Big life update: I’ve joined Nabla as their CMO 

The last few months have been insanely fun. As part of The Future Well, I’ve been working with three clients helping them build their care models. Working with them (and others in the future) will continue indefinitely.

But, for now, why did I join Nabla as their fractional CMO? Well, CMOs should bridge the gap between clinical and product. Since I’ve been doing that since 2007, I’m uniquely qualified. And because I’ve never seen anything like Nabla. See today's article in TechCrunch for more background about what we're up to.

Two things need to happen to fundamentally change how healthcare works. First, care must move increasingly online. And second, once care is primarily online, every single care team workflow must be augmented by machine learning. If a care team has superpowers, patients sense a magic they’ve never felt in healthcare. Not only do patients have a fundamentally better experience, their care teams can deliver more consistent care to more people, with far less headaches.

But in order for those two things to happen, an individual doctor or medical group must be able to fire up an online practice in minutes. When Alex and Laurent, the founders of Nabla, reached out to me a few months ago and gave me a tour of what they’ve built so far, I recognized it. It felt very similar to what we built at Sherpaa and Crossover to power our online care models. But there was a huge difference— imagine a digital health platform purpose-built to power online care with GPT-3 baked into every moving part.

But it’s not just about Nabla’s sexy tech. It’s about our team, vision, and funding mechanism.

Nabla is based out of Paris and we’re just now entering the US market with today’s launch of the Nabla Copilot. For all you doctors out there who want to feel what it’s like to live in the future, give it a spin and add the Nabla Copilot Extension to Chrome. And for those who are looking to power an online practice with Nabla’s Care Platform, you can also give that a try today as well. You’ll see it’s API-first and very developer friendly. Alex and team are developers at heart. Alex’s last company, wit.ai, was acquired by Facebook where he launched and led Facebook M.

Nabla is the first clinical platform built from the ground up for primarily online care models

That’s groundbreaking in and of itself. But, that’s the foundation that unlocks a whole new era of healthcare. You see, online care is wildly different from traditional “time slots in exam room” care. Online care assumes that care is continuous and doesn’t have to only happen in scheduled physical visits. This means care becomes exchanges of information between care teams and patients that unfold as necessary over time as acute or chronic conditions are managed. These exchanges come in the form of asynchronous messages, video visits, phone calls, prescriptions, lab results, remote monitoring device data, and many others. But the most important characteristic of online care is both care teams and patients have access to the same source of truth. This is in stark contrast to traditional care where the patient cannot easily access all their records and clinical notes. When patients don’t have access to their data, they have to remember what was said in the exam room. And they forget 85% of the content of those conversations making it very challenging for patients to know their plan and what they need to do to self-manage. But healthcare isn’t just challenging for patients, it’s an administrative nightmare for clinicians. They despise the 40% of their day spent documenting exam room conversations in their EMR.

Nabla fixes all of this.

The Nabla Care Platform is the foundation enabling online care. And because care happens all online, this unlocks a whole new world of automations and efficiencies. Imagine a video visit conversation that’s automatically transcribed in real time, where medically-trained ML models convert that conversation into a clinical note complete with structured medical data inserted into the EMR. Now imagine that transcription sent to the patient along with a patient-friendly summary of the plan and next steps. That’s Nabla Copilot.

Let’s take it a step further. Imagine a doctor using the Care Platform to manage a patient’s care and the Nabla Copilot auto-suggesting:

• Questions to ask the patient

• A patient-friendly description of the diagnosis

• The most appropriate medication to prescribe

• The imaging or lab tests necessary to diagnose the condition

• The most appropriate local specialist to refer the patient for in-person care

• How to explain a procedure to the patient

• A list of S.M.A.R.T. goals to accomplish weight loss

• A repeating reminder to use their home blood pressure monitor

• A list of things they can do at home to feel better

• A list of reasons to reach back out

With a little imagination, you can quickly see how GPT-3 and medically-trained LLMs are going to revolutionize every single workflow for doctors, especially as healthcare inevitably transitions from oral conversations in exam rooms to primarily online care. It’s going to leapfrog how doctors and patients currently communicate and unlock massive care team efficiencies and patients’ active participation in their own care.

This is the Nabla Care Platform and Copilot. While you can use the Copilot in any practice as a Google Chrome Extension to auto-transcribe doctor-patient conversations and generate clinical notes from those conversations, the magic happens when the Copilot is embedded in every element of the Care Platform.