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Jaden Schaefer (2:00)

Welcome to the podcast. I'm your host, Jaden Schaefer. Today on the podcast I want to talk about a company called Lotus Health which has just raised $35 million and they have this thing where essentially this AI doctor is going to be seeing patients. It's doing it for free. It's kind of going viral on X for a bunch of different reasons. So today on the podcast I want to break down what they're going to be doing. Is this the future of AI in healthcare? Is this actually something that's going to get a lot of usage and kind of where are people at with using AI for healthcare today? So we're going to get into all of that on the podcast today. Before we do, I wanted to mention if you've ever wanted to build an AI tool and you're not a developer like myself. I'm not a developer. I created AI Box AI, my own startup where you can explain any tool or workflow you want to create, anything that you do on a repeated basis. And our tool can link together multiple AI models, input multiple prompts, and create a tool that you can use to repeat that process over and over again. In addition, just like ChatGPT, we have a chat interface where you get access to over 40 of the top AI models, everything from Google, Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, 11 Labs for audio, tons of cool image models. All of it's on there for 20 bucks a month. And you can chat with all of them in the same thread. So you can switch between Anthropic for tone and OpenAI for research in the same thread. And it's $20 a month. So I'll leave a link to that down in the description if you want to try that out. I hope that saves you a ton of money not having to switch between different subscriptions and also a ton of time having everything in one central hub. All right, let's get into the episode. So the thing that I think is important to kind of preface all of this by saying is that today we have like a growing amount of people, tons, that are already going to things like ChatGPT and, you know, Anthropic, and basically using those as a first stop for everything that you're doing, especially in health, if you're going to doing, you know, checking for symptoms, if you have medication questions. I know for myself when my kids are sick, I don't go to WebMD like I used to. Also, I just feel like WebMD always would tell me that either, you know, there's no problem or I was gonna die of cancer if I didn't immediately go to the emergency. And so I just feel like it was sometimes if you just put in your, whatever your issues were, WebMD had some pretty extreme responses. Chat GBT seems to be doing a really great job with that. And I think what a lot of people find is, you know, These aren't doctors. ChatGPT is not a doctor, but it can have really impressive medical context. It asks really impressive, smart follow up questions. And I think it also helps the user, like if you're using it, it helps you articulate and say what your concerns are going to be. And some of these things, which I thought was an interesting point I was talking to someone recently about, and they're like sometimes when you're using ChatGPT and it has kind of these follow up questions there, if you had like a really rushed appointment at the doctor, you might have missed some of, some of asking some of these questions, some of your concerns. And so you could get all of that out to ChatGPT. There's been a ton of really interesting cases where people have been seeing specialists for many, many years, couldn't diagnose or figure out what their issue were. And they went to ChatGPT, listed out just everything, had a conversation and it finds kind of these specialized diagnoses which ended up being correct. So it is a fantastic tool. I think this is a really big behavioral shift. And because of all of this, KJ DiWally is trying to build this new company, Lotus Health. So he like, his background is that he initially sold a dating app called D Mill. This is kind of a South Asian dating app he sold back in 2019 for $50 million. And after that. His interest in healthcare, he said, is something that he's kind of always been curious about. He said when he was a kid he often acted as a translator for his parents during doctor visits. And he said because of that, that kind of showed him a lot of the early friction, the time pressure, a lot of the communication issues that were kind of baked into the US healthcare system. And so he said when modern LLMs are out, when ChatGPT came out, he saw them less as this chatbot and more as an opportunity to kind of rebuild primary care from the ground up. This was, you know, kind of his vision. So he actually started the company in May of 2024, Lotus Health AI and essentially he kind of just set this out and was like, hey look, this is a free always on. It's like your primary care provider, but it's available 24, 7 and 50 languages. And this week he just announced $35 million in a series A. So the company is growing, he's got some phenomenal investors. Uh, the round was led by CRV and Kleiner Perkins, of course, top tier VC firm. And that me that totals up to like his past raise plus the Series A, about $41 million is raised total for it. Tons of people I think are already asking AI about their health And I think this was evidenced by the fact that OpenAI just came out with OpenAI Health Anthropic is doing something similar. And so I think Lotus is kind of looking to go a little bit further than just conversational advice. What they're trying to do is actually be designed as, you know, something that can translate your chats into real clinical outcomes so you can go chat with it and it is going to be able to give you a diagnosis and it's going to be able to give you like, prescriptions, which is really crazy if you think about it. Like, the AI model will be able to prescribe you, it's going to be able to do lab orders and refer you to specialists. Now, I know there's probably a ton of, we'll talk about some of the compliance issues and like the craziness that goes into all of that, but if you think for a minute, you know, what this would, what, what the outcome of this would be. Diagnosis, prescriptions, lab orders, referrals to specialists. I mean, this is basically everything you need a primary care doctor for. And so I think a lot of times, like, I love the vision here because a lot of times when you talk about like, oh, yeah, AI is like helping, it's like, yeah, it can be like informational, but then you still have to go tell a doctor. Like I, my wife and I have done many times, call a doctor, explain everything that chatgpt said. They're like, okay, you're probably right. And they move you along and it's like, yeah, wouldn't it be phenomenal if I could have just talked to the AI and been able to go get the prescription and not have to pay someone and talk to someone because, you know, so, I mean, I think that the hack nowadays is like, you get those Teladoc apps and it's way cheaper than having to go to a doctor and, you know, have to like schedule something. Plus, like, if you're sick with like the flu, you don't want to go to a doctor anyways to or sick with something. You don't want to have to go to a doctor and expose other people to the sickness. So, I mean, honestly, I think this is a way, a way better situation if you could do it. Now. I think in practice they're trying to operate like a full, kind of like a medical practice this. So they're not like, look, we're like a wellness app or something. And they say that they hold licenses to operate in all 50 states. They have malpractice insurance, they run hipaa compliant infrastructure and they have full access to all patient medical records. So I mean they're really setting themselves up like an actual doctor's office. I think the difference is that a lot of the frontline clinical work is going to be handled by this AI and it's essentially trained to ask the exact same questions and the same structure that your doctor would use during an intake. So now for compliance and also just to make sure everything's super accurate. They do always have a human in the loop on all of these things. They have board certified physicians from Stanford University, Harvard University, University of San Francisco and they're reviewing all of the final diagnosis, all of the prescriptions and all of the lab requests before anything is actually issued to a patient. Right. So there's, you know, always a kind of a person that still puts a stamp on this. But Lotus has built their own clinical reasoning model and essentially it's going to go and grab all of the latest evidence based medical research and it's also going to grab the patient's history and all of their responses and pull that all together in a way that is just so much more personalized. And essentially it's really similar to what systems like Open Evidence are kind of like combining the retrieval of these like up to date studies with the structured clinical logic and put it all together. This is what their CEO Dhaliwal said. He said AI is giving the advice, but the real doctors are actually signing off on it. So I think right now the company is like pretty upfront about what they don't handle. They said they don't do anything urgent or you know, emergent conditions that are, all of that is kind of redirected to emergency rooms or an urgent care center. Any cases that require physical exams are also put to, you know, in person providers. And then Lotus kind of, they just position themselves as a replacement for the routine primary care access. And so they're not saying like, look, we're like a substitute for hands on medicine or something like that. Obviously super, super ambitious. There is a lot of regulatory risk that comes with that. Healthcare in the US is you know, obviously kind of governed by a patchwork of state level licensing rules. And you know, I like know for, for in my own family I have an uncle that's a doctor and moving when he, when his family moves. He's moved between many different states before and originally is from Canada and getting the licenses in every state and board certification approval. Like there's a lot that goes into just a doctor moving between states, sometimes months or years for Some of this stuff. And so like this is, it's a complicated kind of process. I think doctors are typically kind of restricted to treating patients only where they're licensed. And if they want to move somewhere, then they have that whole issue, which I think is just another strain on the health care system that a system like this could help with and help alleviate. So automating a big chunk of all of this kind of clinical decision making has a bunch of, I think, additional scrutiny around liability. There's safety and oversight that you have to think about. But still, even with all of that, investors really believe that the timing's right. Personally, I would agree with them on that. Sara Gur, who is the CRV general partner, so he joined the board and he was kind of the person like leading the charge over at CRV on this whole deal. But he is arguing that telemedicine infrastructure, which was kind of normalized during the pandemic, basically opened up the door for some of these new care models which are layered on top of AI. He said, quote, there are many challenges, but it's not specific. SpaceX sending astronauts to the moon. He was also an early investor in like DoorDash, Mercury and Ring. And so he's basically framing Lotus as kind of a high conviction bet. Primary care doctors right now are in short supply nationwide. And so Lotus thinks that their model can handle up to 10 times as many patients as a traditional practice, even while they, even if they're still capping visits at about 15 minutes. And it's interesting because it's like, well, how come they could only do 10 times as many patients as a traditional practice? And it's because, you know, they still have to hire actual doctors to review everything. But with that, like with the same amount of doctors on their app versus an actual office, they can 10x that, so they could hire a lot of doctors and basically get 10 times the output for people. So Lotus definitely isn't alone in kind of going and kind of going after this idea of an AI doctor. There's a bunch of different competitors. Lightspeed recently backed doctrine, there's a bunch of others. For now, I think Lotus is kind of main competitive. Like differentiator is price. Their entire thing is free. And of course, you know, some people are like, well how long can you sustain free? I mean they have licensed doctors reviewing these files. So I'm not sure if they're volunteering their time or Lotus is just kind of taking a hit at the beginning to try to, you know, onboard more people. Their CEO said that the Future monetization options might include something like a subscription or sponsored programs, but right now they're intentionally postponing, like making money, just trying to get users, I think, and their immediate goal is to basically refine the product, build trust and just get as many patients using it as possible. So in a, you know, this is a healthcare system that is very used to long waits and kind of rushed visits. And we hear a lot on the news about like doctors getting burnout and stuff. And so I think because of this, Lotus is basically betting that AI is kind of, you know, if you, if you mix it with a human and you have a human kind of overseeing everything, you can turn what people are already doing informally into something that looks and feels like real care. Like I Already go to ChatGPT and ask all of these questions and put symptoms in. And I mean, OpenAI knows that that's why they launched OpenAI Health. And so making this more formal and saying, look, you had the whole conversation, now just like get it reviewed by a doctor and you go get your prescription, I think is a, is a very, very smart direction. I'm excited to see what happens with this company and I'll keep you guys all up to date on it in the future. Thanks so much for T into the podcast, make sure to go check out AI Box AI if you want to get all of the top AI models in one place for 40 or for $20 a month, there's a link in the description to AI Box AI. Thanks so much for tuning in and I'll catch you in the next episode.