Investing in Counsel Health
Healthcare is experiencing the mother of all supply-demand mismatch crises - we’re short 100K+ doctors relative to demand projected in the next 5 years. One of the ways the system has tried to solve this is by stacking layers of *non-doctors* at the front lines to triage as much as possible _away_ from doctors and save our scarce doctor capacity for the cases that truly need them. But that's had the unintended consequence of higher costs, duplicative services, over-escalations, and patient safety issues... What we really need to do is ensure that patients get access, upfront, to fully-trained clinicians who can make confident recommendations and reduce the downstream swirl associated with traditional triage processes. But we simply don't have enough doctors to do that, absent a fundamental innovation that could create non-linear leverage and amplification of expertise and capacity for each doctor in practice.
Enter Counsel Health, an AI-native medical practice that offers patients unlimited, 24/7 access to personalized medical advice from actual physicians. Patients can message a Counsel doctor with any medical question and receive actionable, reliable responses within minutes. They’ve built AI-powered "Ironman suits for doctors" - essentially proprietary, specialized medical co-pilots that give each Counsel clinician the ability to leverage the collective knowledge of the best of their peers, and multiply their patient reach by at least an order of magnitude relative to traditional medical practices. Counsel represents the type of care model that is only possible in a post-LLM world, led by an incredible "multilingual" founding team:
Dr. Muthu Alagappan, CEO, has experience as an AI researcher, a practicing doctor, and an early leader at a high-growth digital health company that achieved significant commercial scale.
Justin Yu is an MIT-trained computer scientist and ML expert who has built AI systems in robotics, at NVIDIA, and virtual team collaboration.
Dr. Rishi Khakhkhar is an Emergency Medicine doctor who ran one of the nation's first Virtual Urgent Care centers at the renowned Mount Sinai Health System.
We at @a16zBioHealth are thrilled to be backing this exceptional team as they pioneer Asynchronous Care, which could transform the way we leverage our precious supply of doctors.
Full press release: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/counsel-health-launches-with-11m-in-seed-funding-to-deliver-physician-led-ai-powered-medical-advice-302280740.html
