Arihant Jain’s career as a healthcare innovator started in 2021, when his 16-year-old brother suffered a medical crisis that left him temporarily paralyzed. Jain left his job at Microsoft and moved home to New York to help his family. As he saw the burdens that his parents, both physicians, confronted in running their family practice while attending to their younger son’s health needs in the middle of the pandemic, Jain started experimenting with ways to apply the artificial intelligence skills he learned at Microsoft to his parents’ medical practice, where faxes were still being used.

“It was like wow, there’s this huge opportunity to take some of the cutting edge AI work that we were doing there and apply it to the business of medicine, which is very outdated,” says Jain. 

Fast forward four years and Jain, 26, who has degrees in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, has launched a half-dozen AI-powered healthcare ventures. Through his company Nao Innovation Lab he has developed Youologist, an AI health companion agent that surveys a patient’s health records and generates personalized recommendations via chatbot,  StarLife.ai, an AI longevity concierge that builds a customized life plan based on a patient’s goals, and Harmoni Translate, a HIPAA-compliant language tool for providers and patients.

Jain’s flagship product Jivarao is designed to streamline medical records and reduce the fragmentation of services as people live longer and develop more chronic, often overlapping conditions. “They’re seeing multiple doctors, multiple providers, multiple specialists, primary care providers and have multiple telemedicine appointments,” says Jain. “Their data is all over the place and the patient is not benefiting from that.”

Patient records have gotten so massive – one person might have 200 or more pages – that it’s just not reasonable to expect doctors to read and process all the information contained in them. Instead, Jain’s AI products gather and synthesize the data and create a summary report and a proposal for doctors to review. The Jivarao program creates an individualized checklist of services, tests and lab work for every patient visit. By streamlining records and making recommendations before the doctor even walks into the examining room, the program allows patients to have a very efficient visit, says Jain, who spoke at SCL’s New Map of Life Conference in March.

For millions of aging Americans who will need increasingly complex care in the decades ahead, Jain’s AI revolution may be arriving at precisely the right moment. The U.S. faces a projected shortage of 87,000 primary care providers by 2030, while the Medicare-eligible population over 65 continues to double. AI solutions also benefit low-income patients on Medicaid who tend to have care that is not only fragmented, but often driven by crisis instead of proactive monitoring and preventative services. 

Jivarao is also designed to support overburdened providers like Jain’s parents “who are being thrown into this world,” he says. “They have these documentation requirements, revenue, IT and coding. They have to manage their business. And on top of that, they’re now expected to provide really good quality care to a sicker and sicker population with fewer providers.”

Jain sees the demographic shift as a business opportunity. The U.S. primary care market was $271 billion in 2022 and is projected to reach $340 billion by 2030. He markets Jivarao to primary care groups on a subscription basis with the price set by the number of patients seen per month. The service is already being used for around 100,000 patients in New York, with plans to expand to California.  “I’ve seen healthcare getting harder and harder,” Jain says. “For the first time, I feel like we’re at the precipice where it’s actually going to start getting easier now to take care of people, take care of them better, and provide better quality care.”

–Karen Breslau

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