Building Heidi With Thomas Kelly: AI As A Care Partner, A Surgeon's Lessons For Building, And The Future Of Healthcare

About this episode

Tomer Cohen interviews Dr. Thomas Kelly about building AI for healthcare and the challenges of increasing capacity and trust in the industry.

What if the biggest problem in healthcare isn’t diagnosis — it’s capacity? On this episode of Building One, Tomer Cohen sits down with Dr. Thomas Kelly, co-founder and CEO of Heidi, to unpack what it actually takes to build AI for one of the most complex, regulated, and human industries in the world. Before starting Heidi, Tom was a vascular surgeon. He saw firsthand how some of the most highly trained people on the planet were spending their days on low-value administrative work. Heidi began by listening to real patient visits and drafting clinical notes. Today, it’s expanding into the vast — and invisible — work around care: follow-ups, calls, scheduling, and coordination. In this conversation, we explore: What “doubling capacity” in healthcare really means Why personalization must be nearly perfect — measured almost like a clinical SLA What it takes to build AI that doctors actually trust How GPT-4 didn’t kill Heidi’s moat — it forced a radical pivot And how Heidi rewrote the healthcare go-to-market playbook by winning clinicians one by one Everyone talks about AI’s potential. This episode is about delivering it — in the real world, where trust is fragile, stakes are high, and…

People in this episode

Host: Tomer Cohen

Guest: Dr. Thomas Kelly

Topics covered

• healthcare
• AI
• capacity
• clinical notes
• trust
• personalization
• go-to-market strategy

Keywords

• healthcare AI
• capacity
• clinical notes
• trust in AI
• personalization
• administrative work
• surgeon insights
• go-to-market playbook

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Heidi, GPT-4, LinkedIn

More episodes of Building One with Tomer Cohen

• Building Harvey With Gabe Pereyra: Ethical Walls, Agents, and What AI Can Unlock For Law Firms · May 21, 2026 · 34 min
• Building 'How I Built This' With Guy Raz: Patterns, Pivoting, And The Value Of Time · April 15, 2026 · 29 min
• Building Lovable With Anton Osika: The Power Of Simplicity, AI As A Technical Co-Founder, And Why 'Vibe Coding' Needs A New Name · March 10, 2026 · 30 min
• Building Fender With Justin Norvell: Iconic Guitars, The Art Of Restraint, And Learning To Play Faster With AI · January 27, 2026 · 29 min
• Building Anthropic with Mike Krieger: Product Playbooks In The Age Of AI, Why Memory Is Key, And Instagram Lessons · December 9, 2025 · 28 min
• Building Figma with Yuhki Yamashita: Collaborative Design, AI Teammates, and Building for Builders · November 18, 2025 · 29 min