Happy Sunday!
Welcome back to Founders Feature, a weekly newsletter all about the journeys of young startup founders.
For this week's edition, I interviewed Dr. Keith Tsui, Co-founder of Medwise, an AI digital health company based in the UK.
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Here’s what Medwise is all about:
🏠 The Basics
The Problem:
Medical doctors often struggle to find the answers they need to provide the best care to patients because there is a constant flow of new and updated information and guidance. While clinical guidelines aim to summarise new findings, they are often long and hard to digest, and scattered across the internet. 50% of clinical questions that doctors have at the point of care are abandoned and not searched for because doctors don't have the time or tools to find the answer quickly. This leads to unwarranted variation in care, which means that updates best practice are not easily or effectively adopted. The variation in practice across medical institutions is estimated to cost the NHS around £5 billion per year and $105 billion in the US.
The Solution:
Medwise is a digital health company on a mission to organise the world’s medical knowledge and enhance every clinician’s capabilities for better patient care. The platform uses AI to search through all the newest medical information available and pick out the sentence or paragraph that best answers the doctor's question, allowing them to provide the best care in a short period of time.
The Team:
Medwise.ai is co-founded by myself and Luis. I have previously worked as a medical doctor and I also have a background in consulting at Carnall Farrar and product management at Huma. Luis is our CTO with an extensive background in AI and company building, having sold his previous startup, Bloomsbury AI to Facebook. We have a team of 5 other employees, including Dr. Mehul Patel, our clinical lead, who is a practicing GP.
🚀 The Journey
How did you come up with your startup/solution?
I was practicing as a doctor back in Hong Kong and used to work extremely tiring 36-hour shifts. During those shifts, doctors are trying to stay awake while still doing their best for patients. This is hard because there is so much information you need to know as a doctor, from everything you learned at medical school, to the new information and guidance that is published on an almost daily basis - it's just impossible to keep up. I would often find myself on Google, which is something a lot of doctors do, but it is full of patient-facing information and not always helpful for doctors. Alternatively, I would be directed to a "Wikipedia for doctors” which is incredibly dense and made finding the exact information I needed very difficult. So, I came up with Medwise because I personally encountered the problem every day of my own practice.
I had the idea for Medwise for many years, but it wasn’t until two years ago that I saw how advanced AI and natural language processing (NLP) has become, that I realised how valuable both could be in solving the problem efficiently.
Why is this the right time for this problem to be solved?
There has been an explosion in AI applications for healthcare. A lot of these applications are primarily computer-vision-based, for example, a tool to determine whether a patient has lung cancer through an x-ray. Progress in the space really accelerated around 2012. This kind of revolution is now happening again but in the space of natural language processing AI, with recent NLP AI models actually surpassing human performance.
Coupled with the speed of new medical research, the updates and improvements each year are almost infinite. Junior doctors are realising more and more that it's impossible to memorise everything. Instead, they’re shifting their focus to finding new ways to research and understand what they don’t know as efficiently and seamlessly as possible.
What is a recent success you are proud of?
Having Luis join us a s co-founder and CTO was a big moment, and I think it's amazing that someone with his profile and success has such incredible faith in what we’re doing to take the leap and join us from Facebook. It's a testimony to people believing in our mission to help clinicians provide the best care to patients, and also reducing the burden on healthcare staff during COVID-19.
I'm also very proud of closing our recent pre-seed round because fundraising is never easy. It takes a long, long time and a lot of effort, and I think it's especially challenging if you are a first-time founder like me.
What is a recent challenge you have faced?
We're in a quite deep tech space and there is no path carved out for us because we’re doing something that has never been done before. We are using the latest AI technology and then working very closely with clinicians to understand their workflow and how they will use the platform. The pandemic definitely accelerated the adoption of digital health technology, but at the same time because the system is so strained, it also sometimes takes away the head space of clinicians when they're already so busy. It has been challenging for us to find how best to engage with them and get them really excited to try things when their day-to-day is already so overwhelming. So the pandemic has really been both an opportunity and a challenge.
What do you wish you knew before you started and is there anything you would have done differently in hindsight?
I wish I had known just how time-consuming fundraising is because it was even more than I expected. But, there is nothing I would really do differently in hindsight. I try to keep the mindset that it's okay to fail, to experiment, to move on quickly and just iterate. It's okay to not have the answers right away.
🧠 The Lessons
What is the best advice you have been given recently?
Stay focused on one area. As a startup, your solution can often be applied to multiple problems or areas, but given the limited resources a startup typically has, it's important to stay focused on delivering value to a core user group. One way to bring this to your team is to set one core metric that you want to hit, a Northstar metric, to focus on.
What advice would you give to other young founders?
Be passionate about the problem, but not the solution.
The solution to your problem can take many shapes and change over iterations. Those iterations won't always be perfect, and sometimes you might have to pivot and completely change your approach. But as long as you have a mission that is problem-driven, and not attached to a specific solution, you will eventually come up with a solution that can actually solve the problem.
What is the biggest lesson you have learned so far?
One of my biggest learnings is that you can't do it all on your own. I am very fortunate to be surrounded by a great team that we've gradually built. I've learned how having a great team allows me to free up my time to do what I'm best at.
✨ The Inspiration
Who inspires you?
I definitely admire some of the greatest entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and even Jeff Bezos for his business acumen and customer-driven mindset. Steve Jobs' Stanford Commencement Speech is something I think everyone should watch because it gives you a lot of perspective on what you could do with your life. It's amazing.
What book do you think everyone should read?
For Founders: Zero to One - Peter Thiel
For Everyone: Seven Habits of Highly Effective People - Stephen Covey