Reimagining primary care through digital-first thinking, clinician-guided AI, and radical service design.

Welcome to the ⁠⁠⁠North of Patient⁠⁠⁠ podcast - conversations on health[beyond]care - where we paint an inspired landscape of healthcare's future through dialogues with creative and unconventional thinkers from around the world. For a summary of the episode, visit the ⁠⁠⁠blog post⁠⁠⁠ on ⁠North of Patient.

Today we sit down with Dr. Jay Parkinson, MD, MPH – a physician turned product visionary. Known for co-founding Sherpaa, inventors of Virtual Primary Care, Jay spent the last two decades redefining what healthcare could look like. Over the past 18 years, he's built online healthcare companies that have served more than 500,000 patients from major companies like Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft, and now leads Automate.clinic to help make AI in healthcare safer and more reliable.

In this episode, Jay unpacks what it means to approach healthcare as a service, explores what large language models are doing well—and where they fall short—and shares insights into his latest venture

Key stamps from our conversation are below:

00:00 Welcome to Episode 1701:57 - Meet Dr. Jay Parkinson

04:01 - How Flickr, photography and the iPhone kickstarted Jay’s Journey

07:40 - Launching Hello Health: Early Days of Virtual Primary Care

13:24 - Using Tumblr to Build Planned Parenthood’s Digital Sex Ed Strategy

16:47 - Can You Use ChatGPT as Your Personal Therapist?

21:19 - Designing Healthcare Systems Amid Bureaucratic Barriers

26:03 - Establishing Continuous Care with Sherpaa’s Asynchronous Model

28:34 - Building from Scratch Versus Navigating Big Company Complexities

32:08 - Automate.clinic: Where Doctors Don’t See Patients – They Train AI Models

42:35 - Talking Less, Saying More: The Power of Asynchronous Communication

48:24 - The Growing Professional Depression Among Family Physicians and How Automate.clinic Is Making a Difference

53:00 - Hope and Optimism in a World Overwhelmed by Digital Noise