How a Healthcare Startup is Harnessing AI to Improve the Patient Experience at Scale

I had this eye-opening experience in the early 2000s when I met someone newly diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. We were trying to figure out how to manage it and quickly found there wasn’t a great place for tapping into communal wisdom. So, we built an online community, Diabetes Daily. It just started growing, resonating, and eventually reaching up to two million people a month.

Along the way, we discovered this giant chasm between the patient experience and the industry experience. I thought, what if we could make it easy for organizations to understand the patient experience, create better products, and help build a more responsive healthcare system? That was really the birth of Thrivable. Six years later, we have over 100,000 patients on our platform who have chosen to share their feedback with companies addressing everything from diabetes to sleep apnea and various chronic health conditions, helping them build what patients need.

So what is Thrivable? At the heart of it is getting the voice of the patient into all these organizations, making it quick and easy for them to understand what drives patient behavior, like why they’re staying on one product versus another. Understanding their experience is critical towards creating a better future. And to do that, you have to talk to them, so that’s what we do in a variety of ways.

As a small startup, where we all wear 10,000 different hats, AI has become a key part of our workflow with so many compelling use cases. Just today, we had a brainstorming session on recruitment, and Gemini in Google Meet immediately converted this really rich conversation into a one-pager I can share with my team. It was 95% perfect, so after spending just five minutes editing, I had a strategy.

I also use Gemini Deep Research constantly for things like market sizing and contracting. I recently had this light bulb moment when we needed to train our customer success team on contracting processes, which can be pretty dense and dry.

To be an effective CEO, I need to focus on strategy and making sure the whole organization is aligned around executing that strategy. The less time I spend doing research, trying to process a document, or creating a spreadsheet, the more time I have for crucial conversations with customers, patients, and my team. I’ve seen a meaningful change in my schedule, and my calendar is now filled with more productive meetings that are driving things forward.

Similarly, preparing for board meetings now involves dropping notes and decks from conversations with board members into NotebookLM to synthesize and plan my communication. It’s so powerful because as a CEO, I have to communicate extraordinarily efficiently and distill this complex world into something that’s easy for people to follow. I’ll often use Gemini to help me to do that, and I’ve gotten all this feedback over the last year about how I’ve improved as a communicator. By having this AI writing shotgun, I've actually learned what good communication looks like.

I'll take every improvement in workflow, team functioning, and product that helps us provide large amounts of value, quickly and scalably, and ultimately improve the patient experience. And Google AI is a foundational part of this.