Hims & Hers, the Telehealth and Wellness Company, has hired a veteran from the autonomous automotive industry as its next Chief Technology Officer. According to Andrew Dudum, co-founder and CEO of Hims & Hers, the move was intentional.
Hims & Hers said on Thursday that the next CTO will become Mo Elshenawy, former president and CTO of Cruise, a self-driving car company. El Shenawi left the cruise earlier this year after parent company GM closed its self-driving vehicle program.
While a jump from AVS to health may seem unlikely, Dudum told TechCrunch that he deliberately turned to the autonomous driving sector to find a CTO to help his company accelerate its AI-based product agenda.
“I was very much looking for leaders in the autonomous driving space, obviously because you’re talking about leveraging technology, data and AI in a very sensitive environment that puts people’s lives at risk,” Dudum said in an interview.
El Shenawi, who has more than 10 patents across AI, robotics and self-driving cars, told TechCrunch that it is “not as dramatically as it looks.”
“A self-driving car uses AI to make real-time decisions in complex, high-stakes, and highly regulated environments. “Healthcare operates under the same conditions. You deal with systems under people’s lives, limited resources, and stress. Transforming AI into large-scale, safe and reliable decision-making applies directly to HIMS & her built.”
HIMS & HERS is a San Francisco-based Telehealth Company that was released in 2021 through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company. Founded in 2017, HIMS & HERS initially focused on men’s health and sold erectile dysfunction medications and hair removal treatments. The following year it expanded to women’s health and added “her” to the company’s nameplate. Direct consumer companies that connect their customers with licensed health professionals have recently added mental health and weight loss treatment to their portfolio.
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The company’s ambitions are reflected in recent adoption. Earlier this week, the company said former Amazon executive Nader Kabubani will be the next head of business.
Dudum sees AI as a technology that helps the company evolve and ultimately serves more people. According to Dudum, Hims & Hers handles 10,000 to 15,000 patients a day. Anonymous information for millions of patients – clinical visits, the drugs they were prescribed, and if those drugs work – are collected in large data sets. This data is currently being used to create AI models that will ultimately be employed to assist patients in diagnosis and treatment.
Two years ago, the company trained models from datasets to create MedMatch. This is a useful tool for doctors to recommend mental health-related treatments. Dudum said that all AI-based tools still have humans, especially doctors or other medical professionals in the loop.
“There’s a very strict and structured approach when it comes to clinical decision tools within the healthcare industry, and ultimately it’s something that’s needed to make all of these clinical decisions and decisions from a regulatory standpoint,” Dudum said. He said the company’s AI products are there to help them give insight and make their providers more efficient and accurate.
Dudum said the company’s AI shows physicians and health professionals how they reached their conclusions when they made recommendations. “It shows the work and actually provides context as to what is actually driving, what weights are driving the output. In fact, I think it’s just as valuable as the actual recommendation,” he said.
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