Dr. Milton Chen
Milton Chen, PhD, is the Cofounder and CEO of VSee, the AI-enabled, no-code/low-code telehealth platform used by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, McKesson, Optum, Mass General, DaVita, and the International Space Station, and CEO of This American Doc (TAD), a physician-owned telehealth staffing company.
His career has centered on one problem: why videoconferencing failed to become an everyday tool, and how to design video collaboration that people actually adopt.
Milton has led VSee since founding it in 2008, building it from a Stanford research prototype into a HIPAA-compliant platform that serves more than 1,000 healthcare organizations and handles 1.5 million video encounters a month.
In 2015, NASA deployed VSee as the secure video and telemedicine system for astronauts aboard the International Space Station, where it supports private medical consultations and family conferences. Read NASA Deploys VSee Telemedicine and Secure Video Chat on the International Space Station and NASA's Choice For the International Space Station.
In October 2025, VSee received a FedRAMP High Authority to Operate from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, clearing it for federal agencies that require the highest civilian cloud-security level. Read VSee Awarded US Department of Health & Human Services FedRAMP High ATO.
In March 2026, at HIMSS 2026, he unveiled the VSee AI Robot, a fully autonomous telehealth robot that navigates hospital corridors to a patient's bedside without a staff escort. Read VSee Unveils World's First Autonomous Telehealth AI Robot at HIMSS 2026.
Between 2024 and 2026, Milton took VSee public. In June 2024, VSee Lab, Inc. and iDoc Virtual Telehealth Solutions, Inc. completed a business combination with Digital Health Acquisition Corp. to form VSee Health, Inc., which began trading on Nasdaq as VSEE with Milton and Dr. Imoigele “Imo” Aisiku as Co-CEOs. Read Digital Health Acquisition Corp. Announce Closing of Business Combination Transaction.
In November 2025, he was named Chairman of the Board to drive the company's AI infrastructure strategy. Read VSee Health Names Dr. Milton Chen as Chairman to Drive AI Infrastructure Growth. In June 2026, he purchased VSee Lab back from VSee Health, returning 2,870,069 shares to the company and stepping down as Co-CEO and Chairman to run VSee once again as an independent company.
Read VSee Health Completes Strategic Separation of VSee Lab, Retires Approximately 7% of Outstanding Shares, and Transitions to Single CEO Leadership. Watch Milton Chen — Co-CEO at VSee Health on Charles Cormier's Founder Wisdom Podcast and Transforming Telehealth: Dr. Milton Chen on VSee Health's Impact from RedChip Companies
VSee grew out of Milton's doctoral research at Stanford University, where he wrote the first version of the software, and was cofounded with Erika Chuang, PhD of Stanford's Computer Graphics Laboratory. Early backing came from In-Q-Tel, a Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Science Foundation, and, in 2011, a multimillion-dollar investment from Salesforce, by which time more than 6,000 enterprises, including Shell, Intel, and the U.S. Navy SEALs, were using the product.
Read Exclusive: Salesforce Invests In Video Messaging Startup (And Skype Rival) VSee and Secure and Simple Video Conferencing in Live Science, which describes how the U.S. House of Representatives adopted VSee behind its firewall.
A 2012 deployment at the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Gabon, where Milton led a team installing remote-ultrasound telemedicine in the maternity ward, redirected the company toward healthcare, and VSee went on to pioneer the virtual waiting room and other workflows now standard in telehealth. Read VSee in Gabon: Remote Ultrasound and the African Mother (Part 2) and The Accidental Social Enterprise: VSee's unexpected foray into BoP health care in NextBillion.
Milton has personally deployed VSee for Hillary Clinton, Angelina Jolie, UN Secretary-General António Guterres, former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, and the band Linkin Park.
Milton is the coauthor, with Peter Saint-Andre, of XEP-0180: Jingle Video via RTP, an early XMPP Standards Foundation specification for video sessions over XMPP, the protocol then used by Google Talk and Facebook Chat, and he received a DEMO God award at DEMO 06. He has given more than 100 invited talks, from Iceland to Nigeria to Saudi Arabia and the U.S. Congress. Before VSee, he was a Video Communication Researcher at Intel from 1996 to 2003.
Humanitarian telemedicine runs through Milton's career. From December 2013 to January 2014, he worked on-site in Iraqi Kurdistan, deploying VSee for Syrian refugees at the Domiz UNHCR camp in Duhok, where it was used for more than 26 remote eye consultations, and running telesurgery training at the Azadi Teaching Hospital. In 2015, VSee connected an emergency physician live from the Health 2.0 conference to a refugee patient in the same camp. Read VSee & CEP America Use Telemedicine to Help Iraq Kurdistan Refugees.
In 2013 he ran telemedicine for Shell in Nigeria, deploying the VSee telemedicine kit at four sites in remote regions. In 2022, his team built a system linking regional Ukrainian physicians to remote specialists for procedures such as amputations. Read How Mass. doctors and tech companies are helping Ukraine via telemedicine.
In November 2024, VSee Health expanded its Clinton Global Initiative telehealth pilots in conflict-affected regions of Africa. Read VSee Health, Health Tech Without Borders, and iDocta Expand Clinton Global Initiative Telehealth Pilots in Conflict-affected Regions of Africa.
Milton earned his B.S. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley and his PhD in Electrical Engineering in 2003 from Stanford University, co-advised by Pat Hanrahan and Terry Winograd. His dissertation, Conveying Conversational Cues Through Video, showed how videoconferencing distorts gestures, lip movement, and eye contact in ways that reflect badly on the speaker rather than the medium, so that a transmission delay makes a person seem slow.
His papers include Design of a Virtual Auditorium at ACM Multimedia 2001 and Leveraging the Asymmetric Sensitivity of Eye Contact for Videoconferencing at CHI 2002, which found that people are far less sensitive to downward gaze than to sideways or upward gaze, a result that became a design parameter for VSee.
His talks include Welcome and Vision Forward and 7 Secrets of Telehealth Adoption from VSee's 2017 Telehealth Failures & Secrets to Success conference, and Intro to TAD (This American Doc). Read The Telehealth Adoption Black Hole, his argument that poor user experience, not regulation, keeps telehealth stuck in pilot projects.
He was a keynote speaker at iA-MED 2024 in San Salvador, El Salvador, joined STAR-TIDES chair Aaron Rose for the October 2024 fireside chat Why Your Digital Health Transformation Will Be Slow and Likely Hacked, and led two sessions at the American Telemedicine Association's ATA22 expo in Boston, including a panel on supporting Ukrainian refugees through telehealth.
Read VSee Health Co-CEO Among Keynote Speakers at iA-MED 2024: Future of Artificial Intelligence, VSee Health Co-CEO and STAR-TIDES Chair to Discuss Digital Health Transformation and Cybersecurity in Fireside Chat, and Superhuman Telehealth — Dr. Milton Chen, VSee & Partners at ATA22.
Read his interview TMT Interview: Milton Chen, CEO, VSee in Telehealth and Medicine Today, and listen to But Did It Work? Podcast Episode 7: VSee: Enabling Superhuman Telehealth & Creating a Healthier World.
Read his Contributions on the VSee Blog. Milton is based in San Jose, California.
Visit his LinkedIn profile, Stanford Computer Graphics Laboratory page, VSee speaker page, and VSee Health page. Follow him on X.