Alex Lupi and Gabe Siegel, Atlas Care

This mom walked into our ER carrying a four-inch binder with every lab report and imaging study from dozens of doctor visits for her 20-year-old son.

"You're gonna think I'm crazy," she said, "but I go to all these different doctors, and none of their records talk to each other." Her son had been losing weight despite eating constantly. He’d been given a vague rheumatoid diagnosis that wasn't quite fitting. He saw fifteen specialists over six months. All their data was sitting in that binder, but it was scattered everywhere.

Patients are becoming the keepers of their own medical knowledge out of necessity. This mom was doing the work that technology should be doing—connecting the dots between specialists, maintaining continuity, and advocating for her son's care. She had become a better medical records manager than billion-dollar hospital systems.

Eventually we used that binder to figure out it was lymphoma. An army of specialists had missed the big picture—cancer!—lost in the pages.

That shouldn’t happen. So another doctor and I built an AI app that syncs all your medical records and puts them in your phone alongside an AI agent trained by physicians. Patients can record their doctor’s visit, and then you can ask the AI questions about the conversation or your records.

AI’s doubters haven't actually used tools like this. They haven't accepted that AI can do certain things better than humans—like calculators doing math. Sometimes diagnosis is one of those things.

Once I had this complex patient whose diagnosis I completely missed. Later, after I found out, I fed the exact conversation I’d had with the patient into AI. It caught the diagnosis on the very first try.

The moment you stop competing with technology and start using it, you can focus on what only humans can do. And that’s a long list for doctors. Until an AI can see a facial expression on a patient's face, press on a belly, or smell a room, it's utility is limited. The human touch in medicine is irreplaceable, and if you ask any doctor—including us!—they’ll say there are too few doctors, not too many.

That’s why the future of AI in medicine isn’t competition; it’s collaboration. AI gives doctors a cognitive and intellectual safety net. If you're stressed, burned out, or exhausted at the end of a grueling shift in an overloaded ER, then AI can prevent you from missing an important point in your notes. And AI empowers patients, too. It gives doctors access to the full story of what a patient said, not just a doctor's filtered interpretation of it. Combining AI's precision with human intuition and experience leads to the best and sharpest decisions for patients—and that means better outcomes for everyone.

Americans have this incredible ability to take control when systems fail them. Our patient’s mom proved it. And now we're building technology to match that spirit, too.