The Control Gap: Patient Finding, Done Right

AI patient-finding is the most transformative capability in a launch. It's also the most oversold, and the difference between the two is everything.

The short version:

• In rare and specialty disease, surfacing miscoded patients isn't incremental. It's the launch.

• The same pitch aimed at primary care targets a bottleneck that was never the constraint.

• Either way, a patient the model surfaces still needs a human and a system ready to act.

Start with where it's real. In rare and specialty disease, models run against claims and lab data can surface patients who fit a diagnostic profile but were never coded correctly, which means they reach people a field team would never have found in time. For a launch racing the diagnostic odyssey, that isn't incremental. That is the launch.

And it's worth remembering what "diagnostic odyssey" actually describes: a person who has spent years being told their labs look fine while the answer sat uncoded in their own records. Shortening that wait is the most direct line between this technology and the reason any of us do this work.

Then look at where it's oversold, because the same pitch gets recycled into primary care, where eligible patients are everywhere and finding them was never the constraint to begin with. In that setting the real constraints are access, formulary position, and prescriber behavior, and AI aimed at the wrong bottleneck is just expensive precision on a problem you didn't have.

The frontier now stretches into patient-facing agents that handle onboarding, adherence, and follow-up. Promising, and the same discipline applies, along with a line worth drawing out loud: this only works when the data practices behind it would survive being explained to the patient themselves. Point the capability where the bottleneck is, not where the demo looks best.

There's one thread running through all of it. Finding or onboarding a patient the AI surfaced still depends on a human and a system that are ready to act on what it found, and if that part isn't ready, you've automated the easy half while leaving the hard half exactly where it was.

In your therapeutic area, is finding the patient the hard part, or getting them treated once you have?

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