How a tech injection ‘supercharged’ a medical transcription firm

In 2014, Jonathan Larbey and Mark Gilmartin felt they had discovered a business model that really worked.

The co-founders of T-Pro, a transcription-based software company aimed at clients in the medical industry, had experience of working in recruitment and legal services respectively. They decided to combine the dictation software offered by Gilmartin’s law firm with Larbey’s recruitment expertise.

The idea was to pay typists on an outsourced basis to take transcripts dictated by busy doctors in hospitals and turn them into complete, error-free letters and reports.

“We wanted to take dictation software and crowbar it into the cloud, and have a lot of typists on hand who get paid for what they typed,” Larbey said. “We felt we could create a really lean business model and deliver a 24-hour, overnight service to help hospitals with a service they really needed.”

The model worked reasonably well for a few years, the firm proving an attractive proposition for medical providers who felt paperwork was taking up too much of their time. But Larbey and Gilmartin always believed that they could make the business more efficient and drive further growth if they could digitise it further.

So in 2016, T-Pro reinvested all its revenues into the construction of its own cloud-based software, which would use artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the quality of its speech and language technologies, and cut down on the amount of human involvement necessary to produce finalised documents.

Today T-Pro still employs outsourced typists – now called editors – but they now work on improving the machine learning capabilities of its software.

“What they do for us now is almost annotate the data from dictation received from doctors,” Larbey said. “The technology is so good that they don’t need to spend too much time editing to complete the document, so now they’ll tag concepts or definitions mentioned by doctors. So we have this rich data that we can analyse and continue to improve the software.”

Technology, Larbey said, had “supercharged” T-Pro to the point where it had now become a global dictation software provider, with offices in India and a soon-to-be-announced acquisition in Australia.

“We made a decision at a certain point to change this from a service business into a software business. And that was the turning point for us it really accelerated our growth,” he said.

Today, the Enterprise Ireland-backed company employs 52 people around the world, with staff working in different time zones who ensure the company is operational 24 hours a day. It is in the process of entering the German market and aims to grow its operations in central Europe, having adapted its software to work in languages other than English.

T-Pro, Larbey said, was aggressively pursuing mergers and acquisitions because the “inertia” of the healthcare industry was a limiting factor for its growth.

“We want to have a global footprint for this business,” he said, pointing out that T-Pro’s main competitor, Nuance, was recently acquired by Microsoft for $19.7 billion.

“We want to be a market leader, and in all but size, we are. Nuance have size and scale in a way we don’t yet, so for us the next step is to become globally recognised as the market leader in this space.”