The mountains of paperwork that medical and administrative professionals must complete on a daily basis are becoming more and more overwhelming.
Numerous firms, perhaps even hundreds, are recognizing the potential to use generative AI to lessen the strain of those bureaucratic procedures. These businesses are developing technologies for autonomously collecting medical coding from patients’ electronic medical records (EMRs), systems for pre-authorizing health insurance payments, and AI medical scribes.
However, Pharos, a business that was included in Y Combinator’s summer 2024 batch, is using AI to address quality reporting to external clinical registries, another administrative task for hospitals that is sometimes overlooked.
The American College of Surgeons and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) are two organizations that seek to evaluate each healthcare facility’s performance in providing patients with safe and efficient care. Hospitals frequently benefit from reporting to these registries, even though it’s not always required. These outside groups are essential in spotting quality problems (such as a rise in post-surgery infections) that can be fixed to enhance patient care.
But it takes a lot of time to report to the registries. The exact information needed for each registry must be manually extracted by nurses and other staff members from each patient’s electronic health record. According to Ryan Isono, a partner at Felicis, reporting a single case can take up to eight hours. “It’s a big problem, but one that you only know about if you’re deep in the industry,” he said.
In fact, Felix Brann and Matthew Jones, who co-founded Pharos, had some experience with the difficulties of reporting data to medical registries from their previous employment at Vital, a startup that creates software for emergency departments. They acknowledged AI’s ability to automatically fill up registries’ forms using unstructured data from EMRs. They hired Alex Clarke, a physician with a PhD in artificial intelligence from Imperial College London, as a co-founder during YC earlier this year.
Pharos revealed on Friday that Felicis led its $5 million seed round, with participation from Y Combinator, General Catalyst, and Moxxie, the company’s pre-seed investor.
According to Isono, Felicis was drawn to Pharos not just because the company might save hospitals money and free up nurses’ time to care for patients, but also because there aren’t many startups in the area vying for its business.
Brann believes that more high-caliber reporting firms will appear in the near future. “We have top-tier AI talent and five years of experience selling and deploying into hospitals,” he stated. Normally, that Venn diagram doesn’t overlap. We believe we will win because of this.
Only the three co-founders make up the Pharos team at this time, but they plan to use the funds to hire staff to help the business market the product and keep up its connections with hospitals.
