Move Fast and Heal Things — But Who Gets Healed?
Dr. RP, MD — Board-Certified, Emergency Medicine & Critical Care Medicine — Founder, Analog Precision Medicine
Expanding on The Economist's article in the March 14, 2026 issue and why Silicon Valley's $14 billion bet on disrupting healthcare should concern you — and what physician-led precision medicine offers instead.
The Economist recently ran a feature titled “Move fast and heal things,” profiling the wave of venture capital pouring into digital health startups. After a post-pandemic slump, VC investment in healthcare reached $14 billion in 2025, up 35% from the prior year. The article frames this as a potential turning point for a healthcare system that everyone agrees is broken.
As an emergency physician who experienced my own regional group getting absorbed by a private equity-backed contract management group half a decade ago, I read it differently. In many ways, it illustrates precisely why I founded Analog Precision Medicine.
The Problem Is Real
American healthcare costs $5 trillion a year. Annual premiums for employer-sponsored family coverage have risen roughly 50% since 2015. A third of adults report skipping or delaying care because of cost. Trust in physicians has dropped to its lowest level in decades according to Gallup.
The system is broken. People are desperate for alternatives. On that much, everyone agrees.
The “Disruptors” Carry Their Own Risks
Direct-to-Consumer Diagnostics
Companies like Prenuvo and Function Health sell full-body MRI scans and extensive blood panels directly to patients. These services promise early detection of serious conditions and position themselves as empowering patients to take control of their health.
The problem is twofold. First, these companies are backed by VC — the same financial model that has spent decades making healthcare more transactional and less personal. VC demands growth, scale, and exits at multiples. The patient becomes a revenue unit.
Second, and more important clinically: there is no physician meaningfully involved in the patient's care. A whole-body MRI in a healthy person will frequently identify incidental findings — benign cysts, small hemangiomas, thyroid nodules — that are clinically meaningless in context. Without a physician who knows the patient's history, genetic risk profile, and clinical picture, these findings generate anxiety, trigger downstream testing cascades, and in some cases cause real harm. This is the cascade effect, and it is an inevitability of diagnostic testing deployed without clinical judgment to separate signal from noise.
“Any physician who has spent meaningful time in clinical practice has seen the patient who was fine until someone ordered a test without a question to answer — and then spent six months and $15,000 chasing a ghost.”
At their best, these services democratize access to tools that insurance companies have long gatekept. At their worst, they separate patients from their money while generating findings no one is positioned to interpret in the context of that specific patient's life.
New Primary Care Models
Sesame, One Medical (acquired by Amazon in 2023), and similar platforms promise affordable, tech-forward physician access. But their business models depend on patients interacting primarily with AI agents, nurse practitioners, or physician assistants rather than physicians. The physician-patient relationship — the most expensive line item and the hardest to defend in a board meeting — is the variable that gets squeezed.
The Economist notes that health queries are among the most common on ChatGPT, with a quarter of its 900 million weekly users asking at least one health question. The article frames AI as a complement to physician care. But the trajectory of these companies' business models points toward replacement, not augmentation.
Vertical Integration of Care and Insurance
The most concerning development in the article involves General Catalyst, a VC firm that acquired Summa Health in Ohio — a system that operates hospitals, health centers, and its own insurance plans. Daryl Tol of General Catalyst argues that technology must run seamlessly through an entire health system, from choosing insurance to receiving treatment to paying bills.
This means a single VC-backed entity now controls the hospitals, the technology, and the insurance that determines what gets covered. The entity that profits from denying claims is the same entity delivering care. This directly violates the foundational principle that medical decision-making should be separated from financial incentives.
What Physician-Led Precision Medicine Offers Instead
Live consultations and a comprehensive dossier — not a chatbot and a PDF.
At Analog Precision Medicine, we use every advanced tool available — whole genome sequencing, epigenetic age testing, polygenic risk scores, advanced biomarker panels, CT coronary angiography, whole-body MRI, multi-cancer early detection screening.
The difference is that every test is ordered for a clinical reason and interpreted by a physician who is already invested in getting to know you and your medical history before a single order is placed. Genomic variants are cross-referenced against biomarker results, imaging findings, and family history. Signal is separated from noise by someone with the training and the time to do it properly.
After testing, we have a live follow-up consultation to discuss your results, our recommendations, and to answer any questions you have. And we listen.
The next deliverable is a comprehensive written dossier synthesizing all findings and recommendations into a unified clinical narrative for your reference. If you are an Analog Precision Medicine patient on a consultation basis, we send a copy of the dossier and a physician-to-physician handoff letter to your own primary care physician.
“This model cannot be scaled by venture capital because the technology scales but the relationship does not.”
This model cannot be scaled by venture capital because the technology scales but the relationship does not. A physician who has spent hours across multiple consultations understanding not just your lab values but your life cannot see 3,000 patients a year. The economics don't work at VC multiples. They work at a human scale — sustainable for the practice, and actually good for the patient. And the relationship is the point.
The Trust Solution
The Gallup data on declining physician trust is real. But the conclusion that patients want less physician involvement is backwards. Trust collapsed because physician contact was compressed to seven minutes, because doctors changed with every insurance switch, because every interaction felt transactional.
The solution is not to eliminate the physician relationship and replace it with software. It is to rebuild it with the time, tools, and structural independence to do it properly — in a practice that is not owned by private equity, not beholden to insurance companies, and not racing to replace physicians with algorithms.
The Economist closes with FDA chief Marty Makary saying his organization needs to move “at the speed of Silicon Valley.” That is a fine ethos for building a ride-sharing app. It is a dangerous ethos for building a healthcare system, where the things that get broken are human beings.
Technology is extraordinary and we should use every tool it gives us. But the most advanced diagnostic tools in the world need to be wielded by someone who knows your name, has read your genome, and has no financial incentive other than providing care good enough that you stay.
Dr. RP, MD is dual board-certified in Emergency Medicine and Critical Care Medicine and is the founder of Analog Precision Medicine, a precision medicine practice in Southern California. This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice or establish a physician-patient relationship.
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