When clinics are overbooked and appointments take weeks, healthcare can become a waiting-game, a guessing-game, a Google-game.
AI-powered startup Doctronic is offering Americans a different way to play.
Launched at the end of 2023, Doctronic provides free, private, immediate medical consultations to anyone with an internet connection — no login or insurance required.
“The problem people really have is getting access to the system,” Dr. Adam Oskowitz, 47, Doctoronic’s co-founder and a vascular surgeon at University of California San Francisco, told NYNext. “That’s the guiding light for everything we’ve built.”
Nationwide, more than a third of adults skip care due to costs, a study conducted by survey platform Pollfish found, and the U.S. will face a shortage of 86,000 physicians by 2036, the Association of American Medical Colleges estimates.
“In New York City [alone] there’s a three-week wait time to see a primary care physician,” co-founder Matt Pavelle, a 50-year-old tech entrepreneur based in New York said. “We have a system that’s failing a lot of people.”
While the platform shares some DNA with tele-health services and symptom-checking tools such as WebMD and Teladoc, Doctronic differs in two key ways: it’s powered by a proprietary, physician-built AI that leads with structured medical reasoning, and its chatbot can hand off to a real doctor in minutes, not days.
Users begin with a secure, anonymous chat. Doctronic asks only for age and sex, then guides users through a 15 to 20 minute medical consultation powered by AI.
At the end, the chatbot offers four possible diagnoses and two summaries: one in plain English and one in SOAP-note (Subjective, Objective, Assessment and Plan) format, designed specifically for follow-up with a physician, if necessary.
If users don’t already have a doctor, they can pay $40 to speak with a licensed Doctronic physician — available 24/7, in all 50 states, typically within 30 minutes. That physician reviews the AI findings, confirms or refines the diagnosis and provides treatment or referral options. (These virtual visits are Doctronic’s main revenue-generator.)
For those who have a provider, the SOAP-note is intended to travel with them, thus cutting down intake time and helping physicians start with a fuller picture.
The AI-chat is meant more as a waypoint than a destination — getting patients to their next steps quicker and with better information.
“We’re not trying to replace doctors,” said Pavelle. “We’re empowering patients.”
Beneath the chatbot is Doctronic’s proprietary large language model. It’s akin to ChatGPT but trained on clinical guidelines and built by a team of doctors and engineers. It has an accuracy rate near 70% — with accuracy defined as a complete match between the AI diagnosis and proposed treatment plan and the recommendation made by the live doctor the user follows up with.
That level of precision, the founders say, is only possible because the system was designed with clinical rigor at its core.
Rather than relying on a single general-purpose model, Doctronic employs a system of specialized and specifically-trained AI ‘agents’ that deliberate internally during the consultation; by cross-checking information and flagging inconsistencies, they work together to help the system reach its outcomes.
Meanwhile, a second layer of oversight — what the founders call ‘guardians’ — monitors every conversation in real time. If the system detects signs of an emergency, sensitive disclosure, or anything beyond its scope, it can pause the interaction and prompt the user to seek immediate help.
“The whole system is built around patient safety, because safety is what matters,” Pavelle said.
To avoid data misuse, one of the most persistent criticisms of AI, Doctronic is anonymous by default. If a user creates an account, any memory that exists is for their benefit only — remembering details from past visits to make future consultations more personalized, for example — and not to train the system. For those who do create accounts, everything is stored in HIPAA-compliant systems.
“Your data is yours,” Oskowitz said. “If you want to delete it, delete it. If you want to take it somewhere else, take it somewhere else.”
Since launching, Doctronic has conducted more than 10 million consultations. It currently serves about 50,000 users a week, and, with a recent $5 million funding round from Union Square Ventures and Tusk Ventures, is working to build out its network of physicians and back-end engineers.
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Future plans, the founders said, include integration with wearables and lab services and automated prescription refills — but the focus remains squarely on improving baseline access. Doctronic doesn’t currently have physical offices but will soon have headquarters in New York City for its growing team.
“There are a lot of companies out there raising the ceiling for healthcare,” Pavelle told NYNext. “We’re trying to raise the floor.”
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