BetaKit is proud to present Changemakers, an AWS Startups series spotlighting Canadian tech companies solving complex global challenges. Read part three here.
Clinical documentation has always been a pain point for healthcare practitioners, often consuming hours of their time.
Last year, Vancouver-based Jane App wanted to tackle that frustration head-on. Having already streamlined operations for over 50,000 clinics through its practice management software, the team wanted to go a step further.
“Our goal is simple: help the helpers.”
Rafe Hatfield, Jane
With a mandate to simplify operations for healthcare providers across over 100 specialties, such as physiotherapists, psychologists, chiropractors and more, the startup took aim at a problem it knew was top of mind for clients.
Transcribing notes and collecting information while treating clients and patients is a labour-intensive process, and according to Raj Paul, who leads Jane’s new artificial intelligence team, many practitioners have no choice but to bring their work home to keep up.
The company has been quietly launching an AI-powered clinical scribe, Voice-to-Chart, built with a unique set of AI principles in mind, to let Jane practitioners swap notetaking for more eye contact, better patient care, and more connection in sessions.
Jane practitioners can record sessions in a way that is compliant with the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
These sessions are recorded within Jane’s platform—collecting patient consent as they do so. Session recordings are then securely processed into pre-designed smart charts; speeding up note creation for any needs imaginable, from a standard diagnosis to a custom treatment plan, all from the conversation. These charts can then be reviewed, edited as needed by practitioners, signed, and stored securely for client record keeping.
For Rafe Hatfield, Director of Engineering at Jane, Voice-to-Chart is just one way Jane is looking to continue improving how the company enables customers to run their practices better so they can focus on patient care.
“Our goal is simple: help the helpers,” Hatfield said.
Jane aims to help allied health clinics overcome their toughest challenges. But to overcome the challenges in delivering this new tool, the Jane team turned to AWS.
The heavy lifting
Jane’s journey began as a straightforward response to a common problem: healthcare providers are buried under admin. Co-founder and co-CEO Alison Taylor knew this problem first-hand after running her own multidisciplinary clinic and struggling with the software options available to manage tasks like online booking, charting, and billing. She turned to her eventual co-founder and co-CEO Trevor Johnston, with a simple ask to build something better.
That ‘something better’ became Jane App, a platform designed to make clinic operations so much easier so practitioners can focus on caring for patients and clients.
But bringing that solution to thousands of clinics globally came with a big challenge: keeping sensitive health data secure and in compliance with local laws.
“Compliance is a really big part of our field, and regionality is very important to us,” Hatfield said. “We need to ensure data is not crossing borders, and AWS gives us the regionality around the world for the various areas that we’re approaching.”
In healthcare, this precision is critical. Jane needs to securely store data in specific regions to meet regulations, like PIPEDA in Canada, HIPAA in the United States, PCI for payment processing, and SOC 2 certification for data storage and processing. According to Hatfield, much of that “heavy lifting” is handled by AWS.
“We manage healthcare data, and we are the processors of that data for our customers,” Hatfield said. “The security side of things is vitally important to us, and most of that comes almost out-of-the-box with AWS.”
Breaking unfamiliar ground
As Jane expanded to serve new regions, a new challenge arose. Supporting a mix of solo practitioners and larger clinics required its technology to handle more complexity without sacrificing performance.
Hosting on AWS keeps Jane operational, even during outages. By leveraging multiple data centers within a region, otherwise known as an availability zone, Jane’s servers stay operational even if one location experiences a failure.
“We can’t overstate how valuable that has been to us,” Hatfield said.
Scaling also means tackling unfamiliar technical challenges. For example, when Jane decided to restructure its infrastructure with AWS’s Elastic Kubernetes Service—which helps run and scale containerized applications—the team found itself without the necessary in-house expertise.
AWS offered training and experts to support the restructuring, and even vetted some of Jane’s project specs and solutions.
“The help that we get from the technical side of AWS to help us to take those steps, look at what we have, and help us make the right decisions as we move forward, has always been excellent,” Hatfield said.
New tools for old problems
Initially, Jane turned to Azure to build Voice-to-Chart, but later switched to AWS to take advantage of more support.
After moving to the Claude large language models hosted on AWS’s Bedrock system, Paul described the process as relatively smooth so far.
Demand for, and usage of, this feature validates the charting challenges clinics face. Even before being made available to Jane clinics, Voice-to-Chart generated a waitlist of hundreds of clinics. Early adopters of Voice-to-Chart are also reducing their charting time by up to 75 percent.
“Not only do users trust it, but we’ve actually seen them endorsing it to their colleagues, so it’s been a huge time saver to them,” Paul said.
Just the first step
Last year, Jane quietly hit a significant milestone: $100 million in annual recurring revenue. Taylor has said that reaching the next milestone of $250 million in ARR feels more accessible. “Once you hit a certain path it feels like you just keep doing more of the same,” she added.
Hatfield said the startup is still very focused on how it can serve allied healthcare providers better. “The growth we’ve had in the last year has been great, but it’s really just a first step into the sort of scale that we want to be working at,” Hatfield added.
Among its top priorities are expanding deeper into large markets like the US. The startup is also focused on refining its platform to support larger, more complex clinics and updating its infrastructure to handle larger volumes of data. As these challenges intensify, Hatfield expects AWS will help keep the ground steady for Jane.
“Making sure we’ve got the right platform in place to help us do that vertical and horizontal scaling is key to making sure we can hit those goals,” he said.
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Feature image courtesy BetaKit / Jane App.