Counsel recently launched it's first AI-enabled chronic disease management programs.
Solving the growing burden of chronic disease is modern medicine's greatest challenge. Six in ten American adults live with a chronic condition; cardiometabolic disease in particular silently robs us of functional status and longevity.
The good news is that effective treatments for most common chronic conditions are cheap and plentiful. High-quality evidence to guide clinicians on applying these well-tolerated medicines is widely available. The bottleneck is care delivery: in much of the U.S. it takes multiple weeks to book a doctor’s visit. After an initial diagnosis, the current system provides too few touchpoints to get patients to goal. Digital health has long promised to fill the gaps, but the results to-date are underwhelming.
There have been steps in the right direction. First-wave virtual care companies introduced "store-and-forward" techniques to treat conditions like male hair loss, contraception, and erectile dysfunction. For these relatively simple conditions, deterministic logic trees can sufficiently (and safely) improve the efficiency of care delivery.
But this infrastructure breaks down when the richness of patient responses moves beyond what we can capture in a multiple-choice form. As any primary care physician knows, care decisions for even common chronic conditions are individualized at their core. Patients come to us with a wide range of previous history, family experiences, lifestyle preferences, and attitudes towards care.
At Counsel, we think it's time to rethink chronic disease management for the age of AI. We've traded one set of hard technical problems for another: maintaining context, applying the right protocol at the right time, and building appropriate clinician checkpoints into the care journey are no small tasks. Solving them requires a team that's equally fluent in clinical medicine and frontier AI. We believe this is finally a tractable problem.
The core tenets of chronic disease management on Counsel are simple.
Counsel exists to expand the world's clinical capacity—the capacity to provide care, with rigor and compassion, at the cost of compute. This clinical expansion will broaden throughout the year, bringing us closer to safe, autonomous care delivery. Let’s get started.
Dr. Rishi Khakhkhar is CMO at Counsel Health. A practicing emergency physician and founding team member, he leads the clinical team in building best-in-class asynchronous care models. Previously, he served as Medical Director of Mount Sinai’s Virtual Urgent Care, the health system’s largest telemedicine service, and led emergency department operations for Hospital-at-Home while supporting mobile integrated health initiatives across the care continuum.
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