Dashlabs.ai automates lab diagnostics in clinics with AI

By Aubrey Rose A. Inosante, Reporter

STARTUP Dashlabs.ai is automating the diagnostic lab process of local clinics using artificial intelligence (AI), resulting in quicker and more accurate results, its top official said.

“These laboratories and clinics used to take seven to 14 days to process 500 to 1,000 patients,” Weston Coleman Lim, chief executive officer (CEO) at Dashlabs.ai, told BusinessWorld in a videocall on Sept. 13.

“After one year of using Dashlabs to help them facilitate the same bulk operations, it now only takes them 24 to 48 hours,” he added.

The CEO said medical technologists benefit from the software because it does away with manual transcriptions, which is time-consuming and prone to errors.

“Due to the volume of patients, it’s easy to make a mistake,” he said. “You might miss a triglyceride reading or a cholesterol reading, and you think that’s normal.”

An abnormal result is displayed in red text using the Dashlabs.ai software.

The software includes tests like hematology, clinical chemistry, blood count, and uric acid. Radiologists can also remotely retrieve a patient’s X-ray and electrocardiogram results.

“The third party AI model tells us that if it’s abnormal, there’s a risk that a person has lung cancer or tuberculosis,” Mr. Lim said. “We help radiologists screen through X-rays to spot life-threatening diseases. Our role is to help doctors spot these issues.”

Dashlabs.ai, which was founded in 2020, works with more than 200 clinics nationwide, including those in Cebu, Davao, Metro Manila, and some parts of Luzon.

“We work with all kinds of clinics and healthcare partners from sophisticated ones that do work for major business process outsourcing companies for their annual physical exams,” he added.

“During the pandemic, that was the first time the country felt that we were held back by manual processes,” Mr. Lim said.

“We had the machines to handle the volume, but we could not manage information properly,” he added, noting that Dashlabs used to mainly serve airports for travelers and overseas Filipino workers.

Mr. Lim said they realized that there was a bottleneck in the annual physical and preemployment exams of many companies, so they entered this market.

Miguel Carlo S. Gemotra, cofounder and chief commercial officer at Dashlabs.ai, said the company plans to launch this year a free-tier plan for laboratories that are starting out.

Dashlabs.ai offers clinics a monthly base subscription plan at P2,500. This includes features such as patient registration and “cashier,” where payments are linked to a patient and patient records are saved in a database.

The software can also flag abnormal results and generate results in portable document format (PDF). The clinics can then e-mail patients and medical professionals their results. The software can also produce QR (quick response)-coded results.

Some optional add-ons are accounting and ledger, machine integration, and queueing modules, which cost P2,500 to P5,000.

Dashlabs.ai has served 10 million patients nationwide.