Dr. Dave Whitehead, an emergency medicine physician and Clinical Product Lead at Counsel Health, shares how virtual care is transforming access to timely, high-quality medical advice. In this Q&A, Dave shares what inspired him to become a physician, why he joined Counsel, and how virtual care is breaking down barriers to timely, high-quality medical advice. He also debunks common misconceptions about telemedicine and offers insights into the future of digital health.

Our Medical Director, Rishi Khakhkhar, explores this in his latest Op-Ed for Offcall. He writes that AI should be trained the same way we train medical students, starting with fundamental skills like history-taking before advancing to complex clinical decision-making. By applying the RIME framework (Reporter, Interpreter, Manager, Educator), we can shape AI tools that are not just smart, but also clinically useful and trustworthy.

Our CEO and founder, Muthu Alagappan, MD, recently joined Julie Yoo and a16z Bio + Health to dive into how generative AI is transforming clinical medicine. He shares how Counsel is leveraging LLMs to power asynchronous care, why we believe it should be recognized as a new medical specialty, and which long-held healthcare paradigms no longer hold true.

Healthcare often focuses on quality, affordability, and convenience, but capacity—the system’s ability to deliver care at scale—is a critical challenge we overlook. As the population grows older and sicker, our stagnant clinician workforce is stretched thin, making high-quality care harder to deliver. At Counsel, we’re on a mission to multiply clinical capacity, empowering physicians with AI-driven tools to provide more care without compromising quality.

Dr. Muthu Alagappan, CEO and Founder of Counsel, speaks to Pear VC about the new modern solution for access to care.

Counsel Health, a health care virtual communications startup, raised an $11 million seed to expand into more states, CEO Muthu Alagappan tells Axios exclusively.