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Lotus Health AI
Making healthcare free
Happy Monday.
Free healthcare, you say?
It isn’t clickbait, we promise! Lotus Health AI wants to keep its platform free for users. It’s promising, but there’s a lot the team needs to navigate to make it achievable in the long run.
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Lotus Health AI is building an AI doctor, available through an iOS app. It combines peer-reviewed training data with patient information like medical records and wearable data to build a personalized primary care doctor that can provide diagnoses, prescriptions, and more. After determining the appropriate action, the model defers to certified clinicians for final approval.
Check it out: lotus.ai
Lotus’s business model is perhaps its most ambitious feature. The company is pursuing a model where it can keep its product free for patients, which may include sponsored content or subscriptions.
Raised $35 million Series A co-led by Kleiner Perkins and CRV
Created an AI model that unifies data from millions of peer-reviewed studies with patient medical data
KJ Dhaliwal, CEO of Lotus, has a background as a founder and engineer. Prior to Lotus, he founded Dil Mil, the largest and top-grossing South Asian dating app (which was acquired in 2019 for $50 million) and was a member of the founding team of Union Metrics (which was acquired by TrendKite). He pursued an education in engineering, graduating from UPenn and Drexel University.
At the same time, Dhaliwal has thought of the inefficiencies of the healthcare system since acting as a medical translator for his parents during his childhood. His interest in the problem space, combined with the innovation of LLMs and his background, led him to Lotus Health AI, a company with a bold vision for healthcare in the U.S.
Saying the healthcare industry in the U.S. needs a revamp is a cold take. And it has been one for a while.
At the same time, AI is becoming a trusted companion for everything from double-checking emails to making life-changing decisions. Consulting AI for medical advice is just one component of this larger trend, one that OpenAI has tackled with ChatGPT Health, as a complement rather than a replacement.
Lotus’s first value add to users is its custom AI doctor. Like ChatGPT, Lotus integrates with users’ medical information, like medical records and more trendy data like wearable data to answer patient-specific medical questions.
A sample conversation with Lotus AI (refilling prescriptions)
Unlike ChatGPT, Lotus provides diagnoses, prescriptions, specialist referrals, and more. To accomplish this, it works with certified clinicians to provide final approval. On the patient side, this improves reliability and trust in the product. And on the clinician side, it improves the throughput of patients seen by a claimed >10x.
If that wasn’t enough, the company is providing its service to patients free of charge. While it’s early to say what the company’s business model at scale will be, it aims to continue offering its product to patients for free. With this, the company goes from a mere technical innovation to a viable solution to one of America’s most pressing problems. If it makes this model work, it can change the landscape of healthcare, and becoming a Unicorn would be the least of its accomplishments.
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