)
Specialist medical practitioners are among new investors in Medow Health AI after the startup raised $2 million in a seed round to capitalise on rapid growth by the medtech over the past 18 months.
The capital raising was supported by Chris O’Brien Lifehouse CEO oncologist Professor Michael Boyer and leading orthopedic surgeon Michael Solomon as the Sydney-based startup looks to grow its client base of medical practitioners in Australia and New Zealand.
Described as a healthcare technology company “by specialists, for specialists”, Medow Health AI uses artificial intelligence to assist medical professionals automate the delivery of medical reports.
Medow Health AI co-founder Joel Freiberg identified the need for the technology after seeing his father, a lung specialist, spending a great deal of time generating reports after consulting with patients.
“After every consultation with a patient a doctor needs to provide a report on that patient,” Freiberg tells Business News Australia.
“My dad is a lung specialist who would see 40 patients in a day from 8am to 6pm – so he has to create 40 reports a day as well.
“That’s what every doctor goes through and the way they are solving it now is very time intensive or very cost intensive.
“Some doctors will have a full-time typist to transcribe a dictated summary. Some are using speech-to-text dictation, but even if that take three to five minutes, they are doing that for each of their patients which adds up to a few hours a day.”
Freiberg, who co-founded the startup with his brother Josh and Andrew Sharapo, worked “very hard in stealth mode” with 20 specialists to refine the product ahead of its official launch.
The Medow Health AI application runs during the consultation, selectively filtering the conversation to focus on the patient’s medical condition and needs.
“You can talk about the weather, for example, and make the interaction as natural as possible, and our AI automatically transcribes the whole consultation, filters out the things that are not important and then turns this into a bespoke report,” says Freiberg.
“Within 15 seconds you can have the report and instead of having to remember what was said, all the specialist has to do is check it.”
Medow Health AI is delivering its technology in partnership with health technology group Magentus. The startup integrates its technology directly into the Magentus Genis and Gentu systems which are dominant in Australian medical practices.
“Having worked with my dad and several other of his specialist colleagues, this was such a strong pain point,” says Freiberg.
“There are many other applications where we think we can add value, but the first step is their admin needs which are so high.”
Growth tracking at 50 per cent month-on-month
Medow Health AI has been growing 50 per cent month-on-month since September last year, a trend that Freiberg expects to continue as the company expands this year, including a push into New Zealand where specialists have already adopted the technology.
“We didn’t have to look far for investors with our early medical specialists customers already using the technology wanting to be involved in the capital raise,” says Freiberg, who has bootstrapped the company until now.
“Over 50 per cent of our investment capital has come from specialist doctors, providing a huge vote of confidence and also strategic input that other investors couldn’t match.”
Medow Health AI plans to use the proceeds from the capital raise to grow its team further, with Freiberg noting that the pace of expansion has exceeded his expectations at every point for the past two years.
“We’ve scaled up our team to invest in our AI resources,” he says.
“We are also making sure we give our customers a high touch support. Many specialists, like my dad, are not incredibly tech savvy and are so time poor.
“AI is new, so we give every doctor an account manager to really help onboard the whole practice to the technology and we believe that’s an important part of our growth.”
While Medow Health AI is currently focusing on establishing its operations in Australia and New Zealand, Freiberg says there are “definite plans and applications” that can take the technology to medical practitioners globally.
“Doctors know AI can assist them and they are starting that exploration,” he says.
“Less than 5 per cent of doctors may be using a tool like ours in their everyday now, but a year ago it was less than 1 per cent, so it’s growing pretty fast.”
)
