When we shop for almost anything, we expect three things: (1) to understand our options, (2) to see what they cost, and (3) to get what we need quickly. Technology has enabled entire industries to rebuild themselves around making this experience easier for consumers.
Then, we get to healthcare. Consumers don’t shop for healthcare, right? They don’t even know what they need, right (...said a patronizing voice)? In today’s era of pervasive LLMs, we have to acknowledge that patients do often know what they need. And the healthcare shopping experience has only become that much more frustrating as a result. Because even when we know what we need (a prescription renewal, a lab test, a scan, a specialist’s opinion), the work is just beginning. First find someone who offers care, then check whether insurance covers it, then track down our medical records, get the referral, figure out what prior authorization is, call the office to schedule, and then call again. And often, we learn what the whole thing costs only after receiving care.
Healthcare has many sophisticated systems for authorizing services and reimbursing providers. But the information a patient needs to actually make a purchasing decision is scattered across portals, phone calls, and paperwork. To the broader system, these are separate tasks owned by separate parties but to the person looking for care, they are all part of one deeply personal and consequential journey.
We couldn’t be more excited to lead General Medicine’s $120M Series B as they build the general store for healthcare.
Imagine finding a lump in your breast and wondering if it could be cancer. Getting an answer may involve an initial clinical evaluation with a primary care provider, followed by a diagnostic mammogram or ultrasound, and, depending on the findings, perhaps an image-guided biopsy. Then you nervously wait for someone to review the results with you. If it is cancer, the coordination gets far more complex: further imaging, separate appointments with surgical, medical, and radiation oncology teams – sometimes across different practices and locations. And on top of worrying about your health, you’re also the one ultimately responsible for keeping your care moving along.
Several changes are making a more connected experience possible today. Better access to medical records allows a person’s history to be brought together across providers and time, while AI can now synthesize that information and surface it in a way that is relevant to a specific need in the blink of an eye. But knowing what help you need is not the same as getting it. Acting on clinical guidance still means finding the right service, understanding what it costs, and often showing up to a physical appointment in the real world.
General Medicine is built on the belief that facilitating access to care is a core part of delivering it. The company brings patient history, ongoing clinical guidance, transparent pricing, and help accessing care into one experience. Its own medical group combined with a marketplace of external clinicians (including both primary care physicians and specialists) connect patients almost immediately with services far beyond what a single practice could ever provide.
For the patient who found a lump: in the General Medicine experience, her prior mammograms from when she lived in a different city, the fact that her breast tissue requires MRI for screening, her symptoms today, the imaging she needs now, the specialist visit, the follow-up, and the cost of all this care given her current insurance coverage are all in one place from the very beginning.
Building the healthcare store starts with a basic question: what is being sold? In healthcare, this has never had a clean answer, since the same service can be described differently by a patient, a physician, an insurer, and a lab. General Medicine resolves these differences into the infrastructure underneath the store: a catalog of over 2,900 products and services across medications, labs, imaging, specialist consultations, and select in-person visits and procedures.
This matters just as much for everyday care. You might first try General Medicine for a prescription refill. If you later need lab work or a specialist’s opinion, you have somewhere to return that already has your history, medications, and insurance information. Each interaction adds to the scaffolding for the next. And for someone managing an ongoing condition, it becomes the first place they turn for care all year long. As General Medicine’s catalog grows to include more and more patient needs, it earns a larger share of a consumer’s care (and their healthcare spending, over which they feel control for the first time).
Alongside its direct consumer offering, General Medicine is also building for the enterprise. All incumbent healthcare institutions – health systems, payors, pharmacies, and more – are recognizing the urgent need to give their patients and members a world class shopping experience. The same underlying infrastructure for clinical guidance, transparent pricing, and rapid access that General Medicine has already built can be ‘turned on’ for consumers in partnership with any number of enterprise organizations.
We’re thrilled that the PillPack team is back together. TJ Parker, Elliot Cohen, and Ashwin Muralidharan pair deep product understanding with profound industry knowledge and experience. Together, they’re building the next generation of healthcare, and finally answering the question at the heart of every great general store: “What can I do for you today?”
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'And then call again' is the most honest line in this. Every step on that list has an owner somewhere, but the only person who goes through the whole sequence is the patient, which is probably why it stayed broken for so long.
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