Your AI Doctor Is Coming | Julie Yoo

September 6, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

In 2009, the federal government paid doctors tens of thousands of dollars to adopt electronic health records, effectively bribing an entire industry into the digital age. Julie Yoo, a general partner at a16z, was there for that transition, having left a career as a software engineer in e-commerce and fintech to work in healthcare. She spent nine years as co-founder and CPO of Kyruus, a company that tried to solve what she calls the "patient access paradox": long wait times for appointments even though physician utilization rates were well below 100%. Back then, she jokes, there were only about five venture capitalists investing in health tech, and she raised from all of them. Today, the landscape is unrecognizable. Yoo argues that healthcare may benefit more from AI than any other industry — not despite its historical resistance to technology, but because of it.

Why healthcare can leapfrog legacy software

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What you'll learn

1 (00:00) **Healthcare’s Core Problem: Scarcity of Expertise** - Julie Yoo introduces the central paradox: healthcare is expensive yet expertise remains scarce, and AI could fundamentally change this dynamic.
2 (01:09) **Why Julie Entered Healthcare** - Julie shares her personal journey from software engineer to healthcare entrepreneur, driven by the federal push to digitize medicine.
3 (03:21) **The Patient Access Paradox** - Julie reveals the surprising insight that launched her company, Kyruus: high demand for care coexists with low physician utilization.
4 (04:29) **Building in the "Stone Age" of Health Tech** - Julie describes the immense difficulty of building a health tech company before modern infrastructure existed.
5 (06:34) **The Tipping Point: COVID and Systemic Shifts** - Julie identifies the pandemic as the major catalyst that tore apart long-held assumptions about healthcare delivery.
6 (08:08) **Why Healthcare's Moment is Now** - Julie explains the confluence of factors that created the current renaissance in health tech.
7 (12:54) **The Cost-Shift That Awoke Consumers** - Julie details how a change in insurance payment models forced consumers to care about healthcare costs.

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

a16z General Partner Julie Yoo joins MTS host Sophia Dew to explain why she believes healthcare could benefit more from AI than almost any other industry, and why decades of slow technology adoption may actually give healthcare an advantage in the AI era.

Julie traces healthcare’s evolution from paper records and fax machines through electronic health records and telehealth, and explains why AI represents something different: an organic adoption wave driven by tools that doctors and patients actually want to use. Because healthcare never built the same layers of legacy software as other industries, it may now be able to leapfrog directly into agentic AI.

They also explore how AI could dramatically lower the cost of care, why consumers are becoming a more important payer, where Julie sees the biggest opportunities for healthcare founders, and a future where everyone has a highly personalized AI doctor in their pocket for life.

Resources:

Follow Julie Yoo on X: https://x.com/julesyoo

Follow Sophia Dew on X: https://x.com/sophiadew

Follow MTS on X: https://x.com/mtslive

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