adi4213
10 hours ago
Congrats on the fundraise! I've been a fan of Counsel and admire Muthu's bullishness around asynchronous care delivery.
Overall, I felt the human-clinician side of the product worked quite well - the providers responded quite quickly, were well informed, and resulted in a quick turnaround to getting an Rx or some manner of outcome.
On the AI side, I would caution that your team really needs to work quite hard to maintain a defensible moat here.
> Other chatbots can’t connect to your medical records to provide personalized advice. They’re also not trained on the latest evidence-based research and can’t bring a physician into the conversation. With Counsel, you get medical-grade AI support backed by physician oversight, ensuring safe, high-quality care
"can’t connect to your medical records to provide personalized advice" - while I think Counsel's HIE integrations seem to work well (the AI responded with relevant data it had on me from the exchange), that's is reasonably easy to build (which does sound like the famous Dropbox comment).
"They’re also not trained on the latest evidence-based research" - on this note, I'd be curious if Counsel is capable of doing meaningful post-training to meet this endpoint (I'd assume it's not worth the resources to explore any manner of post-training). It strikes me as a good example of Sam Altman's steamrolling comment - I'd imagine the next waive of frontier models will represent a much greater level of health inference than post-training a current frontier model will accomplish.
tl;dr - I found myself immediately skipping over the AI functionality but did find the human physicians on Counsel's app to work great.
Granted, I'm curious to see the company's direction long-term — perhaps along the lines of a16z's healthcare superstaffing thesis (which sounds compelling) or aiming to have most encounters be between a user and AI (which I'm more bearish about, though it's definitely going to happen one day, of course).