Your AI Doctor Is Coming | Julie Yoo

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Health care is one of the most expensive industries in the world, yet time and medical expertise remain scarce. Julie Yoo thinks AI could change that. The a16z general partner joins Sophia Dew on MTS to explain why health care may benefit more from AI than almost any other industry, and why its slow adoption of technology could now be an advantage, allowing it to leapfrog legacy software and move directly to AI native workflows.

Julie also shares where she sees the biggest opportunities for founders, from consumer health care and AI native care delivery, to robotics and new payment models, and why the future could include an AI doctor in your pocket for life.

Sophia Dew (0:42)

Julie, welcome to MTS.

Julie Yoo (0:44)

Thanks so much for having me.

Sophia Dew (0:45)

I'm so excited to chat with you, and I'm so excited to get into this conversation, because often in some of the conversations around AI, people don't totally understand how it affects them, and I think health care is one of the most obvious places where you actually get to see that possible. But before we jump into all of the details there, I would love to just start a little bit with your personal story. Why is health care one of the big problems you wanted to solve?

Julie Yoo (1:08)

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I've been in the health care industry now for probably, gosh, 18 years at this point, and I was too early.

Sophia Dew (1:16)

You're too early, wow.

Julie Yoo (1:17)

I was actually a technologist by training, so out of school was a software engineer in the broader tech ecosystem, wrote code for the first seven years of my career, did a lot in the early era of e-commerce and fintech and manufacturing, etc., and then made a career change into health care right when the federal government was starting to talk about how do we digitize health care, because I'm sure if you talk to anyone about their experience in health care, one of the first things they'll say is, I'm being paper to death, I'm being fax machine to death.

We still have a long way to go, but imagine 20 years ago when the majority of the industry was actually still working on paper, doctors' offices still had those paper folders in their cabinets and nothing was digitized. The federal government decided to implement this massive program, which is a miraculous program when you think about it. Basically, what they said was, we will pay doctors tens of thousands of dollars to implement electronic health records. That was the way by which our industry came into the modern era, was over the course of about five to seven years, I would say. Literally, 100 percent of doctors in the US were heads down, implementing these kind of system of record electronic health record platforms. That's how we came into digitization. Right around then was when I made a career change thinking, okay, I've now seen what great looks like with respect to enterprise technology being applied to all these other industries, e-commerce, retail, manufacturing, etc.

Now it's time for healthcare to have its shot in the light. Of course, again, I was 15, 20 years too early, but obviously, so much of the evolution that's occurred in the last 10 years is really what I get excited about. And I initially started out in kind of the genomics era, which was one of the first areas where you saw just an explosion of data. We had the Human Genome Project, we now understood the fundamental code of humanity, and there was a whole industry that exploded around kind of computational biology, how does genomics tie to ultimate disease and things of that sort. So we did a couple of really cool companies in that area. And then ultimately around 2010 was when I started Chirus, which was my company, really with the thesis of some of what you described. So we as consumers experience extreme access issues when we try to get in touch with the healthcare system. The average wait time for a primary care doctor's appointment is weeks, if not months, in most major cities across the US., still today. And when we started to, when me and my co-founder started to talk to executives who were running these large hospitals and physician groups in the industry, what we didn't realize was they were telling us, yes, people are waiting at the door, but if you actually look at the way that our physicians are being utilized, we're still way under 100%, which was shocking, right? We had this paradox of demand out the door, and yet when you looked at utilization rates of physicians' time, it was way under 100%.