Great to have David on a, CEO, investor, board member, advisor, serial entrepreneur, and passionate cyclist…
He is Co-founder and CEO solving the doctors’ InBox Problem, physicians are spending 2-3 hours a day, 10 -15 hours a week reading and responding to (lab results, Patient Messages, Rx Renewals, etc…..
Affineon Health, Inc.
Streamlines inbox workflows and drive revenue growth. Saving critical time and reducing cognitive load for practices of all sizes.
David’s AI company was born and developed and built in the AI FUND
Quick Pulses of Full Conversation: Tachyons, Soundbites, Takeaways..
Understanding the Burden of Healthcare Providers
Well, I think that, you know, first the problem that providers are facing. So, you know, we all get a lot of email every day and we think about our own inboxes. But when you talk to a provider and what they're dealing with, they get a lot of different types of things that they're called messages into their inboxes. So you go to the doctor, you get your annual wellness visit. The doctor orders four or five different labs. And what happens? Well, the next day, the lab results for those four or five different labs come into their inbox and they have to review them. And a typical doctor like a PCP today seeing 20, 25 patients a day. So you can imagine every day they're getting bombed with a lot of lab results coming in. And they're getting other things like imaging results, MRIs, x-rays, and patients like us are going on to the patient portal and sending messages to the doctor. So they're getting really inundated. And this has gotten worse over the last 10 years as more of us, as patients, go to the portals and ask our doctors questions. It has become unmanageable. And this is causing providers to have to stay up late at night every night. And they can't really wait because the lab results are critical. You know, they need to review them and figure out what has to happen with the patient. So they're getting the short end of the deal because they have to spend whatever time is necessary to catch up on their inbox. And they got to do it every day. And this cannot be done like by a medical assistant. This has to be done by a clinician, correct? Currently under our health care model. Yeah, that's right. The doctor is the one that ordered the labs. They know about the patient, so they need to spend the time to review them. And of course, they need to see another 20 patients. So it's much like all of us will try to catch up on email between meetings. They're trying to do it between visits with patients. So it's a pretty big problem.
Balancing Innovation and Reliability in AI Development
Well, it's a really kind of a pretty good topic. With innovation, I think it's important that every company establish a culture of And the culture that we've really focused on is that it's okay to break things. And if you build a culture in a company where you really punish people for making mistakes, it's incredibly hard to innovate. So we kind of take the approach that innovation is going to cause you to have to make problems happen. And you learn from those and then you move on. And with AI, especially, we've all seen that, right? You can go in and use ChatGPT and you'll see a hallucination where it seems to make up the answer. So the key is if you're going to have an innovative culture and you're going to advance rapidly, you also, to maintain the confidence of your customers, in this case, clinicians, You have to put a layer that helps catch things that go haywire and aren't what you expect. And if you do that right, you can deliver consistent output to your customers that's high quality and internally catch those things when they don't go the way you planned. and have that feedback into the system so that you can improve it. I think that's how most super innovative early stage companies in AI are going to have to do things. Let's face it, if you started having these kind of hallucinations and you put those in front of your doctor, pretty soon your doctor would be like, this thing's crazy. You know, I don't trust it. So you can't do that. So you have to have both a culture of adventure and innovation with systems to protect your customers with reliable results
Building Effective Teams
So, you know, I'm a big fan early in a business once you have the basic idea nailed down to surround yourself with people that are better than you. So I tend to set a bar and try to hire people and bring them into the team early. And I often look for, and this is a challenge for most early stage companies, you know, you don't want to bring somebody in to lead an organization where they want to build an army. I look for people that can do and lead.
Staying Connected in Company Growth
But a lot of entrepreneurs do that as it scales up and you get hundreds of employees and then you don't really know what's going on. I definitely spend a lot of time looking at people that have been very successful
The Importance of Staying Connected to Your Company
And so I do that myself. So when I start a company, I go out and close all the first deals myself. And I help work on the product. And I help typically do the budgets and the accounting. You do all of that early. So there's no question, you know how the whole company works. And I think that's pretty integral to how you build a company from the ground up. And then I imagine you're involved with the biggest that, that, that process. Then once you get that, the scale up, that's another layer of the cake. That's pretty hard to scale up, to make sure everything's tight and get those processes. You're integrally involved in that as well. Absolutely. And if you know it from the, from the beginning, as you scale up, you can kind of keep a pretty close sense for how things are going across the company. You know, the worst thing you can do is get out of touch with your own company. But a lot of entrepreneurs do that as it scales up and you get hundreds of employees and then you don't really know what's going on.
Ensuring AI Accuracy with Human Oversight
So what are you doing to enlist the providers to making sure you're getting really good validation and feedback on the customer? Because I know I'm not mentioning any EMRs or EHRs, but it seems like that's been a hard thing to get right. What are you doing differently? Well, I think we've built out a really, really incredible team of both AI experts, but also a big clinical team that had to train our system how to do this. And then we engaged a broad set of clinicians from the industry to look at what we're doing and to validate the results. So we've used a combination of AI and humans so that we're able to ensure that the quality we're delivering to the clinicians is really, really good. And I think that's probably how a lot of AI is going to be made practically useful over the next few years while it still evolves and gets better. It's just having humans oversee it. You know, I don't think we're yet at the point where AI could do it by itself. But with our clinical team, we're able to deliver very, very high levels of accuracy and really provide what the providers need, which is the information that they should focus their time and energy on.
AI Companionship: The Future of Senior Care
Well, it's actually really, really important. You know, having AI companions that you can interact with, you know, everybody knows that chatbots have been around for a while and you can get help when you go to some retailer and you ask a question. But what's about to occur, and you're going to see this over the next 12 to 18 months, are AI agents that will be able to interact with you so comfortably and so smoothly that you will actually enjoy it. And in some cases, you'll prefer it over a human. I've already experienced some of this. And again, it's pretty early in the technology side of this. But you can see it coming. And one area this will be super valuable is with seniors that need companionship. Loneliness is a huge problem in the senior space. AI will definitely be helpful here. And whether it's done through a texting kind of interface or whether it's over the phone talking to an AI agent, it absolutely is going to be here in a way that actually works. It's not hokey. And I think when it gets to that point, We're all going to really, really get excited about it.
Future of AI: From Planetary Health to Mars Shots
Well, you're going to see it. So the stuff that's being done now with kind of remote interfaces will be incorporated into amazing robots. I don't know if you've seen some of the new stuff that Boston Robotics is doing is absolutely crazy. So my prediction would be that you'll have that within 10 years. So you're going to have a very intelligent robot that can interact nicely with the human and be very helpful. It'll still be pretty costly in the beginning, but the cost will come down over time. But that is going to happen. And that's part of all of this AI evolution that we're going through. So this is going to be the funnest time. And in technology, this is going to be the best. So you're already forecasting the next. We're entering Mars next. So we're on planetary health first, but Mars next. So we are going to start Mars shots next. Planetary health. And that's not to just get confused. The name of the show is kind of a play on words. We want to take care of ourselves, our people, wherever we are. Agnostic to interstellar, whatever. But Mars, meaning the next evolution of what a moonshot is. A moonshot's a 10X and a Mars shot, you heard it first here, is a 100X acceleration of exponential. And that's only through AI and that AI exponential thinking. So I'm glad to be here first to announce that on here. And so I hope you're excited by that kind of stuff, David.
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130 David Norris | Co-Founder & CEO, Affineon Health, Inc., a AI FUND Portfolio company