Oscer’s founders Waleed Mussa,Tom Kelly and Yu Liu.
Dr Kelly set about creating Oscer,an online platform that enables medical students to practise their clinical reasoning skills with virtual patients powered by artificial intelligence.
The newly launched startup has raised $5 million in funding led by Blackbird Ventures with participation from January Capital,Inventures,Archangel Ventures and angel investors Brendan Hill and Jeff Bargmann.
Misdiagnosis is an ongoing problem for the medical system with research published in theMedical Journal of Australia estimating diagnostic errors occur in up to one in seven clinical encounters,with more than 80 per cent of diagnostic errors preventable.
Dr Kelly and his co-founders Waleed Mussa and Yu Liu plan to use Oscer’s launch product,which is being piloted by The University of Melbourne,The University of Sydney and a number of universities in the United States,to collect data and use it to create a diagnostic support tool for doctors.
“You need a huge database of questions and answers and all the different symptoms and conditions that people can have,and we thought that an interesting way to build that database would be to create a product for students,” Dr Kelly said.
Oscer’s clinical tool would enable clinicians to get real-time second opinions through transcription,automated coding and analysis of consults and Dr Kelly said it could be particularly useful in settings where there is a lack of resources,such as rural hospitals.
The startup’s funding round values Oscer at $20 million. The founders plan to use a third of the funds raised to build an internal marketing and sales team to get its education product into the hands of as many students as possible,and use the rest to build Oscer’s clinical product.