St. John’s-based ReportMate, which sells software for cleaning up disorganized medical records, has rebranded as SiftMed as it enters commercialization.
The newly dubbed SiftMed’s artificial intelligence platform automatically organizes medical records into a clearly labelled, searchable database for use by insurance company employees as they assess some types of claims, such as accident-related injuries.
Chief Executive Holly Hill said in an interview that the rebranding serves two purposes: to more clearly communicate SiftMed’s value proposition, and to stop the strict firewalls used by medical institutions from mistaking ReportMate for the name of a dating app and blocking it.
“When we started ReportMate two years ago, we didn’t anticipate the growth” she said. “And we didn’t anticipate that we’d be aiming to be a global player in organizing messy medical files.
“And so, we started working about six months ago with an external branding consultant, and we realized that what we do is we ‘sift’ through large amounts of medical files to help our clients find key facts.”
SiftMed has been in beta testing since around February and is in the contract phase of converting several beta partners to customers.
Hill was previously chief revenue officer at Zorbit’s Math, a Newfoundland and Labrador-based edtech company that was acquired by Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Learning last year.
When she and Co-Founder Dr. Jeremie Larouche, an orthopaedic surgeon, initially conceived of SiftMed, they saw it as a way to streamline Larouche’s own medical consulting business.
They considered a range of avenues for commercialization — including law offices, which often deal with medical files — before deciding to focus on the insurance industry as their beachhead market.
“That's where there's the biggest value that we can provide,” said Hill of the insurance industry. “Every accident benefit claim or injury claim requires a triage of that file to determine if it needs an investigation.
“If it does need an investigation, it is (currently) done manually. So there's a huge need there.”
SiftMed uses natural language processing to automatically organize and categorize files, optical character recognition to make scanned documents searchable and more sophisticated artificial intelligence to extract key medical data from the files.
Most of the company’s clients are located in Canada, but Hill added that a United States expansion is in the works.
So far, SiftMed has 11 employees and is looking to hire a director of sales and marketing, a manager of finance and administration and a full stack developer. Job postings can be found here.
