When four friends and co-founders of a health technology start-up company started the Residency @ The Clinic in the summer of 2022, they were driven by a desire to solve practical problems facing health care professionals.
With their product now on the market and new investment from a leading Silicon Valley venture capital firm Launch.co and angel investor Jason Calacanis, who have previously backed companies like Uber and Robinhood, the team behind medX Insight is scaling up to meet the growing demand for their assisted charting product, clinicassist.ai.
Shreyas Suri, CEO and co-founder of medX Insight, and his team saw first-hand the unnecessary strain that administrative tasks place on the health care system. “The software helps physicians cut down time spent on charting and administrative tasks so physicians can spend more time in front of their patients,” says Suri, a health sciences student at McMaster University. “As we continue to grow our company, it’s incredible to see the adoption and traction in our product. This investment allows us to help match some of the growth in demand that we’re seeing, so that we can continue facilitating uptake among health care practitioners.”
The entrepreneurship journey of the company’s co-founders – Suri, alongside Max Chan, Adil Mohammed, and Kevin Ouyang – started more than two years ago when they first brought their business idea to The Forge, McMaster’s entrepreneurial hub. Bringing a breadth of backgrounds, from health and computer science to engineering and commerce, they developed and evolved their business over the next couple of years, participating in pitch competitions and incubator programs. They then participated in the Residency @ The Clinic, where they prepared clinicassist.ai for commercialization and launched some of its first iterations.
The clinicassist.ai software captures conversations between physician and patient and uses artificial intelligence to convert the transcript into a structured medical note that can be added into the patient’s electronic health record after physician review in a secure and encrypted manner. It also automates related processes such as suggested billing and identifying key insights and trends. MedX Insight estimates that the tool can decrease the amount of time physicians spend on charting and other administrative tasks by as much as half.
“The software provides a suite of tools to cut down on charting and administrative tasks to help physicians spend more time with patients,” says Suri. “That’s the core essence of our company – helping doctors spend more time in front of patients instead of the computer. That’s why our company exists.”
Suri says the Residency @ The Clinic provided the team with valuable coaching from mentors, notably Karen Scraba, one of the Clinic’s innovation coaches, and they were connected with a network of like-minded people who could share knowledge and encourage them in their entrepreneurship journey.
“We had the privilege of working with great mentors. At the same time, there was a key community of other founders who are on a similar path who we could share insights with along the way. A combination of those two factors was critical,” says Suri. “We have a great community at McMaster that has helped support us and played an instrumental role in our journey. They helped expedite our growth and development.”
As the mentor for medX Insight, Scraba worked closely with the team and provided advice and support as they developed the product and strategized how to optimize their business.
“I was immediately impressed with the team’s commitment to their venture, their clear division of labour, collaborative consideration of every resource they explored, and their willingness to pivot as they honed their solution to their target market’s greatest expressed need,” says Scraba. “Their work ethic, communication internally and externally, as well as project management capabilities are admirable. I believe that Shreyas and the clinicassist.ai team are bound for sustainable success, and I’m honoured to have experienced the early part of their journey with them.”
The product is currently being used in family medicine practices and specialist offices in Canada and the U.S., and Suri says the new investment from Launch.co and Calacanis will help them scale up to meet the growing demand. The entire medX Insight team is excited to see the impact that clinicassist.ai can have on improving health care.
“We can see the impact of technology. We see doctors who want to spend as much time with their patients as possible, and as patients, we want to feel like we’re engaged with practitioners,” says Suri. “Our whole focus is to facilitate that experience, help doctors feel less burnt out, and increase their capacity. That’s the vision we started the company with, and we’re excited to take that next step forward.”
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