TORTUS AI (TORTUS) secures £3.3 million Seed investment led by Khosla Ventures

• TORTUS’s lead product, O.S.L.E.R., assists clinicians with time-consuming administrative tasks, enabling clinicians to focus more on patient care and spend less time on paperwork 
• TORTUS also launches a long-term research partnership with renowned London children’s hospital, Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH)
• TORTUS becomes the first company of its kind to achieve compliance under the NHS DTAC Standard

LONDON – TORTUS, a generative AI startup building a next generation assistant for doctors, today announced £3.3 million ($4.2 million) in seed funding led by Khosla Ventures. The company’s lead product, O.S.L.E.R., automates the clinical documentation process for final sign off by clinicians – including pre-chart summaries, visit notes, lab requests, coding, and more – by listening to the clinician’s conversation with their patient and seamlessly interacting with any electronic health records (EHR) system.   

TORTUS also announced a first-of-its-kind pilot with world-renowned Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH), where its technology will be evaluated in clinical settings. In addition, TORTUS becomes the first UK-based company to achieve the NHS DTAC standard of compliance for this AI technology. 

An ‘AI assistant’ for every clinician

In today’s healthcare system, doctors, nurses, and hospital staff are under immense pressure as the NHS faces continued staff shortages, workforce challenges, and growing demand. One of the greatest pressures reported by clinicians is the burden of administrative tasks. 

TORTUS’s platform, O.S.L.E.R. (‘oz-ler’: Operating System Leverage in Electronic Records), is designed to remove this burden from clinicians so they can devote more of their time and focus to patient load and quality of care. O.S.L.E.R. is part of every patient interaction, ‘listening’ to patient consultations, actively processing doctors’ notes in real-time, and automatically inputting data into and taking supervised actions in the patient’s EHR. To ensure patient privacy, the consultation audio is not recorded or stored by O.S.L.E.R., and any outputs are stored directly in the hospital’s secure EHR. 

With the help of O.S.L.E.R., clinicians are able to give their full attention to patients during the consultation. By removing the need to sit behind a computer or manually type notes and letters, clinicians reclaim valuable face time with patients and their families. 

Investing in the future of AI-enabled healthcare

Led by Khosla Ventures, the seed round also included Entrepreneur First, former NHS Chair Lord David Prior, and other investors Eric Jang, VP of AI at 1X Technologies, also joined as Chief Scientific Advisor.

The new funds will be used to accelerate the development and compliance of the O.S.L.E.R. agent, broadening its current capabilities to include performing important tasks such as placing prescription orders and adding diagnoses and coding to the system, giving even more time back to clinicians. The company will also focus on expansion into additional hospitals and primary care organisations, with a number of primary care sites already set to go live in February 2024.

Landmark NHS partnership 

TORTUS’s partnership with GOSH involves a multi-phase research study. In an early phase of the study, the tool was tested in simulated consultations with real GOSH clinicians and actors playing the role of patients. GOSH are now evaluating the tool on the hospital floor, with a cohort of clinicians trialling using O.S.L.E.R. in their outpatient clinics, to assist with the documentation of notes and letters. Data on the technology’s impact on patient experience and clinical workload will be collected and analysed by researchers. 

TORTUS is also in the early stages of partnering with other healthcare organisations across the UK, Canada, and the United States.

Quotes

Dr Shankar Sridharan, Chief Clinical Information Officer and Consultant Paediatric Cardiologist at GOSH:

“Healthcare professionals across all roles spend an average of 13.5 hours per week adding to, or creating, clinical documentation. This is more than a third of the average clinician’s working hours, and 25% more time than in 2015.

“At GOSH, we’re committed to rigorously trialling the best new clinical technologies to generate valuable data and evaluate their impact. We’re very excited to have this opportunity to partner with TORTUS and to study how generative AI tools could help our clinicians by safely freeing them from administrative tasks and allowing them to spend more time directly interacting with patients.”

Lord David Prior, former health minister & NHS chair:

“The U.K. has some of the most innovative, exciting health-tech companies in the world. TORTUS is one of them. O.S.L.E.R. will transform the working lives of doctors and is truly setting the standard for how innovative technologies like generative AI can be safely harnessed and deployed into the NHS to benefit clinicians and patients alike. 

“As the workload for clinicians in the NHS is constantly increasing, TORTUS is now automating healthcare note generation and records, giving doctors more time to focus directly on the patient, but the future potential of this technology is nearly limitless.“

Adina Tecklu, Partner at Khosla Ventures: 

“Doctors become doctors because they want to care for patients, but the reality today is that they are burdened with administrative work resulting in physician burnout and compromised patient care. TORTUS is the AI assistant for every physician, in every patient visit. It automates documentation and critical workflows so that doctors can spend more time with patients and no time on paperwork, a huge boon to both physician and patient wellbeing.” 

Co-founder and CEO of TORTUS, Dr Dom Pimenta:

“Throughout my 16 year medical career I’ve witnessed countless cases of burnout amongst my colleagues, and I’ve experienced it first-hand on more than one occasion. I know that over-worked, stressed clinicians can’t deliver the best quality of care to patients, and that this negatively impacts their patients’ experiences and outcomes. 

“We created O.S.L.E.R to free clinicians from their keyboards and the burden of administrative tasks. The technology delivers an immediate improvement to the engagement between a clinician and patient, which is the foundation of every healthcare system.  

“Ensuring patient safety, data security and water-tight regulatory compliance has been our primary focus during every stage of the product development and testing. We now have the evidence and approvals to confidently enter into a partnership with one of world’s leading paediatric hospitals, and to transform the working practices of their clinicians for the better. 

“I’d like to thank the GOSH team and all of our investors for their support of our mission to develop safe and effective generative AI technologies that solve healthcare’s biggest challenges”. 

– ENDS –

About TORTUS

TORTUS is a London-based generative AI start-up founded by cardiologist Dr Dom Pimenta and machine learning engineer Christopher Tan following their participation in the Entrepreneur First accelerator programme.

The company’s unique generative AI platform, O.S.L.E.R., was designed to assist clinicians by automating a variety of time-consuming everyday tasks, with the goal of eliminating burnout and human error from healthcare. 

TORTUS is backed by Khosla Ventures and several angel investors, including Rob Bishop (Magic Pony, ex-director of ML at Twitter) from the AI and health space. Learn more at www.tortus.ai

Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Foundation Trust

Founded in 1852, Great Ormond Street Hospital is one of the world’s leading children’s hospitals with the broadest range of dedicated, children’s healthcare specialists under one roof in the UK. With more than 252,000 outpatient and 43,000 inpatient visits every year, the hospital’s pioneering research and treatment gives hope to children from across the UK with the rarest, most complex and often life-threatening conditions. As an international centre of excellence in child healthcare, our patients and families are central to everything we do – from the moment they come through the door and for as long as they need us. With the first-of-its-kind Data Research, Innovation and Virtual Environments Unit (DRIVE), GOSH is one of the most digitally advanced hospitals in Europe.

For more information, please visit www.gosh.nhs.uk