Hey HN,
Some friends and I built an app called Sidekick that joins your telehealth visits in real-time. It explains medical terms and suggests useful questions, including ones you may not have thought to ask. After the visit, it provides a summary including next steps, so you can focus on the conversation instead of taking notes.
The idea of Sidekick came from our team's experiences with healthcare. Our founder, Rahul, had stage three cancer at 17. His mom had to manage everything around his care: taking notes through treatment, figuring out what questions to ask, etc. A decade later and he’s now in remission, but still sees a lot of specialists and deals with the same challenges.
Another teammate became a caregiver after his dad had a severe stroke. He found himself taking notes, looking up medical terms, and trying to keep track of what was said during every doctor visit. Others have dealt with situations like this when navigating pancreatitis and other serious health issues.
These experiences got us interested in how we might be able to reduce the burden on the patient or caregiver.
A lot of products focus on simply recording or summarizing the visit. That's useful and a step in the right direction, but we kept coming back to the fact that a lot of the challenge originates while the conversation is still happening. If you can catch something in the moment, you can address it with your clinician immediately and potentially lead to better outcomes. If you realize you missed something after the visit, then you have to try to get another appointment (and in SF I often can't get another doctor visit till 2 months later).
So we built Sidekick, to help patients and caregivers during a visit in real-time to translate medical jargon and suggest useful questions, ideally without becoming a distraction.
If you want to try it, you can download it on our website. Sidekick is desktop-only for now, but we’re working on a mobile app for in-person visits.
We would be especially interested to hear feedback on the live part of the experience. What are your thoughts on the balance between live help vs after-visit? Would something pre-visit be more helpful?
This seems beneficial to many people, but specifically I could see patients with dementia/ADHD/learning disorders etc. finding lots of value with this tool. I wonder if it could qualify for HSA spend (especially for those patients)?
I’m sure doctors will love this. “My AI bot thinks I…”
I'm one of the co-founders and practicing physician on the team.
AI is changing the nature of the patient-doctor relationship where patients are already using AI tools to research material and prepare before and after. Sidekick was purpose built to lean into new interaction dynamics where the goal is to support the patient fully in context of what their doctor says. We are definitely being very mindful of the doctor side and are working to set the right balance of content generated and build intersecting tooling for clinicians.
>> balance between live help vs after-visit
Don't forget pre-visit. Doctor visits go much better if the patient advocate (this thing) has questions in hand. The patient can spend hours talking to the tool and get a summary so they are better prepped for the 5-minute doctor conversation. A tool that summarizes observed symptoms for the doctor might be an idea.
Doctors are good with getting a shorthand note they can scan prior to appointment about updates, etc reverent to the appointment that day. My experience is that AI models even with expert curations cannot currently do well by itself and would waste a doctor’s time and could be misleading too. As such as noted by the parent comment, that note would need to be summary sheet that AI touches would have to list facts and context with patient review that it accurately would represents what the patient would say in their own words.
Pro tip: check out the NoHarm benchmark and tracking to see how the current models are generally trending on the medical frontier. Make sure to select Clinical not General: https://www.arise-ai.org/mast
And if you look at some the data carefully as one of the models highlights on their blog, there’s concerning behavior for Fable on this front: https://www.amboss.com/us/newsroom/noharm
Yes we've taken a look at this. In fact we had a pretty good test case from our teammate's real visit where the text to speech was mistranscribed (despite using a medical model) to the point where it looked like the doctor said to eat a topical steroid. However, because of that case and a few other complicated cases in our internal benchmarks, we've made the after visit prompt much more reliable, both identifying and cleaning up mistakes in the transcript, and marking points where you really ought to confirm with your doctor if it's unclear from context what it was actually supposed to be.
Please try it out and lmk what you think! We would love your feedback!
Note that our tool is not diagnosing or prescribing, simply noting what the doctor said and giving suggestions to the patient of useful questions to ask and contextual plain English definitions of medical jargon
Thanks for the thoughts! I’m one of the co-founders and a practicing physician. One of the big gaps with medical AI benchmarks like NoHARM, MAST is they are all primarily tuned for clinician reasoning and none of them look at the patient context and perspective. It's a huge gap right now.
Yes, actually that was our first experiment! We stripped it for this launch so we could more intelligently handle the cost and latency.
Every time I talk to a doctor they suggest we should do this. Honestly there's often enough time in the waiting room even if the patient doesn't do it at home lmao. Then just show the doctor a few bullets with quotes.
Thoughts?
[flagged]