Welcome to Prompted Health!
Building better patients through AI and personal health data
Admit it. You’ve YOLO’d some pretty personal health info into ChatGPT to get some quick, decent health advice. I have.
OpenAI even gave ChatGPT’s health advice use case top billing in the GPT-5 launch keynote this year, citing its score on the HealthBench eval.
Yet it feels like we’re only scratching the surface of how to use frontier models to actually achieve better health. The story of our health spans a lifetime, and sometimes that’s more than we feel like typing out in a chat message.
I’m starting this newsletter to figure out what “vibe coding” looks like for personal healthcare. Each post will cover some topic related to:
Using AI models to navigate personal health decisions
State-of-the-art models and tools for medical intelligence
Evaluating the quality of health information that models provide
Solving real-world problems that patients can tackle for themselves with augmented intelligence
a bit about me and my perspective
Hey what’s up, I’m Ricky. Never done a newsletter before. Figuring it out. I’m a software engineer who has been known to LARP as a founder.
I started my career in healthcare at a ZIRP-era startup that was “uber for doctor house calls.” When Apple announced Health Records in iOS, I built an integration that piped that data into our doctors’ EHR. When that company got absorbed into a large insurer, I consolidated patient health data into longitudinal records. I went on to build tech for doctors at other ambitious startups aiming to transform some corner of the US h.c. dumpster fire. I even spent a year working on my own startup to connect PCPs with virtual specialists.
After careful reflection on those experiences, the big thing I learned is that changing the behavior of providers is incredibly difficult. Great tech and the very real benefit it can bring to patient outcomes simply isn’t enough. It gets there eventually, or at least some version of it, but that isn’t good enough. Not when everything else is getting worse: longer visit wait times, rising insurance costs, hospitals shuttering, the PE-ization of health systems, and the diminishing role of PCPs as the patient’s quarterback in the h.c. system, just to name a few.
Most doctors are good people who care about and want the best for their patients. They’re just systemically hamstrung in their ability to give it to them. We throw around terms like care “team” and health “partnership”, which is the lens through which many PCPs have told me they see patient relationships. But through no fault of their own, many providers have been reduced to functioning as contractors working on patient health episode projects. Now more than ever, people must take full ownership of their own care. There is no replacement for licensed medical professionals, but there are better workflows for getting the most out of clinical interactions. It all starts with knowing.
The good news is there has never been a better time for non-clinical people to take charge of their health. The quality of intelligence on tap for everyone means that, in many cases, people now have an alternative to accepting subpar care.
The purpose of Prompted Health is to discover the full extent of leverage that AI gives normal people to participate as equals in their own care.