In a statement, Dr. S. Nicholas Desai, chief medical information officer at Houston Methodist said that Physicians today spend more time in front of their computers than in front of patients. Even long after work, physicians have to spend hours entering basic information of the patients they treat into health record systems manually. This pattern causes burnout in the medical profession, which is a serious health and productivity concern observed in several medically-advanced countries.
Notable, an AI-driven intelligent platform led by CEO and co-founder Pranay Kapadia aims to automate these redundant tasks, simplify patient interaction, free up physicians’ precious time, and reduce admin costs.
“The road to purgatory in health tech is driven by integration, and the road to purgatory in deploying any technology is driven by timelines.”- Pranay Kapadia, CEO & co-founder of Notable.
Notable helps identify automated workflow for any healthcare organization using its Electronic Health Record (EHR) system. Imagine automatic notifications for patients for collecting pre-visit info to ease the process of scheduling an appointment.
Behind Notable are three co-founders Pranay Kapadia, Adam Ting, and Justin White. The idea of founding Notable hatched in the mind of Pranay Kapadia, the current CEO of the company. He was born and raised in Maharashtra, India. Kapadia went to Jai Hind College which is known for its biotechnology branch. Afterward, he shifted to the USA and changed his academic path by getting into the University of Wisconsin-Madison 2001 for a BS. This was the time when Pranay Kapadia developed an interest in business and entrepreneurship though he belongs to a family of physicians.
In 2005, Kapadia finished his BS and went for an MBA from Wisconsin School of Business. After finishing his academics, Kapadia joined Oracle as a Technical Consultant in 2005 before switching to Microsoft as a partner from 2006 to 2007. Kapadia got the chance to work on his skills of product management, SaaS, and also Mobile Applications. His abilities landed him the role of Head of Product at Intuit’s Mint.com & Mint Mobile in 2013.
By then Kapadia amassed technical expertise that ultimately helped him to create the Blend platform where he stayed the Vice President of Product Management in 2014. Blend is recognized for supporting and simplifying mortgages and lending in the US. It was through Blend that Kapadia crossed paths with Justin White (VP of Engineering) and Adam Ting (head of design), the other two co-founders of Notable.
Prior to joining the Blend team, Justin White was the co-founder and Chief Technical Officer at Solum Inc. which later got acquired by the German agrochemical industry giant Bayer (formerly Monsanto). As for Adman Ting, the current CPO of Notable met White and Kapadia at Blend Labs after being an associate at Prophet. Now he is responsible for leading the design and development of Notable’s intelligent automation platform.
Pranay Kapadia always came face to face with physicians struggling with a ridiculous amount of paperwork that could easily be done using an automated tool instead of doing it manually. Kapadia married his wife, who is also a physician by profession, and who struggled to finish paperwork every single day. Kapadia’s wife felt like the paperwork onslaught was almost a disservice to the patients because it took away the joy of working from physicians.
Hearing this, Kapadia was moved to dig deep into the orthodox system to find a way to transform the current scenario. He created a solution for everyone going through the same problems including his wife, and six other family members. Kapadia and his wife had sessions sitting around their dinner table about how to solve the issue of handling administrative tasks.
Kapadia was blown by the health system’s administrative backlog and spent a great deal of time thinking about how different workflows can be managed in the same way. Kapadia also realized that there were evident loopholes in the system that could cause human errors easily resulting in poor patient experience. The industry overlooked the reality experienced by the patients, for example, accepting expired insurance cards or being sent to the wrong labs.
After sharing his idea while talking to his wife, Kapadia became sure of starting the company now known as Notable. Kapadia’s previous experience with Intuit inspired him to create a solution like TurboTax but for patients. He reached out to Justin White and Adam Ting specifically to join hands in the project. They certainly did lend their skills and experience to build Notable from scratch.
“Notable Health was founded with the mission of enriching every physician-patient interaction by eliminating the drudgery of administrative tasks and improving data quality,” said Pranay Kapadia, Co-Founder, and CEO
When the trio started to find a way artificial intelligence and automation could help clinicians, they discovered more problems suffered by everyone involved in today’s healthcare system in the US. Kapadia, White, and Ting were overwhelmed seeing just how manual, repetitive, and administrative tasks awaited physicians each day. When they founded Notable in 2017, the idea was to streamline all those tasks to improve patient-doctor relations.
As soon as they entered the market, the three co-founders quickly realized that there were competitions present in the sector. But these competitors who worked on individual problems of administrative task overload within healthcare had only point solutions to offer. But Notable’s platform can do so much more including handling tasks around payments, submitting requests, contacting patients about collections so that that time and effort is reduced for data entry and call center.
Pranay Kapadia, CEO, and co-founder of Notable said “From the start, we've designed our platform so that it can support any use case. Customers use our platform to create Flows, which automate the work out of manual workflows. Just like Apple has its own apps on an iPhone and also enables others to develop and share apps on their app store, we continue to invest in building Flows for partners to use while enabling our partners to build and share Flows on our platform.
According to Kapadia, different folks associated with healthcare can effectively reduce their burdens caused by manual and administrative tasks while also lowering the overall costs of care and compromising outcomes. Patients can use Notable’s AI to scam medical records, identify the kind of care and treatment they need. Notable is built to detect that a certain is due for an x-ray to automatically contact them and schedule an appointment.
Doctors on the other hand can stop worrying about the admin workload that haunts them while practicing medicine. This means no more spending hours after work on creating documentation, billing codes for reimbursement through insurance companies. By automating all that work using Notable, doctors can free up time from their packed schedule. Doctors can even choose to utilize their time with the patients who need them the most.
The administrative staff of any healthcare organization spends the majority of their time doing manual tasks. Their responsibilities include things like calling patients, collecting registration/payment info from them, scanning documents into the electronic health record systems. But using Notable’s automation, all of this can be done in a jiffy. In a way, Notable empowers hospital administrative staff to serve patients at the point of care.
The end-to-end platform built by Notable’s team is capable of managing clinical workflows like patient outreach, documentation, billing, and clinical intake. Below are the main solutions provided by this startup to drive transformational impact across the healthcare sector.
Dubbed as an auto-pilot function for call centers, patient access is responsible for automating workflows. Easy scheduling, patient triage, and verification of a patient’s eligibility are easily done with this solution specifically designed by Notable. By streamlining the referral management process, Notable ensures minimum referral leaks and reduces barriers to open access.
Patient intake is a digital solution that allows a digital assistant to scan EHR for any patient’s upcoming appointment and send a pre-visit registration form in the patient’s preferred language at a time when they are likely to respond. This unique experience is available via a mobile interface designed specifically for them.
The population health solution of Notable contributes to better patient outcomes through automation, perfect care coordination. As mentioned earlier, with Notable’s AI tech platform by their side, physicians can spend more time with their patients and help improve their health. Population health also supports remote monitoring via digital check-ins.
Notable also helps to automate collections and billing workflows for a smooth revenue cycle devoid of denials. Its intelligent automation does not need back-office billing that usually handles all the manual tasks like payment posting and charge entry with the help of digital assistants.
Market Growth, Investors, Competitors, and Partners
“The healthcare industry on average has $1.1 trillion in administrative spend, which is eight times as many resources required per $1 billion of revenue as any other industry in the world,” he said of the annual budget given to all that work. “There are tens of thousands of workflows that can be automated.” estimated Pranay Kapadia, CEO & co-founder of Notable.
Kapadia believes that through the use of continually learning AI, voice recognition, and wearables, the Notable team can continue empowering physicians to be more productive and improve patient outcomes. Modernizing the different workflows using intelligent AI can have a far-reaching impact on patients, providers, and staff.
Ryan Smith, Chief Information Officer at Intermountain Healthcare says “We’ve seen a 97 percent patient satisfaction rating from our partnership with Notable by digitizing and automating patient registration, intake and billing workflows.”
Right now, the San Mateo-based startup is helping clinics, hospitals, and other healthcare organizations that are recognized as partners. North Kansas City Hospital, CommonSpirit Health, Intermountain Healthcare, and Lowell Community Health Center are included in the company’s oldest partners. Notable is guided by healthcare industry veterans who play the role of company advisors.
“We are excited to partner with the Notable Health team with their unique user experience and engineering backgrounds and feel they have the potential to drive a profound impact on how providers deliver care, allowing physicians to focus fully on patients rather than on computer screens.” said Byers of F-Prime Capital.
Company advisors include Robert Wachter, Chair, Department of Medicine, UCSF, Dr. Zeke Emanuel, Chair, Medical Ethics and Health Policy, Penn Medicine, Carl Byers, founding CFO Athenahealth, Tom Peterson, co-founder of Evolent Health, and Annie Lamont, Co-founder and Managing Partner. Now Notable generates up to $146.2K annually per employee (a yearly total of around $5 million).
This early-stage venture has already nabbed some serious and high-profile investors during its three funding rounds. Notable funding rounds were led by F-Prime Capital, ICONIQ Growth, Greylock, Oak HC/FT, Maverick Ventures, and 8VC. With the support gained from its partners and investors, Notable, whose legal name is Zealth Inc., is a fast-emerging Unicorn.
The competitors of this health startup are as follows:
Upon completion of its third funding round, Series B, Notable raised a total of $119.2 million through its investors. Now Zealth Inc. has a benchmark valuation of $704 million (as per Nov 10, 2021). The post-money valuation after Series B is close to $700 million while its last valuation came up as $600 million.
It is also worth mentioning that Notable has received a total Oddup score of 75.31 which represents the chances of success for any particular company on the basis of several in-depth research and analysis across a multitude of aspects. Below is an overview of Notable’s past funding rounds starting with the Seed round.
In December of 2017, Notable announced a seed funding round during which it raised $5.7 million in total from participating investors namely Greylock, Maveric Ventures, and 8VC. During this time, Notable bagged some big customers like $29 billion worth of non-profit CommonSpirit Health. The funds were used to increase the reach of the Notable platform and onboard more providers.
Notable initiated its Series A funding round in September of 2018 which was led by Oak HC/FT and F-Prime Capital both of which are well-known venture capital funds focussing on healthcare and technology. Other participants of the Series A funding round include Mavericks Ventures, Greylock and the total amount raised was $13.5 million.
“Notable Health is bringing innovative and powerful technology solutions, including AI, wearables, and voice interfaces, to address problems and challenges our physicians face daily,” said Annie Lamont. “We are thrilled to be helping Notable Health continue to grow and deliver a seamless, truly hands-free solution to this ever-important set of healthcare professionals.”
Afterward, Carl Byers joined Notable’s Board of Directors, and Oak HC/FT Managing Partner Annie Lamont became a Board Observer.
“Notable Health's powerful AI technology squarely addresses the growing issue of physician burnout and is likely to generate new possibilities for the way care is documented, coordinated, and paid for,” said Carl Byers, Partner at F-Prime Capital.
The series B funding round of this early-stage venture wrapped up not too long ago in November 2021. Notable Health or Zealth Inc. managed to raise a total of $100 million through the support of participating investors like ICONIQ Growth, Greylock, Oak HC/FT, F-Prime Capital. This round was led by ICONIQ Growth.
“We are delighted to partner with Notable to accelerate their vision for a future where every healthcare organization can deliver the highest quality personalized care most efficiently,” said Caroline Xie, General Partner at ICONIQ Growth.
The CEO of Notable Health is proud of partnering up with the industry’s leading digital health investors as Notable continues to expand its product development and expedite hiring talents from across the company. Notable Health is placed in a unique position where it can help physicians operate efficiently, see patients conveniently, and help the industry properly. Healthcare leaders are turning to automated workflows in order to help health systems and reimagine patient experience.
The pandemic also turned out to be a driving force for the company to increase its size beyond expectations. Notable’s unique configurable technology solutions played a key role in supporting COVID-19 vaccine distribution to Missouri residents in collaboration with North Kansas City Hospital (NKCH) in March 2021.
“In order to mobilize a vaccination effort of this size, health systems will need to be proactive in identifying eligible patients and reaching out to them in a timely manner with the information they can act on," says Ezekiel Emanuel, MD, Ph.D. Chair, Department of Medical Ethics, University of Pennsylvania; Member, Biden Transition COVID-19 Advisory Board; Strategic Advisor to Notable Health. "By leveraging intelligent automation to identify, outreach, educate and triage patients, health systems can develop efficient and equitable vaccine distribution workflows."
NKCH utilized Notable to completely digitize and automate the process of identification, scheduling, and outreach. As a result, they achieved vaccination of more patients at a faster rate.
“There has never been a vaccination effort as accelerated or complex as this one. Demand for the COVID-19 vaccine is high but supply is limited, so precise health risk assessment will remain key to a successful rollout. Configurable technology solutions such as Notable can help providers automate and streamline complex workflows like vaccine administration, especially as supply begins to catch up with demand," said Muthu Alagappan, MD, medical director at Notable Health.
