Building the World's Most-used Medical AI | Dr. Thomas Kelly of Heidi - E716
"If you think about a healthcare system, the choke point is a doctor's time and attention. Anything that takes that up has a direct impact on patient outcomes because it slows down bed movement, reduces the speed of different interventions, and you're actually constantly triaging your own time so you end up only seeing the sickest patients. Paperwork is stealing the capacity away from an already very tightly constrained system."
"GPT-4 came out, and that changed the rules. We had to fire half the team, tell customers that we weren't going to fulfill our promises, tell investors that the thesis they invested behind was not correct, and that models were no longer a differentiating factor. In order for Heidi to succeed, we had to pivot to be a product company. It's pretty crazy to have gone from almost death to the most used healthcare AI tool globally."
"Because of the model focus at Heidi, we're actually quite strong in tricky visits where it's Malay, Hokkien, English, and a bit of Singlish, and you're trying to output the note in another language. You naturally gravitate towards the markets where the foundation models don't do as well out of the box. Especially in Asia, because it's not the Latin character set, the LLMs are not as good typically at doing transcription. When we asked our users, we just found we had really amazing traction already in Singapore and Japan."
Dr. Thomas Kelly, Founder and CEO of Heidi Health, joins Jeremy Au to discuss his journey from a vascular surgery registrar to a health-tech entrepreneur. They explore the massive administrative burden placed on doctors, which acts as a choke point in healthcare capacity and limits patient care. Dr. Kelly unpacks the early days of Heidi Health, the challenging pivot the company had to make following the release of GPT-4, and how they rebuilt to become a globally dominant AI medical scribe. The conversation also covers the regulatory landscape of Software as a Medical Device (SaMD), navigating clinical liability, and how Heidi Health is expanding into Asian markets like Singapore and Japan by mastering complex, multilingual clinical interactions.
00:00 - Introduction and Dr. Thomas Kelly’s Journey to Medicine
04:45 - From Medical Student to EdTech Founder
09:00 - The True Cost of Administrative Paperwork on Patient Care
13:40 - The Technical Challenges of Building a Reliable AI Medical Scribe
17:35 - Navigating Liability and Software as a Medical Device (SaMD)
22:00 - Heidi Health’s Future Roadmap: Evidence, Follow-ups, and Hardware
26:30 - Geographic Expansion and Product Localization in Asia
33:00 - Why Clinicians Are Driving Innovation in HealthTech
34:25 - The Crucible Pivot: How GPT-4 Forced a Complete Company Reset
37:25 - Competing with OpenAI and Foundation Models in Healthcare
Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yA5jzWf4V_Y&list=PLl9u6ECOP8_7scb97PE3whKu4yJVizIOd
Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4VoEIJGua0tyPTxFnz652G
Keywords: HealthTech Startups, AI Medical Scribe, AI in Healthcare, Heidi Health, Startup Pivot, Software as a Medical Device (SaMD), GPT-4 Healthcare Applications, Asian Healthcare Markets, Clinical Decision Support
