The Status Quo Is the Biggest Risk

The Status Quo Is the Biggest Risk

By Matt Pavelle and Adam Oskowitz, Co-Founders & Co-CEOs, Doctronic

STAT News called what Doctronic is doing in Utah (AI prescription renewals) "provocative." That framing seems fair, and we'll take it. But there's a bigger provocation hiding in plain sight.

US healthcare costs 18% of GDP. It has consumed a larger share of our economy every single year for the past four decades. Through every administration, every policy wave, every billion-dollar EHR rollout, costs keep climbing.

There’s often risk in trying something new. But at some point, the greater risk is continuing with a system we know doesn’t work.

This is a Human Capital Problem Disguised as a Healthcare Problem

The average American waits more than three weeks to see a primary care doctor. We're projected to be short 120,000 physicians by 2030. The doctors we do have are burning out at record rates. Forty years ago, doctors practiced medicine. Today, half their day is documentation, prior authorizations, and prescription callbacks.

This gets framed as a healthcare crisis. It's actually a human capital crisis. And this human capital crisis won't get solved by training more doctors - it takes over a decade to train one, and there aren't enough students applying. This crisis gets solved by changing what humans are required to do.

The cost of compute drops roughly 10x every five years. At the same time, the demand for care continues to rise. An AI consultation that costs a few dollars today will cost pennies in a few years. So if AI can safely handle even a fraction of care, we've turned an unsolvable supply problem into an engineering problem. And engineering problems have solutions.

24 million consults later, we know people need this. One doesn’t earn that level of engagement (while growing repeat usage) unless the product actually works and people actually use it. This doesn’t mean Doctronic is flawless, but it does mean the need we are meeting is real.

At Doctronic, Safety Is Fundamental

When people call our Utah program provocative, the implied concern is safety. We want to address that directly, because that’s the right place to focus, and it’s where we’ve spent the most time.

When we launched our 50-state clinic in January 2025, we outsourced our physicians. As a young startup, we couldn't afford to hire our own. We quickly learned that wasn't going to meet our expectations. Outsourced physicians are optimized for urgent care: one visit, one problem, move on. That's not what Doctronic is meant to be. We want repeat visits, chronic condition management, longitudinal relationships. We want real primary care, not a digital urgent care window. So we built our own clinical practice from scratch, physicians only, licensed across all 50 states. It's the only way to deliver the standard of care we actually believe in.

Now our telehealth clinic runs 6-7x more efficiently than a traditional practice, and we expect to hit 10x by year-end. That efficiency exists because our AI does the intake, the clinical interview, the differential, and the documentation. Our physicians then have video calls with patients and do what physicians do. And we can measure lots of things and learn what our AI does well, and where it needs improvement.

In Utah, we're still in Phase 1: where every renewal is reviewed by one of our physicians before it reaches a pharmacy. We'll earn the right to operate fully autonomously by proving that we should. This is how trust gets built.

Dr. Bob Wachter, Chair of Medicine at UCSF, put it plainly: requiring patients to call and wait just to refill a statin is a waste of physician workforce. He's publicly said he'd let AI renew his own Lipitor prescription. That view reflects a broader shift: not away from physicians, but toward using clinical expertise where it matters most.

We Do Not Believe "We'll Always Need a Human in the Loop"

But this is the objection we hear most. We take the legitimate version of it seriously: for complex diagnoses or anything requiring clinical judgment about evolving conditions, human physicians matter enormously.

But the objection is often applied as a blanket statement, not a clinical one. Applied as a blanket statement, it's just a description of the status quo dressed up as a safety argument.

We have a 60%+ primary care doctor shortage. It is getting worse. If the answer to "can AI safely renew a statin for a stable patient" is "only with a physician reviewing every single case," then we've decided the physician shortage is permanent and acceptable. We don't accept that.

The question is not whether AI is perfect. Neither AI nor human doctors will ever be perfect. The question is whether it's safer than what we have now - which is patients going without medication because they can't get a timely renewal. 125,000 people die each year from medication non-adherence. That's not a statistic about AI. That's a statistic about the system we inherited.

What $65M Actually Means

Doctronic raised $65M across three funding rounds in under a year on 15x ARR growth in the last six months. The funding goes toward three things: growing the team that built this, expanding health system and payer partnerships, and earning the right to do more with AI in medicine.

Utah is the beginning of something much larger. With every prescription reviewed, all outcomes tracked, and our data peer-reviewed and published, we will prove we can do this safely and effectively while bringing costs down. This is how we turn our unsolvable human capital problem into a simple compute problem.

The Bottom Line

The greatest risk in healthcare is continuing to rely on a system that cannot meet current or future demand. Expanding access requires rethinking how care is delivered, with AI playing a central role in managing routine tasks while physicians focus on complex decision-making. With careful implementation, measurable outcomes, and ongoing validation, this approach can improve access, reduce costs, and better align healthcare delivery with patient needs.