He Lost His Brother To A Misdiagnosis. Then He Built Medome (Dr. Steven Charlap)

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Misdiagnosis kills roughly 400,000 people a year in the US — and when Dr. Steven Charlap tried to fix it, doctors told him they'd rather not know.

In this episode, Jonathan W. Buckley is joined by Dr. Steven Charlap, MD, MBA and founder of Medome, an AI-first primary care platform. Steven had already sold one company and retired when his older brother, a cardiologist, was misdiagnosed and lost his life. That loss, followed by a second misdiagnosis that took his wife's best friend and a third that nearly took his own life, sent him back to school for five and a half years at Stanford and Harvard to understand why doctors get it wrong so often. Misdiagnosis kills roughly 400,000 people a year in the US and permanently disables another 400,000, and the Institute of Medicine predicts nearly everyone will experience one in their lifetime. Steven explains why Medome approaches diagnosis by elimination rather than pattern matching, how it's built on Google's MedGemma model fine-tuned with over 100 million proprietary data points, and the surprisingly tricky engineering problem of stripping personal health information before anything touches a language model, including diseases that are literally named after people. He also shares the hardest lesson from selling into medical institutions first: doctors told him directly that extra patient information was unwelcome because they aren't paid to process it and could be held liable for missing something in it. We close on why he ignored classic startup advice to niche down, why he put his own phone number on Medome's website, and what he'd tell any founder about selling into an industry that actively resists changing how it works.

Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wdcYHpPOoY

About the guest:
Dr. Steven Charlap, MD, MBA is a serial medical entrepreneur — NYU-trained physician, Harvard MBA, and Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute fellow — and the founder of Medome.

Connect with Dr. Steven Charlap:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/steven-charlap-md-mba-8911906/

Learn more about Medome:
https://medome.ai

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