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New York-based K Health has developed an app that uses AI and anonymized health records to augment the diagnoses of health problems. It claims to be the first startup to use true AI in consumer health at the primary care level, as Holden Page wrote at the time of the startup’s $12.5 million Series A.  The company launched its consumer product in mid-2018.

How it works

K Health works by leveraging AI-driven health data that was accumulated over two decades by tracking billions of anonymized health events. (That data was collected by Maccabi, the second-largest HMO in Israel.) K Health has taken that data to create a predictive model aimed at enabling people to learn more about their health by comparing themselves to other people with similar characteristics such as gender, age, symptoms and medical history.

Users can chat with a licensed doctor for a diagnosis and prescription for $14 for a consultation, or $39 for an annual subscription, according to co-founder and CEO .

“K uses technology to reduce barriers to quality primary care,” he said. “Our users are able to get instant answers about their symptoms and chat with a doctor within minutes, all for 90 percent less than the cost of traditional primary care practices.”

With K Health, people can get a more reliable and accurate way to have an initial understanding of what they might have in addition to which drugs other people with a similar history took, Bloch explained.

K is available in all 50 states, and K Primary Care, the option to chat with a doctor, is available in 47 states, covering 300 million people.

The company seems to be growing quickly. Bloch said it recently saw its 3 millionth user after reaching 1 million in June 2019 and 2 million in November 2019. K Health also now employs 200 people, which is up from about 80 one year ago.

Bloch declined to comment on growth metrics such as revenue or profitability.

Looking ahead

K Health will use the latest capital infusion to scale its model and move primary care to mobile devices in an effort to improve access to health care on a global scale.

As part of that, K Health is making its app available in Spanish and plans to introduce it in additional languages “within weeks.”

Recently, K Health partnered with insurance giant Anthem (also an investor) to provide access to its more than 40 million members. Looking ahead, the company is also eyeing a global expansion “to strategically important countries.”

“This new funding will enable us to bring easy and affordable primary care to people in more languages and geographies,” Bloch said. “We will also be expanding the scope of what our primary care platform can diagnose and treat to include more chronic condition management services, pediatrics, and more.”

For, Mark Tluszcz, founder and CEO of Mangrove Capital Partners, “free quality health information is a promise no one has been able to deliver on until K Health entered the market.

“K’s efforts to provide the most precise and relevant medical information along with 24/7 medical care and doctor conversations … underscores the need for better healthcare realities for people struggling to afford care and the medical community challenged by a lack of doctor accessibility,” he said in a written statement.

In general, we’ve seen a rise in digital health startups. Recently, I wrote about , a digital physical therapy company focused on chronic musculoskeletal conditions, closing on a $90 million Series C round of funding led by . Last week, I also covered , a digital health platform, emerging from stealth with a $40 million round of funding led by (a16z).

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The Series B financing brings the company’s total funding since its inception in late 2015 to $58 million. Other backers include , , , Thirty5 Venturers, and .

Because digital health platform is such a broad term, let’s break down what it means in this case. The Redwood City California-based startup claims it can give “members” a web-based in “75 minutes or less.”

The premise behind the company is to help identify health issues before they become worse, or as it claims: “To give individuals a deeper understanding of their own body and how it’s changing over time so they have more control over their own health.”

Indeed, most of us don’t even know we’re sick until symptoms start popping up to alert us. In some cases such as certain forms of cancer–it can already be too late. Q Bio says its platform can actually identify signs of disease at the earliest stages, before symptoms arise. If this is true, I’d say it’s revolutionary.

The way it works seems straightforward. Members register online and the company begins aggregating and digitizing their medical history. On exam day, members anonymously check in for a 75- to 90-minute exam. Two weeks later, a Q “expert” will review the results over a “secure” video chat in which members’ physicians are welcome to join.

With each additional visit, Q claims, its HIPAA-compliant platform gets more sensitive to surfacing anomalous changes in your body, then tailors the set of measurements gathered based on these anomalies and changing risk factors.

In summary, membership includes a fully comprehensive exam including a full body MRI, saliva, blood and urine analysis, a summary and a 30-minute telemedicine review of the health of each of your body’s systems. Health data is continuously updated for one year and stored in the company’s BioVault with lifetime access to review and share.

co-founder serves as Q Bio’s CEO. As part of this new round of funding, Andreessen Horowitz General Partner joins Q Bio’s board, along with from Khosla Ventures.

Background

Kaditz co-founded the company with his own misdiagnoses from over a decade ago in mind.

Since then, he said, he’s “imagined a day when everything about a person’s body could be quickly measured, shared and analyzed.”

“It took some time to figure out some of the scaling issues and to wait for certain technologies to be cheap enough and mature enough,” Kaditz told Crunchbase News. “Our technology allows us to gather more clinical information, more quantitatively, faster and cheaper than anything else and it will only get faster and less expensive over time. We allow for a separation of where you go to get your body measured and where your doctor actually is.”

Over the past few years, the company has stealthily worked on fine-tuning its imaging protocols to determine the “most clinically relevant set of biomarkers” to include in its platform. It has 25 employees, up from 17 a year ago.

a16z’s Pande in a written statement said that“Q Bio makes true preventive medicine possible today.”

“By measuring everything from blood to imaging and more in a longitudinal way, patients can have personalized baselines and physicians the data and power to understand, interpret and utilize this data to personalize care,” he added.

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