Notable Health Files for IPO: Revolutionizing Healthcare with AI-Powered Voice-Enabled Electronic Health Record Solutions

In recent years, both domestic and international authorities have issued laws and regulatory documents promoting Electronic Health Records (EHR) as the core of hospital informationization. EHR has also brought numerous benefits to the healthcare industry. As a major technological transformation in the healthcare sector, it digitizes paper charts while maintaining the overall process of charting and documentation unchanged.

One of the key objectives of implementing electronic health records (EHRs) is to enable healthcare providers to work more efficiently. However, studies have shown that due to the rapid evolution of information technology and the sharp increase in demands for EHR usage, physicians generally experience dissatisfaction with EHR systems and reduced work efficiency.

The underlying reasons include ambiguous EHR system design, poor user-friendliness, and suboptimal functional performance. What frustrates physicians most is that the widespread adoption of EHRs has imposed an additional workload on them. Specifically, for every hour physicians spend on patient consultations, they require approximately two hours for EHR use and other administrative tasks. Outside of office hours, physicians spend an average of 1.5 hours of their personal time each night working on computers, with nearly 60% of this time dedicated to EHR-related activities. Once physicians perceive their role as merely data entry clerks for the EHR system, the use of EHRs will fail to achieve its goal of providing better healthcare services to patients.

Notable Health (hereinafter referred to as “Notable”), a healthcare information technology company, has developed an AI-powered voice virtual assistant that leverages intelligent automation to replace time-consuming, repetitive, and routine tasks in healthcare administration. By automating and digitizing patient-provider interactions, the solution reduces costs and enhances the experience for both patients and caregivers.

Notable was founded in 2017 and is headquartered in San Francisco, USA. Its founding team comes from a mortgage startup named Blend.

Pranay Kapadia, former Head of Product at Blend, conceived the idea for Notable after hearing his wife complain about the numerous tedious administrative tasks and procedural work required of physicians.

Justin White and Adam Ting also co-founded Notable alongside Kapadia. The former, previously the engineering lead at Blend, currently serves as the company’s Chief Technology Officer, while the latter, who oversaw product design at the mortgage company, is now its Chief Product Officer.

To launch and operationalize Notable’s documentation system, the team monitored and documented over 2,000 interactions between physicians and patients. According to the company, the core issue ultimately boils down to data—a domain in which the founding team had been engaged since their early days at companies such as Mint.com, QuickBooks, TurboTax, Climate Corp, and Blend.

Kapadia stated, “We founded Notable to leverage powerful technologies such as artificial intelligence, wearable devices, and voice interfaces to address these challenges, providing physicians with truly seamless, streamlined solutions rather than another screen or application to learn.”

In July 2019, Notable announced the completion of a $40 million Series B financing round. The round was led by B Capital Group and Lifeforce Capital, with participation from Industry Ventures. Notable will use the proceeds to drive company growth and enhance its drug clinical trial platform, thereby assisting pharmaceutical companies in developing anticancer drugs. The platform is primarily designed to predict patient subgroups likely to exhibit drug responses in the short term, helping researchers assess the efficacy of clinical trials and increase the likelihood of trial success.

To date, Notable has completed three rounds of financing, raising a total of nearly $20 million and attracting a group of investors including Greylock Partners and F-Prime Capital. Specifically, it closed a $3 million seed round in May 2018 and a $13.5 million Series A round in September 2018.

Notable’s AI-powered intelligent healthcare assistant leverages expertise in medicine, nursing, and health. By utilizing deep learning and natural language processing (NLP), it performs speech recognition, comprehends the needs of physicians and patients, and addresses related issues. It also automatically documents physician-patient interactions and updates electronic health records (EHR) with relevant health information in real time, thereby helping to reduce the time physicians spend on documentation within EHR systems.

For example, since adopting Notable’s digital assistant, physicians at Austin Regional Clinic have saved more than two hours per day on EHR tasks, allowing for more time to interact with patients and reducing the administrative burden on care providers.

In 2018, Notable released its first Apple Watch application. The company stated that its technology could not only help busy physicians reduce paperwork and other administrative tasks but also alleviate the stress associated with patient visits. Notable’s Apple Watch app can capture information such as visit time and location, then collect data from the physician’s Apple Watch to add details like laboratory results, prescriptions, and referrals to the patient’s medical record. Physicians then review the accuracy of this information before submitting it to the patient’s electronic health record (EHR).

To accomplish these tasks, the application utilizes a voice-activation feature, allowing physicians to complete documentation with just a simple press. The application automatically structures conversations, performs dictation, generates orders, and recommends appropriate billing codes. The company stated that since the launch of its trial version, over 98.5% of physicians using the service have expressed their support for it.

Furthermore, the company states on its website that this application complies with the relevant provisions of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), ensuring the security and privacy of each patient’s medical data.

In December 2019, Notable announced that it would provide a voice-enabled digital assistant to physicians at CommonSpirit, a large health system comprising 142 hospitals across 21 states.

In the preceding months, Notable also announced a partnership with Altais, Blue Shield’s California subsidiary. Furthermore, Notable has leveraged its expanding roster of payers and partners to iterate on its comprehensive suite of solutions, which deliver value beyond medical documentation transcription. These offerings include virtual intake capabilities that enable patients to schedule appointments, check in, update health information, verify insurance eligibility, and perform other tasks via their mobile devices.

Relevant surveys indicate that physicians are highly interested in this voice assistant, with 47% of U.S. doctors expressing their desire to use this technology in their practice.

Efficient and cost-effective vaccine distribution remained one of the biggest challenges in 2021. In early January this year, Notable announced the use of its automation platform to help manage COVID-19 vaccine distribution.

Notable’s automated platform uses robotic process automation (RPA), natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning to identify patients eligible for COVID-19 vaccination. By integrating data from hospital electronic health record (EHR) systems, the platform helps eligible individuals schedule vaccination appointments and directs them to other relevant educational resources.

“By leveraging intelligent automation to identify, scale, educate, and triage patients, health systems can establish effective and equitable vaccine distribution workflows,” said Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, Notable’s strategic advisor and member of the U.S. COVID-19 Advisory Board, in a press release.

For older Americans, scheduling vaccine appointments is particularly difficult, with many reportedly struggling to navigate online scheduling websites. Muthu Alagappan, Medical Director at Notable, believes that Notable has made the process more user-friendly by adopting a simpler approach: sending text message links that request only basic, easy-to-remember information. “I believe it is our emphasis on user-centered design that has enabled us to maintain very strong engagement rates, even among the elderly population,” he said.

Artificial intelligence is expected to advance in the healthcare sector over the coming years, but Alagappan believes that integrating it with other more readily accessible intelligent technologies is also a crucial step toward improving care. “When we speak of intelligent automation, we are actually referring to the combination of two concepts: artificial intelligence—which knows what to do—and robotic process automation—which knows how to do it,” he said. This approach enables Notable to bypass administrative bottlenecks in healthcare by directing robots to execute these tasks in an efficient and adaptable manner.

To date, Notable has partnered with multiple hospital systems across several states, leveraging its platform for vaccine distribution and scheduling, and engaging tens of thousands of patients daily.

In March this year, Notable announced a partnership with North Kansas City Hospital (NKCH) and its Meritas Health clinics to support the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines to residents of Missouri. Kristen Guillaume, Vice President and Chief Information Officer at NKCH, stated, “Notable has enabled us to build upon the progress we have made to date. Intelligent automation has increased capacity and throughput while ensuring a positive patient experience.”

By leveraging Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) technology, Notable can train bots or “digital assistants” to scan Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) and open appointment slots for eligible patients. Currently, Missouri has launched the “Safe Actions” website, where state residents can apply for COVID-19 vaccine appointments. Notable first screens eligible patients within the Electronic Health Record (EHR) system, then collects informed consent forms and schedules appointments. After the first vaccination dose, Notable’s digital assistant automatically contacts patients to schedule their second dose and sends reminders to ensure they attend their appointments.

“We went live within a week, scheduling more than 100 patients in the first minute and 1,600 patients within the first 45 minutes,” said Todd Beardman, MD, Chief Medical Information Officer at Meritas Health. “By automating core workflows such as patient registration, check-in, and follow-up, we are able to handle more than 420 appointments per hour. Intelligent automation enables us to flexibly scale up vaccination capacity on demand.”

Notable has also optimized for ease of use: patients can complete registration without downloading an app or creating a login, and previously shared information from prior visits is automatically populated for patient review and confirmation. Notably, across all patient demographics—including ethnic minorities, patients aged 65 and older, and those with visual impairments or other disabilities—Notable achieves an average patient satisfaction rate of 96%.

Since the outbreak of the pandemic, Notable has conducted hundreds of thousands of automated screenings through its COVID-19 triage solution, identifying thousands of high-risk outpatients and referring them to telehealth or urgent care.