To jog your memory: This is a blog by Nathan Peereboom originally intended to follow his journey in starting a business called ShoreUp, a company that helped other businesses build offshore teams and centers.
It’s been over a year since I wrote a post, so here is a brief update.
Last winter (2023), I was in a funny place. I’d just finished 3 large consulting projects at the same time, and there was a stillness to my life. Not a good stillness. More like the stillness you feel when you’re treading water, alone, in the middle of a windless lake.
Actually, that sounds nice. But, in the traditional sense of the metaphor: I did feel like I was treading water.
Why? The Chat GPT AI revolution had kicked off in November 2022, and my corporate clients were already asking themselves: "If we wait 9 months, can we just automate our tax preparation? And maybe our data cleaning too?"
And, when they asked me directly, I answered: “Yeah, probably.”
The oncoming AI automation of much classically offshored work (and classically onshore work) meant that continuing to invest in ShoreUp felt like delaying the inevitable, staying afloat. The path ahead was more upselling and cross-selling of offshore projects, and maybe hiring some subcontractors to scale. But I no longer felt like I was riding a strong macro tailwind. I was fighting it.
So, while I continued to take on inbound projects from time to time, I decided to wind down my outbound sales efforts for ShoreUp. And, I refocused on a creative side project with a friend of mine, Jackson Bierfeldt.
I won’t go through every twist and turn, but the project quickly became all-consuming.
Jackson and I became fixated on solving the problem of onerous medical documentation. This might seem out of left field. But my parents are both clinicians, and I had osmotically felt this problem from a young age.
If you know a single doctor, nurse, or even a veterinarian with a niche in kangaroo care, you know that “charting” or “noting” is a painful, burnout-inducing part of practicing anything remotely medical. A few statistics:
33% of physicians spend 2+ hrs per day outside of work hours completing medical documentation (JAMA 2020 and 2022)
23% of patients feel their provider’s in-room computer usage interferes with their ability to listen to them (J Gen Int Med 2016)
34% of medication errors in malpractice suits are related to improper EHR entry (J Healthcare Risk Management 2017)
Some clinicians “solve” this documentation problem with medical scribes (both onshore and offshore). Though, most use the age-old tools of grit and commiseration.
At the time we were starting (spring 2023), no company had meaningfully penetrated the market for automating medical documentation with AI, though several had raised significant VC rounds.
Jackson and I had a hypothesis that the “old guard” floundered because they were built on “behind-frontier” AI technology that was unwieldy, and hard to customize. Maybe, with the new AI tools available, we could build something far more “glove fit” for each clinic, or even for each provider.
And so Jackson and I traveled to 7 states, interviewed hundreds of providers, spent months building prototypes, and nearly lived in clinics to test them. We hired some friends to help us, and we had a blast along the way (see end of post for pictures).
The process resulted in a commercial product called “JotPsych,” an AI-scribe built specifically for behavioral health professionals.
Since we officially launched in late summer 2023, JotPsych has exploded. To give you a sense of the impact: as of the writing of this post, JotPsych has AI-scribed for 39,415 patient encounters. We’re growing rapidly month-over-month in users, notes-created, and revenue. Best of all, we’re just getting started.
Bottom line: it’s been a whirlwind of a year. And I’m so grateful to everyone who has supported and encouraged us along the way.
For now, I’m going to pause this newsletter. Every ounce of my brain is currently working on JotPsych (or maintaining community/relationships in my own life), which doesn’t leave much for the readers of Kindling.
But, hey, we have a little thing going 🔥.
If you’re curious about what Jackson and I are continuing to build, please reach out to me via email or text, check out JotPsych.com, or listen to this podcast we were recently featured on:
Photos from along the way: