Due to the coronavirus pandemic, medical workers are working double time to distribute relief and to help as many as they can.
Bot MD, a Singapore-based AI helps doctors and other medical workers to save time as the chatbot lets them look up vital information from their smartphones.
The chatbot gives what the doctors and medical workers need without them having to call a hospital operator or access the intranet. The chatbot announced that it has raised around $5 million Series A led by Monk's Hill Ventures.
The other backers include XA Network, SeaX and SG Innovate, and investors Steve Blank, Yon Chie Lu and Jean Luc Butel added to the relief. Bot MD was a part of Y Combinator's 2018 batch.
Bot MD to expand to Asia
The $5 million funding will be used to expand in the Asia-Pacific region, including Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia, three countries that are hit hard by COVID-19. The chatbot will add new features in response to demand from hospitals and healthcare organizations during COVID-19.
Currently, Bot MD supports English, but developers have plans to release Spanish and Bahasa Indonesian this year.
The chatbot is currently used by 13,000 doctors at organizations like National University Health System, Changi General Hospital, Tan Tock Seng Hospital, National University Cancer Institute of Singapore, Parkway Radiology, Singapore General Hospital and the National Kidney Transplant Institute.
Dorothea Koh, co-founder and chief executive state that Bot MD integrates hospital information that is usually stored in numerous systems and makes it easier to access.
Bot MD's use
Without Bot MD, doctors may need to dial a hospital operator to find which staffers are on call and they will need to get their contact information.
If they wish to get drug information, that means that another call to the pharmacy will be needed. If they need to see some updated guidelines and clinical protocols, that usually means they will need to find a computer that is connected to the intranet of the hospital.
Koh told TechCrunch that a lot of what Bot MD does is to integrate the content that doctors need into a single interface that can be searched 24/7.
An example of this is that during the height of the COVID-19, Bot MD introduced a new feature that takes healthcare providers to a form pre-filled with their information when they type in "record temperature" into the AI chatbot.
Many doctors were accessing their organization's intranet two times a day to log their temperature and Koh said being able to use the form through Bot MD has significantly improved compliance, according to MedCity News.
The time that it takes to onboard the chatbot really depends on the information systems and the amount of content that it needs in order to integrate, but Koh stated that its proprietary natural language processing chat engine makes training its AI very fast. Most of their partners can be integrated for as fast as 10 days.
Bot MD plans to add new clinical apps to its platform, including the ones for electronic medial records or EMR, billing and scheduling integrations, chronic disease monitoring and clinical alerts.
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Written by Sieeka Khan
