An Investor Says Healthcare AI Should Start at the Patient Interaction
Investor Brenton Farnioli argues the best entry point is the phone call, the visit, or the fax, where AI can stop just taking notes and start doing the work.
Lightwork · AI Creates New Viruses, Building AI for Healthcare & Moats in Healthcare IT | LightworkDr. Brenton Farnioli, a health technology investor at Lightspeed Venture Partners who is also a physician, was asked how a founder can find room to compete when large incumbents and well funded research labs are moving into the same territory. Founders should assume others will land in similar places over time, he argued, so the key is to choose what he called a strategic starting point for expansion.
His answer was that founders should, in his words, “insert at a strategic surface area” from which they can “unlock more capabilities” and become more of a platform. For him, that starting point is often, in his words, “the moment of interaction with the patient.”
He pointed to the moments when care actually happens. A patient calls to book an appointment. A patient talks with a doctor during a visit. One doctor faxes a record to another doctor. In each case, Farnioli said, a human has traditionally received that communication, written it down, and filed it into the electronic health record.
The chance, as he sees it, is that an artificial intelligence program or agent could do that recording instead of the human. That creates what he calls a system of action sitting beside the system of record, where a system of record is where official information is stored and a system of action is software that does work with that information. That is why he sees tension between the health record companies moving from storage into doing work and the agent companies moving from doing work into storing more records.
He also said buying is changing, with individual physicians adopting AI tools on their own rather than waiting for administrators to pick a vendor. He said teams that execute well at that starting point earn buy-in and trust from the customer and get pulled into broader work, attracting talent and capital as they add more capabilities.
Questions people ask
What does AI agent mean in a clinic?
In this context it means software that can listen to or read a patient interaction, capture the key details, and then take next steps like drafting a note, placing an order, or scheduling follow-up. It differs from a chatbot that only answers questions. The claim in the piece is that being present at the interaction lets the agent do more than file paperwork.
Why is faxing still part of modern healthcare?
A fax is still a common way for one medical office to send records, referrals, and orders to another, despite newer messaging tools. It persists because many clinics have long used fax machines and the format is accepted for sharing documents. That is why Farnioli includes a faxed record alongside calls and visits as a patient interaction moment.