Code & Clarity

Conno Christou was the picture of health, tracking his sleep with multiple wearables and monitoring nearly 100 biomarkers each year. Then, after a workout, his arm swelled. Doctors found blood clots, but a pre-op scan revealed something far worse: an 11-centimeter tumor behind his sternum. A biopsy confirmed aggressive non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer so rare it affects just one in 420,000 people. His first oncologist recommended a lighter chemotherapy regimen. A second opinion suggested the opposite—a far more aggressive treatment with an 85% success rate versus 60%. Christou didn’t stop there. He gathered 12 medical opinions in two days, all but one agreeing on the harder path. He took it, treating his fight like a startup: data-driven, relentless, and structured. Throughout six months of chemotherapy, he logged every detail—sleep, nutrition, side effects—in a symptom journal and fed it all into Claude, an AI chatbot. When his final PET scan came back ambiguous, the AI f...

Imagine leaving the doctor's office, only to realize you forgot half of what was discussed. A new company called Kin Health is stepping in to solve just that problem, and they just secured a hefty $9 million in funding to do it. Unlike other AI tools built specifically for doctors and clinics, Kin Health is creating a digital notetaker specifically for patients. This new app lets you record your doctor visits, then uses artificial intelligence to give you a clear, easy-to-read summary. It will highlight important medical advice and lay out the next steps you need to take. You can even use it to jot down questions for your next appointment, making sure you cover everything that is on your mind. The idea behind Kin Health is to empower patients, helping them stay on top of their health information and decisions. This seed funding round was led by Maveron, with other investors also joining in to support the patient-focused technology. This move signals a growing belief in...

In a surprising new development, an artificial intelligence model from OpenAI appears to have diagnosed patients in an emergency room setting more accurately than two human doctors. A recent study, published in the journal Science and led by researchers from Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, put AI to the test using real patient records. The findings suggest a significant step forward for AI in healthcare, particularly in high-pressure situations like initial ER triage. The core of the study involved examining 76 actual patient cases from the Beth Israel emergency room. Researchers compared diagnoses made by two internal medicine attending physicians to those generated by OpenAI’s o1 and 4o models. To ensure fairness, two other attending physicians, who did not know if the diagnoses came from humans or AI, then assessed the accuracy of each one. What stood out was the performance of the o1 model. It either matched or slightly outperformed bot...