The following interview is a conversation we had with James Bates, CEO and Founder of AdviNOW Medical, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $24 Million Raised to Build the Future of AI-Powered Healthcare
James Bates
Hey everyone, and thanks for listening.
Brett
Today I’m speaking with James Bates, CEO and Founder of AdviNOW Medical, an AI healthcare automation company that’s raised 24 million in funding. James, thanks for chatting with me today.
James Bates
Yeah, thanks for having me. I appreciate you having this podcast.
Brett
Yeah, no problem at all. So, to kick things off, could we just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background?
James Bates
Yeah, I’m James Bates. I’m Founder and CEO of Advinel Medical. Previous to advinel, I had the opportunity to run a billion dollar business in self driving vehicle technologies at free scale. Previous to that, I worked for a company named Maxim, which did IoT interfaces. So you can think of Apple phones, Samsung phones, as well as nest, people like that use those products. Before that, Silicon Labs. So I’ve got a long history in small companies as well as large companies.
Brett
I saw on your LinkedIn as well that you were working in Japan in 1996. So take us back there. What was Japan like in 1996?
James Bates
Japan was fantastic. I actually lived in Japan for a total of twelve years. Three different tours over there, if you will. In 1998, I joined Lucent Technologies, Bell Laboratories, and Bell Labs, the storied company. They’d invented the transistor, although they’re not around anymore, given all the breakups that they’ve had. But ultimately they sent me to Japan in 1998 to be able to work on the world’s first digital cell phone chipset with NEC and Samsung in a fully integrated form. So that took the size of a cell phone from the bricks that everyone remembered down to the kind of the size we have today. And it was a fantastic job. It worked on that. And then also Sirius satellite radio in 1990, 519 96, it was with a company named Daifuku, and they are a clean room factory automation company.
James Bates
And my job was to model the stresses that robots will have on the semiconductor wafers. So a lot of technical stuff, not super exciting, I believe. But living in Japan with my wife was a very interesting experience because we had to essentially live in the economy. And when were in Nagoya with Daifuku, it was actually a very small town, so we lived in a very small company apartment. Think about 300 sqft dish type of thing. Had Tatami’s on the floor, lived at the company in those days. The Daisco is a very interesting company because we had to share our computer. So you didn’t get your own computer, you added two computers that the company had, and based on your seniority, you get access to them.
James Bates
So if I wanted access to those computers, then I would need to sign up, and it’s usually two or three in the morning before I get those accesses. So I brought in my own computer, convinced them to let me bring in my own computer to do the work.
Brett
That’s awesome. And what’s the policy now with Advent now medical, everyone gets their own computer.
James Bates
I thought that might be helpful, given we’re an artificial intelligence company. It’s interesting when you go back to 1995 and you think that not every employee who does engineering has their own computer. It’s just absolutely mind blowing.
Brett
Yeah, I was born in 1990, so that’s hard for my brain to even comprehend and understand that it’s not. Now, a few other questions we’d like to ask. And the goal here is really just to better understand what makes you tick as a Founder. First one, what Founder do you admire the most and what do you admire about them?
James Bates
Yeah, I think I have to choose Elon Musk. I mean, if I had billions of dollars, I would probably go and invent crazy things like, you know, it’s just so amazing to think he started out in payments and he’s really know, kind of like an Asperger’s level geek coder who coded PayPal, right? That’s what he started, is where he made his initial money. And then he’s like, you know what? I’m going to solve electric car problem. And here we have TESLA. I want to go to mars. The human species has to go to Mars someday. Founded Spacex. I’m going to drill holes in these mountains so I can alleviate traffic. I hate sitting in traffic. SO YoU have the BORing company. I mean, it’s just absolutely amazing to me.
James Bates
YoU find a problem, and then if you have enough capital, the technology exists to solve it. It’s just so capital intensive that it just never gets done. And Elon has been able to really change the world through that thought process.
Brett
If you had unlimited money, what would be the number one project that you would start?
James Bates
My wife laughs at this, BUT as I sat in traffic. I wanted to found the boring company. I basically drafted up patents around a machine that would tunnel and actually automatically build everything around the tunnel in an automated way so you could build roads and freeways that are underneath the world instead of on top of the world, solving a lot of the tie ups we have today. I would still do that. Not know. ELon doesn’t know what he’s doing, but his VisIOn is a LIttLE Bit different. RiGht. He’s trying to make these tunnels that will have automatic driving Teslas in them. And if you’ve been to las Vegas through that tunnel, then you’d see what that’s ThINk. You know, it’s just his focus isn’t on it.
James Bates
His focus is now on Twitter or now X, I guess, and his other companies, and not much on the boring companies. So I think there’s still a great opportunity to build a boring machine that’s automated. And then you eliminate the billions of dollars that are spent to put in high speed rail, as an example, subway systems in cities. You eliminate the billions of dollars that would be spending to add a couple new lanes on a freeway, because you just put it underneath the existing freeway. So there’s tons of things that can be done if it was automated. And what Elon has done with the Boring company is just a very beginning start to that. A lot of the fundamental technology that still needs to be invented is out there waiting to be done.
Brett
So in ten years, after you have your successful 300 billion dollar ipo, I’m going to drop you a note, Vic. All right, James, how are we looking here? Are you still going to start the next generation?
James Bates
I’m on it. Sign me up. Hopefully I can partner with Elon and we’ll partner and go do it together. I’m all for that.
Brett
Nice.
James Bates
I love it.
Brett
And what about books? And we like to frame this, and this comes from an author named Ryan Holiday, but he calls him a quake book. So a quake book is a book that rocks you to your core. It really influences how you think about the world and just how you approach life day to day. Do any quickbooks like that come to mind?
James Bates
For know, on the business side, it really is. Companies like good to great. I don’t know if you’ve had the opportunity to read that book. It is one of the most classic business books. It’s what, 30 years old now? Maybe, but it still is as relevant today as it was back when it was written. So, Jim Collins, he’s a fantastic business guy. He understands management and motivating people and building great companies and the roadblocks to actually doing that. So I reread it probably every two to three years just so that it’s fresh in my mind and I remember what has to happen. Other books that I really enjoy are next generation healthcare books. And interesting thing is that when you think about a book like lifespan by David Sinclair, as an example, he founded the age lab in Harvard.
James Bates
And this is another place that I would put tons of money into. If I had the billions of dollars of Elon Musk, I would definitely be founding an aging company. But what David Sinclair wrote about is how he has been able to literally almost double the lifespan of mice through gene therapy. And although Mice and humans are very different, and gene therapy in humans is fraught with problems. Right. But it will happen. And we’ll get to a point where the real major disease that the healthcare industry is solving is actually aging because young people don’t get sick at the same rate as older people. And there’s whole reasons for this. I’ll spare you on this podcast, but it’s fundamentally basic that this is solvable problem and you can actually reduce how people age and make them 25 forever.
James Bates
And so when I think about books that have impacted me, it is books like a lifespan by David Sinclair as well. Just to know that 20 years from now, my kids are probably not going to have the health care issues we have, not only because of companies like Advi now that completely automate the medical visit and do all the scribe and overhead for physicians through advantage of health care in half, but because people aren’t aging anymore and so the cancer rates go down. Everything goes down to a rate of a 25 year old person.
Brett
I’m a huge fan of Jim Collins. I loved that book. And I have ordered or I have lifespan, I just haven’t read it yet. When I got it looked very big. I think it’s what, like 500 pages long? Is it worth the read, do you think?
James Bates
Absolutely worth the read. I go hiking every morning and that’s when I do my book reading or listening, if you will. So I’m a big audible guy to be able to get all my book reading in.
Brett
Nice. Yeah, I think you’re the third guest in about a month or two months that’s recommended his book. I’ll give it a shot.
James Bates
The third guest in a month that’s recommended his book. That’s interesting. Wow.
Brett
We talk to ten or 15 people per week, so there’s a lot of people that we’re talking to as well.
James Bates
Fantastic.
Brett
Now let’s switch gears and let’s dive into the company. So how we like to start this off is let’s talk about the problem you solve. So can you just paint a picture for us of what that problem is?
James Bates
Yeah. So physicians spend roughly two thirds of their time doing clerical work. Now, the reason why they’re asked to do clerical work is because a lot of the clerical work requires medical knowledge. And physicians went to medical school, and so they have medical knowledge, but there’s nothing requiring them to do the clerical work. They just end up doing the clerical work because they have the knowledge. Then physicians have regulatory knowledge. Why? Because if they get it wrong, they go to jail.
Brett
Right.
James Bates
They use the wrong code. They overbill Medicare. I mean, lots of bad things can happen. So they become experts in the business of medicine because they have to. And it’s not even something really they learn in medical school. They just have to become experts in the regulatory environment. And so a lot of the overhead is regulatory work. Again, physicians aren’t required to do that, but they end up becoming the experts in that space, so they end up doing it well. You’re taking a person in a clinic, which is the bottleneck to seeing patients, and you’re basically making them the most expensive clerk on the planet. Advi now uses artificial intelligence and augmented reality to eliminate that. So that’s our problem statement, and that’s what we founded the company to solve.
Brett
And take me back to the founding of the company. So, 2016, I see. That’s when you officially formed the company. How’d you discover this problem? And what was it about this problem that made you say, yes, that’s it. I’m going to dedicate the next 510 15 years of my life to solving this problem.
James Bates
Yeah. So when we sold free scale to a company called NXP and I retired, I had a two year non compete, which meant I had to do something completely different. And I started looking at healthcare in 2016 because the ACA, or Obamacare, as many people know, it had just passed, and the whole world was divided. Half of the Americans said they wanted Obamacare, half said they hated it. And I didn’t really understand it. I just knew that health care seemed pretty broken, and maybe I could do something. So I got with a banker, and I started looking at medical practices that were for sale. And initially, because I was really a layman in the medical industry, I figured I would just buy some medical practices, and that would allow me to become an expert to know how to fix healthcare.
James Bates
Well, as I started doing due diligence on urgent care companies, primary care companies, cardiology groups, surgery centers, and all these practices that were for sale. I was shocked to see that they don’t really make that much money. I mean, most people think, oh, doctors, everything associated with medicine, a third of our economy, that must be everyone’s rich. But the medical practice businesses, they don’t make money. We’re talking low, single digit EBITDA. So, net, after all of your expenses and everything, you’re talking two to 3% profit. These businesses don’t survive, and they don’t advance because they don’t have the resources to. And so I was just in shock. Wow.
James Bates
How is it possible that the healthcare industry is bankrupt, yet so much money is being know, we have Medicare and politicians cranking down how much they want to pay physicians for each transaction, yet the cost of the transaction continues to go up. And essentially what that means is nobody’s making money. Well, through that process, I became good friends with a guy who ran a chain of urgent care centers. And I got with him, and I started looking at his chain, and he said, look, james, he wanted to sell it to me, obviously, but he’s like, look, I want you to help me fix this. So he let me get involved with the operations to the point that I had some pretty good visibility.
James Bates
And the first thing I did was a six sigma cost analysis, where essentially, what that means six sigma cost analysis is I cost every single movement in the clinic from the time the patient goes in. What does a front desk do? Do they have to stand up three times? Do they go to the printer? Are they using different equipment? If you cost it all the way out? There’s so much money that runs through this clinic. Why is it that nobody can make money? And when I did that’s when I saw the truism that two thirds of a physician’s time was spent doing activities that there was no regulatory reason for them to do. They just happened to be the one with the knowledge, so they were doing it, and I thought, wow.
James Bates
Using similar type of artificial intelligence that I used in the self driving vehicle world, and that’s what my previous life was. I’m like, I could take that. Mimic a physician’s brain, build an AI that will mimic a physician’s brain, and then we build an AI that mimics an administrator’s brain. And those two ais together can eliminate this two thirds burden on the physicians. And that’s the genesis of the idea and what we founded the company to do at the end of 2016.
Brett
And how do physicians talk about this. I know a few physicians and I don’t hear this come up often. Right where, hey, we’re wasting basically all of our time on these low level tasks. It just seems crazy. You have these people who are making good money or they’re well paid, but they’re wasting their time on tasks that don’t add a lot of value. How do they think about this? Do they just think that’s just part of the job or what are their thoughts?
James Bates
Oh, they hate it. It’s the leading part of physician burnout. So if you ask a physician, and next time you meet your physician friends, just ask them, what is the worst part of your job? What they will say is charting, and they’ll say, documentation. And then you’re like, okay, what can you do about that? And they’re like, well, I don’t think I can do anything. I mean, that’s the way it is. All this documentation has to be done. Well, can you hire a scribe to do it? Yeah, but we can’t afford a scribe. Why? Scribes will cost you about 100 grand a year for a reasonable scribe. So physicians that are probably working in these fields, they make two $300,000 a year.
James Bates
If they’re surgeons, they make a lot more, but we’ll start in the non surgical space, and so they’re making two to $300,000 a year. They’re not going to give up $100,000 of their salary to go give it to a scribe. So in very well off clinics, more profitable clinics, that’s what they do when a physician’s, in short supplies, they go hire a scribe. But the clinic’s not making any money. So what Advi now is that AI scribe, but we’re a better scribe because we not only scribe all of the medical information that a scribe, that is a human, would do, but we also do everything in the front desk that the front desk in that team would do. Then we also do everything in the back office from a coding standpoint that whole coding team would do. So we don’t eliminate the front desk.
James Bates
We still need a human there, right? You got to have compassion and you got to have an interface to humans. But now there’s not five of them running back and forth, copying papers, calling insurance companies, and doing all that game, that one, it will be sufficient. And then the back office, you don’t have back and forth with insurance companies over codes because they’re automatically right the first time. So that’s the cost savings that you get from the physician, from the front office and the back office eventually.
Brett
Do you think this eliminates the role of scribes?
James Bates
Yes, the role of scribes will disappear. There’s two different avenues that are being taken for that to happen. What advi now does is we collect all the information ahead of time, right? So the AI engages with the patient through a chatbot experience. We do a differential diagnosis on the patient. We collect basically everything the doctor would need to diagnose and treat them. And then we prepare a one page summary for the physician. So a scribe would just be the one documenting data. So advinel eliminates the scribe because we collect all the data in place of the scribe and present it to the physician in one page summary, allowing them to make that decision very quickly and very efficiently. The human scribe today essentially listens to the physician and documents everything into it. What that gives you that Advil doesn’t give you is contextual information.
James Bates
So Advil will say, oh, I sprained my ankle. And I’ll say, well, sprained your ankle. How’d you do it? Oh, I tripped over the curb or whatever. Adv will collect that. Then we’ll go know, does it hurt to move? Is it a sharp pain? Is it a dull pain? Can you put your weight on it? I mean, all of these normal, standard questions that you would get with a spring dinkle, and it would ask you all of these, and then place the order for an x ray if one of one would be required. And all of this happens without a physician being involved. But what the physician doesn’t know is, okay, so you springed it off of know coming off of that. Did it twist in a weird way, a lot of contextual information that the AI doesn’t think is necessary for diagnosing.
James Bates
But the physician may still want to put in the record, so they’ll capture that and then we won’t. But other systems that are voice to text are taking that job away. So there’s a lot know. You can think of it as a siri for medicine, if you will, or an Alexa for medicine, but they basically are just an ambient listening device inside the physician’s office, and it’s documenting all of the information that’s said as well, and then creating a summary for the physician. So advineau, combined with that, completely eliminates the need for a human scribe, and it’s done both ways.
Brett
Super fascinating. This show is brought to you by Front Lines Media, a podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage, and grow their own podcast. Now, if you’re a Founder, you may be thinking, I don’t have time to host a podcast. I’ve got a company to build. Well, that’s exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host, and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. Now back today’s episode. What types of clinics are you seeing adopt the product and the platform.
James Bates
Right now, urgent care and primary care are by far the quickest to adopt. They suffer the most with the overhead burden and the low profitability. So if you get a large health system, and we’ll use Mayo Clinic as an example, they have a primary care organization, and it’s really not there for profit. It’s there so that when somebody has an issue, they can go see a Mayo specialist, and it’s like a funnel into the hospital system. And so Providence banner, I mean, you can go through the list. All of these large hospital systems, they have primary care and urgent care as a funnel to the hospital system. So they use it as a lost leader with AdVi. Now we basically make it so it’s not a lost leader, and they’re always understaffed because it’s a lost leader.
James Bates
They’re the last to actually get doctors, and a lot of doctors aren’t even going into that space today. So that allows us, those doctors become more efficient to not only make it profitable, but allow physicians to not be burned out and give better outcomes to patients themselves. So everybody wins.
Brett
And given your background and experience in M-A-I want to ask about this as well. I think I read in the news a few weeks ago about how private equity firms for the last few years have been buying up hospital systems and clinics, but now they’re trying to put in regulation that’ll stop them. Do I have that right, or am I completely making up news in my head?
James Bates
I’ll add a little bit of context to that news. The news is real. How much government regulation will come in or not, that’s a whole different conversation. But what’s happening is the independent practitioner is going away, and the independent practitioner is going away because they’re essentially being squeezed. The insurance companies are paying them less and less money, and the government regulations are being cranked up, so they make less and less profit. They’re not surviving, so they’re selling themselves to either health systems or payers. Private equity came out, and they’re like, look, we’ll buy maybe 100 independent practices, group them together, and then make them more efficient, and then sell them to a hospital or a payer and get a much higher multiple. So they’re playing the game of buying low and selling high after they take it and clean it up.
James Bates
Some people in the government don’t like that because the single practitioners are essentially going away. But what I would say is they’re going away anyway, right. The single practitioners are being bought up by the banners of the world or the providences of the world anyway, so that their funnels continue to get new people for that heart surgery. So it’s interesting to see how that finds its way into the press and in the political sphere of, can you really stop that? Because the thing that’s driving it is regulation and the insurance companies, which have become incredibly powerful since the 2016 ACA. And you would need to reverse those things if you wanted to slow down the independent practitioner basically being consolidated. There’s nothing that they can really do for private equity from a regulatory or legal standpoint without touching that’s here to stay.
James Bates
I don’t see any government change on that side.
Brett
Yeah, it makes sense. But it’s also just a little bit od that they’re having so many concerns about this because this is happening in, I think, every single industry that exists. Right. I was listening to a podcast a few months back on the funeral industry. I can’t remember the exact numbers, but it was like 90% of the funeral homes in America are owned by one company. And they went in, bought up all the independent funeral homes, let them keep their names, but it’s this organization that you have no clue who they are or anything about them, but they control the market. So that’s od that they’re focusing on healthcare and making a big fuss at healthcare when that’s happening across every single industry that exists.
James Bates
Yeah. So adding a little bit more color to that. The reality is that when these private equity guys buy up clinics. So let’s say I live in Scottsdale, Arizona. So I’ll use Scottsdale as an example. The independent practitioners can’t negotiate with insurance companies. So an insurance company will come and say, we gave you $100 for a standard medical visit last year. This year we’re only giving you 80. And the only thing the independent practitioner can do is say no. And then they’ll say, okay, you don’t get UnitedHealthcare anymore, or Aetna or whoever they’re negotiating with. So our patients won’t come to you anymore. You’ll have less patients. And if you’re okay with that, fine. Bye bye. They don’t care about them. There’s no leverage for them to negotiate.
James Bates
But very large chains say you had 100 urgent cares in the Scottsdale Phoenix area, and you owned 50% of the market. Now all of a sudden, UnitedHealthcare can’t go to you and say, we’re paying you $80, and by the way, screw you. We’ll just send our patients elsewhere, because then the patients are upset. And UnitedHealthcare is like would say, they’d say, this is the largest healthcare chain in Arizona, and I can’t use my insurance with them. I’m changing insurance companies. And so because that client patient impact exists, that’s why these large private equity guys are getting the pushback, because the insurance companies then go to the government officials and say, oh, well, we can’t lower the cost of our premiums because of private equity, because they’re basically buying them up and creating negotiating leverage and not allowing us to lower costs.
James Bates
It’s not really true because none of the health systems lower their costs either. The hospital systems group up, and they have similar type of negotiations with the insurance companies. So it’s a little bit of a perverted system, but that’s why that noise comes up the way it does in healthcare.
Brett
Makes sense. James, you’re making me feel smarter already.
James Bates
I don’t know about that, but I can say through my years in healthcare, it’s been fascinating. It’s a completely different world, that’s for sure.
Brett
What’s the craziest thing that you found about this space? Was it just the time that’s wasted by the practitioners themselves, or what’s, like, the craziest statistic, or just finding that you’ve uncovered as you’ve gone deep into this space?
James Bates
The number one is the fact that physicians waste so much of their time. But then the number two is nobody actually wants to reduce the cost of health care. And that was really shocking for me. Everyone has competing interests, and I won’t spend too much time on this, but it’s a whole hour conversation that we could have. Insurance companies, by law, get a percentage of revenue as profit. So they can never have more than 20% profit. So UnitedHealthcare, as big as it is, they can never have more than 20% profit. By law, if they have more than 20% profit, they have to return it back to the people who bought insurance from them. Well, what does that mean? That means that for them to increase profit, they have to increase revenue.
James Bates
So rather than making an efficient insurance company, they bloat it as much as possible so that they can grow on the revenue side. So this is why our health insurance premiums have skyrocketed since 2016, because there’s a built incentive to increase revenue over efficiency. So there’s no real competition in the market anymore other than we need to keep our patients happy so that they don’t go to Aetna if you’re united. And so the insurance companies don’t want to have a low cost plan because that reduces their revenue, which in turn, absolutely reduces their profit, even if they have higher margin in the lower cost plans, which is the reality they do. Right.
James Bates
And so the interesting thing is that they don’t want to sell low cost plans that are restricted to only a certain number of doctors because it hurts them on the gross profit that they can make as a company. So the insurance companies have zero desire, but the hospital systems don’t either, right? I mean, the hospital systems, they don’t want to reduce their revenue. So a surgery, and I’ll just use chemotherapy with cancer as an example, you can go to a hospital and say immunotherapy has a higher probability of curing this patient. So you should automatically jump to immunotherapy. And the hospital system would say, yes, we’re evaluating it as quickly as we can. We don’t want to be the first person to use it. We’ll be the second or third.
James Bates
But the reality is there’s a bing counter in the back office that says we make $100,000 with radiation and chemo and we’re only going to make $20,000 off of immunotherapy because the patient gets cured faster. So you know what? We’re going to delay the adoption of immunotherapy as long as we can so we can make more money off of the radiation and chemo. It’s like really perverse, but it really does happen. So when we’re selling advance pitch to them is advers. It saves you and it saves the patient. Nobody loses. And so all the constituencies can win when ADV is adopted. And that’s kind of our selling point. But a new therapy where the hospital system sees the patient less, they’re not for that. Insurance companies don’t want that, so they don’t want healthier patients and they don’t want lower costs.
James Bates
So the government has been trying to force what’s called population health, where you try to keep patients healthy rather than treat them when they’re sick and compensate physicians for doing that. That’s Medicare advantage type programs. And I think that has the potential to actually achieve the goal of incentivizing physicians and hospital systems and insurers to lower cost over time, but we’re still a long ways from that.
Brett
Wow. Super fascinating. And I think we’ll have to bring you back on for a part two, so I can ask you another list of, like, 20 questions here to better understand just how healthcare works in America, but to dive a bit deeper into our final questions here before we wrap. So, sure. As I mentioned there in the intro, you’ve raised 24 million to date. I know in the pre interview were talking, and that money didn’t come from Silicon Valley VCs or Andreessa Horowitz. So can you just talk to us about the funding that’s been raised, who those investors are, and then what you’ve learned about fundraising throughout this process so far.
James Bates
Yeah. So me personally, I have a little under $10 million of my own money into the company. And so I was the first angel investor, if you will, into my own company and been putting money in along with other investors as we go through the rounds. So that’s a big part of it. My lead investor for the last couple of rounds is a venture capital company called Accelerant Ventures. Accelerant Ventures has been great as they have invested. I also have companies like Global Med, which is a strategic investor. They sell medical equipment, and bundling Abby now, software with their medical equipment is a strategy that they were considering. And then companies like a company called Dreamquest or uniquest, they’ve invested a large sum of money as well for partnerships with their medical devices.
James Bates
So we have these type of strategic investors as well as just purely financial investors, another VC in the valley that invested in us as well. And it’s allowed us to really be able to get the money that we need to make this successful.
Brett
And that has to be very meaningful. Right. For investors, for your employees, and even for your customers, the fact that you’re in this with $10 million. So a lot of the founders I speak to, it’s all external funding that they’ve raised. They are betting their careers, maybe on the company, but they’re not betting $10 million. So that must say a lot. And I’m sure that means a lot to really all the stakeholders that you constantly engage with.
James Bates
Absolutely. And they know that I’m not skin deep, I’m like bone deep, if you will. My elbow is all the way deep inside. So I’m all in to make AdV now successful, and I’m going to do everything I can do to make sure that happens. My own money doesn’t guarantee that, if you will. But it definitely strikes a big exclamation point on the fact that I’m in it to win it here. We’re going to change the world of healthcare, and we’re going to create a system that allows every single person in the world to have health care all the time they want it. And that automated platform is here. It’s here now. And we can reduce the cost of health care to the point that governments can give everyone health care for free. And it really doesn’t, it doesn’t break the bank.
Brett
And you being all in here is very similar to Elon Musk’s journey right when he went all in after x.com or after yapel.com. So makes sense here. I see the.
James Bates
You know, some people say it’s, you know, Elon now owns very large portions of these companies, which is where his billions has come. Know, if I funded advinal purely from the external space, I would own a lot less of the company than I do now, that’s for sure.
Brett
Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Now, final question, since I know we’re almost up on time, let’s just paint a picture so maybe we can go bigger here. Let’s go five years, ten years. What does the future look like when Advow is successful and it’s being adopted by all these different health systems and different clinics? What does that look like? Can you paint a picture for us for that?
James Bates
I mean, well, Advi now inevitably becomes a Google of healthcare, right? That’s the dream. Then the next step is really automating the physician side. So today, physicians need to see every patient and the record of every patient. But once you have all of this data, structured data flowing through where the AI is collecting the data, it is populating the data, then you actually can get FDA approval for the AI to actually do the diagnosing and treating as well. And that doesn’t eliminate the need for physicians. And I don’t think the world will ever be without physicians, because humans need physicians to explain what it all means. But physicians won’t be spending their time on the simple stuff that will all go away. And I’m looking forward to a world where health care is not a mystery. Health care is solved.
James Bates
And now we’re talking about the age. How do we solve the aging crisis of America? And that is the new healthcare challenge, is how do we keep people young? And so it’s really exciting for me to go through this journey. There’s a number of companies that are very large, like an Amazon or a Google or Microsoft that have also targeted healthcare because it’s such a large portion of our economy and there’s so much money out there to spend. But ultimately, the only way the problem is really solved is through a system like Advi now, where we automate everything from the beginning to the end. So I look forward to potentially partnering with one of those guys, maybe be acquired or competing to the better end. So we’ll see how that all plays out.
Brett
One final question. I’m going to sneak in here for a prediction. So let’s imagine that a child is born today. How long do you think the average lifespan is going to be for kids born after 2023? Do you have a prediction or a guess of what you think that’s going to look like?
James Bates
I think it’ll be 100 and 3140 years. Wow.
Brett
So exciting. All right, James, we’ll have to wrap here. Before we do, if any Founder listening in wants to just follow along with your journey as you build the google of healthcare. Where should they go?
James Bates
Go to advow.com. You can feel free to contact me if you have any questions. James bates@advow.com or go to some of our partners. I mean, our announced partner is Mayo Clinic. We’ve been partnering with them for many years now. So definitely it would be an interesting conversation that they could have. As you watch the revolution of healthcare. I mean, AI is going to transform many industries, but healthcare will be really dramatically changed. My son is in medical school, and so it’s really interesting to me as he’s gone through medical school to think about how he will actually practice medicine in the future. So it’ll be a different world.
Brett
Yeah, that must be crazy. I wonder, how are they teaching medicine right now in school, given all of these changes that are happening? What are they doing for that?
James Bates
So he’s only a first year, so I can’t really answer with complete experience, but I’ve had a few medical schools bring me in to speak to the students, and they’re learning medicine still in a very traditional way today. It’s ground up biology, where you’re doing the review of systems, you’re asking the patient all the questions, doing the physical exam. They’re learning the same traditional medicine that they’ve always learned, and I can’t imagine that will be true in ten years. But it seems to be that way today, other than inviting speakers like myself to come in and speak to the class about AI changes in healthcare.
Brett
Wow, that’s crazy and a little disappointing. But feel like there’s going to have to be change there. So change is inevitable, and it’s definitely coming. James, I don’t want to keep you any longer than I told you this would take, so we’ll have to wrap here. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk about what you’re building and really just educate our audience about how the hell healthcare works in America. I think it’s a black box for myself and for a lot of people, so this is a lot of fun and really appreciate you taking the time.
James Bates
Well, Brett, I really appreciate you spending time with me, and thanks for having me on your podcast. Happy to come back anytime.
Brett
All right, keep in touch. This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. And for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
James Bates
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