Deepscribe Raises $30M to Automate Medical Transcription with AI

DeepScribe Secures $30 Million in Series A Funding

DeepScribe, a medical transcription platform leveraging artificial intelligence, has successfully closed a $30 million Series A funding round. This investment was spearheaded by Nina Achadjian of Index Ventures, with significant participation from prominent figures like Alex Wang, CEO of Scale.ai, and Dylan Field, CEO of Figma. Existing investors, including Bee Partners, Stage 2 Capital, and 1984 Ventures, also contributed to this funding.

This latest financial injection follows a previously announced $5.2 million seed round secured in May 2021.

Origins and Founding Principles

Founded in 2017 by Akilesh Bapu, Matthew Ko, and Kairui Zeng, DeepScribe was created to alleviate the burden of administrative tasks from physicians. The core mission is to empower doctors to dedicate more time and attention to patient care.

The company’s ambient voice AI technology, which debuted in 2019, automatically summarizes conversations between doctors and patients. This innovation stemmed from the founders’ personal experiences.

Personal Motivations Behind DeepScribe

Bapu’s inspiration came from observing the impact of extensive documentation on his father, an oncologist, and its effect on his work-life equilibrium.

Ko’s perspective arose from his role as a care coordinator during his mother’s breast cancer diagnosis. He witnessed how the demands of clinical documentation could negatively influence patients’ perceptions of the quality of care received.

Frustrated with the level of care his mother was receiving, Ko sought assistance from Bapu and his father. This collaboration highlighted the critical importance of accurate clinical documentation.

Identifying a Gap in the Market

The founders recognized that despite the availability of numerous documentation tools, over 75% of providers still spent nearly half of their day on note-taking.

Ko explained to TechCrunch that existing solutions often required physicians to actively summarize conversations themselves. Simple speech-to-text programs merely transcribed spoken words without providing intelligent summarization.

DeepScribe was envisioned as an ambient AI capable of understanding and summarizing natural patient interactions, effectively addressing this unmet need.

How DeepScribe Functions

Upon activation, the DeepScribe application records patient encounters, generates summaries, and seamlessly integrates them into the physician’s chosen Electronic Health Record (EHR) system.

The application captures patient exams and concurrently prepares clinical notes. These notes are then directly uploaded into the appropriate fields within the EHR, allowing physicians to review and approve them.

The system is designed to filter out irrelevant conversation elements, focusing solely on medically pertinent information. Furthermore, the AI continuously learns and adapts to each physician’s unique communication style and documentation preferences.

Impact and Growth

Over the last 18 months, DeepScribe has expanded its user base to over 400 physicians across the United States, processing more than 500,000 patient-physician conversations.

The platform reportedly saves physicians an average of three hours daily and offers a cost-effective alternative to traditional human medical scribes, at approximately one-sixth the expense.

To date, the company estimates it has saved physicians over 2.5 million minutes of documentation time. Physicians typically require fewer than one correction per note after 20 days of using the system.

Future Plans

The recent investment will be used to accelerate DeepScribe’s growth and further refine medical documentation processes.

The company intends to expand its technology to larger health systems, bolster its engineering team, and increase access to its AI-powered scribe for a wider range of physicians.