An AI digital medical assistant, customized with each surgeon’s expertise, is making its way to the clinical frontline.
Fios Health, founded in 2023 by A.Prof Andrew McDaid and Dr Charles M. Lawrie, has launched a digital medical assistant platform to aid medical clinics and patients access critical information to improve productivity, cost and quality of care.
“The most urgent problem to solve in healthcare today is to provide better, more cost-effective support to frontline clinical staff so they can be more efficient, spend more quality time with patients, and reduce burnout that is endemic across global healthcare systems” says Associate Professor Andrew McDaid, Founder and CEO of Fios Health. “Staff are health systems’ biggest asset and largest expense. Healthcare delivery is complex and highly sub-optimal so there is a big opportunity to improve. We believe the time is right as we see clinical staff desperate to adopt new technologies that will provide relief to their daily grind and enable them to better treat patients.”
The initial role for Fios’ medical assistants will be to help automatically manage patient’s clinical questions. 89% of patients search the internet for information about medical care, where 64% of internet searches related to joint replacement are non-academic, non-government sources, with 17% being social media. As a result, clinic staff deal with large volumes of unnecessary calls to the office as patients seek answers to clinical questions.
“There is large information gap – these days patients are seeking more and more information, however as a surgeon there is often not enough time in consults to answer all their questions” says Fios co-founder and Chief Medical Officer Dr Lawrie, an orthopedic surgeon from Baptist Health in Florida, USA. “Patients are also not medically trained so often don’t understand or retain all that information and may have follow-up questions they didn’t ask during the consult. This causes anxiety, confusion and Googling, as well as a lot of unnecessary inbound calls for myself and my medical assistants to deal with.”
Dr Shay Mandler, a NZ Spine Surgeon and member of Fios’ clinical advisory board says "high volumes of patients, aging population in a low resources health system forces us, the health practitioners, to deal with multiple tasks some are not even related to medical care. This overload creates frustration, increased burn out, reduced motivation and chronic fatigue among health professionals.”
Fios’ first product consists of an AI-driven medical assistant that answers patients’ questions via familiar chat interfaces including SMS and WhatsApp. The assistant has a base orthopedic knowledge curated from trusted sources including peer-reviewed research and clinical practice guidelines. The platform also allows surgeons and hospitals to customize their own assistant to give patients answers based on their own personal protocols and FAQs.
Further functionality is being developed to provide clinics with a broadly skilled assistant, including helping surgeons instantly find information about specific patients to answer more complex questions without needing to search in electronic medical records, as well as collecting data to provide insights to improve performance of clinical products and services. Fios’ intellectual property lies across the product, proprietary algorithms and data assets.
Fios’ digital medical assistant is designed for all specializations, starting with hip and knee replacements, spine, shoulder and foot and ankle surgeries. The team has undertaken significant market validation, including surveys and interviews with over one hundred stakeholders (patients, surgeons, medical assistants, hospital executives). This has concluded that initial patient management functions could save a single surgeon clinic a minimum of 2-3 hours per week, and up to US$2M for an orthopedic department at a large New York hospital.
Fios has early clinical users with an immediate focus on the US market, through its subsidiary Fios Health Inc. The founders have a personal network of over a hundred surgeons in their sales pipeline, and established relationships with large orthopedic and digital health companies who they will partner with for distribution to scale. First revenues are expected before the end of 2024.
Fios is backed by its founders, Auckland UniServices and US investors, intentionally only partnering with funders who can add strategic value beyond capital. Currently Fios is laser focused on product-market-channel fit n order to secure scalable revenue and reach profitability, with future growth coming from adding functionality within existing customers, expanding internationally and across clinical specialities.
Contact: andrew@fioshealth.com
