April 23, 2026

How Vital Is Using AI to Keep Patients Informed, Safe, and Loyal

24 minutes

In this episode, host Sandy Vance sits down with Aaron Patzer, the founder & CEO of Vital.io, for one of the most energizing and candid conversations in the series. Aaron built Mint.com, saved consumers $9 billion in bank fees, and then turned his attention to one of the most anxiety-inducing experiences a person can have: sitting in an emergency room not knowing what is happening.

Vital now guides 7 million patients through ER, inpatient, and urgent care visits in real time at hundreds of health systems, including Ascension, CommonSpirit, Emory, and MedStar. Aaron also shares his work on the AI Care Standard, a growing coalition of health systems and patient advocates building a framework to evaluate AI tools before they go anywhere near a patient. This one is packed with insight, sharp opinions, and genuinely important ideas.

In this episode, they talk about:

Vital sits on top of the EHR and guides patients through their ER or inpatient visit in real time, in plain language

65 to 70% of patients actively use Vital during their visit, one of the highest adoption rates in health tech

Vital reduces leave without being seen rates by 35 to 50%, and those walkouts are worth $2,000 each, plus readmission penalties

Health systems using Vital have seen up to 48 million dollars in additional top-line revenue across two hospitals

Vital improves Press Ganey and HCAHPS scores by about 10 points and increases system retention by 30%

Before showing any patient their doctor's notes, Vital runs 14 separate safety checks, including flags for new cancer diagnoses, pregnancy loss, and self-harm

The AI Care Standard is a free, dynamic evaluation framework at aicarestandard.com that grades AI tools across 10 patient safety principles

Most consumer-facing AI tools like ChatGPT cite Reddit and pop health blogs, not peer-reviewed clinical sources, and that is a patient safety problem

A Little About Aaron:

Aaron Patzer is Founder & CEO of Vital.io (AI-powered patient experience at 100+ hospitals), Mint.com (25m users), and five other startups. He served as Head of Product Innovation and an officer at Intuit. If you've used TurboTax, Quicken, Mint, or QuickBooks, you and 200M other people have used software he's designed. Fortune Magazine named Aaron one of the Top 40 Executives Under 40, has won 5 product design awards, and done over 600 press interviews, at one time appearing as a regular on CNBC, and writing a column for Parade Magazine. He is an angel investor in dozens of startups, including Carbon Health, Radix (now Relatient), HealthTap, and more. He holds degrees in electrical engineering & computer science from Duke, with PhD work at Princeton, and 10 patents as lead inventor, all in algorithms

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