Kin Health raises $9M to develop an AI prescription for patients

The market for AI writing tools has exploded in the US, with the group making more than $600 million last year, according to Menlo Ventures reports. And as a starting point Heidi Health and Freedmenhave shown, there is a real need for this technology in the medical field, where doctors and hospitals see the potential of an AI assistant that can help them track patients’ speech, surface health history, and reduce their burdens.

But these programs don’t do much for patients, that’s why Kin Health is creating a registry that can record your visits to doctors, review medical advice, and suggest alternatives when needed. To that end, the startup has raised $9 million in seed funding led by Maveron.

The program is similar to a meeting note: you can write the doctor’s visits, and it will return an AI summary of the meeting, and the next steps, all of which you share with family and friends if you want. It also allows you to write down questions you might want to ask on your next visit.

Kin Health says it maintains all patient information, and that the summary is kept confidential. The tool is not HIPAA-certified, as it is patient-facing, but it adheres to the same privacy principles, the company said.

The free app is developed by therapists Arpan and Amit Parikh, along with Kyle Alwyn, who has previously developed online therapy. HeyDoctor is a seller of the health platform GoodRx. Doug Hirsch and Trevor Bezdek, co-founders of GoodRx, are co-founders and co-chairmen of the company.

“We have a lot of storage cabinets where our health data can live, but we don’t have a way to turn it into useful information that we can use to drive changes in our behavior. Our goal is to create this picture of health where we can store your information from different sources,” Alwyn told TechCrunch on the phone.

Kin Health says that the summary is given after several stages of preparation. After documenting the visit, the algorithm converts the document into a medical report, which is then converted into a user-focused summary of the events. The company says it relies on unique clinical models to provide coding power, and that it monitors and evaluates the output at various levels to ensure the accuracy of the responses.

But AI in healthcare is being received with caution and trepidation. Privacy experts and researchers have raised it anxiety on data protection, AI accuracy, consent processes, etc the quality of the documents producedand theirs strength.

AI writers often failure to recognize and attempt to write regional words. Kin Health says it is working to make its device work with different voices, and whether someone has a bad neck or is wearing a mask.

Dr. Rebecca Mishuris, chief health officer and VP at Mass General Brigham, a Boston-based healthcare organization, argues that it is important for doctors to review any AI-generated notes.

“Generative AI will predict; it is the nature of the technology built on patterns and predictions. That is why it is important for doctors to check the written documents before publishing them. At the end of the day, the responsibility of the documents falls on the doctor,” said TechCrunch by email.

Kin Health currently only displays data from the conversations they record during the consultation, but the company said it plans to bring data from other health systems, including doctors’ records through electronic systems (EHR), this year.

The company says it will keep the app free forever, making money by sending it to things like professionals and labs. The startup is taking a page from GoodRx’s playbook, which also makes the product free and earns commissions on referrals.

Natalie Dillion, a partner at Maveron, said healthcare tools often expect patients to be in control of their actions. “Kin is built to solve the needs of very different consumers: it can travel between professionals, practices, and providers. It is not visible to any health network or EHR relationship. It is built to serve patients, not an organization, and it is a great distribution opportunity,” he said.

The fund received participation from Town Hall Ventures, Eniac Ventures, Flex Capital, Foundry Square Capital, Pear VC, and The Family Fund. Hirsch of GoodRx and Bezdek; angel investors Jay Desai, Nabeel Quryshi, Alex Cohen and Saharsh Patel; and more than 30 doctors also invested.