't even want to share a hospital room. You're not going to want to share surgery, huh?
SPEAKER_01Hmm. No, no, that makes sense. I mean, like, you know, when you were saying that like we want the doctor on the empathetic side, I think that we have had a few examples of better engagement with some mental health use cases, with I think people disclosing either financial difficulty or things like STDs, right? Where like you don't necessarily want to tell another human being because you're ashamed. I think those were like the two examples of where AI actually had an edge. Because, well, it's not human, right? But yeah. Okay, perfect. And okay, awesome. Well, look, this has been really, really fascinating, and I hope the audience will will enjoy learning a lot of this too. I definitely learned a lot. Thank you for joining me. Please like, share, subscribe, and we'll see you in the next one.
SPEAKER_00Thanks for having me.
