Dallas—Amazon offers us products we might like based on our previous purchases. Pandora creates music channels tailored to our preferences. Why can’t similar technology help us find a doctor, or help doctors’ offices know before a patient comes in if their insurance will pay for treatment?
Those are some of the aims of Dallas-based DocSynk, a startup that makes artificial intelligence software targeted to the healthcare market. Other uses for the software platform include scheduling and reminding patients of appointments (including an option of sending a service like Uber if the patient doesn’t have transportation) and complying with wellness and treatment plans.
To help further develop the software, DocSynk has just raised $1 million in seed funding from five-year-old Naya Ventures, a North Texas-based venture firm that specializes in mobility technologies.
Vaidyanatha Siva, DocSynk’s CEO and co-founder, says the startup’s software can bring needed cost-savings to healthcare institutions and doctors’ practices in treating patients.
For example, a pilot program done at a North Texas hospital chain shows a reduction in patient no-shows of 40 percent. That is the potential value DocSynk offers its customers, he adds.
Siva was previously the former director and executive of Parkland Hospital’s Center for Clinical Innovation and, before that, CTO of Infosys’s life sciences business unit. He credits Naya’s guidance in getting DocSynk off the ground.
“They’ve been entrepreneurs themselves so it’s like talking to a friend,” he says. “This is my first gig as an entrepreneur.”
