#33: We're Ultralight Now

Last year, a clinician I met sent me a photo of his keyboard.

The letters were worn off. E, R, T, A, S, D, N — all ghosts. He'd sent it with three words: this isn't right.

He's a leading integrative medicine physician. He didn't become one to type. He became one to sit with patients, ask better questions than the last doctor they saw, and build protocols that actually account for the whole person in front of him. But somewhere between the EHR that was designed for billing cycles, the lab platform that was designed for volume, the patient portal that was designed for someone else's workflow, and the three spreadsheets he'd duct-taped in between, he'd become a typist. A data integrator. A full-time tab-switcher with a side practice in medicine.

That photo captures why we changed our name.

Ultralight.

When we launched as Vibrant Practice, the word felt right. Energetic. Alive. Full of color. And it named what we wanted the clinician's experience to feel like — a practice that was finally thriving instead of surviving.

But the longer we worked with clinicians, the more we realized that Vibrant described the outcome, not the design principle. What functional, integrative, and longevity physicians actually needed from their software wasn't more. It was less. Less load. Less switching. Less weight on a workflow that is already carrying the cognitive burden of endocrine-metabolic cross-talk, gut–brain–immune signaling, longitudinal biomarker patterns, and five new diagnostic panels per month.

Every visit, you're piecing together a picture of your patient from five different systems and doing most of that synthesis in your head.

Good software, for this category of medicine, should feel ultralight.

Not minimal. Not stripped down. The opposite — dense with intelligence, rich with context, holding the full patient story across multi-omics and wearables and eighteen months of trended labs. But light on the clinician. Light enough that the tool disappears and the medicine comes forward. Light enough that a two-hour longevity visit feels like a conversation, not a documentation marathon. Light enough that the keyboard stops wearing out.

Ultralight is a design principle before it's a product name. It's what we think the infrastructure of modern medicine should feel like. That's the thesis we're building on, and it's the commitment we're putting our name behind.

The product is still the product. If you're a clinician already on the platform, nothing about your workflow changes — you'll see the new logo and the new URL (ultralighthealth.com), and that's it.

What's new is what the rebrand unlocks. Alongside the name change, we closed a $9.3M seed round led by The General Partnership, with participation from Wisdom Ventures, Emerson Collective, Anthemis Female Innovators Lab, and angels including former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and founders from Hint Health, Function Health, Collective Health, and Sprinter Health.

The money funds our capacity to build and grow, which you'll feel in the product:

We're now live in 75+ clinics and known to 1,500+ clinicians, all through word of mouth. Zero paid advertising. That's the signal we paid closest attention to when deciding what to build next. We wanted to share the stories of several clinicians on the platform, and we’re grateful to support these excellent doctors. These are the kinds of doctors we get to support every day using Ultralight.

Jack Penner, MD left academic medicine at UCSF to return home to Santa Cruz. His dad was a primary care doctor and a rock in the community, and Jack is building a thriving practice to carry that same value forward.

Philip Deibel, MD was a successful OBGYN who walked away because he wanted to practice medicine he believed more deeply in. He started from scratch and built D5 into a thriving practice in North Carolina - and he's hiring!

Dannette Kallay, MD spent her career in pediatrics before realizing she could have a bigger impact on her own. Now at Kallay MD, she supports children and adults through genetics and holistic care through her virtual practice, and the practice is thriving.

Crystal Brust, PA-C spent years as a flight paramedic then in pediatric surgery, she decided to go out on her own. After her own journey navigating fertility challenges and PCOS with lifestyle and nutrition changes, she has grounded her functional medicine practice in these foundational principles. One more example of a thriving practice.

Four different paths to the same conclusion: they could practice better medicine on their own terms.

That's who Ultralight was built for.

Whether Ultralight is the right fit for you or not, the exercise of naming what your current infrastructure is costing you is worth doing. Try this:

1. Count the tools. Open a blank page and list every piece of software you log into on a typical clinical day. EHR, lab portal, scheduling, messaging, protocols, wearables, scribes, clinical decision support, supplement dispensary, payments. If you get past five, you're in the zone where most modern clinicians are operating — and where the cognitive tax starts to compound.

2. Map the handoffs. For a single complex patient visit, trace the data journey: where does the lab result live, where does it need to appear, how does it get there? If the answer involves copy-paste, export-to-CSV, or "my MA handles it," that's a handoff with a friction cost. Count them.

3. Name the bottleneck. Across most functional and longevity practices, the bottleneck is one of three things: lab synthesis taking too long, protocols that don't carry across visits, or wearable/symptom data siloed in a separate app. Which one is yours? Specificity matters — "the whole stack is broken" isn't a fixable problem. "My CGM data doesn't talk to my protocols" is.

4. Calculate the opportunity cost. If you're spending 10 hours a week on administrative synthesis that could be automated, at a $300–$500/hour opportunity cost, that's $12,000–$20,000 a month in recoverable capacity. That's the number to hold against the cost of any platform you evaluate — including ours.

5. Ask the harder question. Not "does my stack work?" but "does my stack make me more present with my patients, or less?" One of our clinicians put it this way: "The way I can orient myself toward the person I'm caring for feels much more centered, much more engaged in a humanistic relationship." If your current tools aren't creating that, they're not neutral — they're actively working against your medicine.

I started this company because I spent a year embedded with physicians — OB/GYNs, primary care doctors, longevity, functional and integrative practitioners — and I saw the mirror image of the patient experience I'd had when I was searching for my own autoimmune remission. Brilliant, mission-driven clinicians, squeezed into systems that made it nearly impossible to practice the medicine they trained for.

The rebrand is a commitment to them. Ultralight is what software should feel like when it's built for the clinician instead of around billing codes. That's not a tagline. It's the operating principle we're going to be held to, publicly, from here on out. If we ever stop feeling ultralight to you, I want to hear about it.

Be a modern clinician with the help of Ultralight, the AI-native EHR built specifically for functional, integrative, and longevity medicine.

OpenAI launches ChatGPT for Clinicians — free, for every verified U.S. doctor. OpenAI released a dedicated clinical version of ChatGPT this week, free for any verified physician, NP, PA, or pharmacist in the U.S. It comes with a clinical search layer pulling from peer-reviewed sources with citations, reusable templates for referrals and prior auths, deep-research mode for literature reviews, and — notably — a HIPAA BAA option. On OpenAI's own HealthBench Professional benchmark, GPT-5.4 in the Clinicians workspace scored 59.0, outperforming human physicians (43.7, even with unlimited time and web access) and every other frontier model tested. The AMA says 81% of physicians now use AI in clinical practice, more than doubling since 2023. Two things to hold at once: this is a meaningful upgrade over what clinicians have been ChatGPT-ing with so far, and a general-purpose tool — however well-tuned — is not clinical infrastructure. It doesn't hold your patient's longitudinal record, doesn't know their eighteen-month biomarker trajectory, doesn't integrate with their wearables or labs. For the cognitive tasks where it fits — literature synthesis, draft documentation, differential prompting — use it. For the synthesis that requires the full patient story, it's still the wrong tool. The distinction between assistant and infrastructure is about to matter more, not less.

Patients sue two more health systems over AI scribe use — Medscape, April 16. Two more lawsuits landed this month against health systems for using ambient AI scribes without clear patient consent or disclosure. The legal questions are still unsettled, but the practice question isn't: patients increasingly expect to know when AI is in the room, and the trust cost of finding out afterward is high. For independent practices — where the patient relationship is the product — the standard is higher than "technically compliant." Being upfront about how AI is used in your workflow is fast becoming a differentiator, not a liability.

Eli Lilly's $2.75B bet on AI-discovered longevity drugs — MedCity News, April. Lilly's deal with Insilico Medicine is a tenfold escalation on their prior partnership and a signal about where the pipeline is heading: more than 173 AI-discovered programs are already in clinical development, and 15–20 are expected to enter pivotal trials this year. Your patients will start asking about specific compounds — senolytics, novel NAD+ precursors, off-label candidates — that didn't exist as questions a year ago. The practices that handle that conversation well will be the ones that already have the infrastructure to synthesize multi-system response data on a patient-specific level. The therapeutic pipeline is moving faster than the average clinical workflow can keep up with. That gap is the next bottleneck worth solving.

May 8, Fullscript Forward · Virtual  · Half-day summit with the Fullscript practitioner community. Low lift to attend, high signal on where whole-person care is heading. Dr. Lexi Gonzales is speaking on "Hallmarks of Health: An evidence-driven look at today's leading longevity ingredients."

May 27–30, IFM Annual International Conference · San Diego, CA  · The largest gathering of functional medicine clinicians in the world. The clinical programming is worth the trip; the hallway conversations are worth twice that. Reply if you want to connect onsite. Sunita and the Ultralight team will be there!

Jun 9–11, Longevity Docs Cannes 2026 · Cannes, France · Invite-leaning room for clinicians at the frontier of longevity medicine. Worth it if you are designing the next iteration of your own practice.

Jun 24–26, Longevity Summit Dublin · Trinity College Dublin, Ireland  · Three days deep on the biology of aging with the translational researchers and biotech founders most clinicians only meet through papers. For anyone who wants their longevity practice grounded in the actual science.

Sep 24–26, Vibrant Longevity Summit · Austin, TX  · A clinical room of practitioners running lab-driven, longitudinal care. For anyone building a practice around diagnostics and biomarkers who wants peers who work the same way.

Oct 8–10, A4M Women's Health Summit · San Antonio, TX ·  The best clinical education on hormone, metabolic, and midlife women's health you will see this year. The room to be in if you are growing the perimenopause and menopause side of your practice.

Oct 21–24, NAMS Annual Meeting · San Diego, CA  · The single most practice-changing meeting of the year for midlife women's health. Your protocols will look different after this one.

Nov 5–8, Eudēmonia Summit · West Palm Beach, FL ·  One of the most talked-about longevity gatherings in the U.S. Experientials, hands-on demos, and the best place to try the emerging frameworks your patients will ask you about next year.

Nov 5-7 — Private Physicians Alliance Annual Meeting · St. Petersburg, FL The gathering for independent, cash-pay, and concierge physicians navigating practice independence. Practical and peer-driven. Vibrant will be there!

Nov 8-11 — American College of Lifestyle Medicine Conference · Orlando, FL Lifestyle medicine's main annual event — evidence-based approaches to behavior change, chronic disease, and healthspan. Growing overlap with the longevity medicine community. Vibrant will be there!

Dec 11–13, A4M Longevity Fest · Las Vegas, NV  · The biggest longevity event in the U.S. The room spans clinicians, industry, founders, and the people building next year's platforms, and the connections from this one tend to compound through the rest of your year.

Know of an event we should add? Reply and tell us.

Renaming a company isn't a marketing exercise. It's a commitment — to a thesis about what this work should feel like, and to the clinicians whose keyboards we're trying to keep intact.

Ultralight is the design principle. The product is the promise. The community of clinicians who found us through word of mouth, 1500 now and counting, is the reason any of this matters.

If the rebrand resonates, forward this to a colleague still stitching their stack together. If it doesn't, hit reply and tell me why. The best feedback we get comes from clinicians living the work.

Back to normal programming next week — clinical depth, fresh frameworks, and the conversations that actually matter in your day.

— Sunita and the Ultralight team