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Thursday, 1 May 2025 |
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sponsored by
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Stay Ahead in Life Sciences with Real-Time Market Intelligence
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| Staying current on emerging competitors, shifting markets, disease areas, and investment trends is time-consuming and often fragmented. AlphaSense helps you uncover critical insights faster—often before anyone else even knows they exist.
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| Zocdoc, the health tech company known for helping patients book doctor visits online, is launching an AI assistant to schedule appointments — over the phone. |
| The AI agent, Zo by Zocdoc, can field scheduling phone calls on behalf of doctors’ offices. CEO Oliver Kharraz tells me it’s a "natural extension of what we have been doing, and a natural application of our expertise when it comes to understanding how doctors' offices are run and how scheduling works." |
| The Zocdoc team spent almost two years getting from prototype to launch. For a while, the AI models just weren’t ready, Kharraz said. Zocdoc will provide the Zo service risk-free and will get paid when Zo completes a call without a human intervening. |
| Kharraz said he sees voice AI assistants becoming a technology that everyone might have, like a website. What will differentiate them is a company’s expertise in training the AI agent. |
| "The voice AI is like a high school sophomore, and now you need to teach them the specifics. You need to graduate them so that they can do a specific task," Kharraz said. |
| There's an irony that the company that helped popularize online doctor booking is leaning into phones, but Kharraz is still betting online is the "long term future" of tasks like booking appointments. |
| "The reality is that today, this is still a very material channel," Kharraz said. "Helping people to have almost even this experience here is a key priority for us. But I don't think it changes the long term outcome." |
| Tapping is faster than talking, after all. Even so, every appointment I’ve booked in the last year has been over the phone or in person. I don’t see that changing any time soon, but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time until I end up speaking with an AI agent on the other side. |
| - Lydia |
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Lowering costs |
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The percentage reduction of risk of hospitalizations related to cardiovascular events like stroke and heart attack in the two years since a group of GLP-1 users started taking the medications to manage their weight, according to an analysis by health benefits consultancy Aon. The analysis, which looked at 139,000 people prescribed GLP-1s between 2022 and 2024, found that after an initial increase in spending after starting GLP-1s, costs in the following year grew at half the rate of a control group not taking the
medications. |
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This week in health Тech |
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Peter Foley is stepping down as CEO of LetsGetChecked, the home testing company that bought Truepill late last year. “I am very proud of the progress the company has made over the past decade and the evolution of the platform which now spans across a range of capabilities including diagnostics, genomics, telemedicine and pharmacy,” he wrote in a LinkedIn post. |
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John Carroll
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Editor & Founder
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Arsalan Arif
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Publisher & Founder
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Igor Yavych
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Architect & Founder
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Valentin Manov
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Creative Director
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Ryan McRae
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Chief Revenue Officer
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Amanda Florez
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Chief of Staff
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Drew Armstrong
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Executive Editor
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Liam Chua
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Chief Technical Officer
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Lydia R. Pflanzer
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Deputy Editor
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Zachary Brennan
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Senior Editor
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