The other day, I was coming out of a supermarket, and a woman approached me, telling me a story about losing her home and that she was hungry. I was about to take her grocery shopping, but she informed me she was homeless. There was a Chick-fil-A up the street, so I gave her money to buy a warm meal. I worried where she might stay to remain warm because it was a cold evening.
Doctronic addresses this access problem by delivering AI-powered medical consultations in minutes rather than weeks, combining free, anonymous symptom assessments with on-demand access to licensed physicians across all 50 states for $39 per video visit. The platform has already processed over 15 million medical conversations with more than 1 million unique users, handling 50,000 weekly visits through its collective intelligence architecture where multiple specialized AI agents engage in clinical reasoning under physician oversight.
Research undertaken at the University of Glasgow's James Watt School of Engineering has demonstrated Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN)-based capabilities that could pay big benefits, especially for people who live in rural areas. The demonstrations were dental "exams" physically performed on dentures at a remote location. In addition to an open-source O-RAN, the research used 4G LTE and a haptic controller connected to a robot arm.
The US healthcare system's capacity crisis has reached a breaking point in neurology, where 145 million Americans with chronic neurological conditions face average wait times of 4-6 months to see a specialist, if they can find one at all. This shortage isn't just an inconvenience; it's forcing millions to cycle through emergency departments, endure preventable suffering, and watch treatable conditions worsen while they wait.
Midi, which provides virtual care for perimenopause, menopause, and other midlife women's health conditions, has raised $50 million in a Series C round led by Advance Venture Partners. The raise brings its total funding to about $150 million.Cofounder and CEO Joanna Strober confirmed the raise in an interview with BI. Midi has a $150 million revenue run rate, Strober said, up from about $60 million at the end of 2024.
Florida and Texas made a quiet move last week that could have huge implications nationwide: Their attorneys general asked to join a federal lawsuit against the Food and Drug Administration that seeks to drastically roll back access to the main abortion drug, mifepristone. The states argue that the medication's FDA approval should be revoked or, failing that, that telemedicine prescriptions should be once again banned. Telehealth has allowed thousands of people to get abortion pills in states where the procedure is prohibited.
At Bask Health, we once forced every new patient to download a separate app just to upload their ID. Only 40% of them made it through. Six weeks of development, thousands of dollars spent, and we called it a funnel. That one decision cost us more patients than any Facebook ad ever brought in. Turns out, healthcare has a cart abandonment problem, just like ecommerce. But instead of a forgotten pair of sneakers, it's unbooked visits, lost revenue and patients who still need help.
