A look at US-based startups like CirrusMD and 98point6, which let users seek treatment from doctors for minor injuries or illnesses over text-based online chats
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Dr. Anna Nguyen spoke with none of the five patients she treated on a recent weekday morning. Tweets: @aphealthscience , @thpmurphy , and @nata_copa Tweets: @aphealthscience : The latest wrinkle in health care convenience lets you chat with a doctor in less than a minute. But you probably won't see - or even talk to - each other. https://apnews.com/... Tom Murphy / @thpmurphy : The latest in care convenience, the chat diagnosis. My @APHealthScience story: Doctors turn to thumbs for diagnosis and treatment by text https://apnews.com/... @nata_copa : What is telemedicine? A new trend showing up not only with physicians, but athletic trainers as well. https://www.apnews.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This AP piece lands mid-way through a convenience wave in US care delivery: earlier coverage catalogued how telemedicine startups across urgent care, fertility and beyond had been raising significant capital for years, while on-demand players like Heal and The I.V Doc pushed treatment into patients' homes and workplaces. CirrusMD and 98point6 strip the model down further still — no video, no visit, just a text chat where a doctor like Dr. Anna Nguyen can work through five patients before noon without speaking to any of them.
The story matters because it documents triage-by-typing as a real clinical workflow rather than a demo, positioning text as the cheapest possible interface between patient and physician.
First-order effects
- Patients with minor injuries or illnesses get diagnosis and treatment in under a minute of chat, bypassing waiting rooms, appointments and face-to-face visits entirely.
- Doctors at CirrusMD and 98point6 handle higher patient volumes per shift than exam-room schedules allow, changing the unit of physician productivity from the appointment to the message thread.
Second-order effects
- Urgent-care clinics and ERs lose the low-acuity cases that text-based services can absorb first, pressuring brick-and-mortar providers to add their own virtual front doors.
- Rival telemedicine formats — video visits and house-call startups like Heal — face a cost floor set by text, since chat scales a single physician across far more simultaneous patients.
Third-order effects
- Once diagnosis is decoupled from presence, the next layer is machine assistance in the conversation itself — a path later coverage confirms, with doctors using ChatGPT to communicate more empathetically with patients, pointing toward care encounters co-produced by AI.
- If text-first triage becomes the default entry point, payers and employers increasingly buy access to physicians as an always-on messaging service rather than booking episodic visits.
The trend: US healthcare delivery is migrating from scheduled, location-bound visits toward asynchronous text-first channels that later absorb AI into the doctor-patient conversation itself.