Led by Duke University sophomore John Xu, Durham-based Alleviate Health is a web platform designed to assist doctors and nurses in performing administrative tasks more quickly and efficiently. By using a suite of AI tools, the platform transcribes voicemails, automates responses and categorizes questions and issues in order of importance.
Xu and Co-Founder Saathvik Boompelli, who is also a Duke student, originally conceptualized Alleviate as an e-commerce engine for health insurance plans, similar to an Amazon marketplace to find suitable health insurance plans. After realizing that the insurance industry wasn’t looking for a solutions platform and knowing that he still wanted to stay in the med tech space, they pivoted the company’s mission.
After speaking with dozens of doctors and asking them about their biggest professional challenges, Xu realized that most issues did not have to do with the actual care of a patient, but instead, with the administrative tasks outside of patient care.
He found that most physicians invested almost three hours everyday in administrative work such as answering patient voicemails about medication refills, prescriptions and medical checks. These tasks pose a time-consuming burden on not only the physicians, but also on the rest of the medical staff.
So, in February 2023, Alleviate Health evolved to automate these administrative workflows by using AI, allowing doctors to further their focus on providing the best care for their patients, instead of worrying about typing up reports or writing down summaries.
“As of right now, we have two primary services,” Xu said. “One is voicemail transcription with response generation and the other is medical charting—both of which take a lot of manual writing and typing. We wanted to get rid of that manual labor as much as possible so that doctors can focus on what is most important.”
Alleviate Health differs from other solutions on the market because they focus on working with smaller clinics and practices with outdated voicemail systems. Their platform also performs a variety of different tasks as compared to other medical scribe software, which may focus on one or a few tasks, such as patient-doctor communication platforms, according to Xu.
Alleviate has its own models that the founders have fine-tuned to specific medical questions to be 30% more accurate than baseline medical data and most open-source solutions. The platform integrates a proprietary pipeline to connect to outdated phone and landline systems, since there is often no easy way to get to the voicemails. They’ve developed a way to connect to the landline systems, extract their voicemails as mp3 files and then perform analytics on them to save doctors time.
Their focus on highlighting a relatively overlooked niche in the booming healthtech space is what got them into the 2023-2024 cohort of the Melissa & Doug Entrepreneur Accelerator, a year-long intensive program designed for Duke students who are committed to launching and growing their startups. (We also wrote today about fellow cohort member Hayha Bots.)
“I’ve always been interested in entrepreneurship as a concept since high school, and that’s why I joined Melissa and Doug,” Xu said. “It provides good mentorship, good access to networking and overall just a lot of great people to meet. M&D is also really good because they help you go to conferences and events that you previously wouldn’t be able to go to as well and get to meet and get inspired by big dogs in the industry.”
Alleviate Health currently has three paying users, operating on a per-month revenue model for a specific medical occupation. For doctors, the platform can vary from $80-$120/month and $30-$40 for nurses. By implementing these prices for this model, Xu said that they hope to extend to more medical workers who lack the time and resources to dedicate toward administrative work.
“I think that med tech is an industry that has a bright future,” Xu said. “There’s just tons of opportunities for making things more efficient and innovative since it is more of a lethargic field because medical workers are so ingrained and focused in their current workflows.”
Xu would be interested in hearing from potential partners, customers or mentors at john@alleviatehealth.care.
