Fiza Shaukat founded Patient First.AI to make a difference in the healthcare systems in areas outside the US, such as Pakistan. She decided to create a platform which would allow patients to keep their healthcare data on a digital health card. This card would make the check-in process much faster and efficient.
Highlights:
Sal Daher Introduces Fiza Shaukat
"...How PatientFirst.AI is creating value for patients in places where right now there's no really easy way except for a wad of notes, a notebook, to keep track from visit to visit..."
"... You see all the digitization happening over there, but why don't you have the same seamless experience within healthcare? That's what we want to enable with this digital health card. They'll go at a clinic and they scan their digital health card or a QR code, and as soon as they scan that in, they basically are checked in..."
The Patient First Business Model
Next Steps for Patient First
Fiza's Entrepreneurial Journey
Familial Role Models for Entrepreneurship
"... Somehow a brother and sister you have known each other for your whole life, so chances are you're going to get along more or less. Whereas husband and wife sometimes it can be you've known each other for three years and the stress of founding a company together can be very painful..."
ANGEL INVEST BOSTON IS SPONSORED BY:
Transcript of, “Patient First.AI”
Guest: Fiza Shaukat
Sal Daher: I'm really proud to say that the Angel Invest Boston Podcast is sponsored by Purdue University entrepreneurship and Peter Fasse, patent attorney at Fish & Richardson. Purdue is exceptional in its support of its faculty, faculty of its top five engineering school, in helping them get their technology from the lab out to the market, out to industry, out to the clinic. Peter Fasse is also a great support to entrepreneurs. He is a patent attorney specializing in microfluidics and has been tremendously helpful to some of the startups with which I'm involved, including a startup came out of Purdue, Savran Technologies. I'm proud to have these two sponsors for my podcast.
Sal Daher Introduces Fiza Shaukat
Welcome to Angel Invest Boston, conversations with Boston's most interesting angels and founders. I'm Sal Daher, an angel investor who is very curious about how to build technology companies. Today, we have the privilege of having a young founder, Fiza Shaukat. Say hi to our audience, Fiza.
Fiza Shaukat: Hi everybody.
Sal Daher: Fiza is the founder of PatientFirst.AI, which is in the digital health space. She and her coworkers are creating a way for patients in countries where medical records are not easily accessed, just to make it easy for people to carry that around. Welcome, Fiza.
Fiza Shaukat: Thank you so much, Sal, for having me here today.
Sal Daher: Okay. Tell us what the problem is that Fiza is solving and how it's doing it.
Fiza Shaukat: Sure. Sal, basically, most of the US in the US, you have the Epics and the Cerners and these big EHR systems.
Sal Daher: EHR, electronic health records.
Fiza Shaukat: Electronic health record systems, which are very patient-centric, driven by insurance for a population of 330 million people in the US building revenue of $5 to $6 billion per year. There is an entire population outside the US, which is more than 1 billion people who do not have access to anything like that.
Sal Daher: That's right.
Fiza Shaukat: There's an entire opportunity of basically Athenahealth version of these EMR systems that's missing, that's more patient-centric. Most of these countries are paper-based systems, do not have any electronic medical records, most patients spend out of pocket in these areas, and have no way of actually tracking and monitoring their health story. That is where our solution, PatientFirst.AI comes in.
"...How PatientFirst.AI is creating value for patients in places where right now there's no really easy way except for a wad of notes, a notebook, to keep track from visit to visit..."
Sal Daher: Awesome. Awesome. Let me just set a little context. Our patient listeners will hear the term EHR and EMR used interchangeably. Electronic health records, electronic medical records. It all means the same thing. Your medical data in a database which can be accessed by a doctor in the US that came about because there are payers, insurance companies, and so forth. Put it this way. The providers, physicians, and hospitals needed a system to be able to bill to the payers. This is how electronic health records came about in the US.
In a country such as Pakistan, where Fiza is from, and other places, a lot of medicine is done with people paying out in their own pockets. There's no natural structure to create these electronic health records. The EHRs, and EMRs in the US have their advantages, and they also have great disadvantages because they're not designed to help patients keep track of their health. They're designed for the hospitals and the doctors to get paid. By the way, they're used for that. Anyway, please continue.
Explain how PatientFirst.AI is creating value for patients in places where right now there's no really easy way except for a wad of notes, a notebook, to keep track from visit to visit. It's not like they're seeing the same primary care physician. There's no continuity of care. Nobody really knows what's going on.
Fiza Shaukat: I'll walk you through a patient journey in one of these countries. What happens?
Sal Daher: Excellent. Excellent.
Fiza Shaukat: Number one is when a patient gets sick and they want to find a physician near them, they have no way to find a physician near them. They're calling some of their relatives to find out who might be the best physician. They usually go at a private clinic at night where these physicians have a very long waiting line. They're waiting on an average of two hours to see a physician.
Sal Daher: At night, is it because the physicians usually work at public health during the day? Is that--
Fiza Shaukat: Yes. They're working in the public health sector because of--
Sal Daher: It's a little bit like the United Kingdom.
Fiza Shaukat: The patient-to-physician ratio is 1 to 1,300.
Sal Daher: Oh my God. Comparable in the US is what?
Fiza Shaukat: I think it's still low. It's not compared to because some of these populations is 220 million people and they're only 150,000 physicians. Just look at the massive scale. These physicians have to work in the public sector in the morning where they usually cater to the low-income. Then they have their private clinics where they're majorly catering to the high and the middle income at night. What's happening is, imagine this chronic disease patient reaches a private clinic, is waiting there for two hours, and has a pile of all papers from all these visits that he's had with this doctor or any other doctor with the lab results and every paper that you can imagine sitting inside.
He goes inside for his clinic visit finally after two hours and hands all of those pieces of paper to the physician. Then it's the physician's responsibility there-- The physician maximum has 15 to 20 minutes per appointment, he's going to find his previous paper if the patient hasn't forgotten it at home, hopefully, or he's going to find the latest lab results or whatever in those 5, 10 minutes and just listen to most of the information that the patient is telling him.
Because if he finds the paper good and well, if not, then he's going about the information that the patient is providing him. He'll scribble the next set of prescriptions for him on a new piece of paper and then hand it over to the patient. Then it's the patient's responsibility. They go to the lab, they go to the pharmacy, they come back to the physician, they don't come back. It all is the patient's responsibility and the patient just makes a payment outside. Then that's it.
"... You see all the digitization happening over there, but why don't you have the same seamless experience within healthcare? That's what we want to enable with this digital health card. They'll go at a clinic and they scan their digital health card or a QR code, and as soon as they scan that in, they basically are checked in..."
That is the end of the patient journey right there with more paper piled up and going home with a fragmented healthcare ecosystem. That is where the patient first comes in. First of all, we are a patient-centric platform. What we are doing is we are providing the patient stability to find a physician near them who are ranked and who are trustworthy and they're qualified from the government so that they know that you're going to a good physician.
Once they book an appointment, they go to the clinic, and as soon as-- They show a digital health card like your bank card to the clinic. Imagine the transactions at a clinic in healthcare have to be as seamless as they're in FinTech. You see all the digitization happening over there, but why don't you have the same seamless experience within healthcare? That's what we want to enable with this digital health card.
They'll go at a clinic and they scan their digital health card or a QR code, and as soon as they scan that in, they basically are checked in. Now, they start getting receipts and messages of how long their wait time could be so that they're not getting anxious of like how many times they have to just keep sitting around. That just causes a lot of frustration in the clinic environment.
Once they go inside, what the physician is doing is using the pen and paper technology that we provide them. They write on the paper as they would a normal piece of paper. As soon as it's done writing, it basically digitizes the prescription on our physician and patient application. This is really important because it allows for the physician to not change any behavior. In most of these countries because of the high load of patients, that's coming in, and because this is vital information, the physicians are not willing to change their behavior and are not willing to adopt to a new technology.
We integrated the same technology in the hands of the physician so that you get the information that you need and the patients in drive vital information is also digitized. As soon as that information is digitized, the patient gets a WhatsApp message and a patient portal that here's your digital prescription and then gets a message. "Do you want your prescription delivered at home? You want your lab test done?"
The journey does not stop right there. We are carrying it forward to an end-to-end seamless experience for a patient. If they say yes, then you actually partner up with a pharmacy and lab and have their medication to a lab, and send to them at their home. five, ten days later if their medication finishes, you message them again, "You had a prescription for five days, do you want your prescription delivered again?" If they respond, so you are actually engaging with the patient even after they leave the clinic and making sure that the health and journey is being carried forward. That is what we are trying to do, provide that end-to-end seamless experience for the patient.
Sal Daher: Really interesting. A couple of things occurred to me in emerging markets. I had a previous life before becoming a tech investor. I was an investor in emerging markets for a couple of decades, and a funny phenomenon happened. Wired telephony was the standard back in the '70s and the '80s and the developed world had very well-developed telephone networks. The developing world had a very, very bare-bone telephone network.
When cellular telephony came in, most countries basically leapfrogged. In Africa, there are many countries that they're wired telephony is still around, it's vestigial, but everybody has a cell phone. The wired systems never got off the ground. I see that this potential for peril here. You have in the US, for example, these legacy electronic health records systems which are closed systems. They're not really open to innovation. They're not responsive to the market, a company like Epic, they set the rules, and have the first-mover advantage. They are well established. They have a big chunk of the market and so they provide the services they want to provide and users don't have a lot of say.
Whereas what you're creating is really going to survive only if the users find it really, really usable. You have the potential to create something that might leapfrog the Cerners and the Epics and the other types of EHRs for massive populations around the world. These guys will come along and say we can offer you first-world EMR to a hospital in Lahore or someplace like that in Pakistan. They say, "No, no, we don't need that. You guys are wired telephony. We're on cell phones here already with Patient First."
If you do it right if you're able to execute. There is the potential for that which is really exciting. Anyway please continue. What is your business model? At the moment, how do you think that you're going to be able to make money?
The PatientFirst Business Model
Fiza Shaukat: We'll be making money while providing-- The major amount of revenue will be coming in from providing services to the patient. Just like you talked about right now most of these Epics and Cerners are catered towards the physician centricity. Why? The reason is that the US healthcare system is driven by insurance systems because everything is reimbursed by insurance. You need to understand that most of these markets do not function like that.
There is little to no insurance system as the spending is happening with the patients spending out of pocket when they're going to these clinics, when they're going to buy, the labs, pharmacies, and any other services that they need for their healthcare. Our major business model since we are patient-centric is a fleet platform for the patient but we basically will provide services to the patients and take a commission out of that and that's how we will run through most of our revenue that's going to be coming again.
Sal Daher: You take a commission from the physician, from the pharmacy when the patient shows up for the labs.
Fiza Shaukat: We're providing more customers to them.
Sal Daher: More customers.
Fiza Shaukat: Nobody has insight into the prescription right now. With the piece of paper which is the most important piece of paper which actually has all the information going inside it that gets lost until you are not able to capture that information, how are you able to provide any services to the patient and nobody's able to do that right now.
Sal Daher: You're biting the leg of a very big dog which is big electronic health records in the US but you're also biting the leg of another smaller dog called the PBMS, the prescription benefit management systems in the US. These are intermediaries between the people who are paying for prescriptions and the people who are using them. They have a lot of data. We've had people who've worked with PBMS as a matter of fact founder of Connective Health, Ryan Hess used to work for PBM and they explained their business. They add a lot of value and they are much more responsive.
I should say that PBMS are much more responsive than the providers of electronic health records in the sense that they're creatures of the market. I think there's also potential for that. You're going to have a PBM rolled into your system. At present who is it that's paying you? Is it the physicians paying you for referrals right now?
Fiza Shaukat: Yes, it's the physicians that are paying us for referrals right now. Just to give you some context, it's an $80 billion healthcare market in all of these other countries, and our next target market. It's a huge opportunity.
Sal Daher: You said $80 billion.
Fiza Shaukat: Yes, it's an $80 billion healthcare market in all of these different target markets that we plan to go after. It's the opportunity to impact more than one billion people. You are basically building this healthcare infrastructure from the ground up for them which is very easy to use and lightweight and with the patient being at the center of the ecosystem because these are the people who are actually in charge of their healthcare and you want to give them a solution that they will have a seamless end-to-end digital experience for themselves.
Sal Daher: What's your traction so far?
Fiza Shaukat: We just launched four and a half weeks ago already. We have 300 patients already on our platform. We have a target of around 5,000 patients at the end of the year which we're on ground already to fulfill. As soon as these patients are coming into these clinics, the physicians prescribe their prescriptions and they get onboarded on a platform. Then we are on the board to provide them services. That's how easy it is with their carrying their digital health card wherever they're going and that's the services that we are providing.
Sal Daher: Excellent. You mentioned that you're a lightweight system. This brings to mind another interview that I had about Hikma Health. I think you've run across them, and they are a lightweight electronic health record for dislocated populations, for refugee populations to provide an easy way to keep vital data. That's data people keeping in the scraps of paper and so forth for refugee populations as well.
They're a different route. They're going the nonprofit route. They're basically funded by the Gates Foundation or one of these groups. Basically, it's a service that's provided. I'm just curious what your thoughts are on that approach.
Fiza Shaukat: Yes, sure. I've heard about them. They're doing some great work with refugees. Number one is their target market is a little different where they're working with refugees on the ground. Number two is that the way that they're recording the information is a little different from the physician's end. They have a portable medical record, basically, where the physicians again have to change their behavior from a paper and pen and actually go enter the information on their system.
We started doing that initially as well. We were doing this around a year ago, and we saw that the physicians basically don't have the time to change their behavior to retain to a platform, something like this. That is why our unique, innovative approach, so that we have a platform that's integrated in the current ecosystem within the physician's behavior because no matter how much you want to have these patients on board, you need to get these patients through the physicians initially.
It's a chicken and egg problem. You get enough physicians first, you get the patients are growing, and then once the patients start coming in, start engaging with your platform, then you switch towards the patients' side. That is why there are a few differences where their platform is majorly refugee focused. Secondly, is that I think they're providing a still EMR system or a very lightweight EMR with the physician is actually on the ground.
Whoever is at the attendant, has to go in and in their language, I think they're provided with. I don't know how the prescription is available then. Is it available on a patient platform or do they print it out? I'm not sure about those specifications for Hikma Health, but very impactful work that they're doing and I was really excited to learn about that.
Sal Daher: Yes, it's very interesting. The brother of Senan Ebrahim who was on the podcast is Hassaan Ebrahim. He heads it up now.
Fiza Shaukat: Oh, okay.
Sal Daher: The Ebrahim brothers are quite remarkable. Hassaan, Ali, and Senan. Senan and Ali own another startup, which is a for-profit startup in which I'm an investor called Delfina Health. The third brother, Hassaan Ebrahim-- I imagine they must have soccer matches regularly where they get together.
Fiza Shaukat: Interestingly, my other co-founder is also my older brother.
Sal Daher: Oh, yes. Your co-founder is your older brother. Awesome. What's the division of labor with your co-founder?
Fiza Shaukat: Yes. He's more on the technical side. He graduated as an electrical computer engineer from the University of Toronto. He's on the more technical end. I'm more on the end of the operation and more on the strategy end. That's how we've divided our labor.
Sal Daher: Okay. I saw you pitched at Walnut Ventures and, one of the questions that was asked at Walnut is where are you based? Your client base right now is in Pakistan, but you are a US company operating in Boston. You're located in Boston, and the thought is that probably makes sense to be US based just because you can get things done faster.
Fiza Shaukat: Also because we really believe that Pakistan is just a starting market, our base is in Boston. We are [unintelligible 00:18:56] CAP. We are working out at the Harvard Innovation Lab right now. Our tech team is based out of there, and the entire image is that Pakistan is a starting market. This is not a one-country-born solution. I worked in Peru. I worked in Africa, and I worked in all of these other developing countries as well, and emerging markets.
Similar problems exist there as well with the same healthcare ecosystem, huge populations, highly mobile penetrated, paper-based system, patient paying out of pocket. If these four things, or three out of four things are true, our solution is very much acceptable over there. I just had a conversation with one of my professors at Harvard Medical School who runs oncology centers in Africa, and he wants to do a pilot over there because he sees the need of that.
It's very well a solution that can be very easily be deployed in all of these countries together. That's why we see the vision being extended beyond just Pakistan to all of these countries. That is why we are based over here so that we could have that unified big network that we are working with.
Sal Daher: Interesting. Population Pakistan, what, 220-230 million people?
Fiza Shaukat: 80% are more penetrated.
Sal Daher: More penetrated. This sounds a lot like Africa and digital telephony leapfrogging old telephones. What's the next country on your list?
Next Steps for PatientFirst
Fiza Shaukat: The next country would be Bangladesh and then Nigeria. Very similar. Then we are planning to go to UAE and the thing is that even the patient side of the platform could be very well integrated with people who do have an EMR system. The entire patient application could be used with an EMR system and basically be providing that end-to-end services as well. We think of our company as providing all of these products. Once we have build this entire healthcare ecosystem, any of those products can be used at any case scenario that we want to, and hopefully, there's a market for that in the US as well. There's interoperability very well over here as well.
Sal Daher: Connective Health and digital health in the US. There's so many needs in that all the startups that I see, they're just addressing a small, tiny little sliver and a well-designed lightweight system that's highly responsive, that has very low barriers to use. I like your approach to removing the friction for entry of data into the system. We're just scanning stuff that's really important. Very good.
Fiza, is there anything else that you want to talk about? We talked about need, we talked about traction, we talked about your business model, we talked about your path and the future countries you going to go to. Is there anything else about the startup and the business that you want to talk to? Because what I'd like to do is I'd like to have a brief promo for the podcast, and then the second part we go into your entrepreneurial journey.
Fiza Shaukat: I think the only thing that I would want to add is this vision that, when we are in the US and thinking about the healthcare ecosystem, we're talking to people, they think about it as a very complicated system. Anything is very like, "Oh, you are building it from ground up or it's because of all of these players." I think that's what we want to simplify. We want to simplify the experience for the patients. We want to simplify the way people think about healthcare, and we want to simplify the way that you think about healthcare and aspect of just the US healthcare ecosystem.
The impact it can have. It's not just 330 million people, it's all of these other people who don't have access to it. How can you give them access and improve this opportunity? It's an $80 billion healthcare market that you have to go after and actually help the one with new people who need access to it. I would just want people to think about that. I think when we are in a day-to-day looking at the US healthcare ecosystem we get lost in how complicated it is. There's an entire opportunity to simplify it for this other part of the world which can still be done. That's what we are trying to do,
Sal Daher: Where there's a lot of low-hanging fruit.
Fiza Shaukat: Exactly.
Sal Daher: Yes. Excellent. Before we delve here into what got Fiza to start this company, very, very interesting company, PatientFirst.AI which you can find at a patientfirstai.com. I'd like to give a very brief promo to this podcast in a sense that the reason we exist really is to help people learn about how to build startups in a better way. Listeners, if you found this podcast interesting or useful, please help us get found by more people.
The number one thing you can do is to go to Apple Podcasts or a Google Play store and leave a review. A written review. It doesn't have to very long. Give us a five-star rating and then complain about my talking too much or whatever in writing because that's okay. As long as you give me a five-star rating, you can say all sorts of nasty things about me in the written section.
The algorithm will pick it up and we'll privilege the podcast, a particular episode when you do the review and also follow us. They used to call it subscribe. Now it's called follow our podcast. It means that we'll show up every week in your feed and you will hear about really fascinating startups like PatientFirst.AI and founders. Really compelling founders like Fiza Shaukat. Appreciate that, thanks.
Fiza, how did you decide to go off on this crazy journey? A smart young woman like you, your degree here in the United States in Boston University. You have experience in management consulting. You're probably earning very well as a management consultant. Why are you doing this crazy thing as they say in Arabic, this majnun thing?
Fiza's Entrepreneurial Journey
Fiza Shaukat: Good question. I ask myself sometimes that question. Basically, one of my relatives was hospitalized back home and at that time they were rushed to the hospital with all their medical records and the doctor had lost it. When they lost it, it took them three weeks to rerun the test and she passed away. At that time, I was working as a management consultant at Accenture but I was also doing some global health projects in Africa and I was looking at their healthcare ecosystem as well so I knew that there was a need.
I was working in the US healthcare ecosystem so EMRs and pharmaceutical industry in the US so I understood how they functioned really well. As a biomedical engineer, I thought that the way would be okay, how I could improve the healthcare ecosystems around the work was take a career trajectory go pursue a degree in public health at Harvard, and go work for WHO or UN and that will give me the capability and the tools to increase and improve the access of healthcare in all of these countries. Little to my information when I heard about one of this incidents that happened that affected me I was like, "What can I do to solve it? What can I do to actually solve this pain point?"
I had an engineering degree, my brother was an engineer as well he was more on the technical side, I was more on the operational side. He was also working in the healthcare ecosystem and we were like, "What can we do to solve it?" That is where we came up with this idea of PatientFirst. I went to Boston University's new venture competition and I pitched my idea. Four months fast forward we won that competition and they incubated us in the summer over there and they basically took our idea from market research to actually getting a prototype up and running.
Once we did have a prototype I was like, "Okay, now that we got some funding, we have a prototype it's worth going and doing the next step." We put our corporate jobs on hold and went back to Pakistan peak COVID for one and a half years to actually start basically testing out the idea sitting in the rooms of physicians, showing them the product and the patients what they actually need.
Sal Daher: Wow so you really did on-the-ground research?
Fiza Shaukat: Yes. Spending that time made me realize that this is the level of impact that I was looking for, it's not only just it's serving a certain few patients or a few people it's how can you do work which can basically have access to millions and billions of people. That really excited us as co-founders and the level of impact we could have and we never looked back after that.
Sal Daher: That is so exciting. It reminds me, very interesting, I haven't seen many startups from the Boston University ecosystem but Sol Clarity is a really interesting startup that's come out of that and I've interviewed on the podcast. A very fateful podcast, because it was during a thunderstorm and the lights went out after that or the internet went out, it crashed and everybody had frozen faces. It was unbelievable but today is a nice day, it's just a cold day here in Boston. Interesting companies coming from the Boston University BU environment. Very good. Do you have entrepreneurs in your family? Is that a model for you?
Familial Role Models for Entrepreneurship
Fiza Shaukat: I would say my grandfather was an entrepreneur. He migrated from India at that time and he basically started his own business in Lahore, Pakistan. Then my father basically joined him and they've both been entrepreneurs, that's how I look about it. They started in a very different, in jewelry business so very different from healthcare.
Sal Daher: Oh, totally different.
Fiza Shaukat: It had nothing to do with healthcare. [laughs]
Sal Daher: It's a customer-centric business.
Fiza Shaukat: Exactly, very customer-centric and I would say that it has the mindset that where when you have your own business and you're thinking about things from a very different perspective. I remember my grandfather sitting through-- At that time we didn't have Excels or computers and he didn't have anything. He would be sitting and the jewelers he had a piece of paper with all these Excel-- Just like lines on an Excel that's all and he's writing numbers on it.
Sal Daher: Paper spreadsheet.
Fiza Shaukat: Writing numbers on it and doing all of those calculations. I've seen growing up that. There's definitely that instilled in the family.
Sal Daher: Wow, that is wonderful, very good. Tell me about your co-founder. It's you and your brother as co-founders?
Fiza Shaukat: Yes, it's my brother and I who are co-founders. It was his idea kind of. I was the streak of going and pitching it and I think we both make a great team because we as siblings know what are the strengths and weaknesses for each other. As a co-founder, it's really important because you know the technical and you know the personal. I think it gets a little challenging when you're talking about the business all the time and you need to stop talking about it and be like it's a family dinner that's happening. You cannot talk about the business anymore.
"... Somehow a brother and sister you have known each other for your whole life, so chances are you're going to get along more or less. Whereas husband and wife sometimes it can be you've known each other for three years and the stress of founding a company together can be very painful..."
Sal Daher: I know. That's creating that separation. It's just interesting. We've seen a husband and wife founder teams and it's one of the things that angels they'd like to be told when they see especially the same last name. I know that Walnut, "They have the same last name, the co-founders. What's the connection?" "Oh, no, it's her brother."
Somehow a brother and sister you have known each other for your whole life, so chances are you're going to get along more or less. Whereas husband and wife sometimes it can be you've known each other for three years and the stress of founding a company together can be very painful, but people like David Ciccarelli of Voice.com, it's like a huge platform for voice actors. He founded that with his opera-singing wife.
She was like his first customer. She came to him. She was a voice artist and he had a studio and they ended up founding a company together. They're married and they have a similar division. They keep their business life and private life apart to a certain extent so that's excellent.
Fiza Shaukat: Yes, I think that's key to it, that you need to know how to separate both because otherwise, it can get complicated because you can have an argument at work, but you don't want it --
Sal Daher: You don't want it to carry on to family.
Fiza Shaukat: Exactly. Definitely.
Sal Daher: That's funny. These relationships are dynamic of having a co-founder that compliments your skills, but has the same value system that you have is extremely powerful, is very, very powerful. Actually, I think the most well-supported result in the study of entrepreneurship is that having more than one founder increases the chances of success of the company significantly. It's a statistically significant increase if the founders get along and if they're complementary in skills and so on.
Fiza Shaukat: Definitely. No, it's really important to have someone that you bounce ideas off, that you know you can call someone and went out and also have thinking sessions with, because I'm not sure how solo founders function at this point, but I'm sure it's a hard journey.
Sal Daher: It's very hard. It's also good to have-- Are you thinking about having a board?
Fiza Shaukat: We don't have a board yet, but definitely have some people in mind. We do have investors who've been really good supporters since day one. I had my professor from MIT who's literally been there since day one and a few other HBS people who have actually been really huge supporters of us. I don't think even like at the high lab, their advisors over there it's like going up to them for every small thing that we could think about and they're guiding our way. I think having people like that really help and push you along a journey. It's definitely not something that you do alone.
Sal Daher: Yes. Eventually, I think it's a good idea to think about having a board because a board pushes you to think ahead. Because as an entrepreneur, you're always looking at your toes. This is Ed Roberts, a professor of Meredith MIT Sloan entrepreneurship, you're always looking at your shoes so you don't trip but the board forces you to look up a little bit and so I highly advise that as a company matures--
Your company's still young but eventually, I think you're headed on the right path that you're going to develop. It's good to have board members that you can trust and you can go to them and be very open and very candid and have good, helpful discussions. At this point, is there anything that you want to say to our audience of angel investors, founders, and people who work at startups that you want to leave with before we wrap up the podcast?
Fiza Shaukat: Yes, I would love to get connected to anybody you think who might be a great fit to talk to us. We are raising our next round so we'll love to get connected to people who are interested in this space, in the healthcare market, in all these other markets, and talk there. Thank you so much for listening.
Sal Daher: Tremendous. Fiza Shaukat of PatientFirst.AI.com, the lightweight electronic health record for the rest of the world outside the US where there's $80 billion possible business market, a billion people who need this lightweight EHR.
Fiza Shaukat: Thank you.
Sal Daher: This is Angel Invest Boston. I'm Sal Daher. Thank you.
[music]
I'm glad you were able to join us. Our engineer is Raul Rosa. Our theme was composed by John McKusick. Our graphic design is by Katharine Woodman-Maynard. Our host is coached by Grace Daher.