Y Combinator is likely the most world renowned start up accelerator, and this year, its investing in many companies that are trying to automate clinical workflow with AI. This should be a big signal that the space is ripe for innovations. Today, I will talk about three of these companies.

But first let me explain more about Y Combinator (YC). YC accepts applications from small teams who want to develop a technology-based product and form a start up company. If a team is accepted to YC, they get funded with 125K$ for 7.5% of their company and another 325K$ at future valuations. They also get connected with experts in the field and are given personalized advise on how to improve product-market fit. In doing so, YC has helped several blockbuster companies grow big: Air BNB, Coinbase, DoorDash, Dropbox and more.

So every year, YC has two batches of new startups. I’ve already written about Glass.Health from the winter batch of 2023, the batch in progress when Chat GPT 3.5 was launched to the public. Now, Y Combinator leaders are saying that about 50% of their companies are integrating AI and LLMs into their product.

Recently, the winter batch of 2024 (W24) was announced, and there were several companies that stood out to me. Today, let me introduce you to three: Anaphero, Somn and Kabilah.

Anaphero

Anaphero is a company founded by Ryan Gallagher, MD and Jeffrey Lamothe with the goal of helping hospital staff complete patient facing tasks such as pre-visit preparation, hospital discharge follow-up, financial counseling and urgent care triage. Their service interacts with patients via text, voice or video to perform tasks such as schedule appointments, provide educational material, and increase medication adherence.

Its exciting to see a fellow physician in the YC batch. Per the founders bio, “Ryan Gallagher, MD trained as a physician at Stanford and was on the founding team at Two Chairs and Ophelia. He helped both companies scale to $100M+ valuations. Jeffrey Lamothe led enterprise AI + ML software projects at Amazon Alexa, Salesforce, and Citi.” These guys mean business!

I love the mission of trying to help community and rural hospitals with the burdens of understaffing. However, I hope this type of product (not specifically the one by Anaphero, but moreso by AI in general) does not become another excuse for Private Equity firms to acquire more hospital systems and replace staffing with AI in the first place. Being an alumni of Drexel University College of Medicine, I saw how private equity takeovers can result in catastrophic downfalls of major health systems like Hahnemann University Hospital and more recently, Crozer Chester Medical Center (Check out this Youtube/Podcast by Sheriff of Sodium on how the Crozer surgery residency was stripped of its ACGME accreditation in mere days). That being said, I certainly don’t think these founders intend to use AI for this purpose.

Somn

Somn is a company founded by Shawn Shivdat and Deniz Sert whose focus is to automate clinic phone calls. We all know that clinic operations heavily rely on staff calling patients and confirming appointments, verifying insurance and providing check-in instructions. This team hopes to automate these processes, thereby liberating staff to work on more important matters.

Interestingly, Somn started off as an “AI sleep improvement platform used by schools like Georgetown, Columbia, and Tufts”. I believe their goal was to optimize sleep routines so that students, athletes, and employees can improve their productivity and performance. Seeing they had some success partnering with several universities, I am curious about why they decided to pivot. Nevertheless, their new space is very exciting, as AI voice and phone call automation will undoubtedly improve clinical efficiency. Exciting Stuff!

Kabilah

Kabilah is a company founded by Muhammad Umar Nadeem and Sarah Raza whose focus is to optimize the patient handoff process for inpatient nurses. They create a digital report sheet for patients that highlights the most critical issues for safe patient handoffs. Their product directly pulls from EHR and automatically sends the information for handoff to nurses, using LLMs to synthesize and automatically generate hospital courses.

This product resonates with me a lot. Our family medicine residency at Northridge Hospital Medical Center services about 20% of the total inpatient population of our hospital. That means that we have a 24 hour coverage, and the patient hand-off between shifts are CRITICAL for patient safety. There was a lot of training that went into our first year of residency in how to generate a good patient hand-off, but still there is natural discrepancy between us in our styles and priorities. Having AI automate this process would allow for more consistency, and fewer potential gaps in care that can lead to safety concerns. I’m excited to see how Kabilah’s product helps!

Onwards and Forwards

This is a quick look at just a couple of the Y Combinator companies from the winter 2024 batch. There is a lot of excitement around AI in medicine, especially among startups right now. So many exciting products are on the way!

If you are interested in hearing more about startups and how they will “AI my clinic”, let me know by sending a reply to this email! Or join the discussion on my Linked-In!

Hope everyone is having a great week!

Best regards,

Maxime Rappaport, MD