Dan Rodrigues

“The thing I am most proud of is that because we built the entire tech stack that we own, from the member app, the company, the client dashboard, to electronic medical records systems and other internal tooling.   We enable providers to spend more time with the patient.” How much longer? 3x longer than the average primary care visit.   This week on the Digital Health Heavyweights Podcast I sit down with Joseph Kitonga, CEO and founder of Vitable Health. Joseph shares his journey from a family background in caregiving to creating a health plan that addresses the needs of underserved workers. He discusses the inspiration behind Vitable, his experience with the Thiel Fellowship, the prestigious Y Combinator,and the unique aspects of Vitable's direct primary care model.   “We are growing extremely quickly” The conversation also covers the challenges of hybrid care models, the importance of empathy in healthcare, and the company's growth trajectory. Joseph emphasizes the need for accessible healthcare and shares insights on building a successful startup in the healthcare space.   How is Vitable impacting clients? An average savings of about 12%   Takeaways ✨ Joseph's family background in caregiving inspired him to create Vitable Health. 💙 Vitable Health aims to provide affordable healthcare for underserved workers. 🎓 The Thiel Fellowship provided Joseph with the opportunity to focus on his startup. 🚪 Vitable's model reduces barriers to accessing primary care services. 📈 The company has about 100,000 members and is growing rapidly. 💻 Vitable's approach integrates in-home and virtual care effectively. 🤝 Building empathy through direct interaction with clients is crucial for Vitable. 🗣️ Joseph emphasizes the importance of talking to users to build a successful product. 🚀 The Y Combinator experience was pivotal for Vitable's growth. 🧘 Joseph practices mindfulness and reading to manage stress and maintain focus. Check out the episode and be sure to like comment and subsc https://lnkd.in/dVAzHMQZ

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Three incredible days at #JPM2026. Same conversation with 10+ health system execs: "We're building our AI strategy. Evaluating vendors. Need to pick the right partners." This sounds familiar. 2009-2012: The EHR decision. After the HITECH Act, health systems spent 18-24 months evaluating Epic vs. Cerner. Consultants. Committees. RFPs. Multi-year implementations. The logic made sense: EHRs were monolithic platforms with huge switching costs. You had to get it right. 2025: The AI decision. I'm watching health systems do the same thing. "AI steering committees." "Strategic AI partner" RFPs. Trying to pick winners. But there's a critical difference: EHRs were a single, massive platform decision. AI in healthcare is dozens of different problems that need dozens of different solutions. Here's what health systems are missing: They're looking for "the AI vendor" when they should be building "an AI portfolio." There's no single AI platform that solves:   → Documentation burden (ambient notes) → Radiology throughput (workflow optimization) → Clinical trials matching → Revenue cycle optimization (across specialties) → Clinical decision support These are different problems. Different technologies. Different vendors. Different timelines. Some need FDA clearance and 24-month validations. Some can pilot in 90 days. Some integrate with Epic. Some replace parts of Epic. You can't solve all of these with one "strategic AI partnership”....no matter that Anthropic is saying right now. <ducks> The AI landscape is evolving too fast for monogamous vendor relationships. 6 months ago: GPT-4 for clinical documentation. Today: Ambient listening, agentic workflows, multimodal imaging analysis. 6 months from now: Something else entirely. That's why you need exposure across the whole landscape—not a bet on one vendor. The mistake I see health systems making: Approach 1: "Strategic Partner" Strategy Pick one AI vendor → Enterprise deal → 3-year commitment → Hope they solve everything Result: You're locked in. Technology moves on. You're stuck in vendor negotiations while competitors move faster. Approach 2: "Portfolio Strategy" Deploy capital across multiple companies → Take equity → Co-develop solutions → Maintain optionality Result: You capture upside. You shape products. You're first to new capabilities. You have relationships across the ecosystem. After 20 years building innovation platforms at JPMorgan, Mousse Partners, Blueprint Health, Junto Health, Atlantic Health: In fast-moving markets, portfolio strategies beat single-vendor bets. Healthcare AI is moving fast. The question isn't "Which AI vendor should we pick?" The question is: "How do we build an AI portfolio that gives us the most optionality" If you're thinking about this, let's talk. 📩 douglas.m.hayes@gmail.com ☎️ 215-620-2032 #healthcareAI #digitalhealth #venturecapital #innovation

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Halving health-inequality gaps starts with interoperable data. Right now, care differs not because of medicine - but because of where data lives. Different systems. Different formats. Different truths. When records don’t move, inequality grows. Interoperability isn’t just a tech win. It’s a social one: A rural clinic sees the same record as a city hospital. Prevention isn’t blocked by postcode. AI works on everyone, not just the well-documented few. Health equity begins when data flows. Health equity begins when data flows. Because connected data saves lives.

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𝟲 𝗵𝗲𝗮𝗹𝘁𝗵𝘁𝗲𝗰𝗵 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘁𝘂𝗽𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗿𝗮𝗶𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝗰𝗮𝗽𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘄𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝗻𝗼𝗶𝘀𝗲 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗺𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗵𝘀 🚀 Hello Patient– $22.5M Series A (Austin): Conversational AI agents integrated with EHRs to handle calls, triage, scheduling, and follow-ups. CEO Alex Cohen, Director of Engineering Patrick McJury & Head of Design & Product Taylor Dunham FallCall Solutions – $1.5M Seed (Connecticut) Mobile + wearable emergency platform for seniors, integrated with Apple Watch and smart devices. CEO Shea Gregg, MD & Kristin Gregg Noctrix Health, Inc. Health – $33.5M (California): Wearable therapy device (Nidra™) for Restless Legs Syndrome, offering a non-pharma treatment alternative. CEO Shri Raghunathan & Director of Software Engineering Ben Shelly Predoc – $30M (New York) AI engine that automates clinical document processing (including faxes), already reducing oncologist review time by 70%. CEO Nish Hari, Director of Engineering Ethan Brown & Director of AI Michael Frantz, PhD Citizen Health – $30M Series A (San Mateo) AI-powered virtual advocate for rare disease patients, combining longitudinal community data with personalized support. CEO Farid Vij, Head of Engineering  Lin Wan & COO Hila Moyal Isaac Health – $10.5M Series A (New York) Home-based cognitive care platform using AI to detect, diagnose, and manage Alzheimer’s earlier. CEO Julius Bruch, MD PhD & Head of Engineering Karlan Eberhardt Adding direct links to the funding news in the comments. 👋 follow me for more lists like this every week ✨ thank you to MedCity News, Fierce Healthcare & Crunchbase for sourcing #HealthTech #AI #Biotech #HealthcareInnovation #Startups #Funding

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We don't need any more EHRs or practice management for X (e.g. Longevity EHRs for longevity practices). This mindset of niche'ing down vertical SaaS is so old and tired with tons of data proving how it does not work and only leads to increased costs with more fragmentation. Modularity is and has always been the future of healthcare technology but because healthcare has always healthcare'd, nothing has ever truly integrated the way we wanted it to and the only way to somewhat accomplish "seamless" user experiences was to build it custom. However, this is speaking in pre-agentic terms where LLM models do not exist and there's only two options to operate, 1. white-label one of the legacy EHR-enablement platforms or 2. hire a dev team to stack on top of a tech-enabled product using their APIs. Now fast forward to today where agentic care is possible, LLMs are open sourced and HIPAA complaint, and we have new foundational language protocols for faster and more secure integrations (e.g. MCP). There is no longer a need for EHR or practice management for X. The vertical is outpatient care delivery in a PRIVATE PRACTICE setting, not longevity, not direct primary care, not medspa's or whatever else we want to try to niche down healthcare model in order to satisfy the VC establishment. Private practice is the ultimate vertical and a truly agentic care-enabled modular platform will be the ultimate winner. #HealthcareOnLinked #PrivatePractice #AgenticCare

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Doximity just released a free AI scribe for US clinicians, accelerating commoditization/the race to the bottom. Their product won’t integrate into the EHR like Abridge, but it’ll be interesting to see how much it impacts their ability to acquire customers, drive usage and maintain retention. This is the start of a trend that will continue across every vertical market. Counterpositioning with free products to undercut upstarts and incumbents alike. Buckle up. Your margin is someone else’s opportunity.

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Thanks MedCity News for publishing my perspective on AI's disruption of the EMR market. https://lnkd.in/gmBpksaH As we watch AI scribes command sky-high valuations, established EMR companies with scaled customer adoption trade at a fraction of those multiples. That's because today's most widely adopted EMRs, especially in outpatient care, were not built to coordinate care across systems. And that means they cannot support safe and effective adoption of AI and agents. It brings us to a crossroads. Will AI just add more noise and conflict between payers and providers? If so, clinicians and patients will lose out while profits accrue to the powerful few. Or will AI accelerate better everyday medicine? There's real promise, but that vision requires AI to integrate safely into established clinical, financial, and operational workflows. I believe in the happy path for AI in healthcare but it simply will not happen in legacy EMRs. They are walled gardens built for compliance and billing, with no ability to integrate other software, let alone coordinate or govern autonomous agents. These tools are rate limiting our progress. The path forward requires three critical elements: 🔗 Agents work together with the right tools and context, in a unified data architecture 🤝 Care teams maintain their leverage as agents deeply integrate with established workflows 🔎 Rigorous evaluation systems are in place to ensure AI is deployed safely and with process for continuous improvement We're building this future at Canvas Medical.

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Ferrum Health CEO and Co-Founder Pelu Tran led a focused 45-minute session on what it takes to build real governance around clinical AI, and why so many health systems are struggling without it. In this recording, you'll learn: 🌐 What AI governance should actually look like inside a hospital 🌐 Who needs to be involved beyond just IT 🌐 How to manage AI sprawl and reduce operational strain 🌐 Ways to deploy AI responsibly without slowing innovation Watch on demand now: https://hubs.ly/Q03Bdk340

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As we enter the post-EHR era, it’s worth understanding who won the first battle: Epic, the leading U.S. EHR founded by Judith Faulkner. These insights are based on the recent "Acquired podcast", covering Epic’s story. Here are the key takeaways: 1️⃣𝐉𝐮𝐝𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐅𝐚𝐮𝐥𝐤𝐧𝐞𝐫: 𝐭𝐡𝐞 #𝟏 𝐟𝐞𝐦𝐚𝐥𝐞 𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐞𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐮𝐫 Judith Faulkner may not be widely known, but she deserves a seat alongside Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. A generational talent (she learned Fortran in a week), Faulkner built the world’s leading #EHR system from scratch.  2️⃣ 𝐊𝐚𝐢𝐬𝐞𝐫 𝐏𝐞𝐫𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐞 𝐢𝐧 𝟐𝟎𝟎𝟑: 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐟𝐢𝐫𝐬𝐭 𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐦𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐄𝐩𝐢𝐜 KP, the largest hospital system in the U.S., first tried to build its own EHR, and failed. IBM won the initial KP tender, then failed too. In the final round, #Epic and Cerner were the last two standing. The night before the pitch, Epic president Carl Dvorak flew to California, saw the plan, and said, “No, we need an Excel model showing KP’s daily transaction flow and how our system can handle it with zero downtime.” That’s how Epic won. 3️⃣ 𝐖𝐡𝐲 𝐢𝐬 𝐄𝐩𝐢𝐜 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐧𝐮𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫 𝟏? 𝐓𝐰𝐨 𝐦𝐚𝐢𝐧 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐨𝐧𝐬: 𝐫𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐚𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 Epic’s reliability comes from its single, unified database (Chronicles), unlike competitors who patched systems together through mergers. When Epic gives a timeline and budget, it usually delivers. Its clinical and billing systems run on the same codebase, ensuring nothing gets lost between departments. For #hospitals seeking seamless, end-to-end operations and financial stability, Epic’s architecture is hard to beat. ⚠️ Now, as we enter 2025, the post-EHR era is beginning, and we’re at a crossroads, with several open questions: ➡️ 𝐒𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐥𝐞 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐬𝐲𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐦 𝐯𝐬. 𝐛𝐞𝐬𝐭-𝐨𝐟-𝐛𝐫𝐞𝐞𝐝? Other industries have seen value chains unbundled and then re-bundled through platformization. Waystar (RCM) is gaining traction in the U.S. by excelling in its niche. Can it expand and re-bundle beyond RCM? ➡️ 𝐖𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐡𝐨𝐬𝐩𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐬 𝐝𝐢𝐬𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐞𝐚𝐫? The hospital business model is broken and likely to be unbundled. What does that mean for the healthcare tech stack? ➡️ 𝐖𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐯𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐫𝐞𝐠𝐚𝐢𝐧 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐨𝐥? Large hospitals tried to build / control their own EMR/EHR during the early EHR era (e.g., KP) and failed. Will they succeed in the post-EHR era? ➡️ 𝐖𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐄𝐩𝐢𝐜’𝐬 𝐜𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐦𝐚𝐢𝐧 𝐚𝐧 𝐚𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐭? Epic enforces strict protocols, no remote work, and near-robotic employee behavior. This worked over the last 20 years. But will it hold up in a future that demands agility and creativity? ➡️ 𝐄𝐩𝐢𝐜 𝐝𝐢𝐠𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐳𝐞𝐝 𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐞. 𝐖𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐀𝐈 𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦 𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐞? Tempus AI describes Epic as a “system of records,” arguing that future winners will be “systems of insights". Can Epic still win in this new, AI-driven world? #healthtech #healthcare

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We talk about healthcare interoperability like it’s the goal. It isn’t. The goal is better treatment and healthier patients. Data only matters when it changes decisions. What’s uncomfortable is how limited evidence we have that HIEs improve clinical outcomes: even ~15 years into large-scale exchanges. A lot of the literature is observational, results are mixed, and we rarely measure downstream clinical impact. After building on top of HIE data with Abstractive Health, my take: it’s never been about the data. It’s been about how it gets used. If exchanges mostly move documents, it’s not surprising outcomes are hard to prove. I’d love to be measured on treatment impact. Clinicians want that too. Which raises a bigger question: why do we measure connectivity as the finish line instead of treatment impact? Part of the answer: in health data exchange there’s a principal-agent problem. Clinicians are the principals, and exchange networks/companies are the agents acting on their behalf. What you sell and how you market it shapes what you get optimized for. If you market better access, you'll often attract buyers who want data. If you market better care, you'll often attract buyers who own outcomes. I’m still not sure what the right measurement looks like. But what feels missing is an incentive structure tied to treatment. Maybe we need an independent third party to score HIE vendors on that. One review on HIE and outcomes: https://lnkd.in/eiCDtyQg Full blog article here: https://lnkd.in/eXHAGsvR #HealthIT #Interoperability #ClinicalWorkflows #AIinHealthcare

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My 7 biggest takeaways from The Permanente Medical Group, Inc. experience using AI Scribes after 1 year. This is particularly interesting given the switch from Nabla to Abridge after the decision to go enterprise-wide with AI Scribes by Kaiser Permanente. 1️⃣  72% of physicians used the AI Scribe at least once among a sample of 10,000+ physicians who were given access Also, at the end of 2024 the adoption curve was still trending up, so it may not have plateaued just yet. 2️⃣ 34% of physicians used AI Scribes in at least 100 patient encounters… but that means the other 38% of physicians who tried it only used it for an average of less than 0.38 patient encounters per work day (< 100 encounters / 260 work days) In other words, usage is driven by the top cohort of users. This is what will drive the argument from health systems from why the pricing model should not be “per user” and why the enterprise license should be at a fraction of the original “per user” costs. Ambient vendors will argue that the “per user” pricing already baked in this distribution of usage among possible users, and this is still a fraction of what hiring human scribes for every clinician would cost. 3️⃣ Highest physician adoption was among mental health (42%), primary care (32%) and emergency medicine (32%), based on % adoption by clinicians in each specialty. No real surprises here. 4️⃣ The top 33% of physicians who tried the AI Scribe (“High Users”) were responsible for an overwhelming 89% of the total usage of the AI scribe. In fact, High Users also were the ones who needed it the most - as pre-AI Scribe they tended to be physicians with more time spent in the EHR per appointment and fewer patient visits per day. Not provided: did High Users end up now doing more patient visits per day than before? 5️⃣By the end of 2024, High Users spent even less time in notes than Low Users and Non-Users (i.e. didn’t try AI scribes even once) → High Users went from 4.5 minutes/note to 2.5 minutes/note → Low Users went from 3.75 minutes/note to 2.9 minutes/note → Non-Users went from 3.75 minutes/note to 3.4 minutes/note Will data showing that maybe they could save 30 seconds per note motivate the Non-Users to become Users? I’d guess No. 6️⃣ 57% of patients experienced no difference in time physicians spent looking at a computer screen (caveat: small n=118 sample) This was surprising. Begs the question: were some physicians weren’t looking at a screen much normally during a visit, or whether they just couldn’t shake the habit? 7️⃣ Adoption of AI Scribes were mostly agnostic to the vendor Although the total physician adoption essentially doubled after switching vendors, the team felt that this was related more to: → The positive experience of Vendor 1’s pilot → Increased awareness and support provided over 2024 → Implementation of EHR integration with Vendor 2 Hard to tell how KP truly felt about this or if they were just being nice. Full article in the comments 👇

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Several people have asked what Bioscope.AI is all about. Imagine you're a busy primary care physician, increasingly working in a concierge practice. Your patients are paying you anywhere from $5k-20k a year and expect high quality, sophisticated care. But you're just trying to keep your head above water. You have no hope of personalizing their treatment based on their genetics, the particular microbes that populate their gut, the environmental toxins they're exposed to, or anything else. Now, imagine if you had your own dedicated team of experts - a geneticist, an internist, a cardiologist, a microbiome expert, a neurologist, etc. - and you could give them all your patient's information and let them go off for a few days. Further imagine that after deep examination of all that information they came back to you with a detailed set of recommendations for your patient - medications, supplements, gut-altering probiotics, lifestyle changes, and further diagnostic tests. You would be able to ask follow-up questions and delve into the specifics to your heart's content. Well that's what we're building at Bioscope - a team of AI-based experts to serve as a physician's round-the-clock consultant. This is the future of medicine. Any physician lacking it will be left behind, along with his or her patients. The tsunami is here.

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Two healthcare axioms can explain much about effectively serving patients: Care delivery isn’t just local, it’s personal; and no company can succeed without partners. I knew when I co-founded Sprinter Health in 2021 with Cameron Behar that we would have to find a way to work within the existing ecosystem while offering a better patient experience, or we wouldn’t make much of a mark.  Cameron and I both shared a technology background, so we spent most of our formative conversations trying to figure out how to use tech to be useful, without it overshadowing the patient interaction or becoming performative. I'm pleased to announce a $55M Series B round led by Holly Maloney and General Catalyst – GC initially led our Seed round in 2021, and they were the right partner to help us push harder on our mission as we really started to scale. Holly and the GC team share our passion to expand access to care for people who need it most, all while improving outcomes and delivering real value to health plans and providers.  We’re also grateful to our participating investors from Andreessen Horowitz Bio + Health, the Regents of the University of California, Google Ventures, Accel, and more. By investing heavily in using technology to make an in-home care delivery model not just possible but actually viable, we’ve been able to make huge strides in helping patients across the country - almost 100,000 now - and increasing access to care. From the ground up, we’ve created a logistics, data, and engagement platform that allows us to be extremely efficient with where we deliver care, making Sprinter visits the highest ROI in terms of care gaps closed for plans in the industry, all while maintaining over a 90+ NPS.  We call our mission “Healthcare Untethered” - the idea that most resonates with us is making sure people get the preventive care they need at no personal cost. We are extremely ambitious, and have come a long way from starting with basic blood draws, to now having over 20 services that run the gamut from hypertension checks, diabetic retinal exams, to full annual wellness exams from NPs delivered in a hybrid fashion. We first launched in just California around 2022, and now will be in over 20 states before the end of this year. Our “Sprinters” – cross-trained as medical assistants, community health workers, and phlebotomists – have served patients from ages three to 103, on behalf of national health plans. I’m extremely proud of what the team has achieved and thankful to all our supporters, but we have a long - a LONG - way to go to reach the impact that we know we are capable of. Hand-in-hand with the quality and risk departments of health plans, Sprinter Health will be seeing millions of patients over the upcoming years, so please reach out if you want to go on this journey together!

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Today Salubrum (Backed by Forum Ventures) is introducing the Patient Intent Score. Healthcare growth has relied for too long on rough proxies like demographics, keywords, and broad targeting. We built The Patient Intent Score to replace guesswork with signal, using privacy-safe healthcare and consumer datasets including claims-based insights, medical propensity models, social determinants of health, and verified consumer records. The output is a single score that helps healthcare brands and providers prioritize the patients most likely to convert, and deploy spend with greater precision and accountability. The best part is, leads with the given score can be pipelined directly into the CRMs of healthcare brands, allowing them to make a difference immediately. This product reflects our broader shift toward building the demand intelligence layer for healthcare and the bet we are making on consumerization of healthcare. We’ll be sharing more on how it works, and where it’s already being applied, in the weeks ahead. Learn more: https://www.salubrum.com/

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Changing Healthcare's Innovation Playbook - Fascinating healthcare policy shifts creating opportunities for AI-native startups: 1. CMMI's aggressive push for digital health in disease prevention 2. FDA deploying GenAI to accelerate regulatory reviews! 3. Tension between deregulation demands and AI safety needs At C10 Labs, in healthcare we're backing founders building at these intersection of policy evolution, AI first thinking and technological capability. The winners will navigate regulation and leverage it as competitive advantage. Think where the puck is moving and build to it faster and better. #HealthTech #AIinHealthcare #VentureCapital C10 Labs

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