Launching Superpower’s Beta and a Contrarian View on the Future of Health
A sneak peak into where healthcare is going
It’s official — Superpower’s beta is LIVE!
You can read more in my posts (and I’d be super appreciative for a like/comment to help them reach more people)
Over the past 6 months, we’ve amassed 100k+ members on the waitlist. Today, we’re opening Superpower to the wider world. We believe that everyone deserves access to a new form of healthcare that helps prevent disease and enhance human capabilities.
But getting here was no easy feat. Many told us, “It’s impossible” or “This is too ambitious”. But we decided to do it anyway.
We’ve been heads down building a horizontal health system and have now shipped a full stack health concierge, health data centralization, AI health roadmaps, and an aggregated and integrated ecosystem of 100s of tests, pharmaceuticals, supplements, clinicians, and healthcare service providers. This is essentially 5 companies in one, a testament to our engineering, product, and ops teams.
To learn more about what we’ve built, check out my LinkedIn and Twitter posts.
I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
For subscribers to my newsletter, I’m sharing an additional snippet about where I think healthcare is going a decade from now. 95% of people disagreed with this two years ago. I suspect 80% will disagree today. 60% will disagree next year, and so on.
In other words, you’ll probably disagree with me.
So here we go…
A Sneak Peak into a Future for Health
$5 trillion was spent on healthcare in the US in the past year. And yet, despite such an established market, the next decade of healthcare is about to look dramatically different.
The rise of large language models, ubiquity of healthcare APIs, doubling of healthcare data annually, growing consumer health culture, and emergence of increasingly powerful diagnostics and therapeutics means that healthcare will be rethought.
So, what will healthcare look like?
Doctors will be replaced by an algorithm that runs your life.
This might sound preposterous, but this is already happening. After all, if you have a health question, what’s the first thing you do? You probably go to Google (an algorithm), not your doctor.
Several trends will only continue:
1: Consumers will disintermediate doctors.
Consumers will go directly to the solution they’re looking for, with the fewest intermediary steps. We first saw this for the simplest solutions like ED with companies like Hims. Then we saw it for more complex solutions like hormones with companies like Maximus. Now, we are seeing it for even more complex problems, such as chatGPT for Long Covid. In fact, there are 1 billion Google searches every day related to health. But imagine Google or chatGPT had all of your healthcare data, knew everything about you, knew everything about medicine, and could order tests, supplements, and pharmaceuticals on demand. This is the world we are approaching.
2: AI will perform cognitive reasoning
From first principles, we already know this has to be true. Why? Because the role of a doctor is to compute between two databases — patient data and medical knowledge. This is an informatics problem, not a human problem. And it’s becoming exponentially hard for humans to compute between the databases of patient data and medical knowledge as these databases exponentially increase in size, especially with the long tail of diagnostics and therapeutics. Human cognition is becoming fallible and an algorithm is needed.
3: Everyone will have a personal health model
One of my beliefs that many disagree with is that every person is a diagnostic odyssey. In other words, everyone’s health is uniquely complex. Everyone has some set of hidden factors impacting their health, and it’s really hard to know exactly what is going on. In this world, an algorithm will be able to work out the path forward in a way that humans cannot. In a world where AI is performing cognitive reasoning and consumers are disintermediating doctors, everyone will have a personal health model that tells them what to do. In other words, an algorithm will run your health.
We can visualize this future in the graphic below, which has a few key components:
Consumers go to an algorithm or agent
The algorithm makes recommendations based on (a) patient data, and (b) medical knowledge
The algorithm, or agent, connects consumers to real-world endpoints (RX, supplements, diagnostic tests, allied health consults) to start actioning its recommendations
Counterintuitively, the algorithm is the most commoditized part of the stack. The three assets that matter are:
Patient data — it’s essential to deeply understand the patient, aggregate existing data, and acquire novel data through cutting-edge testing.
Medical knowledge — to make recommendations based on patient data, it’s necessary to build a database of medical knowledge, which is not on the internet but rather in the brains of 10x doctors.
Real-world endpoints — once patients have an algorithm to connect their data to medical knowledge, it’s still necessary to take action in the real world. This requires integrating with real-world endpoints, including ordering diagnostics tests, supplements, pharmaceuticals, and more.
Doing this will create an all-in-one healthcare system where someone goes to the algorithm as the front door to the healthcare system, rather than Google or the doctor. As a result, the algorithm becomes a product that makes sense for the majority of people to own.
I completely agree with this perspective. Purely based on the capacity to store and synthesize data, doctors cannot compete with algorithms. I believe that in the coming years, doctors as we know them will be replaced. That by no means renders them obsolete, but it does drastically impact the type of care they provide and the method by which they provide it. It true that every person is a diagnostic odyssey, so its unreasonable to expect a doctor to be able to provide the level and depth of care that each person needs - it is a job better suited to an algorithm. Its an incredibly exciting time for the medical field as roles are shifting and the quality of individualized care that can be provided is rapidly improving. This article raises some questions about where one should focus their time and energy if they are going into the medical field, and how to have the biggest impact on health and wellness going forward.