Wouldn’t it be great if we all had a little, digital minion handling all the small back-and forth chores of our medical care?
On Thursday, Ro is officially announcing the launch of its new AI health agent, designed to do more than a health inquiry on ChatGPT. It’s the latest in a long lineup of healthcare agents — from insurers, telehealth providers, electronic health record systems, and regular chatbots — promising to cut down patient wait times, increase access to care, and improve personalized health recommendations with AI.
Ro CEO and co-founder Zach Reitano gave Business Insider an exclusive preview of Ro’s new agent, called Robin, showing us how the tool could be used to perform routine tasks like managing side effects, meal planning, or making medication changes.
A founder’s mission: disrupt healthcare delivery with AI agents
Reitano said this isn’t just about making life more convenient for Ro’s current subscribers, though that is the starting point. His long-term goal is to identify pain points where Ro customers need to seek out specialists for common conditions or prescriptions, then start offering more and more of that care in-house, becoming your go-to “quarterback” for the entire American healthcare system.
“I think it’s very unlikely to me that one provider or one system handles 100% of someone’s care, but I do think it is quite likely that there is one place in someone’s life that serves as that quarterback and helps them navigate the rest of the healthcare system,” he said. “We hope to be able to just continue to increase those concentric circles, where instead of saying you might be better suited outside of the Ro ecosystem, we would want you to be better suited in it.”
When I asked him if his “ultimate goal” is to become a full-service virtual clinic, he said yeah, that’s the hope.
For now, though, Ro’s AI agent uses information from doctors, patient feedback, prescriptions, and smartphones to try to personalize recommendations for medication changes, dosing tweaks, or habits that might improve side effects.
“The underlying premise is: If I have your underlying health information, I can provide more informed and better things, better recommendations,” telehealth researcher Dr. Ateev Mehrotra, chair of the health policy department at Brown University, said.
Only issue is, we don’t yet know if that’s true.
“People are giving up a lot of data for this, and so you really have to say that it truly is going to give you something,” Mehrota added. “It sounds cool in theory, I’m not saying it’s a bad idea. I would love some evidence before millions of Americans start doing this.”
Personally, Mehrotra says he’d be much more likely to try out one of the AI agents embedded into an official electronic health record system, which has access to everything he’s told his regular doctors and specialists within a specific hospital system and which — critically — has to abide by strict privacy rules. (Business Insider did not see Ro’s privacy policy for Robin.)
“My health system doesn’t have the weird financial incentives that we’re worried about with Ro,” he said. “More data, less financial incentives, I might use that.”
Reitano says ultimately, it’s not in his company’s interests to go after short-term profits at the expense of a good patient experience.
“We fight for patients and we serve you, and if we don’t, then we go out of business,” he said.
- Zach Reitano is a speaker at Business Insider’s The Long Play event on Thursday.
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