This health startup is harnessing AI for quick, free diagnoses with shocking accuracy
When clinics are overbooked and appointments take weeks, healthcare can become a waiting-game, a guessing-game, a Google-game.AI-powered startup Doctronic is offering Americans a different way to play.Launched at the end of 2023, Doctronic provides free, private, immediate medical consultations to anyone with an internet connection — no login or insurance required.“The problem people really have is getting access to the system,” Dr.Adam Oskowitz, 47, Doctoronic’s co-founder and a vascular surgeon at University of California San Francisco, told NYNext.
“That’s the guiding light for everything we’ve built.”Nationwide, more than a third of adults skip care due to costs, a study conducted by survey platform Pollfish found, and the U.S.will face a shortage of 86,000 physicians by 2036, the Association of American Medical Colleges estimates.“In New York City [alone] there’s a three-week wait time to see a primary care physician,” co-founder Matt Pavelle, a 50-year-old tech entrepreneur based in New York said.
“We have a system that’s failing a lot of people.”While the platform shares some DNA with tele-health services and symptom-checking tools such as WebMD and Teladoc, Doctronic differs in two key ways: it’s powered by a proprietary, physician-built AI that leads with structured medical reasoning, and its chatbot can hand off to a real doctor in minutes, not days.Users begin with a secure, anonymous chat.Doctronic asks only for age and sex, then guides users through a 15 to 20 minute medical consultation powered by AI.At the end, the chatbot offers four possible diagnoses and two summaries: one in plain English and one in SOAP-note (Subjective, Objective, Assessment and Plan) format, designed specifically for follow-up with a physician, if necessary.If users don’t already have a doctor, they can pay $40 to speak with a licensed Doctronic physician — available 24/7, in all 50 states, typically within 30 minutes.
That physician reviews...