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HealthTap, a Palo Alto, California-based company delivering connected health apps, announced a slew of platform updates today at VentureBeat’s Transform 2018 conference that “augmented the patient experience” with artificial intelligence. It also revealed that it has served more than seven billion answers to health patients’ queries — nearly one for each human on earth.
“It’s amazing to consider that what might once have required 7 billion doctor visits can now be achieved digitally thanks to the power of augmented intelligence,” Geoff Rutledge, chief medical officer at HealthTap, said. “We’re drawing on the shared expertise of … doctors to deliver meaningful insights, but we also understand how important it is to connect directly with a doctor when the time is right. By rewiring the health care experience to be as useful and convenient as your favorite consumer apps, everybody wins.”
Most patients interact with “Dr. AI,” HealthTap’s AI backend, through an app for the web, iOS, and Android. It learns about patients’ symptoms over time and directs them to next steps of care — anything from text-based answers culled from historical data to doctor-authored care guides, treatment reminders, and online videoconference consultations.
The new and improved HealthTap platform is “more accurate” than a traditional symptoms checker, HealthTap said, because it maps health recommendations information to the doctors who contributed them. And it boasts an improved interface that allows users to quickly review their symptoms.
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There’s plenty of competition in the “doctors on demand” market — Doctor on Demand, PlushCare, Teladoc, and American Well, to name a few. But HealthTap contends that its medical library, which now covers 800 topics, and its growing network of medical professionals set it apart.
In addition to its freely available consumer apps, HealthTap licenses apps to employers, insurance companies, and health systems. Hundreds of millions of users and more than 140,000 doctors use its platforms every day in over 170 countries.
It was one of the first companies of its kind to market with a Facebook Messenger chatbot, which launched in 2016 and allows patients to quickly find out what they might be suffering from and how to treat it, or contact doctors via text or video chat. In 2015, the company launched Compass, an enterprise app that helps employees manage their health care. (One of its first partners, the supply-chain company Flex, offered more than 12,000 of its employees access to personalized health care via HealthTap.)
To date, HealthTap has raised more than $88.3 million in funding from investors such as Khosla Ventures, Mayfield Fund, Mohr Davidow Ventures, and Innovation Endeavors.
