The front door to healthcare is a funnel: it directs patients to higher-level care, where the money is. Oura and Whoop are rebuilding that front door on a consumer subscription — and the demand it absorbs never shows up in the claims data.

Gallup says 14 million U.S. adults skipped a provider visit last month after using AI, which adds up to 168 million skipped visits per year. That's 16% of monthly physician visits — and it’s completely invisible in claims data, and ignored in healthcare planning.

Eighteen percent of AI chatbot users have adjusted a medication based on a chatbot conversation. No doctor, no clinical oversight, no documentation anywhere in the healthcare system. The prescribed regimen and the actual regimen are diverging moore and more, via a channel that is invisible to healthcare.

I speak with at least 100 healthcare leaders each year. They track everything — length of stay, readmissions, OR utilization, revenue cycle velocity. The one thing they're not tracking at all? The demand leaving the system entirely. And a Harvard finding that should have set off alarms six years ago has gone almost completely unnoticed.