Hi and welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Hannah and this is another in our series of all remote

podcasts. We're at a moment where we're now seeing medicine go virtual faster and at a scale

that it has never done before. So in this conversation with A16Z Bio General Partners,

VJ Ponday and Julie You, who come from the worlds of biotech and care delivery, we talk about what exactly virtual care and telemedicine is and what it isn't,

what it works well for, what doesn't yet, and where there's potential.

And finally, the current pain points, including regulation,

and what will learn from this current moment for the next generation of tools.

Stay tuned for another episode soon where we'll also

cover the clinical perspective from the field next. I'm going to tell you guys right now that

there may be some dog barks and kid stuff in the background. Okay, so we're all getting these

messages from all our providers telling us to, you know, use virtual chat to use all these different

telemedicine tools. So we're in a moment where medicine is really going virtual at scale.

Can we start by just talking about what virtual medicine or telemedicine actually means,

what those different categories are? Is it all the same thing? Like, what are we actually

talking about here? Typically, what are we actually talking about here?

Typically, what people think about when we say virtual care is probably the traditional sort of video

visit, where, you know, you have two screens. The patient and the provider are talking to each other

live. You know, virtual care, I think, is much more of like a broader paradigm around, you know,

how do you sort of overcome the constraints of the traditional

healthcare system, which are largely, I would say two things. One is geography, which is that,

you know, typically you as a patient, the demand side of the market only really has access to the

supply side that is within a reasonable radius of where they physically are. And then also

...