Ep 70: Nourish CEO Aidan Dewar on Hiring in the AI Era, Future of GLP-1s and Scaling Metabolic Health

Well, I thought-- I figured there were lots of things to dive into today that I'm sure our audience will wanna know, but maybe, uh, at the start, would just be helpful to contextualize kind of both what Nourish does today, maybe how that's evolved over the course of the business, and then, you know, where, where you're hoping to take this thing over time.

Yeah, happy to speak to it.

So Nourish is a dietician-led metabolic clinic.

Uh, what that means is a registered dietician is the first point of care for, for every patient, and then we layer on additional types of care depending on patient acuity and, and need.

Um, this includes having physicians on staff that can, you know, deliver virtual medical care, but also, you know, order and interpret labs, prescribe and manage medications.

Uh, GLP-1s, which I'm sure we'll talk about, uh, are of course one of those medications, but we, we manage a number of different medications.

And then, um, every patient has an AI health agent as part of the care team.

What that looks like is we've invested a ton in a, a consumer mobile app, and that, that AI health agent is, is, is kind of the core operating system of, of that app, and it does a combination of both lower acuity care delivery, so actually supporting the, the behavior change, um, but also agentically coordinating care and dealing with the annoying parts of, you know, insurance and prescriptions a-and labs and making that a better patient experience for, for folks.

Um, and of course, we built a ton, a ton of technology on the provider side as well with AI that enables our providers to both be more efficient, but also, uh, deliver higher quality care.

You know, at this point, we have over 10,000 dieticians on the team.

We're the largest network of dieticians in the country, and then have partnered with a number of most important health plans and health systems to both raise awareness of what we're doing, but also access to the care by getting it covered by insurance.

Uh, we have over 200 million lives covered, um, and then have tens of thousands of, of providers referring to us for, for over... from over 250 health systems.

So that's what we do today.

Um, you, you talked about where we, where we head over time.

I think, you know, maybe to, to frame it up, I think, uh, important to kind of center first on the, on the problem.

So well, there's a lot of problems in, in healthcare.

What, what we view as kind of the, the two root cause, most important ones are, one, unhealthy modern lifestyles that folks who are living in the modern world are causing cardiometabolic dysfunction, uh, which in turn causes all these chronic conditions, uh, that have exploded and, and, and driven hundreds of millions of folks to have these trillions of spend, millions of preventable deaths.

And then secondly, uh, bad incentives in the system are rewarding volume of care as opposed to cost efficiency or clinical outcomes.

And so as we think about the, the longer term solution that we wanna build, it's, it's trying to attack those two problems.

Uh, the way we think about changing lifestyle is, the first problem is, uh, we call it building a, a virtual health system.

So what that means is combining, uh, all-- many different types of providers in an integrated virtual care team, uh, with medications, data, and, and AI, um, basically trying to remove as much friction as possible, uh, to living a healthy lifestyle.

It's fascinating, uh, you know, both footprint, uh, and scale you have today and also kind of vision for where you're going.