I’m thinking of things like Flatiron Health, BenevolentAI, Quartet and Spreemo, and surely many more.

At heart these companies seem to shy away from being “really about” medicine, and try to be a more watered down data company, looking at health records, social media, and other data to provide recommendation, service matching, comorbidity analysis, hospitalist tools, cost tools, assistance program allocation tools.

I’ve been very interested in ML applications in health, but a lot of the businesses that seem capable of getting funding seem like they are super light / elementary on the statistical modeling side, and the value add is just a claim to modernize crappy claims data or unify a bunch of previously disparate health data sources.

Maybe more advanced use of modeling will come later, though I am skeptical just given the way that once big enterprise customers dig hooks into essentially consulting services for health records, they won’t let go.

Another thing that creeps me out is when you see e.g. an ex Palantir board member joining health record data companies. It’s not hard to understand why a big insurance company, or at worst even government agencies, want decision tools on top of huge stores of health record data. Do we really benefit from some super new / unproven startup building up that data set & tooling?