For decades, the patient referral process has been plagued by inefficiency and fragmentation. Patient data remains scattered across systems, forcing staff to spend excessive time manually compiling and summarizing records for specialists.
A startup seeking to fix this problem through automation was crowned the winner of the startup pitch competition at MedCity News’ INVEST Digital Health conference in Dallas last month. A panel of investor judges named Omaha, Nebraska-based Docology the winner, recognizing it as the most promising among three other companies developing AI tools to improve clinical operations.
Docology was founded in January to fill a gap in the industry, said CEO Andrew Rogers. He said he and his co-founders — Dr. Sida Niu and Tyler Hamik — spent months meeting with doctors and nurses, as well as participating in online chat groups, to understand more about the pain points within the patient referral process.
“What we found is that there is a pretty big gap in the software solutions today that help with the patient referral process. While there are a lot of tools out there that are focused on how to automate billing or to use the back end of the workflow, there wasn’t a whole lot that was focused on the front end,” Rogers explained.
To help solve this issue, Docology created an AI platform that automates and summarizes referral documents by intercepting faxes, parsing the information and then generating summaries for physicians.
The product is currently live with 23 independent physicians, all of whom work in private practice settings. Docology launched its pilot phase, during which these physicians will test out the platform, in May. The plan is that some of these physicians will turn into paying customers — Rogers said he expects the startup to begin generating revenue in three to four months.
So far, Docology’s technology has cut referral processing times from around 9.5 minutes to around 90 seconds in the pilot phase, he added.
“If we can shave that nine and a half minutes down to 90 seconds, you could add one more patient per day per position, which could generate up to $60,000 per physician in additional revenue to the practice — and that’s just assuming one new patient a day with an average bill rate of $200, which is what we found is the sweet spot of what the average clinic visit is billed at,” Rogers remarked.
Alternatively, this extra time can be given back to physicians to reduce burnout or used to increase face-to-face time with the patients they are already seeing.
Rogers pointed to the importance of integration as one of the most valuable lessons from Docology’s initial pilots. Physicians don’t want to use standalone apps — new tools must fit into their existing EMR workflows, he stated.
He noted that Docology is working on its EMR integration capabilities, aiming to soon be able to drop both documents and AI-generated summaries directly into the EMR, regardless of the vendor.
The startup’s initial target customer is independent physician practices specializing in urology. Over the next couple of years, Rogers said the company plans to expand to serve practices specializing in oncology, anesthesiology and other specialties. Later on down the road, he sees Docology selling to regional and large health systems.
“Our belief is we want to build in public. We want to iterate quickly and learn quickly from our users. We didn’t want to go out and build the perfect product and try to go shoot for a large hospital system or a large EMR as our only customer. We wanted to focus on how to get as many users as quickly as possible and try to build that momentum,” Rogers declared.
Essentially, Docology wants to refine its product rapidly with real user feedback rather than build in isolation.
The startup plans to complete its first funding round in the first quarter of next year, targeting $1.2 million.
Rogers said the capital will be used to expand Docology’s platform to serve new specialties, deepen EMR integrations, and scale the team — hiring engineers, business development leads and customer support managers with healthcare experience.
Photo: Eric St. Furcy, MedCity News
