Technology

Doximity buys Pathway Medical for $63 million to help doctors get AI-powered answers

Doximity buys Pathway Medical for  million to help doctors get AI-powered answers

Doximity at the New York Stock Exchange for its initial public offering on June 24, 2021.

Source: NYSE

Doximity is diving deeper into artificial intelligence, announcing on Thursday the acquisition of startup Pathway Medical for $63 million. 

Pathway has built an AI-powered clinical reference tool that doctors can use to ask questions about guidelines, drugs and trials. Pathway’s answers are synthesized from medical literature, and Doximity said the Montreal-based startup has one of the largest structured datasets in medicine. 

Doximity’s platform, which for years was described as LinkedIn for doctors, helps clinicians stay current on medical news, manage paperwork, find referrals and carry out telehealth appointments with patients. Through its acquisition of Pathway, Doximity hopes doctors will also turn to the platform to answer their clinical questions.

“We hunted high and low, and I think we found the best company in the space at answering physicians’ questions using AI, and it wasn’t in Silicon Valley,” Jeff Tangney, Doximity’s co-founder and CEO, told CNBC in an interview. 

The deal closed in late July for a cash consideration of $26 million and up to $37 million in additional equity grants, Doximity said. 

Doximity’s integration with Pathway is well underway, Tangney said, and the companies are testing a combined product with thousands of doctors. 

Read more CNBC tech news

Doximity already has a free AI product, Doximity GPT, that doctors can use to generate insurance letters and summarize patient charts and reports. Pathway will bring additional “robustness” to the data that Doximity has on the back end, said Dr. Amit Phull, Doximity’s chief clinical experience officer.  

“What Pathway brings to this party or this marriage is that they have a very, very robust back-end data set that ties dosages to guidelines to literature to citations,” Phull told CNBC in an interview. 

Pathway’s model scored 96% on the U.S. Medical Licensing Examination benchmark, Doximity said, which doctors have to take to prove that they understand and can apply medical knowledge.

Doximity, which went public in 2021, has seen its stock climb 8% this year after soaring 90% in 2024. The company has a market cap of about $11 billion.

Doximity is holding its quarterly conference call with investors to discuss its fiscal first-quarter results on Thursday at 5 p.m. ET.