When Dr. Rachel Draelos—the first person to earn both an M.D. and a doctorate in computer science from Duke University—was in medical school, a patient asked her to find a specific lab test result.
It took her an hour to find that result—and she can recall times it took much longer. Dr. Draelos said that antiquated user interfaces on certain popular electronic health record (EHR) systems cause healthcare workers to lose invaluable time searching for medical records, hurting patient care.
After seeing the harmful inefficiencies of today’s systems during medical school, Dr. Draelos started Cydoc, a Durham-based healthtech startup, by herself while still in school.
“These are big problems that are a large limitation of medical records today,” Dr. Draelos said, “and solving them will enable not only saving many hours of doctors’ time, but also lead to better patient care,”
Many EHR systems not only cost healthcare workers time, but also make sharing records difficult. Dr. Draelos noted that studies find more patients die when records aren’t properly shared. She hopes Cydoc will save lives by eventually becoming part of the solution to the seamless sharing of electronic health records.
Cydoc’s initial product is a “smart” patient intake form targeted at private practices that saves doctors 10 minutes per visit by generating “clinically relevant notes before patient appointments,” according to the company’s website. By helping clinicians write notes 3x faster, Cydoc can save doctors up to two hours a day and allow them to better focus on patients.
While other companies offer similar products, Dr. Draelos said that Cydoc is built separate from existing EHR systems—yet is still compatible with them—and allows customization for niche specialists, features that competitors don’t offer.
Dr. Draelos also said that Cydoc does not rely on AI based on large language models (LLMs) because they can be both inaccurate and biased. Factual accuracy in a medical setting is essential, of course, because lives are literally on the line. So Cydoc tapped medical experts to help design its patient questionnaires and the process to generate the pre-appointment notes for doctors.
Cydoc launched a year ago and currently has two paying clients and two in a trial period. Customers pay a subscription of $99 per month per seat.
Long-term vision
Dr. Draelos hopes this product is a springboard for the company’s overarching goal of building an improved EHR system that allows easy record-sharing.
“The current product that we have is a good foundation for that because a lot of the interfaces involved are similar,” Dr. Draelos said. “There’s some interfaces that we’ve actually already built out, but haven’t launched yet.”
Before making the jump to creating a full EHR system, Dr. Draelos and the Cydoc team are focused on building revenue flow and raising funding.
Dr. Draelos said doing more demos is key to attracting customers and revenue. And in recent months, Dr. Draelos said she’s noticed an increase in demo requests and emails requesting more information.
While the company is still building its customer base, Dr. Draelos is looking for ways to fund the startup. For approximately the first two years, she bootstrapped Cydoc before raising some “family and friends” funding.
She recently applied for a grant through the National Institutes of Health that would award $300,000 in phase one and up to $2M in phase two if Cydoc received the grant and completed phase one.
Dr. Draelos also started to do freelance AI consulting after graduation to help pay for personal expenses and fund the company. She said she hasn’t paid herself for Cydoc yet and that outside of freelancing, Cydoc is her full-time job.
“I could have graduated from the M.D./Ph.D. program and got some super high-paying job at some big company, so there’s been a large loss of potential income,” Dr. Draelos said. “But I really believe in the company’s mission, and I’m really passionate about working on it.”
