A new wave of AI healthcare applications has emerged in the past two years, each backed by tens of millions in venture capital and each offering medical care at no charge to the patient. The pitch is appealing. The economics are not complicated. Investors expect returns, and those returns must come from somewhere.
Usually they come from advertising inside the app. Or sponsored content woven into your care experience. Or pharmacy partnerships that surface specific medications at specific moments. Or, most quietly and most alarmingly, the sharing of your health data with third parties who find it valuable.
The scale of capital flowing into this space is remarkable. In the first half of last year alone, AI-enabled healthcare startups captured 62 percent of all digital health venture funding in the United States, raising nearly four billion dollars. Investors are writing larger checks than ever before, with average deal sizes climbing to $34 million per round. The money is chasing a simple thesis: automate the clinical work, minimize physician involvement, maximize patient throughput, and extract value from the data that flows through the system.
The business model requires volume. More patients processed per physician means better margins. This is not a flaw in execution. It is the design.
These platforms use AI to perform the clinical work. A physician reviews the output before it reaches you, but that review is measured in minutes or even seconds, if at all, and the guidance is rubber-stamped. The physician is not directing your care. The physician is approving what the algorithm has already decided. This is not good for patients or physicians.
Some of these applications disclaim, in their own FAQ sections, that they are not a replacement for your doctor and do not provide in-person care. Read that again. They are telling you, in the fine print, that what they offer is not actually medicine as you understand it. They are not medical practices, rather they are AI chatbots with a shady compliance layer, and this can be extremely dangerous.
“If a tech startup needs venture capital to survive, it will be forced to extract value from users to repay its investors.”
— Richard Gardner, CEO Modulus
Then there is the matter of how they handle your information. Targeted health advertising, incidentally, violates federal law. The HIPAA Privacy Rule expressly requires written authorization before protected health information can be used for marketing purposes. The Federal Trade Commission has begun enforcing aggressively in this space, levying a $1.5 million penalty against GoodRx in 2023 for sharing sensitive health data with advertising platforms without consent, and an additional $7.8 million settlement against BetterHelp for similar practices. These are not edge cases. They are the inevitable consequence of business models built on monetizing patient data.
Modulus is different.
We are privately funded. We have no venture capital investors expecting exponential growth. We have no pressure to process patients at scale. We run no advertisements, no sponsored content, no pharmacy deals, and we never sell, share, or monetize your data. Our only revenue comes from membership fees paid by patients who want thorough care.
Our physicians do not rubber-stamp AI outputs. They spend the time necessary to review each patient’s history and complaint. Our patented clinical AI system and Synapse™ Evidence Graph are tools that our physicians leverage, not a replacement for their judgment. This distinction matters more than any other.
Modulus provides premium physician-led care, augmented by clinical AI. Not AI-generated care, rubber-stamped by a physician glancing at a screen.
The difference in practice: When you bring a complex question to Modulus, a physician studies your complete history, consults the clinical literature, reviews imaging and laboratory data, and thinks carefully before responding. The AI accelerates research and surfaces relevant information. It does not make decisions. The physician does.
There is also the matter of your records.
Free platforms rely on data you upload yourself or pull from patient portals you choose to connect. That captures a fraction of your medical history. It misses the imaging center that never joined an electronic network. It misses the specialist still using paper charts. It misses the surgical notes from a decade ago that explain your current symptoms.
This is not a minor gap. It is often the difference between an accurate diagnosis and a dangerous assumption.
Modulus retrieves your complete medical history through Carequality and TEFCA, the federal networks established under the 21st Century Cures Act to enable nationwide health information exchange. Access to these networks requires a licensed provider. As one major electronic health records vendor has described it, this level of access represents “the keys to the kingdom” and cannot be granted lightly. Free apps do not have these keys. They cannot query the national infrastructure. They see only what you show them.
We retrieve records manually when necessary. By phone. By fax. By mail. We call the hospital that closed five years ago and track down the archive company that now holds their files. We do the work that free platforms cannot afford to do, because doing this work does not scale, and their business model requires scale above all else.
Learn more about medical record retrieval
The question patients should ask any healthcare or tech company is simple: How do you make money?
If the answer involves advertising, your attention is being sold. If the answer involves pharmacy partnerships, your prescriptions are being influenced. If the answer involves data licensing, your medical history is being packaged and distributed to parties you will never meet and never approved.
If it offers healthcare for free, it is selling something other than healthcare.
Modulus provides care. Nothing else.
Our members pay for the privilege of being treated as patients rather than products. They pay for physicians who have the time to think. They pay for access to records that most platforms cannot reach. They pay for a company whose financial incentives are aligned entirely with their wellbeing.
This is not a complex value proposition. It is the way medicine was always supposed to work, restored in a world that has forgotten what thorough care looks like, as tech-driven healthcare companies compete in a race to the bottom.