Proactive Investments recently interviewed Augmedix CEO Manny Krakaris about what his company does and how the coronavirus pandemic has affected his business.
“Augmedix’ mission is really to re-humanize healthcare,” Krakaris said. “What we mean by that is allowing doctors to have a natural interaction with their patients and not be distracted by having to take medical notes and documentation at the same time, which is the current practice today.”
Essentially, Augmedix takes care of the documentation of the visit so the doctor can focus on the patient.
“We pioneered the whole concept of remote, real-time medical note documentation,” Krakaris said. Augmedix equips doctors either with a Google Glass device or a smartphone, through which a remote scribe observes and hears the interaction via a HIPAA-secure communication channel and takes notes for the provider.
The company provides two levels of service: a real-time level, where the notes are delivered at the end of the interaction between the patient and the doctor; and a non-real-time service, where medical notes are delivered the next day.
Because Augmedix was always a remote service, the pandemic served as a catalyst in terms of the demand for the company’s services. Many healthcare systems did not consider medical scribes to be essential personnel, so they were not allowed to be on hospital premises because of the risk of transmitting infection. “Our business actually benefited from the transition to telemedicine that most healthcare organizations had to deploy to deal with the pandemic,” Krakaris said.
The first quarter of 2021 has brought a number of new bookings and solid sales growth despite a resurgence of the pandemic on the West Coast in January. Krakaris says the company has a “very solid pipeline and backlog” of orders and that he expects to meet or match revenue expectations for Q2. For the rest of the year, he anticipates returning to historic growth levels of between 30 and 40 percent.
See the full interview here.