Healio AI: A physician-first tool built to ‘never settle’

I am here to tell you something that we do not discuss outside the walls of Healio and the parent company, The Wyanoke Group. It is our secret sauce to what we do and how we built Healio AI.

Healio AI launched on November 4, 2025. Another generative AI tool, you say? Yes, Healio had the audacity to build a generative AI tool when behemoths already exist for both the general public and health care – the arena that Healio serves.

Healio’s secret sauce for Healio AI is a mantra we created in 2010 and guides everything we create. In 2010, we began the ideation of “one big site” that would later be named Healio. At that time, we created three guiding principles to keep us focused on our physician and other health care professional audience. In their simplicity, these statements have given us touchstones for the last 15 years.

Respect their time

Earn their trust

Give them what they want

For more than a century, our family of brands has built a reputation on trust, delivering clarity and credibility physicians can expect. That legacy led to the creation of Healio AI, a physician-first gen AI tool built for those who never settle.

But, how did we get here?

Respect their time

“We know there are many, many issues in health care right now. For doctors, nearly 50% of us are claiming a level of burnout. And the two main culprits are EMRs – completing our medical records and closing our charts by the end of the day often leads into pajama time where it is time you should have for your family, your children, your spouse,” said Cynthia Matossian, MD, a renowned ophthalmologist who spoke recently at a disruptive innovation event.

“The second pain point for doctors is that they are overwhelmed and not understanding how to keep up with the incredible amount of information that is being disseminated,” she said.

Dr. Matossian went on to speak about how generative AI can help “claw back time” that physicians deserve.

During our research and development phase for Healio AI, we learned from our physician advisors and through surveys conducted by Healio Research that physicians and other health care professionals’ generative AI needs do not fit neatly into the box of them sitting in their clinical setting in front of their institution preferred gen AI tool using their institution chosen EHR.

More often than not, they may be at home preparing for their clinical day.

And in that spirit, we created Healio AI for the physicians when they need it and where they need it.

In keeping with the concept of time, it is important to note that the RAG system that Healio has curated and compiled is updated daily.

Why does this matter?

As you may know, RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) systems work in tandem with an LLM (large language model) to produce answers that are more accurate, current and relevant.

It is helpful to remember that LLMs do not “learn,” they predict patterns and interpret the intent behind a user’s question (prompt). And, therefore, a LLM on its own is only as good as its knowledge cutoff date. That’s why it’s so important that we augment Healio AI with fresh, daily content.

With the speed at which medicine moves, it would be unconscionable not to include daily vetted content into our RAG system.

Earn their trust

For 125 years, The Wyanoke Group, parent company of Healio, has built a reputation on trust, delivering clarity and credibility to physicians. In today’s world, AI has flooded health care with speed, noise and sameness.

The trust our physicians bestowed on us for all these years and the trust I modestly write that we earned unbiased, authoritative article by unbiased, authoritative article, day after day, year after year, could not be squandered. Healio AI was built upon these 125 years of trust.

We do not want our physician audience to settle for a “good enough” generative AI tool.

We built Healio AI with the promise to always put physicians first and adhere to a standard that mirrors our audience.

“A lot of times … with ChatGPT, it brings in a lot of errors and we really do have to go through it and [Healio AI] is taking that step for us,” Kendall Donaldson, MD, Professor of Clinical Ophthalmology, Medical Director of Bascom Palmer Eye Institute at Plantation and Rodgers Clark Chair in Ophthalmology, said at the Disruptive Innovations Symposium at OSN New York & Retina Annual Meeting.

To demonstrate this commitment to trust, Healio AI provides references and sources for all generated answers.

In addition, every content source is vetted by the Healio AI physician advisors.

Healio’s content within the RAG system — Healio Clinical Guidance, Healio CME, the Drug Lookup, news reporting from 140 medical meetings, news articles by Healio’s award-winning medical journalists — is fact-checked by inhouse subject matter experts as well as physician editorial boards.

“Gen AI is like a really good professor. If you want to know more, ask. If it doesn’t seem right, challenge the first answer. A professor who does not have deep knowledge gets annoyed and their answers fall flat. Physicians need to find a gen AI tool that functions like a great professor,” said Scott Edmonds, OD, a doctor who specializes in vision rehabilitation for patients with concussions and other brain injuries, told me during our early beta testing.

Give them what they want

“Physicians should have a seat at the table when companies are developing products intended for their use,” Hansa Bhargava, MD, Healio Chief Clinical Strategy and Innovation Officer, told us the day we discussed with her that we wanted to hire a physician full-time at Healio.

Healio has brought Dr. Bhargava’s AI product development expertise and clinical experience together with Healio’s robust physician advisors. Together they have guided us in how we developed Healio AI, from the content we have chosen to ingest, to the tools necessary to reduce administrative burden, the user interface and so much more.

Our beta-testers haven’t just tested the answers Healio AI provides, they have also vetted the sources, given input on what an answer should look like, provided input on the right answer length, helped us choose the correct level of empathy and establish guardrails about sensitive topics.

What Healio is and is not

Let’s talk more about that all-important Healio AI RAG system that is updated daily.  How did we do it?

Perhaps the one unique aspect of Healio AI that is easily overlooked is that Healio is a content producer. We create 40 to 50 original pieces of content every day. We review the medical literature and write succinct executive summaries on the most important content released that day.

What does Healio AI have that other health care gen AI tools do not have?:

• Articles written by real journalists from important medical meetings and who include in their reporting expert physician perspective
• Articles about federal health agency policy changes that affect guidelines, drug access, drug costs as well as disease outbreaks
• Enrolling and recruiting US clinical trials
• Top-line data from pharmaceutical companies
• Healio’s physician-written content
  • Clinical Guidance
  • CME activities
  • Physician authored blogs and columns

We like to say that the Healio staff are “The Heart Behind Healio AI.”

And for clarification, we have not trained our own LLM. But we do use a carefully selected combination of best-in-class LLMs to produce generative responses that are fast, secure and medically comprehensive.

“We know there’s an LLM arms race going on between Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and others. Competing directly with them would be a fool’s errand. But where we do have an advantage, is in our access to proprietary medical content,” explains Healio’s Vice Principle of Technology, Matthew Skepner. “Even without building our own LLM, there were still plenty of challenges that came up during development. How do we ground responses in medical literature? How do we control the tone and output of the generative response? Which model do we choose for each task? I’m sure there will be many more obstacles to overcome, but fortunately, we have physicians on staff and in our network who are available to help guide our product development.”

This is an iterative process. The frontier AI labs are not slowing down, and newer, more capable models will continue to be released. Healio AI is equally committed to improving quality and releasing new features that will be useful for our users. In the coming weeks, Healio AI plans to add new data sources, more sophisticated models and a mobile app.

Why are we different

AI has transformed how medical knowledge is shared, but it has also made the landscape louder and harder to navigate. Healio AI bridges that gap by combining technological precision with human editorial expertise to surface only what matters most: trusted, relevant and clinically meaningful insight.

We listened to our physician audience. We gave them a seat at the table. We are committed to ongoing performance enhancements and ancillary tools.

Healio AI gives physicians clarity and confidence and assists in making sound clinical decisions quickly, so they can focus their time on what matters most.

This reflects the heart of our philosophy, Never Settle, a mindset that mirrors the way physicians think, work and lead.

Author

Joan-Marie Stiglich, ELS, is the Healio Chief Content Officer as well as the Chief Strategic Alliance and KOL Officer. She is a medical journalist, is Board-Certified Editor in the Life Sciences and has worked at the parent company for 31 years.