Dendritic Health AI

Jonathan Theros, Co-founder and COO

A few months after ChatGPT began reshaping conversations around AI, two medical students asked a more practical question. How can AI improve every step of medical training?

Jonathan Theros, co-founder and COO of Dendritic Health AI, was one of them. He and a fellow medical student, joined by an AI engineer and a designer, had just taken their board exams and lived through the intense, fragmented study schedule of medical school.

“We knew the problems in medical education firsthand,” says Theros. “AI could connect the entire learning process, from the first lecture to actually talking to a patient and make it more personalized and immersive for every student.”

From that insight, Theros and his co-founders launched Dendritic Health AI with a clear mission: built by you, for you.

How does Neural Consult connect different stages of medical learning within one platform?

Its core product, Neural Consult, applies AI across the full medical learning process. It builds on-demand flashcards, supports deeper literature searches, simulates objective structured clinical examinations (OSCE) with AI patient encounters and delivers feedback tailored to each learner’s progress. For the first time, a student’s entire learning history lives in one place, making it possible to teach to the individual rather than the class.

“Medical schools provide access to experts and real patients and that curriculum will always be the core,” says Soetikno. “What we want to add is precision education. Where are your gaps and how do we help you close them so you are ready to take care of real patients?”

We knew the problems in medical education firsthand. “AI could connect the entire learning process, from the first lecture to actually talking to a patient and make it more personalized and immersive for every student.

Why is active simulation-based learning becoming important within modern medical education programs today?

Neural Consult’s generative AI frees up the cognitive energy students once spent extracting key points from a 30-slide lecture or a dense textbook chapter. A textbook chapter with no questions at the end can be turned into 20 easy, 20 medium and 20 hard questions in minutes, guiding the learner through the material and solidifying knowledge as they go.

The AI patient simulation tool carries learning into structured clinical encounters that reflect how students are assessed in school. A separate simulation environment moves closer to real clinical work, where AI generates a patient having a heart attack and students step in as the primary clinician. Unlike most platforms, Neural Consult does not hand students the chest X-ray or lab result. Students must decide which tests to order, call for the right images and manage the case as it unfolds, exactly as they would in practice.

Faculty remain involved throughout. Drawing from a rich case bank, instructors can adapt existing cases or generate new ones with AI, upload lecture slides, refine answer pathways and shape the questions students work through. That keeps the platform tied to each school’s curriculum while giving students a more practice-oriented learning experience.

In what way do feedback systems support clinical judgment and value-based patient care training?

Rubrics reinforce value-based care by penalizing unnecessary testing, helping students understand not only how to reach a diagnosis but also how to manage a patient cost-effectively.

“Even doctors treat patients and never find out how they did,” says Theros. “We can simulate that feedback instantly and students can iterate on it.”

Widening Toward Other Healthcare Horizons

Named among the Top AI-Powered Medical Education Tools 2026 by Education Technology Insights, Dendritic has expanded well beyond its medical school roots. With over 60,000 students on the platform, it has moved into nursing and is extending its simulation-based model into physical therapy, pharmacy, dental education and speech-language pathology, fields where the same gap between classroom knowledge and applied clinical judgment exists.

Theros is now a resident at Mass General, Harvard’s residency program, while Alan Soetikno, CEO, is joining Stanford Medicine’s residency program. Both are living what they are building, staying close to the demands of future providers as they shape the platform’s future.

“Being a doctor or nurse is a lifelong learning profession,” says Theros. “We built the platform to support that journey, so students carry it into residency and practice and keep building on it.”