Yoona Kim, 44, wanted to help people access health care. That desire led her down a compounding path–from an early career analyzing health care cost trends, to pharmacy school, and then to a PhD program in health economics. Eventually, she encountered an important, solvable problem: Millions of people are prescribed suboptimal–and often dangerous–medications each year. So in 2017, Kim and CTO Penjit "Boom" Moorhead co-founded Arine . The platform, powered by AI , recommends safer, more effective medication regimens. It’s grown by illuminating the shadowy side of the $1 trillion U.S. pharmaceutical industry .
No.
236
Arine
San Francisco
Three-year growth rate: 1,728%
I always saw gaps in the health care system. My mom is a public health nurse, and even when we were kids, she would bring us to volunteer at public health fairs and county clinics. I remember seeing lines of people out the door–so many people who struggled to get health care.
I spent 20 years in health care in different roles. Most of what I did was evaluate the outcomes of different medical interventions. In 2017, everyone was focused on medication adherence and dispensing and delivery solutions for pharmaceuticals. But I realized nobody was focused on the root of the problem: Are patients even taking the right medications in the first place?
As a health economist, I’m used to looking at data and evaluating outcomes. My co-founder, Boom, is a nuclear physicist-turned-data scientist and developer. We could’ve come to market with a manual medication-review service for individual patients. Instead, we spent two years building a platform to be scalable.Humans can’t get it right every time. There are so many different data points you need to piece together, like which other medications have been tried and failed, what other conditions the patient has, and their age, gender, and life situation. This is the biggest area of waste in our health care system today–spending $530 billion on the problems that are caused by taking the wrong medicine. We really needed to utilize AI to solve this massive problem.Before we went to investors, we launched a pilot with a Medicaid plan, and we had some […]
How I Used AI to Fix a Massive and Dangerous Problem With Prescriptions
