The Pulse by Wharton Digital Health
00:19:05 · Chase, Arpan Parikh
[00:19:05] S0: Yeah. Love that story. It's also showing the power of the the Wharton MBA network, so always love to hear stories like that. [00:19:12] S1: Always. Always. There's, like, so many examples of that over the course of just my own professional career and Yeah. You know, the last seven years since I left Philly. [00:19:20] S0: Yeah. Okay. Cool. Well, let's pivot just to talking more about Kin, helping our listeners understand the business model. So for those who aren't familiar, can you just walk us through what Kin is and Yeah. Really what you're trying to solve for?
00:19:35 · Arpan Parikh
[00:19:35] S1: Yeah, in its simplest format, Kin is a patient and caregiver copilot for healthcare. It's something we strongly believe has to exist and the world has needed for decades and no one's ever built it and we're here to do that. So what does that actually mean? Because like Copilot for healthcare can mean a million different things, right? Today, Kin has one core function and we think it's actually, you know, it's the most important function that patients and caregivers need, which is it's an ambient notetaker, right? For listeners who use granola, like this is granola for patients. And just like double click on why that's important, like we know from the published literature, the average American, number one, does not understand the majority of what their doctor tells them. And this is like, we're assuming English proficiency is not an issue here, right? Like they understand English, but they literally don't understand a technical conversation that happens with their doctor. And number two, we know even what they do understand, the average American forgets somewhere between fifty and eighty percent of what they remember by the time they reach their car, the parking lot after an appointment. So when you combine those two things, you have patients who, number one, don't fully ever understand what's happening in their healthcare journey, and number two, what they do understand, they forget. How can we be surprised that we don't have great health outcomes in this country? Right? I don't think we have a clinical problem in this country. I actually think we have the best clinical care on the planet in this country. Right? The technical expertise of physicians and healthcare professionals in this country is matched by no other country in the world. But where things fall apart is when the patient leaves the exam room. And guess what? That's where all the work happens is when the patient leaves the exam room. So we believe arming every American with a completely free notetaker that helps them functionally records the conversation, right, that they have with their doctor. And then within ninety seconds to two minutes, they get a beautiful, simple fifth grade reading level summary because that is the average reading proficiency of an American today of what the heck the doctor just said. They get a checklist of the things they have to do when they walk out.
00:21:55 · Arpan Parikh, Chase
And then we think most importantly, Kin lets the user share those summaries and checklists with whoever's important in their life in real time. Right? So maybe that's a spouse. Maybe that's an adult child that lives across the country and is trying to help mom navigate her cancer journey. Maybe that's a home health aide who needs to know the latest changes to the medication regimen the cardiologist is making. So that's the core function of Kin today, an ambient scribe that takes notes and creates beautiful shareable summaries. And you can then imagine all of the really cool stuff you can build and hang on top of and off of that backbone. Right? Because just the conversational data creates an incredibly robust graph of our user's health, right? We get so many discrete data points about conditions and diagnoses and symptoms and treatments and medications and diagnostics. And as we stitch those together over two, five, 10, 20, 30, 50 visits, there's no single source of healthcare data in this country that has the breadth and depth of the data that we are collating on behalf of our users. And then that lets us actually create incredible experiences for our users. [00:23:04] S0: Yeah. No. I I think this kind of dataset is especially important for those who are... Who aren't in one place all the time. [00:23:12] S1: So just
00:23:12 · Arpan Parikh, Chase
[00:23:12] S1: So just [00:23:12] S0: for for an example, in my life, I've moved from DC to New York to Philly and having to navigate... Having... Seeing doctors in all of those places and the... Their EHRs aren't connecting on the back end and trying to gather all the different lab results, etcetera. It's it's quite challenging for someone that works in health care. So so, yeah, I I think it's a great problem that you're tackling. One thing I wanna dive into more is the fact that Kin is free for patients. So where, you know, what's your business model? Where does your revenue come from? How do you make it work if patients aren't paying?
00:23:47 · Arpan Parikh
[00:23:47] S1: Great question. So number one, let me just explain like why we have this super strong belief it has to be free, and then I'll... We can dig into, like, then where does the commercial angle come from? Because it it is a business. Right? So we have this very strong belief that it has to be free because the folks who need Kin the most are the people who cannot afford to pay for an app like this. Right? We know both from our own user research plus, like, now real user feedback and data that, like, Americans would pay for something like this. Right? Like, we have users who in interviews tell us, like, if you took this away from me, like, I would happily pay you for this every month. But the person who really needs Kin is like the 85 year old grandpa in rural Ohio who is on a fixed income and Social Security disability and has congestive heart failure and chronic kidney disease and cannot keep things straight. Right? Like, that person can't afford $5 a month to pay for an app, and that's who needs it the most. So that is the core root of this idea that Kin should be free. Okay. Great. Kin should be free. How do you make it free and sustainable in a way that is still ethical and protects the rights and the privacy of the patient? Right? Because there's a world in which there's a simple way to monetize this, which is you monetize the data. Right? I know in this world that we now live in, like, that's something we all think about every single day, right? It's like, what's happening to all of our data? And I'm sure both you and I and everyone listening to this podcast, like, you know, we use tools that are free or close to free, and, like, we know the way it's free is, like, they're selling the data on the back end. That is not Kin's model. It's, like, we do not sell any of our users' data. We don't we don't even train models on our users' data. Our users remain a 100% in control of who sees it. They can delete their data whenever they want, no questions asked, and it's wiped off the face of the earth. So then where is the commercial angle? Here, we we took some inspiration, not knowing it from GoodRx, right, Which is, as you think about the dataset that we have with each of our users, we know in real time, like, the next steps they need to take in their healthcare journeys, right?
00:26:08 · Arpan Parikh
Like, Kin here is the primary care doctor tell the grandpa in rural Ohio, like, Joe, you need to see a cardiologist, and I'm going to refer you to physical therapy. Right? And not only do we know that in real time because we hear the doctor say it, like, we also have the privilege of living on Joe's cell phone, which is such a privileged place to live as an app. Right? We have direct connection to our user. So now as Joe walks out of his primary care doctor's office, like, Kin is an incredible place to actually connect him to the things he needs, right? The cardiologist, the physical therapist, maybe the prescription discount program for the expensive branded med his doctor's about to start him on, maybe the vitamin or supplement that the doctor recommended that's available on Amazon. So now, as you think about what we call this action and orchestration layer, orchestration is way overused in tech circles and AI and healthcare circles in 2026, this is true orchestration. It's like we know what the user needs in real time, and we're now building the fulfillment partners to help our users get those things in a way that it's magical to them. So like, it's a truly delightful moment. Like, just imagine you walk out of a doctor's office and the doctor told you to do five things, and now you have an app on your phone that's already gone and gotten you those five things before, like, you reach your car or the subway. That's, like, an incredible experience as a patient in America. And those are inherently extremely commercial streams that we just get to dip into and participate in. So we like that as our model way more than relying on, you know, charging the user a monthly or annual subscription fee for the app itself.