In the “Iron Man” movies, superhero Tony Stark breezes through tedious tasks aided by Jarvis, a computer system lobbing helpful rejoinders at the billionaire’s spoken questions.
Jarvis helped Stark save the world. Dentist Ryan Hungate watched the films and wanted that kind of tech in a dental office.
Inspired by the idea of a hands-free helper, Hungate assembled a team that included two local orthodontists and a Google engineer to create Simplifeye, a software platform that connects with a dentist’s electronic records and allows a doctor to verbally access patient data through a wearable device such as Google Glass.
The startup hopes to capitalize on a growing army of wearables, including the Apple Watch that is scheduled to ship in April, to help dentists save time and focus more on the patient. A dentist, for example, could use Simplifeye to quickly pull up a patient’s history and see a list of allergies on Google Glass or call up an implant demo on a nearby screen – all without taking off the latex gloves.
“You’ve been to the doctor where you come in and they greet you and turn their back to you to start typing,” said Hungate, 31, Simplifeye’s chief executive. If a doctor weren’t tethered to a computer keyboard during the visit, “that entire 20 minutes they’re looking at you instead of missing something.”
Simplifeye is testing the platform privately with a select number of dentists and plans to expand to a beta test in a few hundred offices by next month.
The company is in the process of raising upwards of $1 million from angel investors and venture capitalists for the first round of funding, taking meetings locally but also in the Bay Area, New York and Texas. A prominent competitor, Silicon Valley-based Augmedix, recently secured a total of $23 million in venture funding.
“If a practice is chartless and retrieving patient information from computers in the operatory, you’re talking about one to two hours a day of time that could be spent on something else,” said Lois Banta, a Grain Valley, Mo., dental practice management consultant.
Simplifeye’s biggest challenge might be a generational one, however.
“Younger dentists graduating from dental school, who grew up with technology, will be all over that,” said Banta. “If it’s somebody well established, who doesn’t use a lot of technology, they might be more resistant to this idea.”
Hungate, who’s a month away from getting his orthodontics degree, met co-founder Dr. John Pham at USC while Pham was finishing up his own orthodontic studies. Pham brought on classmate Vince Nguyen, an electrical engineer. The founding team was rounded out on the financial side by Zach Hungate, Ryan Hungate’s cousin, who previously worked as an investment banker for Raymond James in New York.
Their company, Augmented Reality Orthodontics, won last year’s New Venture Seed Competition at USC’s Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies. The team walked away with $20,000 in seed money and $5,000 worth of legal services and admission to the preccelerator program at law firm Stubbs Alderton & Markiles.
While the initial infusion has been helpful, especially because it wasn’t exchanged for a chunk of the company, the law firm’s mentorship and free space in its Santa Monica office has been essential, according to Ryan Hungate.
“The preccelerator has probably been the biggest win,” he said. “They helped us set up the company from scratch.”
In addition to the co-founders, Simplifeye has added six employees, including Chief Technology Officer Patrick Lai, who remains an engineer at Google.
Healthy tech
In addition to technological hurdles, the Simplifeye team has to navigate the rules of the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which, for example, dictates the level of encryption that must be used in software programs containing patient data.
“We are making sure all the patient data when transferred and stored is secure,” Hungate said. “The platform was created with security first. With what just happened with Anthem, you can never be too careful.”
Anthem Inc., based in Indianapolis, was hit by a data breach that exposed the personal information of some 80 million people.
The Simplifeye platform is hosted in Google Cloud and works with Google Glass and Android-enabled smart watches, and the team has already started working with the Apple Watch developer kit.
Its final release will also support dictation, transcribing and recording of spoken notes. Users will pay $375 a month to use the platform, and dentists will supply their own wearable.
Hungate said Simplifeye has focused on dentistry to start with because “we’re dentists and we know the industry.” It plans to expand to other professions as well.
But Banta, the consultant, sees lots of uses in dentistry alone, particularly with the ability to quickly cue up video demonstrations of procedures dentists are suggesting.
“If you can spend that time really focusing on the discussion with patients and less time trying to find what you’re trying to show them, that is money in the bank,” she said.
