Vocadian

Workforce fatigue and burnout are highly prevalent but often underdiagnosed and untreated. In the healthcare sector, it led to two substantial consequences — poor performance or service delivery and long-term staff turnover.

First, burnout is estimated to have led to a yearly $6B in value due to poor service delivery or medical errors. It occurs across all specialty verticals. In the specialties where labor shortage is more prevalent, patient satisfaction rates are even lower.

Second, it is estimated that such long hours have led to dissatisfaction among the Healthcare. Care teams are under tremendous strain — with burnout, turnover, and labor shortages at record levels. The high cost of turnover and growing reliance on contract labor are sending labor expenses soaring and operating margins plummeting. Simply put, employees are at their breaking point, which could have a long-term impact on patient access and care quality. Moreover, burnout can put the sustainability of the healthcare profession at risk. A survey indicates 1 in 10 medical residents considered dropping out due to fatigue. Yet, training a medical resident in the U.S. costs $1.3M.

A challenge behind the issue is an ineffective scheduling mechanism that failed to audit cognitive performance and readiness for high stake tasks. Where existing solutions exist, they require a high threshold for adoption.

At Vocadian, we see Holistic Health as the heart of all organizations, and an opportunity to improve HSE and productivity management simultaneously, subsequently promoting a healthier working culture and society for future generations to come.

We have developed a clinically validated voice biomarker that can provide instantaneous assessment and long-term prediction of one’s fatigue and fit-for-duty. On top of assessment, Vocadian also offers behavioral intervention measures to alleviate burnout symptoms based on latest research in circadian science. For front-line HCPs, our solutions are two-folds. At individual level, Vocadian acts as a personalized schedule assistant, offering suggestions on when to perform task and when to take a rest based on individual target assignments and circadian rhythm. Individual can also leverage the behavioral intervention features (i.e., light exposure, power nap schedule, sleep hygiene, mealtime adjustment, caffeine intake) to actively manage burnout symptoms. At organizational level, Vocadian is a SaaS platform that can manage complex workforce with aggregated HCP fatigue assessment data to replace the current generic and disconnected system to combat inefficient workflows and communication bottlenecks that can frustrate providers, delay patient access, and compromise care.

Vocadian serves physicians and nurses, especially the ones most susceptible to burnout (i.e., emergency room HCPs, night shift nurses) to make an impact on their operational performance and individual wellness. Patients will also be positively impacted by Vocadian as a more effective healthcare operation system will improve patient access to care and reach better quality of care.

Vocadian is built on 3 key factors: high technology barrier with proprietary scientific findings, leading-industry connections to expand the business, and scalability due to the low-cost and non-invasive voice-powered software.

We have identified long-lasting pain points in high-stake industries without effective solutions. Our novel AI technology enabled us to provide first-of-its-kind treatment and segment-specific solutions to transform workforce fatigue. This is an open market with substantial profits. Vocadian breaks in the workplace safety regime with protected solutions and diverse industry connections to scale up.

In parallel to healthcare sector, we are also applying Vocadian’s technology in other safety-sensitive industry sectors, including transportation & logistics, and mining, oil & gas. In the past three months, Vocadian has established strategic pilot partnership with one of the largest miners and a global top three container shipper. In total, the user group has reached over 2,000 employees. These pilot studies will enable to further validate the effectiveness and convenience of Vocadian technology in real-world work settings, and help us gauge the economic benefit Vocadian can bring. With more accumulated in-the-wild data, Vocadian is expecting to form more alliance in the the healthcare sector. 

To enable the paradigm shift in health worker health management, Vocadian will conduct a vast scale of in-the-wild testing. We see Solve as a mediator/anchor for us to connect with potential high-impact clients, accelerate our pace in implementation, and strengthen our proposition as we collect more feedback from such pilots, with mentorship from industry experts available from SOLVE.

Monetarily, funds from SOLVE will also be pivotal for Vocadian in supporting the second batch of clinical trials, which will allow us to pack in new features with the pilot programs and open up new business opportunities for Vocadian, such as Employee emotion monitoring and personalized mental health intervention, Vocadian to establish first-mover traction in the market.

With our clinically validated voice biomarker and AI algorithms, Vocadian is the only solution that exists to provide a preventative approach to addressing workforce fatigue and burnout based on individual circadian rhythm, which is scientifically proven to be highly correlated with one’s work performance.

Our proprietary voice biomarker and processing algorithm are what make our solution irreplaceable. Our solution is the only one that would allow individuals and organization to easily quantify fatigue, one of the most prominent burnout symptoms. Individuals only need to record 30 seconds of speech, our AI algorithm will assess sleepiness, fatigue, and cognitive performance based on vocal parameters. This process is simple and easy to implement. Our voice biomarkers are generalizable across different populations, validated by the diverse participant demographics (gender, race, and mother language) in clinical trials.

We expect our solution to raise awareness of HCP burnout and its downstream impact on patient access to care and care quality and call for action. Based on our market research with experts in the field, even thought healthcare resilience and HCP wellness have been acknowledged as a prevalent social problem, due to the complexity of the problem, there is not enough force to combat HCP burnout at organizational level. As we start to partner with healthcare organizations and research institutes, we will conduct relevant research using the voice biomarker tool to demonstrate the scale of damage HCP burnout can have on the organizations (high cost of turnover rate and reliance on contract workers, medical errors, etc.). This is our goal for the next year.

In the next five years, we expect to transform healthcare workforce management, incorporating individual circadian health and fatigue level into work assignment and schedule, to create a more agile and effective workflow and substantially support HCP physical and mental health. In order to achieve this goal, we will apply a B2B2C model by involving insurance companies to scale up the promotion of Vocadian’s SaaS service to hospitals and behavioral intervention/wellness support to individuals. Insurance companies will have aligned interest with Vocadian with our proven data showing that by reducing HCP burnout, we can reduce burnout-related medical errors, HCP turnover rate, and ultimately economic cost to treat patients.

Our solution targets SDG 3 (Good Health and Wellbeing), SDG 8 (Decent work and economic growth), SDG 9 (Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure). Our solutions will continue monitoring Healthcare Professionals’ stress level and satisfaction burnout labour, as well as the subsequent improvement in quality of medical delivery, such as patient satisfaction rate and medical errors where our solutions are piloted. Our tracking can be directly pulled.

Our proprietary voice biomarker and AI algorithm analyzes specific vocal parameters to assess sleepiness, fatigue, and cognitive performance in recorded speech. In our ongoing clinical trials at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, 72 participants undergo strictly restricted sleep routines.

Our voice biomarkers are generalizable across different populations, given the diverse participant demographics (gender, race, mother language) in the clinical trials. Estimations and predictions from our algorithms are validated with clinical procedure results, such as cognitive test performance and blood samples. We will shortly begin in-the-wild testing (~2000 people) to further confirm Vocadian’s performance.

Our proprietary voice biomarker and AI algorithm analyze specific vocal parameters to assess sleepiness, fatigue, and cognitive performance in recorded speech. In our ongoing clinical trials at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, participants undergo strictly restricted sleep routines.

Our voice biomarkers are generalizable across different populations, given the diverse participant demographics (gender, race, mother language) in the clinical trials. Estimations and predictions from our algorithms are validated with clinical procedure results, such as cognitive test performance and blood samples. We will shortly begin in-the-wild testing (~2000 people) to further confirm Vocadian’s performance in assessing the target individual cognitive performance.

Our behavioral intervention measures to alleviate and prevent burnout symptoms include power naps, sleep hygiene, meal time, light exposure, and caffeine intake. There have been a tremendous amount of studies suggesting the link between these measures and how to effectively adjust the circadian rhythm by applying these measures. Combining advanced circadian science with AI-enabled instantaneous assessment of circadian rhythm, our technology allows for accurate adjustment of one’s body clock to boost alertness and improve performance. 

Over the past 30 years, our advisor, Dr. Charles Czeisler (Director of the Sleep Medicine Division at Harvard Medical School), laid the foundation of circadian science, which is known today as the internal “body clock.” Once we decided to focus on workforce burnout, we analyzed the whole sleep tech industry, market, and all product offerings with their respective features (data modalities, temporal/spatial resolutions, monitoring/intervention methods, target conditions/stages, etc.). We seized the potential in such findings and proposed the first-ever voice biomarker to estimate the clock non-invasively.

Our hypotheses were further confirmed by our medical research advisor Dr. Charles A. Czeisler. We then designed the study protocol with all the execution details. Currently, both founders are conducting clinical trials to develop the core technology behind Vocadian at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders.

In our ongoing clinical trials at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, 72 participants live in our labs and follow a sleep deprivation routine for 30 days. We periodically assess their fatigue, sleepiness, cognitive impairment, and circadian phases with clinical procedures in sleep medicine. The voice-based fatigue and sleepiness assessment technology of Vocadian is tested four times a day for each participant over 30 days. Our current AUROC ranges between 0.80 to 0.85. Human subjects with diverse demographic backgrounds recorded their voice by reading a standardized English script under the same environment with counter-balanced interventions (sleep-deprived or not).

A great paper on voice biomarker: "Voice for Health: The Use of Vocal Biomarkers from Research to Clinical Practice" https://www.karger.com/Article/FullText/515346

A paper on the link between sleep, circadian and physician burnout

“The Impact of Sleep and Circadian Disorders on Physician Burnout” https://journal.chestnet.org/article/S0012-3692(19)31380-7/fulltext

We value integrity, curiosity, and collaboration. We embrace ambiguity and critical challenges that have fundamental impacts on society and human life. From here we build products that cultivate empathy, trust, and care.

Our beneficiaries are frontline health workers. They are usually overwhelmed with heavy care burdens for patients and long working shifts. Especially after COVID19, nurses working in hospitals are overloaded with responsibilities and long working hours, and are more burnout than ever before. To resolve this issue, Vocadian provides personalized and circadian-aligned shift optimization services backed by clinically validated circadian science and AI algorithms. These services take into consideration personal life events, such as family responsibilities and exercise, to prevent work-related fatigue and burnout.

At the organizational level, Vocadian offers hospitals and health systems SaaS solutions to optimize workforce management through population-based shift scheduling. These safety-sensitive hospitals and health systems are our key customers. By preventing workforce fatigue and burnout, they will be able to reduce work-related malpractices and associated financial costs. It is worth noting that the healthcare industry has an employee turnover rate of 25.9%, primarily driven by work-related burnout. Adopting Vocadian will be an essential step in investing in social responsibility, promoting an ethical and sustainable working environment for nurses and physicians, and creating cost-cutting measures to retain a valuable workforce. Additionally, payers ensuring healthcare workers will also be our customers as they bear the financial risk of accidents and malpractices.

We believe that a cooperative business strategy that deliver benefits to nurses and physicians thorough collective purchase from hospitals and health-systems will allow us to become financially sustainable.

Long-term speaking, with validated deliverable value of preventing clinical accidence that generate catastrophic medically compensate claims, we plan to enter the payer market as an effective way of scale and benefit more frontline HCP with fatigue management service. 

We have raised around $40K from accelerators among the MIT Sandbox, Harvard Innovation Labs, and Harvard Health Lab Accelerator since founding in October 2022. These funds has broadly paid off the initial development costs from R&D and team operation. While we are searching for a 1M seed fund to scale up our clinical trial and implementation efforts, we have secured our first paying customer. Starting from Q2 2023, we will generate $2000 and $8000 monthly starting Q3 2023, upon successful completion of proof of concept and subsequent price uplift. We expect to break even by Q1 2024 with strategic partnerships scale up and expansion to other high margin sectors including healthcare.

Additionally, we have started our revenue generating product deployment with Brigham and Women Hospital . We expect to break even 1H next year with our ARR reaching $500K and client pool and revenue bandwidth continues expanding.