At Infinitus, we have a clear opportunity to help transform the patient experience with AI agents. We can help real people to get quicker access to the answers they need, calm their anxieties, and reach care providers without the administrative headaches healthcare brings. To do this right, we need to make sure our AI agents convey warmth and instill confidence when patients are scared or confused. And we need to do it safely and securely, meeting the high bar that healthcare enterprise demands.

I’m here to help make sure that happens. Perhaps most importantly, I’m here to define and oversee the safety guardrails for AI in clinical conversations between our AI agents and patients. Today, I’m excited to share more about why I’ve chosen to join the Infinitus team as we scale our patient-facing AI agent offerings.

From OR to AI: A drive to scale impact in healthcare

I am a general surgeon with a specialization in surgical critical care. I’m on staff as a trauma surgeon at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose, Calif., and I also have an MBA and have been working in tech – voice and AI specifically – since 2017.

Like most doctors who gravitate toward the business side of healthcare, I’ve always been interested in interventions that achieve scale. Bedside medicine touches one life at a time, and I don’t want to discount the importance of that – doctoring is a valued and hard-earned skillset, and we play a privileged role in our patients’ lives. 

But the other side of my brain loves the challenge of building a product that can reach millions. I came to Infinitus after eight years at Suki, a voice assistant for doctors. The appetite for adoption of AI in healthcare was very different eight years ago, and it was exciting to be a part of the wave of adoption that has occurred over the last two years. Now, ambient scribes are everywhere, and the industry has taken note that AI is the future.

Why now … and why Infinitus?

In contrast to the headwinds AI adoption faced in the past, we are now seeing a clear market pull driving AI adoption. If ambient scribes are in the spotlight today, the question is: What’s next? Today, the focus has shifted from clinician-oriented use cases to the realm of AI interacting with patients. The market is now saying that maybe, with the right guardrails, we can trust AI to talk directly to patients. 

That autonomous agent space is noisy right now. Infinitus, for me, cuts through the noise because of our track record. 

Sometimes the biggest opportunities in healthcare come from solving a non-sexy problem. That’s exactly the opportunity that Infinitus saw. All of us can think of a time when we felt frustrated navigating a phone tree to reach our doctor’s office, or waiting on hold with a health insurance company. That’s where Infinitus started, and the foundation on which our robust voice, telephony, and intelligence infrastructure is built. 

This technology platform and our team’s experience serving enterprise customers, with their high bar for accuracy and performance, gives us a head start on the patient-facing and increasingly clinical use cases that have become the next frontier. That clinical frontier is what brings me to Infinitus.

Building for patients, with the team to do it right

Infinitus is a company with clear product-market fit in a particular market segment. For me it’s exciting because I get to break new ground on a 0-to-1 product journey, with a team that’s already firing on all cylinders across the tech, commercial, and operations functions. And I’m excited to work alongside visionary founders like Ankit and Shyam, as well as the entire team committed to this important mission. 

I learned a lot from the developers and product designers who I worked with at Suki. Coming to Suki fresh out of my trauma surgery fellowship was like doing a second residency, this time in product management. It was hard and a big cultural shift, but worth it because clinicians and technologists working together is the only way to build game changing AI for healthcare. I am hopeful that Infinitus will benefit from what I learned on that journey – and I am grateful for the opportunity to learn a new space and a new way of working alongside this team.