AI physician startup Doctronic aims to expand its reach beyond adult primary care with the acquisition of text-based pediatric healthcare platform Summer Health.
The companies did not disclose financial terms of the deal.
Fast-growing Doctronic is an AI-native primary care provider that has supported 30 million health exams In just 2 years. The company says it offers its own AI doctors and a national network of certified clinicians who provide personalized medical guidance and video visits for $39.
The startup offers free personal AI doctors via chatbots to help navigate symptoms and answer medical questions, and can connect users with certified doctors through virtual visits. Doctoronic is available in all 50 states and is being tested for prescription refills in Utah as part of a pilot program.
Founded in 2022, Summer Health provides on-demand, text-based pediatric care and supports more than 100,000 pediatric visits to tens of thousands of families. Doctonics executives said. Summer Health’s conversational model and deep pediatric expertise are a close complement to Doctronic.
Adam Oskowitz, MD, co-founder and co-CEO of Doctronic, said families no longer experience healthcare in silos, and the company is building “a single, trusted gateway to healthcare where families can access timely, affordable, AI-enabled care through one continuous experience.”
“At Doctonic, we have always focused on access to quality health care. We noticed that many of our patients came to us with pediatric-related questions, often asking if we could help treat their children, so it made sense to consider expanding our pediatric services,” Oskowitz said. “Around the same time, we were actually introduced to Ellen and started having conversations with her and her team. We really fell in love with what they were doing and initially felt like a partnership made a lot of sense. And then eventually, as with many acquisitions, partnership discussions started. As we talked about the opportunity, we felt like it was a really great match, so we quickly moved from the partnership idea to an actual acquisition.”
As primary care moves from episodic outpatient visits to always-on, digital-first care, pediatrics is one of the most frequent and needed entry points, Doctonic and Summer Health executives noted. Summer Health will move to AI-based triage that provides escalation to pediatricians on Doctronic’s platform, said Ellen DaSilva, founder and CEO of Summer Health.
“This is the perfect combination and distillation of what Doctronic has to offer and what Summer Health has to offer,” she said in an interview.
In addition to expanding clinical services, this acquisition also significantly enhances Doctronic’s AI capabilities. Summer Health’s repository of more than 100,000 actual pediatric text conversations provides a unique foundation for developing pediatric-specific AI models, executives said. Summer Health has a rich dataset of medical procedures where parents describe symptoms and ask questions. This will allow Doctronic to further differentiate its platform while building a more accurate, clinically-based pediatric experience, executives said.
“Doctronic has the world’s largest data set of AI and physician clinical practice to date,” said Matt Pavel, co-founder and co-CEO of Doctronic. Combining the capabilities of both companies will create a synergy where “one plus one equals three,” he said.
Pavel said Doctronic aims to build “the safest and most clinically accurate pediatric AI,” and the entire Summer Health team will be transitioning to the company.
“We’re leveraging all of their expertise and knowledge to build all the rest of the software that we need to do this. One of the reasons why Doctronic’s clinical AI is so accurate is that we have tens of thousands of physician-authored clinical guidelines, all written for primary care and emergency care. And we’re currently building all of those guidelines based on all of our Summer Health guidelines for pediatrics,” he said. We’re able to take all of the insights that Summer Health has gained in the four years we’ve been in business and jump-start it, providing the same level of care and the same high quality and safety, and bring it in-house. ”
Doctronic plans to use Summer Health’s pediatric data to build AI guardrails for safe, high-quality pediatric care, executives said.
“By integrating Summer Health with Doctronic, we Health has all the unique encounters and information that no other model has been trained on, so it gives us a huge competitive advantage. But these are real world, high quality, and rated. From an integration perspective, Doctronic has access to a repository of people and interactions that no one else has, which is a real competitive advantage for us as a combined business,” DaSilva said.
Oskowitz said that as Doctonic continues to grow rapidly, it is looking to quickly expand into new clinical services that branch out from advanced primary care through both “growth and acquisition.” He said the company plans to launch an internally developed behavioral health program within the next three months.
“Longer term, this is probably the start of a cycle over the next 12 to 24 months where we will grow through internal programs and acquisitions,” he said.
The company is also expanding its capabilities by providing consumers with end-to-end diagnostic screening integrated with virtual clinical care through partnerships such as one with Simple HealthKit, an at-home health screening platform.
Doctronic is also looking to expand its B2B services, and DaSilva will lead those efforts as the company’s new senior vice president of partnerships. “We have a number of partners who are eager to work with us, and I will help oversee the execution of those partnerships,” she said.
The company partners with health plans, employers and third-party administrators who “generally want a specific ROI on their AI investments,” Oskowitz said. “They want to improve access to care, but often they also want to make sure that care is delivered at the right time,” he says.
Doctronic also works with health systems and other digital health companies that want to leverage clinical AI technology for the benefit of their patients and members. Oskowitz said the company’s patient-centric approach gives it a differentiated approach in the B2B market.
“When you’re designing for patients, you focus on the clinical side of care, and we think we’re uniquely positioned in that regard. In fact, we have by far the most patient interactions of any clinical AI company, with approximately 3 million unique users, 30 million AI “We have so much experience that we can demonstrate how effective the technology is for these partners.”
