00:05:18 · Sebastian Johnson
[00:05:18] S0: But it must be amazing to have almost, like, internal advocates fighting for your product or or at least this type of change. You mentioned kind of product road map and you're moving from, I guess, you're on this journey from being like a scribe tool, which is your initial product or initial kind of wedge to now this sort of like AI native operating system for clinicians. How are you deciding what to build next for the clinicians that you're serving?
00:05:44 · Lukas Saari
[00:05:44] S1: Yeah. I mean, so we're working very closely with our customers and, like, having these regular check ins and workshops with their CIOs and so on to understand, like, what are the additional challenges and issues that you are seeing. And then from our side, also seeing what is it that we can develop that we can apply across Europe, like across care settings, providers, and so on. So if you think at the core of it from, like, a patient journey perspective of how does it look today and how is it starting to look now when you use Tandem instead. So if you, as a patient, are feeling sick and you're calling into your clinic, you would today be calling in between eight and nine in the morning when there's a phone slot available. You sit in a phone queue for half an hour, and then you get told, sorry. We're fully booked today. Please try calling again tomorrow and call a bit earlier because then it might not be fully booked yet. So, like, not a great experience for you as a patient, but also very time consuming for the clinic. How can you instead have what is rather like an AI receptionist that responds to the phone call, can do triaging, can do scheduling, handle simpler tasks as prescription renewals and so on, and be available twenty four seven. And then when you come into the clinic, how can you... Instead of having the clinician sitting and reading through Lukas's past 50 medical notes to figure out who is Lukas, why is he here today, what should I do with him, Instead, just have an LLM summarize that for you. And then during the visit, if you as a clinician are unsure about something, instead of using Google or sitting with control f in various PDFs and so on, can you just have, like, an AI with you in the room that's listening and has access to the patient context, the right guidelines? And then after the visit, instead of manually doing the note taking by hand, the coding by hand, the referral by hand, the prescription by hand, the follow-up appointment booking by hand, and so on, having this, like, complete AI medical assistant that takes care of all of this for you. So...
00:07:29 · Sebastian Johnson
[00:07:29] S0: Yep. I was gonna say, are you betting on a... You know, along that stack from, you know, the phone call to the post night... Post notes, write up, whatever, are you betting on specific areas right now? Are there areas of focus that you really think is gonna unlock the next kind of area for you?
00:07:43 · Lukas Saari
[00:07:43] S1: So all of the things that I described now, we have live at various stages. So, I mean, a year ago, we were more in the scribe space, expanded to this, like, AI medical assistant, and now doing more of also the patient facing and patient flow aspects that we're bringing across. And then how I'm thinking about it with this, like, grander AI native operating system is really breaking down and thinking more first principle. Like, what are the 20 categories of tasks that you need to do at a clinic? And I listed a bunch of those in the use cases that I just described, but there's also many others. And then saying, how can we go to a clinic and say, what we now want to do is to help you sort of automatically handle all of these 20 different types of tasks. And we can either support this at a level zero, which is we don't do it at all. A level one, that is that we provide a draft to the clinician and they act on it manually. Level two, we provide a draft to the clinician and they come press yes, and then it's automatically handled. Or level three, you can just do it without the clinician being in the loop. And now wanting to see, okay, how can we go to clinics and then say, what we want to do with you over the coming few months is that we want to bring all of these types of tasks that you're doing up to, like, level two, level three, and then using that as a type of framework for how do you bring a clinic into the AI era and sort of make them more and more agentic and automatic.
00:09:03 · Sebastian Johnson, Lukas Saari
[00:09:03] S0: Are you... When you're working with these clinicians for the first time, is Tandem Health their first experience using tools like this? Or have they... Are they working with other people beforehand? Are they looking at lots of providers? What's it like trying to get them on board? [00:09:18] S1: So we're commonly the first AI solution that they have come in contact with and are procuring. But then it depends a lot also per market, and I think this is also one of the very interesting parts of Europe that some markets such as The UK are more mature and also much more competitive. So everyone knows that this is a thing, and it's more of a, like, competitive process and seeing, should they select our solution or another solution rather than should we select a solution? And then when we go to some other countries, it's much earlier in the maturity. So then it's more about, like, creating the awareness, convincing this is a positive ROI in business case and so on. But then there's also less competition as a virtue of that. [00:09:56] S0: Are you doing a lot of the sales yourself still? [00:09:59] S1: I mean, try to be involved in some of the most important sales processes that we have, also quite a lot of different partnerships and so on. And so seeing how I still want to be close to the business in it, but then still seeing, like, where can I be active, where I get the most leverage on my time? [00:10:17] S0: And how else is your job changing? You've been through this transformational journey. How how many employees do you have now?
00:10:17 · Sebastian Johnson, Lukas Saari
[00:10:17] S0: And how else is your job changing? You've been through this transformational journey. How how many employees do you have now? [00:10:23] S1: So we're now about 230 or so. [00:10:25] S0: And the company's, what, three years old? [00:10:28] S1: Yeah. We turned three years now just recently. So, I mean, three years ago, we were three cofounders sitting in my apartment and living room, and then two years ago, 10 people. One year ago, 60 people, and now 230 people and being in 14 different countries across Europe. And I think, like, for me as a person, my core drive is very much feeling that I get to learn, that I get to develop, do novel things. For this journey, I'm getting that on, like, steroids. And every few months, we jump to, like, a new phase of the company that then brings, like, novel types of challenges and novel types of learnings, and I just get so much energy and excitement from this. [00:11:05] S0: And what are you focusing on now that maybe you weren't focusing on two years ago? Is it more about hiring and fundraising where it used to be more about sales and product? Like, how how has your world changed?