Intelligent automation: The prescription for what ails healthcare

Today we announced that Notable raised $100M in Series B funding, led by ICONIQ Growth and including participation from returning investors Greylock, F-Prime Capital, and Oak HC/FT.

This is a validation of the incredible work our team has driven, and even more importantly, of the transformational outcomes that our health system partners have realized with our platform.

With that in mind, I wanted to share some thoughts on what this means for the future of our company, the technology we’re building and the industry we’re aiming to transform. 

How we got to today

As part of a family of physicians, I’ve heard more times than I can count that doctors are the world’s highest paid data entry workers, spending countless hours on manual administrative tasks in the EHR.

About five years ago, back when I was digitizing lending and building the platform at Blend (NYSE: BLND), I decided to figure out a solution to the administrative burden that doctors like the ones in my family face on a day-to-day basis.

Working with Adam and Justin, my fellow Notable co-founders, we discovered that almost every person involved in healthcare delivery is overwhelmed with manual, repetitive administrative tasks that have little to do with serving patients. Clinicians are spending more time in their EHR than patient care, medical assistants and front desk staff spend countless hours processing paperwork, and most health systems rely on massive call centers to perform basic tasks like scheduling appointments and collecting from insurance companies.

In light of the staffing shortages facing healthcare, this overwhelming administrative burden is the biggest obstacle standing in the way of delivering high quality, affordable care, with $1.1 trillion dollars in spend per year on administrative costs.

That’s what inspired us to start Notable, with a mission to enrich every patient-provider interaction by eliminating the administrative burden associated with healthcare delivery. We assembled a team of best-in-class designers, engineers, and healthcare industry veterans to build an intelligent automation platform that can streamline every manual workflow in healthcare, from patient registration to revenue cycle management.  Along the way, we’ve had the privilege of partnering with and learning from thousands of providers across the country’s leading healthcare organizations. 

Intelligent automation has unlocked transformational impact for our partners, automating 700+ hours of staff and clinician work per provider annually while fundamentally reimagining patient care. For example:

• At Lowell Community Health Center, Notable leveraged AI to identify patients in most need of the COVID-19 vaccine at a time when supply was scarce, while automating outreach to these patients in a language of their choice.
• At Austin Regional Clinic, we modernized the patient registration experience, eliminating the need for lengthy phone calls to register patients and while reducing back-end denials and the associated financial headaches that often result.
• At Intermountain Healthcare, Notable digitized and automated every pre-visit patient interaction, freeing up front desk staff and medical assistants to spend their time supporting patients instead of processing paperwork, contributing to a 97% patient satisfaction rating. 

These results leave us as convinced as ever that intelligent automation is the prescription for the overwhelming administrative burden that ails healthcare.

What’s next for Notable

The latest investment in Notable validates the urgent need to address the overwhelming administrative burden in healthcare and our vision to do so with intelligent automation. 

With this latest round of funding, we’ll be investing in 3 key areas:

• Expanding the number of workflows we automate. Our goal is to replace every manual workflow in healthcare with an automated flow. To do that, we’ll be accelerating development of flows on our platform, as well as empowering our health system partners to build and share automated flows using the Notable Flow Library. ‍
• Enhance our best-in-class artificial intelligence capabilities. Our past investments in artificial intelligence have enabled us to deliver substantially higher ROI than legacy digital health alternatives. Capabilities like the ability to extract and process structured data from insurance card images, faxes, and EHR records, alongside technologies like natural language processing and robotic process automation, enable our platform to perform highly complex workflows more effectively than any human worker. We’ll be tripling down on these capabilities, with the goal of driving even higher ROI for partners deploying our platform.‍
• Extend greater access to our platform. Since our start, we’ve seen enormous demand for Notable’s platform, and currently perform over one million automated workflows every week. We will be scaling our technology and teams to rapidly expand the number of automations we perform across healthcare organizations of all sizes. 

As excited as I am about the work our team has accomplished, I know that we are just scratching the surface of what is possible. If you are passionate about healthcare and are eager to make an impact, we are hiring across each and every function to power our continued growth. 

And if you’re working within our healthcare system and are interested in learning more about the impact our platform can have for your organization, we’d be more than happy to arrange time to connect with our team.