Full Episode:

A clip of Lailah sharing her experience moving from London to SF, it's really helps me to know I'm not alone in griefing for my old life:

I sat down with Dr. Lailah Kara-Newton, an OBGYN-turned-tech-founder, co-founder of Aster. When she demonstrate her AI voice agent, I wasn't prepared for how natural it sounded. The agent wasn't just robotically collecting information—it was actually conversing, asking follow-up questions, understanding context.

The Problem Every Practice Faces

Lailah didn't start out building phone solutions. Her company was developing Electronic Health Record systems for women's health practices. But every single customer kept coming back to the same pain point—they couldn't answer their phones.​​

"The phones are constantly ringing and nobody's able to answer them," Lailah explained. "Or if they are able to answer them, they're not really able to then talk to the patients in front of them. Or they're missing new customers and actually they need new clients so that they can build and grow their businesses."

In my practice, I see this play out differently but with the same underlying problem. I'm often in treatment rooms with patients, needles placed, guiding them through breathing exercises. The phone rings. I have to choose: interrupt the healing space I've carefully created, or let another potential patient go to voicemail. Neither option feels right.​

Healthcare call centers typically handle 2,000 calls daily but only have staffing to cover 60% of what they need. Average hold times are 4.4 minutes when patients expect answers in under 50 seconds. About 30% of callers just hang up if they wait longer than a minute.​

Lailah shared something that made me pause: one of her behavioral health customers has a 33% no-show rate for initial appointments. Think about what that means. A third of people who desperately need mental health support make an appointment and then don't show up. Patient no-shows cost the U.S. healthcare system $150 billion annually. That's not just lost revenue—that's people not getting care.​​

When Technology Meets Healing

I had to ask Lailah the question that was probably on everyone's mind: Can AI really provide the human connection that healthcare requires? As someone whose entire practice philosophy centers on holistic, person-centered care, I was skeptical.​

"We've trained our agents to be sensitive, non-judgmental, have no bias around the conversation and really act like a member of the team," she explained. "And in some ways it's sometimes easier to talk to than a human at the front desk who you sometimes have a bit of a relationship with".​​

I understood what she meant immediately. Sometimes patients feel embarrassed asking basic questions—Where do I park? Can I bring my partner? What should I wear? They don't want to bother the front desk staff. But an AI agent? There's no judgment there.​​

The safety guardrails she described also put my mind at ease. If a patient mentions specific symptoms or concerning keywords, the system immediately pauses and transfers to a human. "We bake that in," Lailah emphasized. "If patient mentions a symptom, pause conversation and pass to a human or take the information and suggest a call back".​​

The Language Breakthrough

Here's where I got genuinely excited. During one of their test calls, a Spanish-speaking patient called. The AI agent—which hadn't even been officially trained in Spanish yet—responded fluently and handled the entire conversation. "We hadn't launched that yet," Lailah admitted. "We wanted to train, we wanted to test and make sure the conversation went well. But we got a call in Spanish and the agent handled it very, very well".​​

In my previous work at an international hospital, we constantly struggled with language barriers. We had patients speaking Arabic, Russian, German, and dozens of other languages. Coordinating a translator, the doctor, and the patient's schedule was a logistical nightmare. AI that can translate not just words but context? That could be transformative for making healthcare accessible to wider communities.​​

The Journey From Doctor to Founder

What struck me most about Lailah's story was how much her path mirrored my own in unexpected ways. She started her company during maternity leave from her OBGYN residency in London—a full year, which gave her time to actually think and plan. After taking two years total away from residency, her program required her return. She had to make the choice: go back to clinical training or commit fully to building something new. She chose the startup. Officially left medicine. Moved from London to San Francisco with her family less than two months before our conversation.​​

When she described the first year of being in a new country, I felt it in my bones. "I underestimated it because we speak English. I thought that meant everything was gonna be the same," she said. "Obviously the cultures, I thought it was quite similar to the UK, but it's not the same at all".​​

I told her about my own transition from Beijing to San Francisco. How I constantly caught myself doing mental currency conversions. How I compared every restaurant, every park, every social interaction to what I'd left behind. How a life coach finally named what I was experiencing: grief. Not for a person who died, but for a life that ended.​​

Lailah asked, "Do you do this thing where like every time you go outside, you compare it to where you used to live? It makes you in a really bad mood." Yes. I had to actively retrain my brain to stop comparing and start experiencing.​​

We talked about the green card process restricting travel home, about missing family during holidays, about the isolation of starting over. "We know deep down like you get another job, your practice will grow, my husband will get a job, we know this," she reflected. "But it's getting against that time".​​

Why Physicians Make Different Founders

Lailah shared something that resonated with my experience building Puzzle Acupuncture: clinical credibility opens doors.​​

"We can skip the whole, do you understand what my practice does? And do you understand the patients that we like?" she explained. When she talks to potential customers—other doctors, practice managers, clinic owners—they immediately trust that she gets it.​​

But here's the challenge: "We weren't trained in running a business, starting a company, marketing," Lailah noted. "We weren't trained in tech". I felt this acutely when starting my practice. TCM training equipped me to diagnose patterns, select acupoints, prescribe herbs. It didn't prepare me for building a website, managing insurance billing, or writing marketing copy.​

The flexibility helps, though. "Being a founder is you don't have much time, you're always working, you're working late at night on the laptop," she reflected. "But on the other hand, I think because it's less structured, I've found that I can do a bit more things like picking up the kids at 2 p.m. if I need to from school, which if I was in the hospital, no way".​​

What This Means for Healthcare

Lailah predicts that within one to two years, AI voice agents will be standard in healthcare. "I think every large hospital that any of us call will have an agent answering the phone," she said. "So it's really now a question of which agent are they using?"​​

I think she's right. Not because the technology is perfect, but because the alternative—the current system—is clearly broken. Administrative burden consumes 15-30% of medical spending and directly contributes to physician burnout.​

Nobody has said no when she pitches the solution. "Nobody has said, no, I don't need it," she reported. "Most people are like, okay, yeah, they keep asking more and more questions". Even practices still using paper records are expressing interest because the pain is universal.​​

Final Thoughts

After our conversation ended, I kept thinking about what Lailah is building. AI voice agents won't cure diseases. They won't replace the therapeutic relationship between practitioner and patient. But they might ensure that patients can actually access the care they need when they need it.​​

In a system where 140 patients per day abandon calls before getting help, where $150 billion in annual costs stem from missed appointments, where healthcare workers are burning out from administrative burden—that's not a small contribution.​

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, we spend time listening, building trust, creating therapeutic relationships where healing can happen. AI voice agents that handle appointment booking, answer routine questions, send reminders, and provide multilingual support don't threaten that model. They protect it. They give us back the time and mental space to do what we do best.​​

Every missed appointment is a missed opportunity for healing. And if AI can help solve that problem while preserving the human connection that makes medicine meaningful—I'm all in.