Ghent start-up Squire has received funds from Pieterjan Bouten’s investment fund Entourage via Entourage’s startup studio.
Squire has developed an AI solution to automate general practitioners' (GPs) consultation reports, reducing time spent on admin.
For every consultation, Flemish GPs must write a SOEP (Subjective, Objective, Evaluation and Plan) report on the patient and the diagnosis. In this report, they also consider medical codings which help classify medical patient data and clinical activities and display them in electronic patient records in a consistent and computer-processable way.
“Considering that a GP completes an average of 20 to 30 consultations a day, you can imagine that preparing these reports takes up a huge amount of time,” says Stan Callewaert, CEO and co-founder of Squire.
Callewaert asserts that GPs spend almost a third of their time on administration with more than half of all GP practices in Belgium implementing a (partial) patient stop.
“The aging population is driving the demand for care to unseen heights, but at the same time, a healthy work-life balance is becoming a priority for more and more and especially younger doctors.“
Squire’s software creates a draft of such a report after each consultation, based on the conversation between GP and patient, which the GP can later modify or finalise. The software also immediately applies medical coding automatically, ensuring that the report is soundly structured.
“With Squire and recent developments in AI, we can help halve the time GPs spend on administration. In this way, we create much-needed space for physician expertise and personalised patient care,” says Ignace Maes, CTO and co-founder of Squire.
Squire's software is now used in several GP practices, district health centres, and GP out-of-hours surgeries in Flanders, and it is currently available in a trial version for free to all Flemish doctors. According to Bâlâ Kirimli, a GP in Ghent:
“The software supports me in preparing consultation reports. The platform is constantly being developed based on feedback from doctors like me, which only enhances efficiency in my practice.”
Pieterjan Bouten asserts:
“Today, doctors spend a significant portion of their time on administrative tasks, and we have rarely seen such rapid technological adoption in healthcare as AI copilots.
The US has seen tremendous growth in this sector over the past year and we expect a similar trend in Europe. Squire is excellently positioned to become a category-defining player in the European healthtech sector.”
With Entourage's backing, Squire aims to accelerate its growth. Immediate priorities include enhancing the product's functionality and integrating it seamlessly with existing GP software. Beyond Belgium, founders Stan Callewaert and Ignace Maes envision international expansion and plan to adapt the platform to automate administrative tasks for other healthcare professionals, such as nurses and specialists."
Lead image: Squire. Photo: uncredited.
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