Medical and administrative staff are increasingly overwhelmed by the mountains of paperwork they must fill out every day.
Dozens, if not hundreds, of startups are seeing an opportunity to reduce the burden of these bureaucratic processes with the help of generative AI. These companies are building AI medical scribes, platforms for pre-authorizing health insurance payments, and products that automatically extract medical codes from patients' electronic medical records (EMRs).
But Pharos, a company in Y Combinator's Summer 2024 cohort, is applying AI to another, somewhat less obvious administrative function for hospitals: quality reporting to external clinical registries.
Organizations such as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the American College of Surgeons aim to measure each medical center's performance in providing safe and effective care to patients. Although reporting to these registries is not always mandatory, it is often in a hospital's best interest to do so. These external organizations play a critical role in identifying quality issues (such as increased postoperative infections) that can be addressed to improve patient care.
However, reporting to the registry can be very time consuming. Nurses and other staff must manually review each patient's electronic health record to extract the exact data needed for each registration. “It can take up to eight hours to report a case,” said Ryan Isono, a partner at Felicis. “It's a big problem, but it's one that you don't understand unless you're deeply involved in the industry.”
In fact, Pharos was co-founded by Felix Brann and Matthew Jones. They had some exposure to the challenges of reporting data to medical registries in their previous jobs at Vital, a startup that develops software for emergency rooms. They realized that AI could take unstructured data from the EMR and automatically fill out the forms required by the registry. They added another co-founder, Alex Clark, when they passed through YC earlier this year. He is a medical doctor and holds a PhD in artificial intelligence from Imperial College London.
On Friday, Pharos announced that Felicis led a $5 million seed round with participation from General Catalyst, Moxy, and Y Combinator.
Pharos caught Felicis' attention not only because the company can save hospitals money and free up nurses' time to care for patients, but also because other startups in the region are still following suit. Isono said that's because they haven't.
Brann (pictured above, center) predicts that other high-quality reporting companies will emerge soon. “We have top AI talent with five years of experience in sales and hospital implementation,” he said. This Venn diagram usually does not overlap. That's why I think we can win.”
For now, the entire Pharos team is made up of just the three co-founders, but the company plans to use the funding to hire a team to help the company sell its products and maintain relationships with hospitals.