Geek of the Week: Adeel Malik, CEO at Clearstep
Clearstep (formerly known as Lytic) seeks to change the way we deal with diagnosing ourselves. There’s a common trope that if you start typing symptoms into Google, it’ll eventually tell you that you’re going to die, even though all you have is a cold. Clearstep uses an AI-powered chatbot to offer helpful suggestions to patients regarding standard over-the-counter solutions for their medical woes. The company’s future seems incredibly bright as the Chicago-based startup has gotten a lot of attention from investors.
The company was initially named Lytic as a nod to its analytics system that learned from patients’ symptoms and offered them an accurate diagnosis. As the company shifted focus away from merely offering a determination to giving the user suggestions for medication, they changed their name. In September of 2019, the company renamed itself Clearstep, since its aim was not just to offer the patient diagnosis, but to provide the next clear steps towards getting better. The company aims to provide a better overall customer experience in healthcare by delivering utterly personalized service to every user.
Critical to its success is the company’s CEO, Adeel Malik. Formerly a Health and Life Sciences consultant with Accenture in the Washington DC metropolitan area, Adeel worked as a researcher within Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine after graduating with a dual Bachelor of Science, Finance, and Neurobiology in 2015. Understanding the crisis of customer experience in the healthcare sector. Adeel decided that the time was right to leverage technology and artificial intelligence to create a system that users would be glad to utilize. Americans, in general, have had an aversion to visiting doctors over the past decades, and having an AI-based chatbot to help diagnose and point them in the right direction seemed like it would take off.
Clearstep is only now beginning to surface on investors’ radars. It offers consumers not just the benefit of a doctor’s visit without the need to leave their homes, but also a transparent idea of the costing of their medication. Adeel’s background in science research and finance makes him an ideal candidate with a unique experience that covers both science and business. His reputation speaks for itself. Thanks to his presence, the company has already managed to raise over $400,000 worth of seed funding. This money will go a long way towards making this towards making the dream of this company into a reality. Only time will tell if Adeel’s attempt to create a more personable healthcare system will gain traction. However, with the way most of us think about visiting a doctor, many people would likely utilize the service if only to avoid going into a doctor’s office.
