We Build AI for Healthcare. Here’s Why We’re Refusing to Scale Empathy.

Tuesday next week, my co-founder Dr. Faisal Rafiq and I are loading up a car with 100 dozen donuts and spending the week personally delivering them to behavioral health practices across Long Island.

No pitch deck, no demo, no “Hey, while I have you here…”

Just showing up to say thank you to the providers who treat everyone else’s mental health while their own is falling apart.

I build for a living and I love it. I’ve been working in health tech and data engineering for the last 15 years. (Yeah, I know I’m only 28, I started my first company at 14). Now I’m a full stack developer and co-founder focusing on AI/ML and data engineering. Nextvisit transforms patient conversations into clinical intelligence and saves providers time so they can focus on patients more. We automate documentation so providers can spend less time typing and more time with patients. We’re good at automation. Really good.

But some things shouldn’t scale. Some things need to stay small, personal, and human.

The Problem With Everything Being AI Now

Open any social media platform and more than half the comments are bots. It’s ridiculous.

The inspirational LinkedIn posts? Probably ChatGPT. The customer service chat? Automated. The marketing emails? Generated.

Everything online feels like talking to a machine pretending to be human. Most of the time it freakin’ is.

We’re drowning in AI-generated content that mimics authenticity but has none. It’s efficient. It’s scalable. And it’s completely hollow.

When everything can be automated, actually showing up in person becomes radical.

What Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) Taught Me About Healthcare

I have Type 1 Diabetes, diagnosed somewhat dramatically years ago (we’ll save that for another post), and it fundamentally changed how I think about healthcare.

My pancreas doesn’t produce insulin. Without it, I’d be dead in days. I’m actively involved in the T1D community, particularly around DIY Loop technology and advocating for insulin access. I walk in the Breakthrough T1D events in Westchester County because this stuff matters to me personally.

Living with T1D teaches you something. Healthcare providers showing up for you isn’t transactional. It’s life or death.

When an endocrinologist takes the time to really understand your struggles with blood sugar management, when they actually listen instead of rushing you out, it changes everything.

I know what it’s like to depend on healthcare workers. And I know most of them are drowning.

The Burnout Crisis That Nobody’s Fixing

Faisal has been a practicing psychiatrist since 2008. He’s worked in emergency psychiatric centers, crisis services, acute and long-term inpatient facilities, and rehab programs across the country. We founded Nextvisit together because he was tired of choosing between complete documentation and patient care.

Behavioral health providers face some of the highest burnout rates in medicine. They’re treating trauma, addiction, and suicidal ideation, then going home to spend hours finishing notes.

We built AI to solve the documentation problem. We serve around 300 practices now with a 99 NPS score. Providers save up to 50% of their documentation time.

But technology can’t solve appreciation, it can’t automate gratitude, and it definitely can’t replace the simple act of showing up.

Why We’re Delivering Donuts Instead of Sending Gift Cards

Now we could easily scale this by sending automated gift cards, hiring a delivery service, setting up a system that handles appreciation at scale. It’s something the engineer in me would completely enjoy doing!

But… that would completely miss the point.

So, next week, Faisal and I are personally driving to practices across Long Island with donuts from local Duck Donuts locations. We’re delivering to both our customers and practices we’ve never worked with.

When we show up, providers will know it’s us. Not a service we hired. Not an automated gesture. Us.

Drug reps show up at offices with food all the time. But there’s always a pitch. “Try our new medication.” “Switch your patients to our product.”

We wanted to flip that script entirely.

Show up with food and leave. No strings attached. Just pure acknowledgment that these providers are doing some of the hardest work in healthcare and nobody’s thanking them for it.

The Old Way Is Making a Comeback

Vinyl records outsell CDs now, film cameras are making a comeback, and people are buying typewriters. Handwritten letters mean more than emails and even those are questionable, robots write and clone handwritten letters easily.

So in a world where everything can be faked, generated, or automated, the analog is becoming valuable again precisely because it’s real.

Now showing up in person with donuts isn’t innovative, it’s certainly not disruptive, and it’s not going to make TechCrunch.

But it’s real, and in 2025 that matters more than it has in years.

What Should and Shouldn’t Be Automated

Automate the tedious. Preserve the human.

Clinical documentation? Let’s automate it! Providers shouldn’t spend 3 hours after clinic typing notes. That’s a perfect use case for AI.

But gratitude? Appreciation? Support? Those need to stay human.

The moment we start trying to “scale empathy” is the moment we’ve lost humanity. Some things are supposed to be inefficient. They’re supposed to take time. They’re supposed to be personal.

We’re healthcare founders who refuse to automate everything, we draw lines, and this is one of them.

If You’re a Long Island or Westchester Healthcare Provider

If you’re a psychiatrist, PMHNP, PA-C, or NP in a behavioral health practice (or a burnt out physician in general) on Long Island and want us to stop by your office next week, reach out. We’ve got 1,200 donuts to give away starting Tuesday, November 25th.

And if you’re in Westchester County where I’m based, we’re planning the same thing soon. Drop a comment or send me a message if you want donuts delivered to your practice.

Just to reiterate we’re not coming with a pitch and not showing you a demo. Just coffee, donuts, and a genuine thank you for showing up for your patients every single day.

Because in a world of general spam and AI-generated everything sometimes the most valuable thing you can do is just show up.

If this resonated with you, consider subscribing. I write about building healthcare tech, powering through challenges, and the moments when technology should step back and let humans be human.

Ryan Yannelli • CTO & Co-Founder, Nextvisit AI​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​