Counsel's medical AI available soon in your Oura ring app

Over 100 million people in the US are without a dedicated doctor. But it shouldn't have to be that way. The technology to scale medical advice exists today. I’m proud that @a16z is doubling down to co-lead @CounselHealth’s Series A alongside our friends at @GVteam. On top of that, Counsel's medical AI is now available to anyone. Our healthcare system is designed to ration access to our scarcest resource – doctor time. And in a world where clinician capacity is scarce, people are forced to turn to Google or ChatGPT for answers. Consumers ultimately need clinical resolution: the prescription, the lab test, the specialist appointment, the follow-up, the ongoing guidance and encouragement to change their lifestyle. Counsel is building healthcare abundance for the AI era. We led Counsel’s seed financing last year because of our conviction in this bold idea: that we can build a world in which everyone has their own doctor for life. They’ve seen immense progress under the leadership of @malagappan, who was previously a Stanford-trained physician, AI researcher, and healthtech executive. I’m delighted to expand our support as Counsel redefines how we access healthcare. @julesyoo @a16zBioHealth

AI will be amazing for our health

We @a16z are excited to announce our investment into @CounselHealth, as they offer consumers 24/7 access to personalized medical advice from expert physicians within minutes. In a world where we can call a (driverless!) car, order a meal, and pay a friend -- all with a tap and a swipe on our phone -- we expect to find reliable medical answers about our health just as easily. It is no surprise that, today, the fastest-growing care setting isn’t the hospital or the home, it’s the mobile phone. However, our healthcare system is under tremendous strain. Wait times to see a doctor in many cities can exceed 40 days, while patient messages for medical advice have increased sixfold in the past decade. Doctors deal with increasing information overload at the point of care, leading to worsening burnout, growing labor shortages, and greater barriers to accessing care. Counsel Health is building a national medical practice that provides everyone unlimited, 24/7 access to personalized medical advice from expert physicians. Their solution is to go upstream of the problem: by providing the appropriate clinical expertise to patients right away, before they are bounced around the healthcare system, Counsel can prevent unnecessary medical expenses and avoidable stress. Under the hood, Counsel does this sustainably by empowering their clinicians with “Ironman suits for doctors” -- specialized medical co-pilots through which they leverage the collective knowledge of the best of their peers and multiply their patient reach well beyond traditional medical practices. @malagappan, along with @justinyu__, @khakrish, and the rest of the Counsel team together bring a rare combination of experiences building AI systems, scaling healthcare operations, and delivering patient care with which to design a new care model for a post-large-language-model world. We are thrilled to lead Counsel’s seed financing, alongside our friends at Asymmetric, Floodgate, PearVC, FYSK, and many more. Thanks to Counsel, we’re closer to a future in which everyone can feel like they have “a doctor in the family”. @a16zBioHealth, @julesyoo, @sk_leung, @rajko_rad, @liubowen16