Since 2011, StartUp Health community member Cristian Pascual has been building Mediktor around a deceptively simple problem: when people get sick or hurt, they usually have no idea where to go for care. Now 15 years later, that first step in healthcare is still the one Mediktor exists to solve, even as the technology underneath it has been transformed by AI.

"Nobody trains you on what services are available. Nobody tells you how to decide where to go, and people just guess, or Google, or ChatGPT," Pascual told Logan Plaster in a recent Health Moonshot Update. Mediktor's answer is a virtual triage tool that assesses symptoms and guides users to the right level of care, work that Pascual says has always run on AI, just not the kind grabbing headlines today.

"We have never been rule-based. We have always let AI decide where to launch," Pascual said. The company's core question has stayed the same since the beginning: what is the next best question to ask, the way a physician would ask it. Natural language processing was part of Mediktor from day one; the recent addition is an LLM layer that lets the system hold a more natural conversation while preserving the clinical safety of its earlier architecture. Whether clients turn that layer on, Pascual said, is their choice: it adds convenience, but some users still prefer the simplicity of guided buttons over open text.

Pascual is direct about where general-purpose AI fits, and where it doesn't. "When it comes to healthcare delivery... you need a professional tool. You cannot use a general purpose tool, and these tools need to be integrated in the flow of healthcare," he said. LLMs, in his view, are an option layered onto that professional foundation, not a requirement, and one that comes with real cost tradeoffs depending on where in the world a client operates.

Mediktor now works with insurers, private hospital chains, and pharma companies across more than 30 countries, according to Pascual, and has recently added a new category of client: governments looking to solve healthcare navigation at a countrywide scale. "I see increasing interest in governments to solve, let's say, countrywide problems on the healthcare space," Pascual said, pointing to Mediktor's decade of clinical validation and reputation as what puts it on the short list for these deals. Mediktor's goal for the next 12 months: closing its first government-wide agreement.

For early-stage founders eyeing enterprise or government go-to-market strategies, Pascual's advice centers on one word: trust. "That's the most difficult thing in this market. To build the needed trust for the client to buy your technology, you need to prove it's safe, prove it works, and also comply with all the regulations," he said. He pointed to certifications, published clinical validation, and reference clients willing to share real ROI and KPIs as the building blocks that compound over time. AI has sped up parts of that work internally too. Pascual said Mediktor uses Claude to prepare client offerings and ROI documentation that used to take days in as little as half an hour, and has connected it to the company's HubSpot and Redmine systems for internal work.

Even with AI making information radically more accessible, Pascual doesn't see it flattening the playing field between regions. "Personal interactions still matter a lot," he said, describing the travel required to meet government stakeholders face to face. "It's totally impossible that [a deal] ever happens if you don't fly and meet them." If anything, he argued, universal access to the same data has made in-person relationships more valuable, not less: everyone can find someone's contact information, but far fewer can build the relationship that gets a government to sign.

That combination, professional-grade AI paired with old-fashioned relationship building, is what Pascual is counting on to get Mediktor over the line on its next big milestone.

If you're building at the intersection of AI and clinical care, join the community to connect with Health Transformers like him, collaborate on the problems you're both solving, and share your own health moonshot story.