While Alan is better known as a health insurance company, the French startup has always tried to offer more than insurance coverage. It now wants to build a super app for all things related to healthcare, and announced three new product updates on Tuesday morning, including an AI chatbot that’s vetted by doctors.
Alan has long offered its customers a chat interface that lets them ask a question to a doctor and get an answer within 15 minutes or so. The next logical step these days would be to leverage artificial intelligence for medical conversations, so Alan is adding a virtual assistant called Mo to the chat feature.
“On the one hand, we increasingly want to be in charge of our own health. On the other, our healthcare system is mostly reactive and is therefore under constant strain,” Alan’s AI lead Antoine Lizée said at a press conference on Tuesday.
But given that AI chatbots tend to hallucinate, healthcare professionals may not want to rely on inaccurate information or risk misdiagnosing a patient. This issue has come up in the news lately with AI-based medical transcriptions — eight out of ten audio transcriptions exhibited some level of hallucinated information, according to a study by a University of Michigan researcher.
Alan said it has put in place guardrails to prevent this. First, using the AI chatbot is entirely optional. “Mo rephrases my question, introduces itself and asks if I want to start with Mo or if I want to talk to a doctor,” Lizée explained.
Second, Mo’s answers are checked by a doctor within 15 minutes. They can either confirm the medical advice or correct what has been said in the conversation. Patients will then receive a message explaining how the doctor feels about the AI’s answers.
Alan said it has facilitated 900 conversations between its users and Mo over the past few weeks. But given that 680,000 people are currently covered by Alan’s health insurance products, Mo is quickly going to become a widely used healthcare-related AI chatbot. It will be interesting to see how people react to this new feature and how Alan tweaks the bot over time.
Mo is mostly a chatbot for now, but the company plans to give it the ability to remember more details, and add personalization features to make it more proactive. “This is just the beginning. Our vision for Mo goes beyond that. Our vision is to make it a health companion that understands your context and your health history,” Lizée said.
An online shop and some gamification features
In addition to the AI features, Alan unveiled a mobile shop from which users can buy dietary supplements, sports accessories, baby-related goods and other health-adjacent products.
“It’s a curated selection of health and wellness products to improve your daily life,” Alan product manager Mélanie Alsberghe said. “We favor French brands that share our high standards and values. And we have negotiated preferential rates for our members.”
This feels like the first step of a bigger play. Online pharmacies aren’t very common in France due to regulatory and logistics hurdles, so Alan could be well-positioned to offer over-the-counter drugs and more in the near future.
Finally, the company is launching Alan Walk, a gamified step-counter. If you opt in to Alan Walk, the app will use your phone or smartwatch’s built-in pedometer to record how many steps you’ve walked.
Alan said Walk has been designed to fight sedentary lifestyles, and when you reach certain step goals, you’ll unlock berries (a virtual currency).
“You can exchange your berries to donate to charities, or get discounts on the Alan Shop, or personalize your avatar,” Alan product manager Antoine Moulet said. There’s even a leaderboard that shows your rank alongside all your colleagues’.
“For us, this is all about improving this integrated experience between health insurance, prevention, and access to medical care,” Alan co-founder and CEO Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve said.
Alan recently raised a $193 million funding round at an impressive $4.5 billion valuation. After France, Belgium and Spain, the company last month announced plans to expand to Canada, where it will be the first new health insurance company in almost 70 years.
