Building the World's Most-used Medical AI | Dr. Thomas Kelly of Heidi - E716
episode
BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech: Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand & Malaysia Startups, Founders & Venture Capital VC (English)
46 min
2 speakers
8 chapters
transcribed 17 days ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Who is Dr. Tom Kelly and how did he go from vascular surgery trainee to AI health founder?
GPT-4 came out and that changed the rules. We had to fire half the team, tell customers that we weren't gonna fulfill our promises, tell investors that like the thesis that they invested behind was not correct and that models was no longer a differentiating factor. We had some patients who ended up losing their limbs because doctors were in a rush, uh put my surgical career on pause to build the company. It's pretty crazy to have gone from almost deaf to the most used healthcare AI tool globally. Hello, Doctor Thomas Kelly, exciting to have you on the show. Yeah, thanks for having me, Jeremy. Excad to be here.
Yeah, so I think it's fascinating that you're building out Heidi Health, you know, an AI scribe and healthcare care partner. Uh and just really exciting to see you grow uh from, you know, milestone to milestone. So please, uh, could you introduce yourself?
Yeah, hi everyone. I'm Dr. Tom Kelly, but Tom is fine. So I was a surgical trainee originally. So I'm an Australian. I was a vascular surgery registrar. It was my last uh clinical job before starting Heidi. And yeah, can tell me more about the whole background, but I was basically inspired by some bad patient outcomes where um in vascular surgery all you have to do is feel a pulse, but people in emergency are very busy and We had some patients who ended up losing their limbs because doctors were in a rush. They didn't have the chance to think of the right diagnosis. And so I always thought that doctors should practice with some sort of partner in their care that could support them in their reasoning and maybe make them in less of a rush do some of their work for them.
So that was the inspiration for Heidi back in 2020 and uh put my surgical career on pause to build the
Why did Tom decide to become a doctor in the first place?
company since then. Why did you want to be a doctor in the first place? Was it something your parents said? Was it something you were inspired by? Was it how how did you go about being a doctor in the first place? Yeah.
I loved my primary care doctor. So my my GP, he was I I still what I imagine as like the platonic ideal of the best, you know, doctor. He was he would always wear this um tweed suit. He would sit on a radiator heater. He would like you know, he he didn't even have a medical record. Um, and it didn't matter how sick you were or you're worried, he always seemed to have like a good answer or plan of what to do next. Um, and he was old fashioned, like he used to do home visits. We knew where he lived. Um, I remember when I was little, I think we went to his house and he had uh some asthma medicine, like a nebulizer that I had at his house. So we almost did like a in home hospital kind of thing. Um and yeah, so gro growing up when I was thinking of, you know, what I wanted to be, it was like if I if I was smart enough and I could get the grades, I couldn't imagine a a better thing to do what he did.
Uh so it was kind of the inspiration. Obviously, as I grew up and went along. and learned more about medicine. Uh I explored other interests, but I was always this gravity towards, you know, caring for others, spending time with people, constantly learning all the attributes of being a doctor appealed to me. So that's why I went into it. Uh no regrets. I I think it was it was great.
Yeah, and what's interesting is that, you know, you had, you know, studied out in uh mathematics as well as undergrad. Were you like more mathematically inclined? I mean, is that the standard like pre med route?
Yeah. A little unusual. Uh I guess so in my final year in school, I did all of the uh the quant kind of subjects. So I did, you know, physics and chemistry and university maths. So I loved I really loved like maths and engineering was kind of the direction that I was I was, I guess, most uh gifted at it, but also most interested in. Um, so then the way the entry path works, pre-med, you can do sort of any undergraduate. You just had to do a few subjects to get into medicine. So you had to do biochemistry, biology, obviously, and then a bit of human anatomy, pathophysiology.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Who is Dr. Tom Kelly and how did he go from vascular surgery trainee to AI health founder?
0:00–1:38
2
Why did Tom decide to become a doctor in the first place?
1:38–7:43
3
What is the capacity‑crisis caused by doctors’ paperwork and why does it matter?
7:43–11:55
4
How hard is it to build a reliable AI medical scribe compared with a demo?
11:55–16:15
5
How did Heidi evolve from a pure scribe to a full AI care‑partner with decision‑support features?
16:15–27:28
6
Why are Singapore, Japan and the broader Asian market critical to Heidi’s roadmap and how is the product localized?
27:28–33:07
7
What was the GPT‑4 pivot that forced Heidi to abandon its model‑first strategy?
33:07–36:27
8
How does Heidi plan to compete with OpenAI and stay ahead of large‑model rivals?
36:27–46:12
Speakers
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