Founders’ Story: Bright.md

At Bright.md, we like to say some of us are doctors, but all of us are patients. We had first-hand experience with the promise and the pain of early telehealth solutions on both sides of the care spectrum. Our co-founder Dr. Ray Costantini, MD, saw this every day as a medical director who oversaw product strategy for a healthcare system. Other modalities in the market (e.g. video visits) weren’t fully meeting patient and provider needs. We were confident there was a way to improve care delivery so that it worked for patients, providers, and healthcare systems.

With a unique understanding of the physician side of the care delivery experience, we created SmartExam to help healthcare organizations address the significant challenge of endless demand for primary care visits. They cannot build urgent care or retail clinics or hire fast enough to meet patient demand, and physicians are burning out at alarming rates. Meanwhile, patients are waiting weeks, if not months, to see their doctors. SmartExam drastically improves provider efficiency and eliminates patient wait time entirely.

Enabling clinicians to treat more than 450 common medical conditions through asynchronous virtual visits, SmartExam acts as a virtual medical resident by thoroughly gathering each patient’s information through a dynamic interview, collecting information about symptoms, medical history, and past prescriptions. SmartExam then sends that information to the patient’s provider along with a provisional diagnosis, potential treatment plan, and a chart-ready SOAP note for the physician to review and approve. Once that’s done, taking less than two minutes of provider time, the patient’s EHR is updated automatically, saving providers valuable time and unnecessary frustration. Patients are then notified that their care plan is ready and can access it from their smartphone. And, if prescriptions are required, those are automatically sent to the patient’s pharmacy of choice. Patients and providers can access SmartExam anywhere, from their smartphone, computer or tablet 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. There is no need for an appointment or high-speed internet.

Dr. Ray Costantini has a deep background in healthcare, first as a physician and then as the leader of telehealth for a large hospital system in Oregon. His co-founder Mark Swinth founded, ran and successfully exited an enterprise software company in the fintech and legal space.

We are a SaaS company. Healthcare systems adopt our platform so they can open a new, convenient front door to care using a new virtual care team member—without adding staff.

We work with integrated delivery networks who make SmartExam available to their patients at no to low cost.

We follow CDC guidelines for evidence-based practices, and 90 percent of SmartExam encounters adhere to evidence-based medicine, in contrast to 40 percent for in-person or video visit encounters. SmartExam is available through a broad range of delivery networks across the United States and Canada, to more than 8,000,000 patients and 30,000 providers.