Why we're building a company dedicated to improving doctors' lives
With the recent launch and increasing adoption of Glass Notebook, the first digital notebook designed to optimize the way physicians capture, organize, and apply their medical knowledge, many are asking why Graham Ramsey and I founded Glass Health.
Our story started during my first clinical rotation in medical school. As a medical student on a critical-care rotation, I watched the team carefully discuss the sickest patients in the hospital. As the senior resident listened to the junior doctors’ plans for each patient, he hand-wrote the patients’ names on a blank sheet of paper. He then wrote the many tasks that had to be done for each patient beneath their names. At the end of rounds, he sent me to make copies of the paper for each team member.
I was shocked that this was how a modern medical team stayed in sync during their workday. Coming from graduate studies in biotechnology and having worked as the chief of staff for a venture-backed biotechnology startup, I was accustomed to teams using software like Slack, Asana, and Trello to collaborate efficiently together. It was clear that medicine remains far behind other professions in leveraging technology to enable practice.
Around this time, I met Graham Ramsey, now cofounder of Glass Health. Graham had worked as an engineer and product manager building fertility hormone dashboards at Modern Fertility and designing a telemedicine-specific electronic medical record (EMR) at PlushCare. We bonded over our shared belief that software could enable doctors to practice medicine as efficiently and effectively as possible.
We observed that the core work of practicing medicine – clinical team communication and collaboration, learning and applying medical knowledge, interpreting clinical data and developing treatment plans, and handing-off care between doctors – was all done with very little help from the electronic medical record.
We began to imagine a software company that was solely and relentlessly focused on improving the lives of medical doctors and relieving their pain points during the clinical day. Then, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and its worsening of the healthcare worker burnout and mental health crisis made us believe the need for such a company had only become greater. In 2021, we founded Glass Health, with the mission to empower medical doctors with the software they need to learn and practice medicine frictionlessly.
Our first product, Glass Notebook, helps doctors manage a complex landscape of medical knowledge to take the best possible care of their patients, which we see as one of the first and core components of the clinical day. You’ll hear more about Glass Notebook and why we chose to begin our journey with medical knowledge management in our next blog post.
Because we know them best, our current focus is on serving medical doctors. In the future, we plan to to serve a broader base of clinicians, a wide range of care settings, and a tackle more tough problems facing clinicians.
We know that the enormous challenges facing healthcare are of greatest importance. And we believe that the tools needed to meet those challenges should arrive on the order of months to years rather than years to decades. If our mission resonates with you, we hope you’ll join us by subscribing to this blog and following @GlassHealthHQ for updates. Most importantly, we hope you’ll join us in embracing innovation and pushing for positive transformation of our field.
Dereck Paul, MD
Cofounder & CEO
P.S. The Glass Health team is recruiting talented engineers. Find more information about how to join our mission here.