a16z Bio + Health

How Americans get their medicines is changing rapidly.

Today in Chicago, a16z's @JayRughani sits down with:

- Tanvi Patel, VP & GM of Amazon Pharmacy
- AJ Loiacono, CEO of @judihealth
- @Annie_m_collins, co-founder of Aradigm Health

To discuss what's actually changing, and where there's room to build.

Baylor Scott & White CEO Peter McCanna on where AI has the potential to bring efficiency to health systems today:

“We have to circle back to [systems deployed before AI] and say how do we really super charge them and put the rocket fuel of AI into them?”

“Our transfer center... it's complicated. Where do you put people in beds? How do you make that work?”

“Our navigation system... we have a product called Help Me Decide where you go through a symptom presentation online, but how do you inject AI into that so that you're triaging people to the right place?”

“AI in imaging is super powerful… it's so powerful that it would be malpractice not to deploy it.”

Formation Bio CEO Ben Liu on overcoming adverse selection in clinical trials:

“No one's willingly looking to get rid of a great drug. And so the reason why we play at this IND Phase 1 translational medicine juncture is because this is where we think the markets are most dislocated today.”

“Where we play, there's oftentimes not data yet to know.”

@formationbio @BenjamineYLiu

“What I observe is in most cases, people confuse motion and progress.”

Josh Weiner of CVS Health on how to balance speed and caution in the healthcare space:

 “Just because I got a pilot off the ground in one month, by no means suggests I set up for success.”

“ People don’t spend enough time saying, ‘Well, like what really are the risks?’”

Full episode: youtube.com/watch?v=TRDpun…

“One of the biggest unlocks in VC-backed tech was when companies started going full stack to challenge incumbents head-on (‘Challengers’), versus just building tools for incumbents (‘Enablers’).”

Healthtech is now following the same path. While tools for incumbents still dominate in volume, full-stack startups are catching up fast in capital raised and public market exits. To expand the TAM, we’ll need both.” - @julesyoo