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Medical and administrative staff are increasingly struggling with piles of paperwork to fill out every day.
Dozens, if not hundreds, of startups see opportunities to make those bureaucratic processes less burdensome with the help of generative AI. These companies are creating AI-powered medical clerks, platforms for pre-authorization of health insurance payments, and products to automatically extract medical coding from patients’ electronic medical records (EMRs).
But Pharos, a company that was part of Y Combinator’s summer 2024 cohort, is applying AI to address another, somewhat lesser-known administrative function for hospitals: providing quality reports to external clinical registries.
Organizations such as Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and American College of Surgeons It aims to measure the record of all healthcare centers in providing safe and effective patient care. Although reporting to these registries is not always mandatory, it is often in the best interest of hospitals. These external organizations play a critical role in identifying quality problems (such as increased postoperative infections), which can be addressed to improve patient care.
However, submitting reports to the registries is very time consuming. Nurses and other staff must manually sift through each patient’s electronic health record to extract the exact data required for each record. “It can take up to eight hours for a single case to be reported. It’s a big problem, but it’s one you don’t know about unless you’re deep into the industry,” said Ryan Isono, partner at Felicis.
In fact, Pharos was co-founded by Felix Bran and Matthew Jones, who had some familiarity with the challenges of transferring data into medical records from their previous work at Vital, a startup that develops software for emergency rooms. They realized that AI could take unstructured data from electronic medical records and automatically fill out the forms required by the records. As they went through YC earlier this year, they added another co-founder – Alex Clarke, a doctor who also holds a PhD in AI from Imperial College London.
Pharos announced on Friday that Felicis, with participation from General Catalyst, Moxxie and Y Combinator, led its $5 million seed round.
Pharos caught Felicis’s attention not only because the company could save hospitals money and free up nurses’ time to care for patients, but also because the region still doesn’t have other startups pursuing it, Isono said.
Bran (pictured in the middle above) expects other companies specializing in quality reporting to emerge soon. “We have five years of experience selling and deploying in hospitals, and we have top-notch talent in the field of artificial intelligence,” he said. This Venn diagram usually does not overlap. That is why we believe we will win.”
Right now, the entire Pharos team consists of just the three founders, but they will use the capital to hire a team that will help the company sell the product and maintain relationships with hospitals.
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