Swedish AI startup Tandem Health has raised a $9.5m seed round led by Northzone, alongside angel investors from OpenAI and Deepmind.
Tandem, founded less than a year ago, develops an AI-driven co-pilot for healthcare clinicians that automates administrative tasks, such as transcribing doctor-patient meetings and generating medical notes. It has 50 healthcare providers as customers in Sweden, and is planning European expansion.
“We are essentially interested in all the larger countries around Europe and which country we start in depends on where we find the right partners,” CEO Lukas Saari says.
Clinicians in the driving seat
Since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT many startups have doubled down on AI for healthcare providers, including triage systems to help patients understand their symptoms and co-pilots to help practitioners with admin tasks and to help diagnose patients.
Companies like symptom checker app Ada Health and healthcare co-pilot Corti have been working on solutions for years. What differentiates Tandem is that it’s an admin tool for practitioners that helps them transcribe notes from patient-doctor meetings and adds the details to patient journals. It can also help find the right medical codes specific to a patient's symptoms.
“The key feature of our product is what one would call an ambient scribe,” says Saari. “It listens during the patient-doctor conversation, makes a transcription and then creates a draft for a medical note directly afterwards. Instead of the doctor spending 5-10 minutes after a 15-minute patient visit writing everything from scratch or dictating to a medical secretary, the AI generates a draft that can be reviewed and edited in 1-2 minutes.”
Based on OpenAI’s GPT and Whisper
Like many other AI startups, Tandem uses GPT-4. It also uses OpenAI’s software for speech recognition and transcription, called Whisper. But Saari says that initially, Whisper struggled in a Swedish medical context because there were many drug names and terms in Swedish that weren’t part of its initial training data.
“What we saw when we started using the product live with real doctors was how you quickly get to a 60% solution that works well as a demo or proof of concept. But then, when you face reality, there is a lot of work to go from 60% to 95% plus in terms of ensuring the right headings [on documents] are included, how you express yourself correctly, and so on,” he says.
A single clinic can have 10-20 different patient journal templates. By training Whisper to each clinic's purpose and making sure the tool adds the right information from the doctor-patient meeting in the correct patient journal has given Tandem a competitive advantage Saari says.
“We are moving more and more towards having a self-service flow with the goal that healthcare providers can start using Tandem without really needing to interact with us or without needing our involvement,” he says.
Working with a variety of partners
Tandem works with a mix of specialist clinics and general practitioners, which vary in headcount from a few clinicians to around 100. As well as selling to healthcare clinics, it also partners with journal system providers, which means Tandem can reach a larger number of clinics.
Tandem is offering its software as a subscription service, charging 1,500 SEK (around €133), per month per user. It employs 10 people and is looking for large partners to expand overseas across Europe. The secured funding will be used to continue developing the tool and on the expansion.
“The key to our expansion plan is to find large anchor customers or anchor partners. This can be either larger healthcare providers with hundreds or thousands of doctors who see this as something they want to collaborate on, run pilots and start rolling out. Alternatively, with medical record systems that offer it as a solution to their users.”
