Pharma
For years, documentation has been one of the most frustrating aspects of healthcare. Physicians, already burdened with long working hours and administrative responsibilities, found themselves spending an increasing amount of time writing notes instead of engaging with patients. This growing issue became a personal struggle for Akilesh Bapu and Matthew Ko, who co-founded DeepScribe in 2017 to alleviate the documentation burden using artificial intelligence.
Bapu’s inspiration came from his father, an oncologist who often struggled to balance his professional and personal life due to overwhelming documentation demands. Ko had firsthand experience with the issue when he served as a care coordinator for his mother during her battle with breast cancer. He saw how excessive note-taking affected not only doctors but also patients, who often felt ignored as their physicians focused more on writing than on meaningful interaction.
Despite the widespread adoption of digital tools, the documentation process remained inefficient. Physicians were still spending nearly half their day writing notes, even with existing speech-to-text solutions that merely transcribed conversations without summarizing them. Bapu and Ko saw an opportunity to leverage advancements in artificial intelligence and natural language processing to create a solution that could truly understand and summarize patient-physician conversations without requiring additional manual input.
