Swedish AI startup Tandem Health has secured a $9.5 million seed round, led by Northzone, with additional investment from angel investors affiliated with OpenAI and DeepMind. Founded less than a year ago, Tandem develops an AI-driven co-pilot for healthcare clinicians designed to automate administrative tasks such as transcribing doctor-patient meetings and generating medical notes. Currently, Tandem serves 50 healthcare providers in Sweden and has plans for European expansion.

Clinicians in the Driving Seat

The surge in AI technology, exemplified by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, has spurred many startups to focus on AI solutions for healthcare providers, from triage systems to administrative co-pilots. Tandem differentiates itself by providing an admin tool that transcribes notes from patient-doctor meetings and integrates them into patient journals, assisting in finding the appropriate medical codes specific to a patient's symptoms.

“The key feature of our product is what one would call an ambient scribe,” said CEO Lukas 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

Tandem utilizes GPT-4 and OpenAI’s Whisper for speech recognition and transcription. Initially, Whisper faced challenges with Swedish medical terminology, particularly with drug names and terms not included in its initial training data. Saari highlighted the difficulty of moving from a 60% functional demo solution to a 95%+ operational solution, ensuring proper document headings and accurate expression.

Each clinic can have 10-20 different patient journal templates. Tandem's competitive edge comes from training Whisper to meet each clinic's needs, ensuring the right information from doctor-patient meetings is accurately added to the correct patient journal.

“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,” Saari said.

Working with a Variety of Partners

Tandem collaborates with both specialist clinics and general practitioners, ranging from a few clinicians to around 100. Besides selling directly to healthcare clinics, Tandem also partners with journal system providers, allowing them to reach a larger number of clinics.

The software is offered as a subscription service, priced at 1,500 SEK (approximately €133) per month per user. With a team of 10 employees, Tandem seeks large partners to facilitate its European expansion. The newly secured funding will be used to continue developing the tool and support expansion efforts.

“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,” Saari explained.