AI doctor startup Doctronic aims to broaden its reach beyond adult primary care by acquiring text-based pediatric care platform Summer Health.
The companies did not disclose financial terms of the deal.
Fast-growing Doctronic is an AI-native primary care provider that has supported 30 million health encounters in just two years. It offers a proprietary AI doctor and nationwide network of licensed clinicians delivering personalized medical guidance and video visits for $39, according to the company.
The startup offers a free personal AI doctor via chatbot to help navigate symptoms and answer medical questions and can connect users with a licensed physician through a virtual visit. Doctronic, available in all 50 states, is being tested by the state of Utah to refill prescriptions as part of a pilot program.
Launched in 2022, Summer Health offers on-demand, text-based pediatric care, supporting more than 100,000 pediatric encounters for tens of thousands of families. Doctronic executives said. Summer Health's conversational model and deep pediatric expertise closely complement Doctronic.
Families don't experience healthcare in silos, noted Adam Oskowitz, M.D., co-founder and co-CEO of Doctronic, noting that the company is building a "single, trusted front door to healthcare where families can access timely, affordable, AI-enabled care through one continuous experience,"
"We at Doctronic are always about access to high-quality healthcare. We noticed that a lot of our patients were coming through and asking questions related to pediatrics, oftentimes asking us if we could help with children, and so it made sense to us to explore expanding our offering into pediatrics," Oskowitz said. "Around the same time, we actually got introduced to Ellen and started chatting with her and her team. We really fell in love with what they were doing and initially felt like a partnership would make a lot of sense. And so, like a lot of acquisitions in the end, they started off as partnership discussions. As we started discussing the opportunities, it just felt like a really great match, and so moved from the idea of a partnership to an actual acquisition quite quickly."
Primary care is shifting from episodic office visits to always-available, digital-first care and pediatrics is one of the highest-frequency, highest-need entry points, Doctronic and Summer Health executives noted. Summer Health will transition to an AI-based triage that offers escalation to a pediatrician on Doctronic's platform, said Ellen DaSilva, founder and CEO of Summer Health.
"It's the perfect combination and distillation of what Doctronic offers and what Summer Health offers," she said in an interview.
Beyond expanding its clinical offering, the acquisition also significantly strengthens Doctronic's AI capabilities. Summer Health's repository of more than 100,000 real-world pediatric text conversations provides a unique foundation for developing pediatric-specific AI models, executives said. Summer Health has a rich dataset of medical interactions where parents describe symptoms and ask questions. This will enable Doctronic to build more accurate, clinically informed pediatric experiences while further differentiating its platform, executives said.
"Doctronic has, by far, the world's largest dataset on AI plus doctor clinical encounters," said Matt Pavelle, co-founder and co-CEO of Doctronic. The combination of both companies' capabilities creates synergy where "one plus one equals three," he noted.
Doctronic aims to build the "safest and most clinically accurate pediatric AI," Pavelle said and the entire Summer Health team is moving over to the company.
"We're using all of their expertise and all of their knowledge to build out all the the rest of the software that we need to run this. One of the things that makes Doctronic's clinical AI so accurate is that we have tens of thousands of clinical guidelines that our doctors have written, and those are all written for primary care and urgent care. We're also now writing all of those guidelines based on all the Summer Health guidelines for pediatrics," he said. We can take all of the insights that Summer Health has gained over their four years of being in existence and immediately jumpstart that and bring that same level of care and that same high quality, high safety bar and implement that internally."
With Summer Health's pediatric data, Doctronic plans to build out its AI guardrails appropriate for safe, high-quality pediatric care, executives said.
"By integrating Summer Health into Doctronic, it now has a tremendous competitive advantage because Summer Health has all these proprietary encounters and all this information that no other model is trained on. But these are real-world, these are high quality and these have been graded. From an integration perspective, Doctronic now has access to a repository of of people and interactions that no one else has is a real competitive advantage for us as a combined business," DaSilva said.
As it continues to grow rapidly, Doctronic is exploring quickly ramping up new clinical offerings that branch off advanced primary care through both "growth and acquisitions," Oskowitz said. It plans to launch an internally developed behavioral health program in the next three months, he said.
"Long term, this is probably the beginning of a cycle over the next 12 to 24 months when we will both grow through internal programs and through acquisition," he noted.
The company also is expanding its capabilities through partnerships like a tie-up with Simple HealthKit, an at-home health screening platform, to offer consumers end-to-end diagnostic screening integrated with virtual clinical care.
Doctronic also aims to expand its business-to-business offerings, an effort that DaSilva will lead as the company's new senior vice president of partnerships. "We've got a long slate of partners who are clamoring to work with us, and I'll help oversee the execution of those partnerships," she said.
The company has partnerships with health plans, employers and third-party administrators that "generally want a specific ROI on their investment for AI," Oskowitz said. "They want to improve access to care, but they also oftentimes want to make sure that the care is done at the right time," he said.
Doctronic also works with health systems and other digital health companies who want to leverage its clinical AI technology for their patients and members. The company's patient-focused approach gives it a differentiated approach in the B2B market, Oskowitz noted.
"When you're designed for patients, you really focus on the clinical aspect of care. We think we're uniquely positioned for that. We've actually had by far the most patient engagement out there for a clinical AI company, nearly three million unique users, 30 million AI human interactions, and tens of thousands of doctor visits a month. Because we have so much usage, we're able to showcase just how effective the technology can be for these partners," he said.