INVEST Pitch Perfect Spotlight: How Docology automates the wrong steps in patient referrals

For decades, the patient referral process has been plagued by inefficiency and fragmentation. Patient data remains fragmented across systems, forcing staff to spend significant time manually compiling and aggregating records for specialists.

A startup seeking to solve this problem through automation has won a startup pitch competition. Medical City NewsINVEST digital health conference held in Dallas last month. A panel of investor judges named Omaha, Neb.-based Docology the winner, identifying it as the most promising among three other companies developing artificial intelligence tools to improve clinical operations.

CEO Andrew Rogers said Docology was launched in January to fill a gap in the industry. He said he and his co-founders — Dr. Sida Niu and Tyler Hamik — spent months meeting with doctors and nurses and participating in online chat groups to learn more about pain points in the patient referral process.

“We found that there was a sizable gap in software solutions today to help with the patient referral process. While there were a lot of tools that focused on how to automate billing or use the back end of the workflow, there weren't a lot of tools that focused on the front end,” Rogers explained.

To help solve this problem, Docology created an AI platform that automatically aggregates referral documents by intercepting faxes, parsing the information, and then generating summaries for doctors.

The product is currently used by 23 independent doctors, all of whom work in private practice. Docology launched a pilot phase in May, during which these doctors will test the platform. The plan is that some of those doctors will become paying customers — Rogers said he expects the startup to start generating revenue within three to four months.

So far, Docology's technology has reduced referral processing time from about 9.5 minutes to about 90 seconds during the pilot phase, he added.

“If we can reduce that nine-and-a-half minutes to 90 seconds, that can add one more patient per day per location, which can generate up to $60,000 in additional revenue per physician, and that's just assuming one new patient per day and an average billing rate of $200, which we find is the sweet spot for average clinic visit billing,” Rogers said.

Alternatively, these additional hours could be given back to physicians to reduce burnout or used to increase face-to-face time with the patients they are already seeing.

Rogers points to the importance of integration as one of the most valuable lessons learned from Docology's initial pilot. Physicians don't want to use standalone applications—the new tools have to fit into their existing EMR workflows, he said.

He noted that Docology is developing its EMR integration capabilities with the goal of soon being able to put documents and AI-generated summaries directly into the EMR, regardless of the vendor.

The startup's initial target customers are independent physician practices specializing in urology. Over the next few years, the company plans to expand its services to serve clinics in oncology, anesthesiology and other specialties, Rogers said. Later, he saw Docology being sold to regional and large health systems.

“Our belief is that we want to develop in the public arena. We want to iterate quickly, learn from users quickly. We don't want to go out and build the perfect product and then try to get big hospital systems or big electronic medical records as our only customers. We want to focus on how to get as many users as possible as quickly as possible and try to build that momentum,” Rogers declared.

Essentially, Docology wants to quickly refine its product based on real user feedback, rather than building it in isolation.

The startup plans to complete its first round of financing in the first quarter of next year, targeting $1.2 million.

Rogers said the funding will be used to expand Docology's platform to serve new specialties, deepen EMR integration, and expand the team — hiring engineers, business development executives and customer support managers with healthcare experience.

Photo: Eric St. Furcy, MedCity News