Glass: AI Revolutionizing Clinical Decision Making

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Trey Layton
June 14, 2024

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AI in Healthcare - Fundamental Change to the Diagnostic and Treatment Process

Addressing Administrative Overload in Healthcare

THE PROBLEM

How many hours a day do you spend checking emails, scheduling appointments, or answering texts?

Chances are, quite a few.

Our med school friends experience this, too, though unlike us normal folks missing out on an extra episode of Dated and Related, every minute that a doctor spends on administrative tasks is a minute they can’t spend treating patients.

On average, the time a medical professional spends on these mundane tasks amounts to an entire workday.

One of the biggest problems that I saw was that doctors truly didn’t have good software to support their critical clinical workflows and making complex decisions for very sick patients.

Dereck Paul, CEO

Introducing Glass AI for Healthcare

THE SOLUTION

Glass, an AI platform transforming healthcare, is addressing this, empowering clinicians with differential diagnoses and clinical planning.

Doctors can type (thank goodness they don’t write amirite?) the patient’s details (age, gender, etc) and symptoms and get instant diagnoses to test for.

Then, once the doctor gives the patient an actual lookover and confirms the diagnosis, the AI automatically generates a plan of attack for treatment.

Glass AI's New Odyssey Product

Even better, as of yesterday, they have officially launched their new Odyssey product for EHR integration (talk about early to know 👀).

The tool actually listens in on the conversation, taking notes and combining with the patient’s existing medical record (and subsequently the diagnosis) in real time, only further boosting clinician efficiency.

THE NUMBERS

Glass AI by the Numbers

Traction:

Market Size:

  • TAM: $16.85 billion

  • SAM: $5.055 billion

  • SOM: $252.75 million

Competition:

  • DeepScribe, Notable

  • Ambience AutoScribe, Babylon Health

  • IBM Watson Health

The Team Behind Glass AI

Team:

  • Dereck Paul, MD, CEO: internal medicine resident at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School and a medical student at the UCSF School of Medicine

  • Graham Ramsey, CTO: designed the first telemedicine-specific EHR at PlushCare, and helped build the world's best fertility dashboard & ovulation tracking app at Modern Fertility

Risks and Challenges for Glass AI

Risks:

  • Data security: Glass deals with a ton of highly sensitive patient data, and the potential consequences of a breach (and the regulatory scrutiny the company is likely to experience as a result of this potential) are devastating to the company and to the space

  • Differentiation: My first thought when looking at the product was “how is this different from ChatGPT?” The traction eased my concerns a bit, but the product still has a long way to go prove to be anything more than a “ChatGPT wrapper”

    • Admittedly, this opinion is a bit skewed by my familiarity with the AI space. it’s possible that for medical professionals without such close exposure, everything about Glass Health is completely novel

  • Adoption risk: also eased by the company’s traction numbers, but healthcare is a notoriously hard

It is notoriously difficult.

We do something very unusual in healthcare which is that we are a Product-Led Growth company… Those 70,000 doctors who signed up did so organically without any marketing spend, mostly from word of mouth.

Dereck Paul, CEO

What I Like About Glass AI

What I like:

  • Advisors: part of the reason for this early traction is the strong network of more than a dozen highly connected medical professionals on the advisory board, leveraging their networks to get the software into the hands of as many doctors as possible

  • Augment vs. replace: a faulty strategy wielded by other companies attempting to solve this and similar problems is attempting to automate out the professional… not only is this error-prone, but it’s nearly impossible to do given the pushback and lack of feedback the founding team will get from the niche group of people their product is attempting to infiltrate

  • Simplicity: this is pretty much a ChatGPT wrapper, with a single box for entry and a clean, simple response and follow up design. Glass knows their audience, and they’re building the product that they want to use, not what the tech world (see: me) thinks they should build

Opportunities for Glass AI's Growth

Opportunities:

  • Build own LLM: Glass is about to have access to a massive amount of medical data, incessantly reinforced and corrected by tens of thousands of medical professionals on a daily basis… the finetuning that the company will be able to perform could make for the strongest medical diagnostic and treatment models in the game

  • Data licensing: What to do with all of this data and the model? Why, open up a new revenue stream of course! Glass can consider selling encrypted and redacted data to medical researchers for the sake of treatment development, and even better, by leveraging this position of power, it can organize partnerships with treatments to promote their products to the Glass network of doctors

  • Verticalization: Glass’ new Odyssey product is a massive step in the direction of verticalizing their product offerings for the entire scope of the medical examination and treatment value chain, but there’s still a ton of room to go, from the pre-examination data collection and scheduling process to the prescription fulfillment and monitoring stages

Share this newsletter with one friend to get access to the Links of the Week section in every newsletter, including today’s! 👇️ 

  • BeReal was acquired by Voodoo, a French app developer, for ~$530 million

    • This was probably the best outcome for the founding team given the lack of a clear path to monetization… just look at how much Snap has struggled and the stagnant user growth numbers

    • It is even reported that the CEO had been exploring a sale last year, so he was clearly aware that the peak had already been reached… frankly, I’m amazed that they were able to bring in this much

    • A theme in today's Links section: wins for European startups…

  • Rasberry Pi, the people’s computer, went public on Tuesday, shooting up 32% in its initial day of trading. Takeaways…

    1. Good get for the London Stock Exchange which sees the vast majority of the UK’s tech companies list on the NYSE, opting for buttermilk biscuits over those powdery ones the Brits eat with their tea

    2. The success is a bit shocking considering the use cases for the company’s cheap, small computers are mostly limited to niche hobbyist ventures

    3. Loyal users aren’t thrilled as they see this as a pivot away from community-powered products towards catering to shareholder demands, meaning cost cutting and low quality in pursuit of ~profits~

    4. Relatedly, ARM, a major strategic investor in the company, has stated its interest in increasing its stake

  • Twitter will finally be hiding all user likes

    • Elon has long voiced his opposition to users’ likes being public and visible on their profiles, and after an initial rollout with Premium subscribers, the privacy enhancement officially began public rollout earlier this week

    • He claims that he is tired of people being attacked for the posts they like, so he wants people to be able to give their thumbs up in peace

    • I actually agree with this, and I think it’s stupid that something as simple as a little button indicating “good tweet” can get someone virtually persecuted, especially as someone who likes just as many tweets as a way of saying “this is the dumbest thing on the internet right now,” but I must admit - I will miss the days of Ted Cruz getting caught like porn

  • Joey Chestnut was banned from this year’s Hot Dog Eating Contest after announcing a partnership with Impossible Foods

    • A spokesperson for Nathan’s claims that the greatest athlete on the face of this Earth had broken an exclusivity agreement that had linked the man, the myth, the legend and the sponsor of the contest, meaning he is unlikely to defend his title and win his 18th very elastic, very loose belt

    • Jokes aside, this genuinely might have a negative impact on the event which has become a legitimate revenue stream

    • The power of the creator economy is only beginning, and no industry is safe

  • What the actual fuck

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Cheers to another day,

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