Irish start-up founded by 19-year-olds uses AI to automate medical paperwork for doctors
The co-founders of Microdoc, an AI-based dictation tool for doctors, are two of the youngest entrepreneurs to feature in this column since its inception more than a decade ago.
Brian Kelleher and Richard Blazek are 19-year-old students at Trinity College and the idea for Microdoc came from Kelleher who first became aware of the mountains of paperwork medical practices have to manage during a summer job with a spinal care consultancy in Dublin.
“Paperwork is a necessary evil and essential to high-quality patient care, but it requires an enormous amount of effort, diligence, and time. Creating, sending and processing documents are key parts of any paperwork flow and these are the parts we’re trying to help with,” says Kelleher who is studying maths and economics and currently participating in Launchbox, Trinity’s start-up accelerator for student entrepreneurs. His co-founder, Richard Blazek, is studying computer science.
“From working in the medical practice I could see how much was still being done manually and the amount of scope for automation. Much of what was needed was relatively simple to do but I knew it would make a big difference to the more efficient use of time and resources,” says Kelleher.
“When we started Microdoc in 2022 we launched with a tool that analysed incoming medical documents. However, we quickly realised that this problem wasn’t valuable enough from a business perspective so we pivoted to focus more on our dictation tool,” says Kelleher, who has been coding since the age of 12.
“From talking to doctors we discovered that many were spending thousands on transcription services and that this was where the real opportunity lay. By introducing AI and robotic automation we knew we could make the whole paperwork process more efficient and cheaper.
“Microdoc is faster, costs less and is higher quality than the alternatives on the market. It is also quicker than human typists and more accurate and has more features than existing dictation products.”
There are four elements to the company’s digital assistant: a smart dictation function that generates letters from dictation in seconds, a review tool that makes it easier for doctors to review incoming documents, an insight engine that delivers medical insights based on the patient’s medical history and easy integration with existing patient management systems.
Kelleher says the dictation tool has various checks and balances to pick up typos and other errors in referral letters while a series of automation tools speeds up the review process by highlighting anomalies or medical terminology that may need to be corrected. There is an autofill function for signatures, different letter templates to choose from and the letter is easily uploaded to a practice’s existing patient records system. “The idea is to make the life cycle of a referral letter as seamless as possible from creation to distribution,” says Kelleher, who points out that big practices often send out hundreds of referral letters a month.
Microdoc has been revenue generating since the launch of its dictation tool in May. The founders used the €15,000 in prize money from their win in the Enterprise Ireland student entrepreneurship awards to kick-start the business and were able to keep costs to a minimum as they self-developed the product. The current focus is on selling to individual medical practitioners from all disciplines, but the product is also scalable for large scale settings such as hospitals.
Microdoc is a SaaS product and ultimately Kelleher says the revenue model will be a tiered subscription. For now, there is a flat fee of €20 to sign up and a charge of €1 per referral letter dictated. The founders are currently focused on cracking the Irish market but the UK and the US are also firmly in their sights.
Reporting on: www.irishtimes.com