Medical Summary Software - The pitch

Physicians should not have to spend hours a day looking up patient information, computer software should give summaries of everything they want to know so that the doctors can focus on delivering great care. Medical Summary Software does exactly that.

Medical Summary Software - The fun part

The key to this software it something like natural language processing. I say “something like” because it involves parsing medical documents and texts. The same principles from NLP apply, but the content is quite different than books or blog posts. Pushing NLP to tackle the language and forms of a specialized field could be quite challenging.

Medical Summary Software - The growth potential

There are almost one million practicing doctors in the US. If 10% of them signed up to use this software, it would generate around $20 million a year in revenue in the US. If this went global, it could grow to many times that.

Medical Summary Software - The monetization

I think the software would be sold on 3 year licenses for around $600. I think the software would create ten times that amount in savings.

Medical Summary Software - The idea

There is (finally) a push to get medical documents digitized. Digital medical documents facilitate a number of interesting ideas including doing data analysis to connect genes with diseases and using medical history to predict future problems. In addition to those large (insurance) uses, there are smaller efficiency-oriented uses for these data.

Doctors and other medical professionals need to review patient files before seeing them. Looking over a patient’s medical history can take a lot time or, more realistically, take a moderate amount of time but a involve a lot more skimming. What these doctors really need is a summary of the relevant parts of the patient’s medical history given what the patient has come in for. If the patient is complaining about chest pain, any previous heart problems and cholesterol levels and cholesterol drugs would be clearly relevant, hearing loss probably would not.

The software should be an aid to doctors to also look for hints of other things in the patient’s past that might be related. For example, the doctor should be able to get a summary of everything in the patients history related to shoulder injuries in case the chest/shoulder pain is from an old injury and not pain from a heart problem. The process should be fast and interactive where the doctor can enter and refine queries over seconds. Faster interactive summary software could make doctors more efficient and more effective at diagnosis.

Medical Summary Software - The motivation

Doctor’s have to review your file every time you come in. It would be nice if a summary of your entire (relevant) medical history was available on demand.