Included Health is rolling out a new AI tool that could pit it against Big Tech’s latest health bets.
The healthcare startup has launched an AI-powered personal health assistant, Business Insider has learned exclusively. The tech draws on patients’ medical claims, benefits information, and other data to offer on-demand answers to health-related questions.
Included Health is tapping into a hot area in healthcare AI, where it’s competing against other health startups as well as tech heavyweights. Alphabet’s Verily released its own AI-powered app in October that allows patients to connect their medical records and ask a chatbot their health-related questions. OpenAI wants to win in consumer health tech, too, and is considering building tools such as its own personal health assistant, Business Insider reported in November.
Included Health has been scaling on the premise of personalizing how patients interact with their healthcare for over a decade. The company, which sells tech to about 300 employers and health plans to help patients better navigate their health benefits, tested its AI assistant for about 18 months to ensure its accuracy in smaller pilots before making it available to its entire employer base, CEO Owen Tripp said.
“This can’t be ChatGPT level of probability. It has to be precise,” he said.
Tripp is optimistic about patients receiving general health guidance from LLMs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude. Those AI tools can help patients learn more about their conditions and prepare for doctor’s visits, he said. But he emphasized that Included’s tech takes that guidance a step further.
“When it gets down to the business of actually taking care of oneself or taking care of somebody else, you’re going to need a lot of very secure, specific data and a whole context to go solve problems, including the exact medical history of that patient,” Tripp said.
Patient-facing healthcare AI sometimes walks a regulatory tightrope, especially if the tech provides personalized advice that effectively replaces the work clinicians are licensed to do. Tripp said he doubts that most large tech companies attempting to delve into medical records aggregation will want to grapple with that complexity.
“I predict, like many before them, they will pull back. It’s just hard, and the juice is often not worth the squeeze for these high-profile companies,” he said.
Health AI with humans in the loop
Included Health’s personal health assistant, called Dot, has become its members’ front door and the foundation for Included’s new products, said COO Nupur Srivastava.
Included recently put Dot in front of members during open enrollment to help answer their benefits questions, Srivastava said. The AI agent can also help patients prepare for doctor’s visits and send the clinician a summary of patients’ past visits ahead of time.
Included Health still employs plenty of its own clinicians and care advocates that members can talk to if they prefer. Srivastava also noted that if a patient mentions the term ‘suicide’ in a conversation with Dot, “within a minute, someone will call you.”
When asked about Big Tech and AI startups’ ambitions to build personalized health AI, Tripp said that Included Health is in talks with multiple potential partners to help them achieve those goals. He didn’t specify which companies it’s talking to, but he suggested some AI companies are focused on acquiring personalized health data that they can anonymize and use to train models.
“But when it comes to actually delivering patient care, we’re pretty confident that companies that are going to succeed will be the ones that have well-trained physicians licensed in all 50 states, delivering on a real-time platform, across mind, body, and wallet,” he said.
Included’s IPO delay
Included Health was supposed to go public in 2022. The startup had hired banks for an IPO push, but pulled out of its planned investor meetings when the market started to tank, Tripp told Business Insider in January.
Tripp declined to share specifics about Included’s exit strategy as of November. But Included is profitable, so the company doesn’t need to raise money through a public listing, he said. Included hasn’t publicly fundraised since it was formed from the 2021 merger of Grand Rounds and Doctor on Demand, and the company hasn’t shared its valuation.
The public markets haven’t been forgiving to healthcare startups. Only two digital health companies went public this year, Hinge Health and Omada Health. And while Hinge and Omada have fared far better than most companies that listed during digital health’s 2021 IPO wave, healthcare IPO hopefuls still face high standards to going public and significant volatility risks once they begin trading.
“The last few years in our space haven’t been a great commercial for being a public company,” Tripp said.
With so many developments in healthcare AI, however, Tripp does recognize that an IPO could create opportunities for Included Health to acquire other companies.
“I do think this is a time where there are going to be some interesting capabilities and technologies available in the market that allow us to provide even more service to our members,” he said. “I do have my eyes very open to how I would use capital to execute on some of those M&A events. That part is more important to me.”
