The Modern Healthcare Stack: Healthcare in the Age of AI
By Carol Magalhães Isaacs, BBG Ventures
In his essay Machines of Loving Grace, Dario Amodei notes that biology and healthcare are among the domains where AI’s impact may be most profound—not because AI replaces the doctor or the drug, but because it unlocks new levels of precision, prediction, and scale. Healthcare can be messy, fragmented, and constrained by human time—hence an area where breakthroughs in AI can be felt first.
What this means in practice is not a sci-fi future where algorithms cure disease, but something subtler: AI is rewiring the healthcare stack itself. It is changing how patients are triaged, how diagnostics get done, and how clinicians spend their hours. The result is a new generation of companies that use AI to move bottlenecks, scale scarce providers, and create new front doors into the system.
Meeting Patients Where They Are
A recent discussion hosted by Kindred Ventures on The Modern Healthcare Stack, centered not on replacing clinicians, but on rebuilding the scaffolding of healthcare itself—one AI layer at a time.
Startups like Prosper Health are redefining mental health care for autism, collapsing what was once a 20-hour diagnostic process into just five. By embedding AI in the diagnostic process, Prosper is addressing one of healthcare’s most acute gaps: timely access.
Summer Health began as a DTC pediatric service and is now covered by insurance, routing patients to pediatricians within minutes. Their model embodies Amodei’s framing: technology scales the system, while humans deliver the care. AI helps providers check their work in real time, ensuring quality without sacrificing speed.
Heartbeat Health, shows how provider-first models can endure. By integrating AI into triage and intake—such as bot agents that drastically improve call answer rates—they’ve proven that the story isn’t about automation replacing clinicians, but about giving them sharper tools to sustain quality at scale.
In BBGV’s portfolio, Millie exemplifies this patient-first evolution in care delivery. By reimagining maternity care as an integrated, hybrid model, Millie blends in-person, virtual, and AI-enabled touchpoints to support women through pregnancy—and beyond, into perimenopause and menopause—natural extensions that expand customer LTV. From launch, Millie has used technology to scale personalized, high-quality support while demonstrating measurable improvements in maternal and newborn outcomes, building patient trust and payor interest alike, all with low capital intensity and rapid cash conversion.
While the above companies are not AI-native, they are AI-enabled —AI isn’t their core value proposition, but it is a critical enabler that makes their model more efficient, data-driven, and scalable.
Diagnostics as the Front Door
Diagnostics are becoming the entry point to care—and a high-margin, recurring revenue stream. Whether it’s Function Health’s twist on lab testing, Whoop offering Advanced Labs integrated into wearable data, or Apple’s push into blood pressure monitoring, diagnostics are shifting from episodic to always-on. The next frontier is closing the feedback loop—translating test results into clear, actionable next steps that guide ongoing care and behavioral change. Without that follow-through, even the best sensors risk falling into what panelists called “Apple Watch syndrome”: floods of false positives that overwhelm systems while patients with real needs wait.
As Summer Health’s Ellen DaSilva noted, the challenge is scaling beyond niche distributions—like Owlet or Nanit, which reach under a million families—to the 75 million children in the U.S. These devices are valuable but not transformative: they generate data without meaningfully expanding access. That’s where AI can play a catalytic role—turning raw signals into actionable insights and positioning platforms like Summer Health as parents’ first line of diagnostics at home, extending reach far beyond the small subset of connected-device users.
The goal isn’t for every family to own a sensor, but to learn enough from those who do to train models that help pediatricians and parents detect early warning signs—making proactive care available to all, not just the few being monitored.
Personalization is key to making that shift meaningful. When diagnostics are tailored to the individual, they unlock more proactive, preventative care—especially when delivered at an accessible price point. But technology alone isn’t enough. The experience must also be intuitive, with clear explanations and actionable next steps—an area where many consumer health platforms still fall short.
Within BBGV’s portfolio, Oova captures this evolution by transforming hormone testing into a continuous, at-home diagnostic experience. Oova enables women to track their fertility and hormonal health with lab-level accuracy—without leaving home. While many diagnostic tools start as DTC offerings, strategic B2B partnerships can demonstrate a path toward scale: accelerate access and drive adoption across larger populations. Oova’s upcoming integration with health platforms like LifeMD illustrate how diagnostics can extend beyond data collection into coordinated, longitudinal care.
Infrastructure for the Next Era
Behind this consumer facing layer, a new set of companies is tackling the plumbing of healthcare with AI-native infrastructure:
Elaborate anticipates patient needs—refills, lab results, messages—while saving clinicians hours of inbox work. Its deep customization integrates seamlessly with EMRs like Epic to automate what incumbents struggle to do. Assured reduces time-to-network for providers by automating credentialing and insurance workflows across states—turning a costly, manual process into one that’s accurate, compliant, and ROI-positive. Max AI automates end-to-end billing processes between payors and providers, targeting specialties underserved by Epic.
These companies operate behind the scenes, making the economics and operations of the system sustainable. Yet the bar for adoption is higher than ever. Providers are inundated with tools and have little time to experiment—so the product experience has to be exceptional. This is the real opportunity for AI: to finally deliver on the promise of “do-it-for-you” technology.
As mentioned above, ROI must be clear from day one, not aspirational. Clinicians also need to trust the product. Companies like Abridge have paved the way in administrative tasks like note-taking—where the status quo was so inefficient that any improvement feels like a win, but that was lower stakes. Clinical use cases is an area we have an eye on, such as patient follow-up, where companies like Altira are innovating; But the stakes are much higher when software is interfacing directly with clients. Accuracy, reliability, and patient safety can’t be afterthoughts—they’re the moat.
Finally, speed to market matters. In a crowded space, we look for teams that have a GTM advantage—those who understand how to navigate complexities of the healthcare system or who bring early partnerships that accelerate distribution. In healthcare infrastructure, great tech is table stakes; great execution is what wins.
What AI Can and Can’t Replace
Amodei reminds us that healthcare is a “multi-layered system of interventions.” AI excels at pattern recognition, prediction, and triage—but it is not a clinical intervention on its own. The panelists echoed this point. AI is already raising the floor on administrative workflows, quality assurance, and diagnostic support. From GPT-powered EMR notes to at-home diagnostic tools for strep, it lowers barriers to care. However, the promise of AI in healthcare isn’t to replace the clinician, but to restore their time and attention to where it matters most—the patient and the messy, human work of diagnosis and treatment.
Embedding AI into Daily Life
The future is not episodic check-ups, but always-on support. Whether through wearables, diagnostic apps, or AI companions, the opportunity lies in embedding therapeutic takeaways seamlessly into routines. The most compelling AI products may not just answer clinical questions but become companions—whose valuable actionable insights nudge us toward better health choices every day.
–
Healthcare in the age of AI looks less like a single breakthrough and more like a system-level shift. Companies mentioned above are proving Amodei’s point: AI doesn’t replace the doctor, it reshapes the stack around them—making care faster, more predictive, and more scalable. The work now is to build infrastructure and products that ensure those gains translate into real access, better outcomes, and durable businesses.
If you’re building in this space — or you are an investor exploring the impact of AI on healthcare — we’d love to connect. Drop us a note: carol@bbgv.com.
–
About BBGV: BBG Ventures is a pre-seed and seed fund investing in underestimated founders building solutions for our polycultural future. Our founders are tackling the biggest arenas of the economy that require reinvention: health and wellbeing, work and education, financial security, energy resiliency and overlooked consumers.
About Kindred: Kindred Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm focused on software, Internet, and deep technology investing
.