I’m excited to distribute the armaments we’ve been building to enable individuals to take sovereignty over their own health.
Mission
We exist to empower individuals on their health journey. Self Health integrates the best clinical reasoning and practical know-how using AI Agents to advocate for each individual’s personal care.
This is about more than software — a first step toward a US health system built around individuals, not insurers or providers.
Our Offerings
Over the last month, we’ve built a new set of tools for our pilot users:
Personal Health Record (PHR) Chat
Upload labs, pictures, visit notes, prescriptions, screenshots, audio recordings, CDs. One place. Searchable & queryable.
Chat on your health: research treatments, compare medications, find patterns in your symptoms, analyze labs.
Pre- and Post- Visit Prep
Make the most of every appointment. Pre-visit packets ensure clinicians have the data they need – no time wasted looking up labs or remembering questions.
Eliminate mistakes from doctor's orders, lab fulfillment, medication/fasting/site requirements. Everything validated.
Never miss follow-ups. Post-visit, ensure your entire care team stays coordinated. Stay proactive on every action item.
Healthcare Concierge
Zero-effort scheduling, rescheduling, records transfers, prior auths, dispute resolutions.
Navigate difficult prescriptions. Formulary research, sourcing, delivery logistics – handled seamlessly.
Rally your care team even as insurance changes. Auths managed before appointments, finances in line.
Self Health Chat is tailored to your contraindications, logistical requirements, and health goals. One of our users used Self Health Chat to decide which allergist’s medication advice to listen to.
Join the Pilot
Just for you, I’ll let you in on all these features for free. If you or a friend could use a hand, consider joining our pilot:
Our pilot users love our visit prep.
Our reward for drinking from the firehose of patient pain has been celebrating real, unprompted product usage: the PHR that we painstakingly put together now actively assists our pilot user’s key care decisions and medication selections via Self Health Chat. An unexpected bonus: our patient (unprompted!) decided to use it mid-visit to remember a concern he needed to bring up to his endocrinologist.
Each week in NYC would have us toiling 5+ hours on phone menus and queues alone. That’s an uncomfortably oversufficient amount of Opus 1 jingling.
We also confronted the difficulty of specialist matchmaking. Many fantastic providers aren’t on ZocDoc. Verifying insurance-compatible providers is yet another phone chore. Ultimately, what works best so far is asking for personal recommendations from doctors and other patients + brute-force going through many initial consults.
At the end of each week we’d spend hours sifting through all the TODOs – I don’t know how an individual could manage this alone. Forgot to ask for a referral to a new GI doc for SIBO? Guess that treatment timeline just got pushed back yet another week to worsen. Every day is a bombardment with urgent notifications. No wonder healthcare’s default mode is reactive.
Any individual who’s had to navigate care knows there’s much, much more. Specialty formularies. Record requisitioning. Calendar jenga. Providers running late. Notification overload. Unjust bills. EHRs not working. Dead-end phone numbers. And the emotional toil to soldier through it all.
I’m glad to now be recharging in San Francisco. 6 weeks of NYC couch-crashing on a 24/7 chronic care concierge micro-odyssey has been intricately insightful, but has me physically spent.
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We’d love to start charging for our work, but we’re holding off until users actually ask us to do that. There is still more exploring and much building to do. Our north star remains to be building a product people love.
Our biggest challenge these days: juggling between manually serving our users and building product. Providing a great care concierge experience is abundantly time-consuming, especially as a non-clinician. We owe thanks to the many doctors in our friend circle for filling our sails.
Gratitude
Brian for his continued guidance on product development
Doris for piloting our platform to discover her health goals
Ms Lee for jumping to trial our pilot program
VLS for insights on how to make the most out of PCP visits
Sonia for sharing her autoimmune journey
Shannon for enlightening us on MD Anderson’s patient experience
Valerie for highlighting the unique care challenges of hidden congenital defects
Dr Kevin for his seasoned advice on objective data for pre-visit packets
Dr Vinny for an ED doc’s perspective on patient mentalities
Dr Park for a neurologist’s take on the inpatient experience
Xavier for eruditely expositing the mechanics of Aetna
Russell for sharing his story of building what health insurance was always supposed to be
Rich for keeping me motivated about our financials
Amhed, Grayson, and Caleb for continuous enthusiasm in my work and personal belief in my entrepreneurship
Conor for continuing to sponsor our New York office
Monty & Dima for the sojourn in Brooklyn
Yvonne for rubber-ducking some of our newest ideas
Ker for keeping me at the top of her immense rolodex
I’m looking forward to our next update where we’ll hopefully have denser clarity around a tech product that our customers love, yet also works for our business.
Best,
Josh Dong
Reply with your story and let us know what you’d like to see us build next towards the future of sovereign, individual-centric care.