Deepscribe: The AI startup disrupting healthcare documentation forever

(4 minute read)

This AI startup plans to disrupt clinical documentation with AI forever

Their tool is so accurate it outperformed GPT-4 by over 32%.

They’ve raised $37.3M from investors like the Founders of Scale AI and Figma

So what’s the startup and how does it work?

Here’s the story of Deepscribe:

Deepscribe was founded by Akilesh Bapu and Matthew Ko in 2018 to help Physicians increase productivity & efficiency. Deepscribe automates clinical documentation so clinicians can focus more on providing healthcare.

Deepscribe leverages AI to automate this process, transforming patient conversations with their physicians into fully customizable, detailed clinical notes.

Deepscribe has set the industry standard for accuracy in medical documentation - it's outperformed GPT-4 by over 32%.

The healthcare tool has already been used by over 1,000 Physicians and healthcare providers to record, transcribe and create Physician’s notes. 

Using Deepscribe is a massive productivity driver, gives more people access to healthcare, and makes these medical practices more profitable.

Backstory

Before Deepscribe, both Akilesh and Matthew went to UC Berkeley, and were always interested in AI and Deep Learning.

Akilesh’s dad was a Physician, and Akilesh noticed how stressed he was and how much time it took writing patients notes.

Akilesh realized that back in the day, most Physicians took these notes by hand. In 2009, a healthcare act was passed, which mandated healthcare providers to transition from paper-based records to electronic systems.

This was meant to streamline their workflows but ended up disrupting it…

Akilesh noticed an opportunity: There are lots of healthcare documentation tools already on the market, but no one was focusing on summary - where most of the physicians’ time was spent. In fact, ⅓ of physician time is spent on paperwork.

Akilesh and Matthew then created the tool: an AI that automates and summarizes clinical documentation.

Hustle

The 2 founders spent over 6 months just developing the tool and were actually about to quit soon.

They went to 10 doctors and realized it was impossible to get feedback from any of them because they were too busy, and lost hundreds, if not thousands of dollars for every hour spent with them.

Most doctors either ghosted them or said it wasn’t usable and can’t be trusted or save them any time.

The founders continued pitching another 10 doctors who all rejected them for the same reason, before the 21^st said they would love using it. They’d officially found product market fit.

Akalish says that the best advice he’s received is don’t get sensitive too early on what customers think about the product.

In other words, customer feedback is sometimes overrated.

The opportunity

Of the $3.5T/year spent on healthcare in the US alone, about $700B goes directly to physicians (the human doctors alone).

The medical documentation space is also expected to grow to almost $5B in 2027, from only $1B in 2019, literally a 5x increase in 8 years.

When AI medical documentation technology is truly accurate, it’ll be worth so much more than $5B because of its many second and third order effects.

Capturing a big part of healthcare data through something like recording notes between a doctor and patient leads to personalisation. This leads to second and third order effects which could play into other products.

This is why all the world’s biggest companies are trying to build a product in this space including Nvidia, Amazon and Google.

This could also, however lead to data privacy issues, where the use of patient recordings could be used unethically.

Healthcare is also a super difficult sector to disrupt overall because of data privacy and ethical implications. For example, JP Morgan, Berkshire Hathaway and Amazon started a fund to disrupt US healthcare called Haven in 2018, which completely failed.

Numbers

To date, Deepscribe has raised $37.3M with the latest funding round being a $30M Series A in 2022. The round was led by Index ventures with participation from Scale AI CEO Alex Wang and Figma CEO Dylan Field.

According to the Wall street Journal, this round valued the company at $180M.

Deepscribe recently announced that it will be working with Amazon’s AWS to accelerate LLMs in healthcare, having one of the largest labeled datasets in healthcare.

They’ve already processed and labeled over 3 million de-identified clinical conversations, to train these LLMs.

The company currently has over 150 employees - a team of 50 edit a lot of the Physicians’ notes made, because the tech still isn’t very accurate.

They’ve also recently hired Dr. Dean Dalili, as their Chief medical officer to drive strategy through his connections in the healthcare sector.

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