INVEST Pitch Perfect Spotlight: How Docology Automates an Interrupted Step in Patient Referral

For decades, the patient navigation process has been plagued by inefficiency and fragmentation. Patient data remains scattered across systems, forcing staff to spend too much time manually compiling and summarizing records for specialists.

A startup seeking to solve this problem through automation has been crowned the winner of the startup pitch competition at MedCité News” INVEST Digital Health Conference in Dallas last month. A panel of investor judges named Omaha, Nebraska-based Docology as 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, CEO Andrew Rogers said. 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 focus groups, to better understand pain points in the patient referral process.

“What we found is that there is a pretty significant gap today in software solutions that facilitate the patient referral process. While there were many tools focused on how to automate billing or use the back end of the workflow, there weren’t many that were focused on the front end,” Rogers explained.

To help solve this problem, Docology created an AI platform that automates and summarizes reference documents by intercepting faxes, analyzing the information, and then generating summaries for doctors.

The product is currently operational with 23 independent doctors, all of whom work in private practice. Docology launched its pilot phase, during which these doctors will test the platform, in May. The plan is for some of those doctors to turn into paying customers — Rogers said he expects the startup to start generating revenue in three to four months.

So far, Docology’s technology has reduced referral processing times 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, you could add one additional patient per day per shift, which could generate up to $60,000 per doctor in additional revenue for the practice – and that’s just assuming one new patient per day with an average billing rate of $200, which is what we’ve found is the sweet spot for what the average clinic visit is billed for,” Rogers noted.

Alternatively, this extra time can be returned to physicians to reduce burnout or used to increase face-to-face time with the patients they already see.

Rogers highlighted the importance of integration as one of the most valuable lessons from Docology’s early pilots. Doctors don’t want to use standalone apps: New tools need to integrate with their existing EMR workflows, he said.

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

The startup’s initial target customer is independent physician practices specializing in urology. Over the next few years, Rogers said the company plans to expand to serve practices specializing in oncology, anesthesiology and other specialties. Later, he saw Docology selling its products to regional and large health systems.

“Our belief is that 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 after a large hospital system or a large EMR as our sole customer. We wanted to focus on how to get as many users as quickly as possible and try to build that momentum,” Rogers said.

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

The startup plans to finalize its first funding round in the first quarter of next year, with a target of $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 managers and customer support managers with healthcare experience.

Photo: Eric St. Furcy, MedCity News