Included Health’s Dot: a member-facing AI and a push to make health AI safer

The useful part

They've now introduced Dot their AI companion which had a big upgrade last week. We talked a little about that and I snuck in their video comparing the Dot Experience with a standard LLM. The conversation really got into how do we make AI safe and trustworthy–which is definitely the hot topic these days.

How it works

• Owen is putting together a coalition of the willing to work on that exact topic.
• I'll be watching closely– Matthew Holt This was such a great discussion I wanted to publish the transcript.
• Matthew Holt That would never work — I said that second opinions alone would never work.
• This isn't some speculative set of information I'm going to share with you today — this is born specifically out of our direct experience, watching people have very long conversations with Dot.
• So you can schedule appointments, you can follow up on medical records, you can explore and pre-select different members of your care team to make sure they're part of your ongoing care.

What to take from it

Matthew, if I may, I'm just going to set up what Dot does for your viewers, because they may not be super familiar with it. How much time, effort, energy does the human — the clinical provider, or whatever flavor — save because the patient has had that conversation with the AI, with Dot, first? In some cases these go 20 or 30 minutes of engagement, and people are having conversations where they disclose, on a comparative basis, more information than we sometimes see in our primary care practice, where a human is acquiring the same level of history, concern, need, and chief complaint, and so on.

Example or evidence

• I then read it, and if I think it's made an error, I dip back into the video and listen to what actually happened and make a correction.
• This is all to say: I think this transcript is pretty accurate, but it might have a bunch of AI- and human-generated mistakes.
• Matthew Holt Matthew Holt with The Health Care Blog, back with Owen Tripp, the CEO of Included Health.
• You've been talking a lot about a number of things, like health plans, but probably the most significant thing Included Health has done in the last year is come out with its own AI platform, called Dot.

Details worth keeping

Owen, we haven't chatted in a while, and the good news is absolutely nothing has happened with Included Health, or about this topic you may have heard of called AI, in the last six months — but apparently we're all stopping now, or something. One of the things I think we can celebrate at the start of our conversation, especially as two old dogs in healthcare — I'm not sure, actually — I think on this podcast we've talked about the story of us first meeting, in which you told me this would never work. Those of us who are technologists working in healthcare really feel like we've always been trying to drag healthcare into modern frameworks — data compatibility, member-facing and member-usable experiences, provider tooling — all that stuff has always felt like we were operating years, if not decades, behind.

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