The Pulse by Wharton Digital Health
00:28:07 · Arpan Parikh, Chase
[00:28:07] S1: Great question. We're taking a crawl, walk, run approach here. Right? So this quarter, Q4 of twenty twenty six, we will likely launch our first couple or handful of crawl versions of this, which is Chase, we just heard your doctor say you need X, Y, Z. Here's where you can get X. Here's where you can get y. Here's where you can get z. And we'll sort of, like, seamlessly hand you off to, like, the partner for fulfillment of x, of y, and of z. Right? The walk version of this, which we'll build, like, as a fast follow in q one, will be slightly more active orchestration. Right? And then the run version of this is we just do it seamlessly for you in the background and tee it up. All all of this with your permission, of course. Right? We're not gonna share our users' data with an external party without their permission to, for example, book a specialty appointment, but we'll ask for permission to do that. And once you as a user give us that, then, like, we can easily go and make that happen. So crawl q four twenty twenty six, walk q one twenty twenty seven, and then run q one q two twenty twenty seven. [00:29:10] S0: Got it. Okay. That's super helpful. And then other question is, are you... In terms of your partnership strategy, are you focusing first on a particular group like providers or pharmacies? You know, what... What's your sort of initial wedge there?
00:29:27 · Arpan Parikh
[00:29:27] S1: Yeah. So from a go to market perspective, it's a really interesting business. So so far, most of our users have actually been acquired via paid channels. And it's... What's really interesting... There's two... Actually, there's many interesting things, but two really interesting things are our power users at Kin today are Americans, like, age 50 to 90 in the middle of the country, which I really like. Right? And this is kind of going back to, like, why I chose to be a psychiatrist and, like, serving the underserved. It's like, you know, the coastal elites and people like you and I, like, we we we need kin, but, we're not gonna, you know, die if we don't have it. There are people in the middle of the country who will die if they don't have Kin. Right? Because we know a hundred thousand Americans die every year because they forgot or didn't understand what the doctor told them. And typically speaking, that's not people like you or I. Right? So I think it's very cool and compelling that we've been able to build a cutting edge AI software product that is actually so simple and delightful to use that, like, again, to go back to the example, the 90 year old grandpa in Iowa City is, like, using it 10 times a week. So I love that. And we've acquired most of those users using paid channels. What we're scaling up now, though, is a really interesting muscle of B2B2C distribution, which is we actually now get distribution inside the traditional healthcare ecosystem, which is a very defensible moat for us as a business, right? So today there are physician practices and ACOs and MSOs and resparent groups, and soon some large health systems from California to Florida and everywhere in between that actually recommend Kin to their patients at the point of care. And again, there's many parallels here between Kin and GoodRx. The way it works is we activate the practice. The practice is like, this is a no brainer, like why wouldn't we tell our patients about this? And then we send them a beautiful kit in the mail and they put collateral for Kin in their waiting rooms and in their exam rooms. And the front desk hands out tear sheets to every patient who walks in saying, This is something we recommend you download and use when you walk back to see the doctor, because they'll help you remember what the doctor told you.
00:31:42 · Arpan Parikh, Chase
And I think that's beautiful, number one, because it's defensible, but number two, because we're not only serving our primary users who are the patients, like we are also solving a major pain point that every doctor feels. And as one myself, it's really cool to be able to kind of solve pain points for like two very important stakeholders in the healthcare system. [00:32:03] S0: Mhmm. Yeah. I I can also see a value prop for payers given this increases patients follow-up and medication adherence, etcetera, which is going to improve outcomes and ultimately lower costs for them. So I'm sure you guys are thinking about all those things. [00:32:19] S1: A 100%. We're in active conversations right now with a number of health plans from across all lines of business, right? Commercial, Medicare Advantage, Medicaid, and it's exactly the value prop you described. The data suggests, and some of our modeling suggests, a tool like Kin that can reduce the amount of information a member of a health plan forgets, right, when they leave the office can drive somewhere between one and two and a half percent total cost of care savings to the bottom line. And one to 2% of the bottom line for a health plan is massive margin uplift. Right? [00:32:56] S0: Wow. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. Switching gears a little bit. So as you know, The Pulse is a a digital health care podcast. So I wanna learn a little bit more about Kin's tech stack and, you know, how everything runs on top of your your core platform.
00:33:14 · Arpan Parikh
[00:33:14] S1: Yeah. It's a great question. So Kyle, who is our cofounder and CTO, is a is a genius, and and he's architected things in in very intelligent ways. I'll I'll talk about this from two angles, like, from the product angle and then one from the business angle because I think they're both relevant. Right? From the product angle, in terms of the outputs we actually show to our users, we've architected every piece of that, you know, data ingestion and productionalization pathway to be agnostic to model. So we can, at the flip of a switch, like, point every step in the funnel to whatever model we want based on the flavor of the day, like, which model is giving us the best combination of quality of output, speed of output, and cost of output. Right? So, for the most part, so far in Kin's history... And, you know, Kin has been live as an app publicly for about eighteen weeks, so not not super long. Almost all of that or all of that has been contained inside GCP, inside Google. Right? And we made that decision for a couple of architecture reasons and security reasons. And we also, you know, in surveying the models, found that different iterations of, you know, Gemini models were were the best combination of cost, quality, and speed for us. So, you know, if you've used Kin or if any listeners have used Kin, like, you know, from a visit recording, there's multiple outputs we generate for our users. Right? We generate the title of the visit. We generate the clinical summary. We generate the detailed topics, and then we generate the action items. Like, we actually point each of those to different Gemini models because to generate the title of a visit, like, you don't need to use a frontier model for that. Right? But to generate the detailed summary, we wanna use a model that's a bit more robust. So we're very, like, picky and selective, and we have that flexibility in real time. Okay. So then flipping to the the business side, I personally can't imagine what it could have been like to run a business or be a CEO in a pre LLM era. Everyone says this. Right? With, like, whatever the preeminent technology of the day is, I couldn't imagine what it would have been like to do x without y. But we've been extremely intentional, and this is a combination of Kyle plus Amit in the way we wire up the whole business. And we literally wire every single system in in...
00:35:41 · Arpan Parikh
At Kin on the business side into data warehouse. On top of which we have a company harness, which Kyle has actually built from scratch. And what that lets us do is we have this, like, single source of truth, this single chatbot that knows everything about Kin in real time. And not only does it know everything about Kin, it can almost... It can do almost anything we need done for us inside this data warehouse. And that is incredibly powerful as a management team for a business to have your fingers, like, on top of and inside the data in a real time twenty four seven, three sixty five in a self serve way. So if I had one takeaway here, I actually think the business stuff is a little more interesting than, like, the product side stuff. And I would encourage folks who are building businesses or scaling businesses. Obviously, it's a privilege to have built a business natively this way, but if you're early in in the game, like, it's... It is a 110% worth the effort and intention to to wire it up this way because it gives... It will give you and it gives the management team a type of leverage that I don't think has ever been seen in, like, corporate America before.
00:36:55 · Chase
[00:36:55] S0: Yeah. Very cool. I know you mentioned AI, and and I I can't get through this podcast without asking Mhmm. Folks about AI. But how is... One thing about AI in particular that I'm curious about is how is Kin thinking about using AI for administrative purposes, like synthesizing notes, which it seems like you're already doing Yep. Versus sort of getting into the clinical territory of providing clinical guidance. There there is a fine line between, you know, nudging a patient along to take another action actually providing clinical guidance. So curious how Yeah, you think about