doctors – Product Management Confabulation

September 5, 2022

Docquity, a community for healthcare professionals, raises $44M Series C

A call between doctors can save lives. That’s what Docquity co-founder Indranil Roychowdhury learned when his father was hospitalized with a life-threatening condition in India. An emergency room doctor initially told him that there was no chance of survival, but then another doctor called one of his peers in the United States, and they came up with an alternative treatment plan that worked. Docquity was created to help doctors collaborate in the same way, at scale, even if they live in different countries.

The Singapore-based company announced today it has raised $44 million in Series C funding led by returning investors Itochu Corporation, which put in $32 million. The rest of the round came from investors including iGlobe Partners, Alkemi, Global Brain, KDV and Infocom.

Roychowdhury told TechCrunch that after his father’s experience, he and his co-founders, Amit Vithal and Abhisek Wadhwa, wondered why “in today’s day of social media, it took a phone call to save someone’s life.” Docquity was founded in 2015 so doctors and other healthcare professionals have an easier way of working with one another.

The new capital brings Docquity’s total raised to $57.5 million. It says it is the largest community of healthcare professionals in Southeast Asia, with more than 350,000 doctors on board. The funding will be used to grow Docquity in its existing markets, like Indonesia and the Philippines, and enter new ones, including Japan, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. It recently launched in Taiwan, where more than 2,000 doctors have signed up so far. The company claimed two-fold revenue growth in 2021.

The company now has a team of 300 people and aside from its Singapore headquarters, also has a tech and engineering hub in Gurgoan, India, and other offices in Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and Taiwan.

In addition to giving doctors tools to connect and collaborate, Docquity has partnered with more than 250 medical associations in Southeast Asia to develop learning modules, which can be used to earn compulsory continuing medical education (CME) credits. The company says that so far, its platform has enabled doctors to earn a total of 4.2 million CME credits.

Docquity has three core features. The first, Docquity Academy, partners with universities and senior medical practitioners to create learning tools for doctors. The second, Docquity Clinic, allows doctors to have follow-up consultations with their patients. Finally, Docquity Insights takes data about user engagement on the platform to understand what they need.

Roychowdhury said that on average, about 50,000 doctors take courses on its platform every month, and that it was one of the first companies to launch online lectures and symposiums when the pandemic started in 2020. It now hosts about 500 lectures a month. Doctors taking the courses can also join private groups to discuss real world cases and the best treatment plans.

“While teaching and exam-style education is a key component, we believe that experiential learning through case discussions among peers in a major learning source for doctors,” said Roychowdhury.

Docquity ensures patient privacy through several measures. It’s a closed, GDPR and HIPAA-compliant network that only allows in doctors verified by medical associations. It has also set up internal compliance and pharma co-vigilance team to ensure privacy and security. It lets pharmaceutical and medical device companies to engage with doctors, but no advertisements are allowed on the platform.

Another Docquity initiative is making healthcare more affordable. It recently launched its Patient Adherence Program (PAP) to help doctors bring care to underserved patients. “Making treatments more affordable is a key objective of the platform and we have started working in breast cancer as a therapeutic area with one of our clients, and have already served close to 600 breast cancer patients in the Philippines,” said Roychowdhury.

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July 13, 2022

Carepatron is passionate about helping solo practitioners and small healthcare practices

The founders of New Zealand-based Carepatron, a healthcare platform used by providers and patients, say they are passionate about solo practitioners and small health teams. With that in mind, they built Carepatron, which helps reduce the amount of administrative work that practices need to perform and also automatically reminds patients about appointments to reduce no-shows.

The company announced today it has raised $1.6 million NZD (about $980,000 USD) in pre-seed funding led by Blackbird. The funding will be used to hire for Carepatron’s global team and on product and growth. It has clients in 30 countries, including the United States, and markets in Europe and Asia Pacific.

Carepatron is used by practices ranging from a solo practitioner to teams of about 100. It says its clients save about eight hours of administrative work each week by helping them manage tasks like booking, rescheduling appointments, responding to emails and generating bills. It is now used by 700 health teams, with about two-thirds of its clients based in North America and Asia. More than half of Carepatron’s usage is on mobile devices.

Carepatron was founded in 2021 by David Pene and Jamie Frew. Both were inspired by their life experiences. Frew helped his family with their community hospital as a kid, while Pene’s partner is a doctor who works with small teams and practices.

Frew, Carepatron’s CEO, told TechCrunch that “David and I were frustrated by the lack of progress and innovation across the healthcare software sector, as we had personally seen the impact of poor tools on our partner’s mental health and medical practices. We bring everyone together in an ultra-secure app with the tools and information they need to achieve better health outcomes.”

The platform’s core products are scheduling and workflow, client records and documentation, and billing and payments. Frew says it can reduce costs by 74% for its clients by reducing the range of software subscriptions and tools they require from nine to two.

“Because we are community-driven, we can massively reduce the cost of our platform with an average subscription of $12 month per patient,” he said. He added that even though Carepatron is in its early stages, it is already generating revenue and has been growing its customer base consistently since launch.

The platform reduces patient no-shows through tools like scheduling automation, including smart reminders, online rescheduling and built-in video options.

In a prepared statement, Blackbird principal Phoebe Harrop said, “By allowing people to access the experts they need, Carepatron reduces the frictions associated with getting timely care. We are really excited to support Jamie and David on their journey to supercharge hundreds of thousands of health professionals around the world with lovable practice management software.”

February 3, 2021

Bot MD, an AI-based chatbot for doctors, raises $5 million for expansion into more Asian markets

Time is critical for healthcare providers, especially in the middle of the pandemic. Singapore-based Bot MD helps save time with an AI-based chatbot that lets doctors look up important information from their smartphones, instead of needing to call a hospital operator or access its intranet. The startup announced today it has raised a $5 million Series A led by Monk’s Hill Venture.

Other backers include SeaX, XA Network and SG Innovate, and angel investors Yoh-Chie Lu, Jean-Luc Butel and Steve Blank. Bot MD was also part of Y Combinator’s summer 2018 batch.

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The funding will be used to expand in the Asia-Pacific region, including Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia, and to add new features in response to demand from hospitals and healthcare organizations during COVID-19. Bot MD’s AI assistant currently supports English, with plans to release Bahasa Indonesian and Spanish later this year. It is currently used by about 13,000 doctors at organizations including Changi General Hospital, National University Health System, National University Cancer Institute of Singapore, Tan Tock Seng Hospital, Singapore General Hospital, Parkway Radiology and the National Kidney Transplant Institute.

Co-founder and chief executive officer Dorothea Koh told TechCrunch that Bot MD integrates hospital information usually stored in multiple systems and makes it easier to access.

Image Credits: Bot MDWithout Bot MD, doctors may need to dial a hospital operator to find which staffers are on call and get their contact information. If they want drug information, that means another call to the pharmacy. If they need to see updated guidelines and clinical protocols, that often entails finding a computer that is connected to the hospital’s intranet.

“A lot of what Bot MD does is to integrate the content that they need into a single interface that is searchable 24/7,” said Koh.

For example, during COVID-19, Bot MD introduced a new feature that takes healthcare providers to a form pre-filled with their information when they type “record temperature” into the chatbot. Many were accessing their organization’s intranet twice a day to log their temperature and Koh said being able to use the form through Bot MD has significantly improved compliance.

The time it takes to onboard Bot MD varies depending on the information systems and amount of content it needs to integrate, but Koh said its proprietary natural language processing chat engine makes training its AI relatively quick. For example, Changi General Hospital, a recent client, was onboarded in less than 10 days.

Bot MD plans to add new clinical apps to its platform, including ones for electronic medical records (EMR), billing and scheduling integrations, clinical alerts and chronic disease monitoring.

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December 2, 2019

Amazon debuts automatic speech recognition service, Amazon Transcribe Medical

Amazon is expanding its automatic transcription service for AWS, Amazon Transcribe, to include support for medical speech, the company announced this morning at its AWS Re:Invent conference. The new machine-learning powered service, Amazon Transcribe Medical, will allow physicians to quickly dictate their clinical notes and speech into accurate text in real-time, without any human intervention, Amazon claims.

Unlike some services, the physicians won’t have to say things like “comma” or “full stop,” but can speak normally during the dictation process. The text can then be fed to downstream systems including ER systems or AWS language services, like Amazon Comprehend Medical for entity extraction.

The service is also HIPAA compliant and scales with the users’ needs, meaning you’ll only pay for what you actually use and without upfront fees, notes Amazon.

From a technical perspective, the service works as follows.

You first capture audio through a device’s microphone, then send PCM audio to a streaming API, based on the Websocket protocol. The API responds with a series of JSON blobs wit the transcribed text, plus word-level time stamps and punctuation. This can also be optionally saved to an Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) bucket.

Amazon Transcribe Medical, which builds on 2017’s debut of Amazon Transcribe, arrives at a time when Amazon is increasing its investments in the medical space — particularly in terms of the intersection of voice technology with medicine. Last week, for example, Amazon launched a medication management service for Alexa which allows consumers to make voice requests for refills and get medication reminders.

The company has also made it possible for Alexa voice apps to be HIPAA compliant, acquired health startups like PillPack and Health Navigator, launched its own healthcare service for employees, Amazon Health, and has been piloting the use of Alexa in a hospital environment.

Amazon is not alone in working with speech recognition in the healthcare space — this is an area Google is working in as well, with Google Brain, plus Microsoft, established players like Nuance and Philips, and a wide range of startups.

Amazon Transcribe Medical is initially available in the U.S. East (North Virginia) and U.S. West (Oregon) regions.