Artificial intelligence is making healthcare advice easier to access, but turning that advice into actual care remains a challenge.
While many healthcare companies are building AI assistants that can tell patients what care they might need, few have built the underlying marketplace and fulfillment layer required to deliver that care.
Startup General Medicine aims to bridge that gap by connecting healthcare recommendations to actual care, whether that means filling a prescription, ordering a lab test, scheduling a telehealth visit or booking an in-person appointment.
Consumers need a healthcare store, asserts TJ Parker, co-founder of General Medicine.
"We're entering a world where advice is abundant, but acting on it is still an enormous hassle. General Medicine makes it easy to get guidance from a clinician, shop for care, and see what it will cost before deciding," he said.
General Medicine announced Tuesday that it picked up $120 million in series B funding to build out its "healthcare store" and expand into more categories of care.
Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) led the round with participation from Matrix, VXI Capital, Eli Lilly and Company, Mercy Health through Granger Management and BoxGroup. A year ago, the company picked up $32 million in venture capital funding led by Matrix, BoxGroup, the Founder Collective, VXI Capital and JSL Ventures. The company has raised $152 million to date.
General Medicine, started by the founding team that built PillPack and Amazon Pharmacy, is an online marketplace where customers can search, compare and buy care, see insurance and cash prices before deciding, and get guidance from a licensed clinician. The platform connects consumers to providers to either address specific medical needs or to chat about the symptoms they're having.
The company's executives refer to it as a "one-stop shop" for telemedicine, prescriptions, imaging, labs and specialists. Parker and PillPack co-founder Elliot Cohen teamed up with former Amazon executive Ashwin Muralidharan to get General Medicine off the ground in the fall of 2023.
After serving on General Medicine's board since the company's founding, Parker has now jumped in full-time as CEO. Muralidharan moved into the chief product officer role and Cohen serves as president. Before joining full-time, Parker was a general partner at Matrix, where he led General Medicine's early funding rounds.
General Medicine is seeing strong customer traction, Parker said, attracting "hundreds of thousands" of customers across every state and nearly every county, with users spanning commercial insurance, Medicare and Medicaid, he noted.
The majority of users, about 83%, say the company helped them address a health need they had been putting off; a third had delayed care for more than six months.
The company's product catalog now includes more than 2,900 products and services across medications, labs, telehealth and select in-person visits and procedures. General Medicine is expanding its healthcare marketplace gradually, starting with simpler, more standardized services such as pharmacy and lab testing before tackling more complex procedures, Parker noted. The company plans to broaden its catalog to include imaging and a wider range of outpatient procedures.
General Medicine built its healthcare marketplace around a standardized catalog that translates how patients, clinicians, insurers and providers describe the same healthcare service, making it easier to compare options, prices and care pathways, executives said.
Consumers can access care through direct shopping, clinician consultations or an AI chat interface, with their health history and context following them across each channel. A licensed clinician determines what is clinically appropriate whenever clinical review is required, according to executives. General Medicine gathers an average of 11 years of health history for each customer, and that's presented to clinicians as a prioritized summary at the time of care.
The same infrastructure that supports consumers today is designed to eventually enable AI agents to search for and purchase healthcare services on a patient's behalf, according to executives.
Parker, a second-generation pharmacist, co-founded e-commerce pharmacy PillPack along with Cohen, which Amazon bought in 2018 in a $750 million deal. Parker and Cohen helped build Amazon Pharmacy, which was born out of the PillPack acquisition, as well as Amazon Clinic.
Parker says there were lessons from his work at PillPack and Amazon about making healthcare more convenient, accessible and a more enjoyable experience. But he also sees distinct differences between what General Medicine is building and Amazon Health, which has the online pharmacy business, One Medical concierge primary care and Amazon One Medical pay-per-visit telehealth services (formerly Amazon Clinic).
"We have really focused on this concept of a product catalog, which I think is a big unlock for customers' ability to actually shop and navigate healthcare. What the catalog ultimately does is it connects the need that a customer has with the system that exists today, and so enables us to have really precise intake, so that the customer can actually share everything they need with the clinician before a visit, the clinician is prepared for the visit and then it actually aligns everything that happens in the backend with that need," Parker said.
He added, "You take things like CPT codes, which historically were never designed to turn into a customer-facing price, and create this product catalog that allows us to align all these backend systems with the ways customers think about the offering."
The company also aims to bring together pricing data that has traditionally been fragmented, allowing consumers to compare both insurance-based and cash-pay costs side by side before making healthcare decisions.
General Medicine offers a broader range of products and services than most telehealth companies and other online healthcare marketplaces, Parker contends. "I think the last generation of telemedicine, by and large, have been very vertically focused on a couple of conditions or a very specific clinical focus. We intentionally want customers to be able to come to us for absolutely anything, and we don't constrain the types of services that we can get them access to," he said.
Consumers can shop for care from General Medicine's own medical group or connect with clinicians and healthcare organizations across the country, throughout the same storefront.
"We can get you to any provider that you want to see. We're not constraining who you can access based on us having a deep integration with them or a financial relationship. The goal is that if a customer wants to go see a provider that's local, we facilitate the referral, we administratively handle booking them the appointment, and in that process, it's very obvious who's in and out of network and what your out-of-pocket cost is going to be to see that provider. The goal is to get customers access to the care that is best for them without constraining that," Parker said.
Along with attracting venture capital investors, General Medicine's series B round was supported by two legacy healthcare incumbents, Eli Lilly and Mercy Health, through institutional investor Granger Management.
General Medicine and Eli Lilly are aligned on reorienting healthcare and pharmacy around the end customers, Parker said. The pharma giant launched LillyDirect in 2024 as the first major drugmaker to offer a direct-to-consumer model.
Regarding Mercy Health's participation in the funding round, Parker said, "Given our ambition is to create this continuity to traditional offline care, we felt super aligned that they would be a really interesting partner to try to figure out exactly how that works and what that looks like for customers to go seamlessly from a digital storefront all the way through to an offline procedure or visit."
Vineeta Agarwala, M.D., Ph.D., general partner at a16z, who led the investment, said in a statement, "General Medicine has built one of the best patient experiences we've seen in the market. One-click, comprehensive medical record collection, same-day specialist visits, prescriptions delivered to your door: the team has meticulously designed and built the core scaffold for almost every consumer healthcare product we could imagine. We can't wait to see this scale to patients seeking all kinds of care."
General Medicine's co-founders believe giving patients greater visibility into costs and choices will lead to a more consumer-driven healthcare market and create stronger incentives for providers, payers and manufacturers to compete for their business.
Parker rejected the notion that insurers, rather than patients, are the true customers in healthcare.
When consumers are shown clear side-by-side comparisons of insurance and cash prices, many choose the option that offers the best value, he noted.
"Ultimately, the customer is the one receiving care. At the end of the day, they are the ones deciding where to go and what to get, obviously alongside the clinician. I think we will prove that you can make the customer the actual decision-maker here, and that will shift the centers of power and the incentives," Parker said.