[Funding alert] TORTUS Raises $4.2Million in Seed Funding

There is pressure on the NHS due to ongoing personnel shortages, workforce issues, and rising demand. The weight of administrative responsibilities is among the biggest stresses that physicians have to deal with.

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O.S.L.E.R. (Operating System Leverage in Electronic Records), the company's flagship product, listens to the clinician's conversation with the patient and seamlessly integrates with any electronic health records (EHR) system to automate the clinical documentation process for final sign-off by clinicians. This process includes pre-chart summaries, visit notes, lab requests, coding, and more.

O.S.L.E.R. does not record or preserve the consultation audio in order to protect patient privacy. Instead, any outputs are directly stored in the hospital's secure electronic health record. Consequently, physicians are able to devote their entire focus to patients throughout consultations and allocate time for paperwork.

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Co-founder and CEO of TORTUS, Dr Dom Pimenta said, “I know that over-worked, stressed clinicians can’t deliver the best quality of care to patients and that this negatively impacts their patients’ experiences and outcomes. We created O.S.L.E.R to free clinicians from their keyboards and the burden of administrative tasks. The technology immediately improves the engagement between a clinician and patient, which is the foundation of every healthcare system.”

In addition to Entrepreneur First, former NHS Chair Lord David Prior, and other investors, Khosla Ventures led the Seed round. Chief Scientific Advisor Eric Jang, VP of AI at 1X Technologies, also joined.

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In order to give physicians even more time back, the additional funding will be utilized to expedite the development and compliance of the O.S.L.E.R. agent. This will involve expanding its present capabilities to include making prescription orders, adding diagnoses, and coding to the system. Along with growing into new hospitals and primary care facilities, the company has other primary care sites scheduled to launch in February 2024.

Dr Shankar Sridharan, Chief Clinical Information Officer and Consultant Paediatric Cardiologist at GOSH, shared: “Healthcare professionals across all roles spend an average of 13.5 hours per week adding to, or creating clinical documentation. This is more than a third of the average clinician’s working hours and 25 percent more time than in 2015. At GOSH, we’re very excited to have this opportunity to partner with TORTUS and to study how generative AI tools could help our clinicians by safely freeing them from administrative tasks and allowing them to spend more time directly interacting with patients.”

According to Adina Tecklu, Partner at Khosla Ventures: “Doctors become doctors because they want to care for patients, but the reality today is that they are burdened with administrative work resulting in physician burnout and compromised patient care. TORTUS is the AI assistant for every physician, in every patient visit. It automates documentation and critical workflows so that doctors can spend more time with patients and no time on paperwork, a huge boon to both physician and patient wellbeing.”

About TORTUS

With the patient cohorts they presently have, the human resources at their disposal, and the enormous power and accessibility of technology, if they were to construct a healthcare system from start, the result would not resemble the one they currently have. They would construct an alternative structure. And at T O R T U S, they are building the AI-powered healthcare of the future—exactly that.

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