Despite the groundbreaking science of recent decades that has led to life-saving vaccines, treatments, devices, and surgeries, there is still one part of medicine that relies mostly on a doctor’s own knowledge: diagnoses. Physicians train for many years and are experts in their fields. They spend about half of their time analyzing past diagnoses, patient records, treatments, and other medical data to figure out what ails us. But, increasingly, doctors are stretched thin and facing burnout, and would love to get back some of the hours they spend trawling through data to instead spend more one-on-one time with their patients.
That’s why Calibrate Ventures is thrilled to be an early investor in Regard, a fast-growing startup applying artificial intelligence to healthcare.
Regard arms doctors with a powerful tool to make more accurate diagnoses. Traditionally, doctors review case notes, charts, patient records, and published research to come up with diagnoses, but they are stretched thin, facing burnout, and don’t always have the time to research all potential conditions for each patient. Regard’s AI platform ingests a patient’s electronic medical record (EMR) and drafts a physician’s note, including likely diagnoses, based on the most recent information available. Doctors may then accept, edit, or delete the note, giving them full control over the diagnosis. Traditionally, doctors spend half their time on computers scanning charts and data. With Regard, doctors can instead spend the majority of their time doing what they do best: interacting with patients.
And when doctors can make faster, more accurate diagnoses, patients and hospitals benefit, too. Patients get the right care for their illnesses and get better faster. Hospitals generate more revenue and achieve better patient outcomes, with the potential to lower costs, too. According to Regard’s research, a typical 1000-bed hospital loses $10M in revenue per year due to poor documentation, as they are reimbursed only when diagnostic information is accurate and complete. But Regard solves this issue, ensuring providers effectively capture the correct diagnostic and treatment codes at the point of care.
Regard was founded by longtime friends and collaborators Eli Ben-Joseph and Thomas Moulia, who met at MIT, and Nate Wilson. All three originally planned to go to medical school and become doctors, but discovered a passion for computer science in college and their early professional lives. They co-founded Regard in 2016 because they realized AI could make a huge impact on healthcare and wanted to create new tools for doctors to do their jobs better and faster. They’ve already made great strides in that goal and we can’t wait to support them on their company-building journey to bring Regard to hospitals across North America.
Like every sector today, the medical field is awash in data. But that data isn’t worth much unless it’s analyzable and actionable. AI can scan vast volumes of data—petabytes, exabytes, zettabytes—and understand patterns to make actionable recommendations. Regard does this for diagnostic data, automating a previously manual task. Doctors are an incredible wealth of knowledge. With Regard’s AI platform, doctors can automatically scan millions of real-world diagnoses, combined with troves of anonymized patient, case, clinical, and other medical data, to improve health outcomes for everyone.