Tali is a voice-enabled AI assistant for physicians at the point of care. We save physicians’ time so they can visit more patients and have more face time with them.
Tell us about yourself?
I got my masters in Computer Science from McGill University and worked at a few companies including BlackBerry before starting my first company, Evenset Inc, in 2015. At Evenset, we partnered with organizations of different scales in the healthcare and medical industry to help them build their products all the way from research and design to implementation and validation. Tali was initially a project that Public Health of Agency (PHAC) contracted Evenset to conduct research on as part of Innovation Solution Canada (ISC). My co-founder and I saw a lot of potential in the project and registered Tali as a separate company in January 2020 and moved to build this company full time, as we hired a managing director to continue running Evenset.
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
I would advise myself to be bolder and think bigger!
What problem does your business solve?
Physicians report high volumes of burn out with technology being a major contributing factor to it. A famous article in 2018 by Atul Gawande details this frustration with the bold title of “Why doctors hate their computers?” Research shows that physicians are losing up to 15 hours per week in administrative tasks that involve documenting patient notes into Electronic Medical Record (EMR) software or retrieving information from the EMR. We are building an AI assistant for the physicians that will adapt to their specific workflows at the point of care and will be their single point of contact to all their interactions with their technology solutions.
What is the inspiration behind your business?
Physicians are one of the most educated and hard-working parts of our society, and they have been crippled by all the technological solutions that have been thrown at them. We want to turn technology into a team player than a burden for physicians so they can focus on what they love to do most, which is caring for patients and making clinical decisions.
What is your magic sauce?
We are using state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing(NLP) algorithms to deliver an experience that was not possible even 5 years ago. In our team, we have experience from the technology world, to building and running a company and the experience from point of care.
We have also built a partnership with WELL Health, the largest operator of outpatient clinics in Canada to deliver Tali to more than 17,000 physicians in their network.
With all of that, we are uniquely positioned to solve a real pain point for physicians, and that is what gets us excited every morning to push hard and deliver results!
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
We aspire to be the largest provider of voice technology to physicians in Canada in the next 5 years. With that, we will be saving millions of hours of administrative work for Canadian Healthcare that we all know has been drowned under the heavy demands that it needs to respond to during the COVID time and beyond.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
Innovation in healthcare is very challenging for many reasons. From one side, physicians are already overloaded by work, so they don’t have too much time to test and adopt new technology. On the other hand, EMR providers have been historically very close to innovation due to challenges around privacy and security regulations. We have been fortunate enough to have partners that help us navigate through the challenges of building for healthcare.
How can people get involved?
We look forward to partnerships with more EMR providers or physician networks to distribute Tali to the point of care at scale.
But physicians can also directly download and start using the basic version of Tali that doesn’t require deep integration with the EMR from our website www.tali.ai.
Any interest can be submitted to us directly at contact@tali.ai.