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Tuesday, 5 May 2026 |
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| When I first heard about Parsley Health close to a decade ago, the startup embodied a few trends I was following closely: primary care startups and cash-pay healthcare. For a monthly fee (no insurance accepted), you could get functional medicine care that could be more comprehensive than a typical insurance-covered annual
visit. That includes services like working with a nutrition coach, testing and care plans focused on things like sleep and stress. |
| Now Parsley represents a few different trends we’re watching: Functional medicine (especially when it comes to comprehensive testing that's looking at more data points to find the root cause of a person's condition) has taken off, as has the longevity market, which seemingly is blending in with
functional medicine and primary, preventive care, for that matter. |
| CEO and founder Robin Berzin told me she wants Parsley to be the board-certified medical player integrated into that evolving healthcare system. |
| “There's a missing clinical layer of the longevity and functional ecosystem,” she said. |
| And, as of Thursday, Parsley is now in-network with insurers nationwide, covering things like medical visits and prescriptions (it still charges a monthly membership fee to cover all the other services Parsley provides). Berzin said that’s what she’s been working toward since founding the company in 2016. |
| “It's really just the culmination of what we started out to do,” she said. That is, “to make this care infinitely more accessible than it had ever been, and to move this care into alignment with the broader healthcare ecosystem so it stopped living off in its own strange, untethered world.” |
| Parsley operates in-person clinics in New York and Los Angeles, and Berzin said there are no plans to expand the physical footprint beyond that. The company went into virtual care years ago, and Berzin said the company has found it can provide the same kinds of outcomes online as it can in person. |
| - Lydia |
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Doctors vs AI |
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AI beat human doctors on diagnostic reasoning tests, a study in Science published last week found. While AI did a lot better than doctors when making diagnoses off of limited and messy emergency room data, the gap between AI and human performance narrowed when both were given more information. This chart shows the percentage of 76 ER cases where physicians and ChatGPT models came up with the correct or near-correct diagnosis across three stages of ER clinical evaluation. |
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This week in health Тech |
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Cigna is the latest insurer to ditch the ACA marketplace, following Aetna’s exit this year. The company said it will no longer sell plans on the individual market in 2027, leaving 369,000 members to find new coverage. “We did not see a clear path to scale this business to achieve meaningful impact,” Brian Evanko, president and soon to be CEO, said during Cigna’s first-quarter earnings call last week. |
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Worldwide made. Thanks for reading.
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