Sep 6, 2026 · 28 min
AI could help healthcare leapfrog legacy software
Your AI Doctor Is Coming | Julie Yoo
Healthcare’s slow technology adoption may become an advantage if AI can widen access to medical expertise while lowering costs and personalizing care.
- 1Healthcare’s weak software foundation could let AI-native workflows bypass entrenched legacy systems.
- 2AI may make specialized medical intelligence more accessible, especially for rare-disease diagnosis and research.
- 3Personalized healthcare will depend on combining individual biology, data, and models with responsible clinical judgment.
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Julie Yoo explains how a hackathon using a child’s genome and clinical data showed AI’s potential to surface rare-disease insights.
The brief
Julie Yoo traces her path from software engineering and healthcare entrepreneurship to healthcare investing at Andreessen Horowitz, as COVID and shifting incentives accelerate the sector’s technology reset.
Healthcare’s historical resistance to technology created frustration and inefficiency, but it may also have left fewer entrenched software layers for AI to work around.
The central promise is broader access to medical expertise: AI could support rare-disease insights and make specialized intelligence available beyond the institutions that traditionally hold it.
Yoo sees an unusually favorable environment for healthcare builders, spanning consumer health and systems that turn personal biology and data into more tailored care.
The conversation’s larger bet is that people will increasingly assemble personalized, agentic healthcare—provided models can be evaluated and applied responsibly.
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