Credit Suisse as part of their Healthcare Disruptive Technologies & Innovations Series, hosted Ran Shaul K Health’s Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer for a small group investor meeting in New York City. K Health https://khealth.ai a mobile app, allows users to enter symptoms and then ask questions to an Artificial Intelligence system to enable users to make an accurate self-diagnosis.
Based on the results, the user has the choice to self-diagnosis or they can text a doctor through K MD. A team of 10 full time doctors and roughly 40 part time doctors are available. The company believes that sending texts are much different than video calls and has found that people are more comfortable texting rather than communicating via a video.
The cost of consulting the AI machine is free, and when a patient elects to text a doctor, K Health charges a $15 consultation fee. The company’s cost structure is less than the traditional copay of $25 for an in-person visit and less than a telemedicine visit for around $50. Company management notes that 50,000 sessions are completed every day on the app, and 15,000 of them are new sessions. The K MD service is provided in 38 states but has plans to expand the service into more states.
The company protects themselves from liability because the app is not considered a medical device, but rather an application that is offering a user information based on “people like me”. K Health does not tell their users what sickness they have, but rather what people in the databases with the same medical history and symptoms have experienced, as well as what the physician told the patients to do.
It was explained that the executives at K Health located both in N.Y and Tel Aviv, realized that the data needed was not sufficient in the EMR system since the details from the doctor’s notes were focused on checking symptoms but did not answer key questions that were needed.
Through a partnership with Maccabi (an Israeli HMO plan), K Health was able to get access to 20 years of history, 400 million doctor notes and hospital charts, 4 billion lab charts, and genetic data. Plus, the Israeli government provided support to leverage the data. Since the company uses AI, it is possible to constantly evolve and further improve the system.
K Health believes that the company needs to play a key role in reducing wasteful care. The next step is for the company to get a research institution to randomize the data and test the accuracy of K Health. Also, the company needs more data and believes that there are more opportunities to gather that information.
K Health has around 1.3 million users and are adding 15K new members a day. Combined with their new partnership with Anthem, the company will offer the app to Anthem users. As a result the company expects to reach 10 million users by FY 20.
For more information or to provide feedback, email Jailendra Singh, jailendra.singh@credit-suisse.com or call 212-326-8121.