Founded in 2017, Hims & Hers has quickly revolutionized the health tech industry. The company has done some admirable things in healthcare since its original debut. Starting out with an exclusive focus on men’s health, it made its national name delivering erectile dysfunction meds and hair loss drugs to guys discreetly. Two years later, the company expanded its mission to include women’s health. That shift necessitated a rebranding, and they adopted “Hers” in their name.
During this time, Hims & Hers has collected a large dataset of anonymized information from millions of patients. This dataset is key to understanding clinical visits, prescribed medications, and the effectiveness of various treatments. The company claims to use this information to smarten up their services. Its groundbreaking tool MedMatch allows doctors to more easily recommend mental health treatments using data-driven insights.
Hims & Hers uses AI-based tools that work in concert with licensed healthcare professionals. These safeguards help make sure a patient retains the benefit of a doctor—or, indeed, any other healthcare worker—reviewing recommendations generated by AI. What makes Hims & Hers’ AI systems unique is their ability to be transparent in how they arrive at their conclusions. This transparency increases confidence in their recommendations.
Just last week, the company announced that it had hired a new chief operations officer, Nader Kabbani, who joins the firm from Amazon. With deep expertise in technology and data-driven approaches, his background is a perfect fit for where we want to take Hims & Hers. According to Dudum, a representative of Hims & Hers, this strategic move underscores the company’s commitment to evolving through AI technologies.
“I was looking very much at leaders in the autonomous driving space, explicitly because you’re talking about leveraging technology and data and AI in an extremely high-sensitive environment where you have people’s lives at risk,” – Dudum
Dudum went on to discuss the similarities that autonomous vehicle technology and healthcare share. He discussed the use of self-driving cars AI to understand how we make important decisions in dynamic environments where trust is very important. Just like the world of healthcare which exists under a microscope where broad policy decisions have immediate, real-world consequences.
“Self-driving cars use AI to make real-time decisions in complex, high-stakes and heavily regulated environments, where earning trust is everything,” – Elshenawy
That last point is key, Elshenawy added—especially when it comes to translating AI into safe, reliable decision-making at scale. The capacity to do more with less under ever-rising expectations is the reality of today’s burdens on our healthcare providers.
“Healthcare operates under the same conditions. You’re dealing with people’s lives, limited resources, and systems under stress. Translating AI into safe, reliable decision-making at scale applies directly to what we’re building at Hims & Hers,” – Elshenawy
As AI has increasingly become part of health care delivery, the need for human oversight has come into focus. Dudum promised that Hims & Hers hasn’t lost the human touch with its AI-powered tools. He said giving context behind AI outputs is critical for trust building with end users, namely healthcare providers and patients.
“Showing the work and actually providing the kind of context behind the scenes as to what’s driving and what weights are driving the outputs, I think are actually, in many ways, just as valuable as the actual recommendation,” – Dudum
He welcomed the regulatory uncertainties that are shrouding clinical decision tools in the medical industry. As such, healthcare providers are still the bedrock of employing clinical judgement and thoughtful decision-making.
“There’s a very strict and structured approach when it comes to clinical decision tools within the medical industry, so providers are ultimately, from a regulatory standpoint, still necessary to make all of these clinical judgments and decisions,” – Dudum