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Today we meet a founder we’ve encountered before, but who now has a brand new startup for us to take a look at.

Read on to find out all about Jigsaw Medical.

But first…

• UK-based Creator Fund has raised $41 million from more than 60 investors in an initial close of its first Europe-focused fund

• Designed to help scientific founders turn research into deep tech startups, Creator Fund now has a presence across 24 universities in eight countries

• LPs in the new fund include Germany’s Equation Capital and the Export and Investment Fund of Denmark (EIFO)

– Martin

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Jigsaw Medical wants to solve a tricky efficiency puzzle for hospitals

Some founders spot an opportunity and take different approaches until they feel they’re on the right track. Grant Nolan is one such entrepreneur

A year ago, we spoke to him as CEO and co-founder of MyOpNotes. But now he’s back with a fresh approach to tackling the same problem: making sure hospitals get paid for their work.

Meet Jigsaw Medical.

Imagine you have an operation. Whether you go to an NHS hospital in the UK or a private clinic in the US, or pretty much anywhere else, the surgeon will write up notes about what they do for you. These notes are then ‘coded’ by specialist staff who ensure that the hospital is paid, whether that’s from NHS funds or private medical insurance.

The challenge is that ‘clinical coding’–the process of totting up the list of work done so it can be charged for–is far less efficient than it should be, and isn’t always accurate.

“The current process is as manual as it comes,” Nolan says.

“Skilled individuals read through doctors’ and surgeons’ medical notes, then open books, pick out the relevant four-digit codes for the work done, and type them into another system.

“That's how all healthcare data is captured, not just for billing. When we talk about a big waiting list, what we're actually talking about is all these patients on the waiting list with these specific codes. When we talk about a measles outbreak, what we're saying is that measles code in this one postcode has gone up. So it's really the data layer that underpins all healthcare.

“But it has a huge financial implication, because as a hospital, if you don't assign codes, even in this country, you just don't get paid.”

How it works

Through his previous venture, Nolan learned that selling new systems to the healthcare market is tricky as “nobody has the time or energy” to implement them. So Jigsaw Medical is designed to operate in the background of existing processes.

“It runs invisibly in the background, a bit like Grammarly or a spell checker. We've done it in that way so that no one has to change what they do, and no one has to really adapt in any sort of way,” Nolan says.

He explains that when medical professionals enter their notes into existing software, Jigsaw Medical’s software uses a combination of rule-based algorithms and AI algorithms to get to the clinical codes with “really high accuracy”.

Rather than talk about replacing human clinical coders, Nolan talks about his software making up for a shortage of clinical coders around the world, working alongside them to lighten their load by taking care of backlogs that often build up.

The story so far

Nolan came to the startup world after working as an NHS doctor. He is no longer involved with his previous business, but he’s learned a lot from his approach last time around.

“We struggled to get commercial traction. And I think the reason for that was because we were duplicating other systems.

“Hospitals often would have spent millions of pounds, sometimes up to half a billion pounds, installing new IT systems. And when we came along and said, ‘oh we've got this great idea, let's replace a little bit of it’, it just was never on the cards. No matter how good the tech was, it just didn't fit with what they were currently doing.”

Working with new co-founder James Henshaw and clinical coding specialist Sue Eve-Jones, Nolan has redefined the exact problem he’s solving this time, too. Last time, he was helping clinicians avoid entering inaccurate information, which was a problem that led to inaccurate codes. This time, it’s more about taking the load off clinical coders, and he believes it’s a much better problem to solve as a startup.

“I think when you start solving problems that aren't well defined and people don't know about, you just run into loads of problems commercially. People aren't going to pay to solve problems that they've never heard of. When you have to educate the market, you're probably in the wrong place.”

This time, Jigsaw Medical started by speaking to clinical coders to discover the pain points they had. They then built the tech to fit those needs, rather than trying to bend the market to fit their tech.

Nolan says hospitals have been keen to buy the tech. He says the startup’s first two customers signed up in 34 and 26 days respectively, which is very rapid for a healthcare sales cycle. The startup is now onboarding six hospitals.

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