A medical software start-up founded by a group of Brown students is trying to change how private practices approach medical billing through the use of AI.
Kyron Medical co-founders Jay Gopal ’25 MD’29 and Lucas Lieberman ’25 believe that physician burnout is a major crisis across the country. Gopal told The Herald he hopes Kyron can help “create an environment where physicians are fulfilled and don’t have to do administrative repetitive work,” which could result in “improvements in outcomes as well for patients.”
Current billing workflows require physicians and administrators to wade through an abundance of forms in multiple software applications. Kyron’s founders aim to use AI to complete billing forms in pre-existing software, automating the process to require less physician attention.
Gopal and Lieberman serve as CEO and COO of Kyron, respectively. Their team consists of five other undergraduates — Jo Jojo ’27, Sam Latzman ’25, Henry Harary ’25, Yen Chu ’25 and Lisa Duan ’25 — and one medical student, Maguire Anuszewski ’23 MD’27.
The team decided to focus on medical billing after conducting “over 200 customer interviews across the U.S. with doctors that we know, staff, different stakeholders, billers and cold calls,” according to Gopal. They found that medical billing can be time consuming and lead to revenue losses for private practices.
Since then, Kyron has closed presales and signed letters of intent from several customers. Lieberman said the start-up is currently conducting “bottom-up research, problem validation, building up our team and finishing and building up the product.”
Kyron hopes to launch its fully completed product in the coming months. In the meantime, they plan on releasing smaller versions to garner initial customer feedback.
“We think that being able to couple product developments and user feedback in interviews is going to be our secret sauce,” Gopal said.
Lieberman concurred, explaining that if the customer “wants something slightly different than what we’re making, we’re not going to keep pushing our vision … We’re going to adapt our vision to fill their needs.”
Kyron has received ongoing support from the University’s Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship in the form of grants, advising and mentorship. The start-up is a recipient of the Explore Grant, Expand Grant, Hazeltine Grant and a $5,000 Amazon Web Services compute credit. The team is also in the process of applying for additional funding.
Kyron’s advising team includes physicians and entrepreneurs from Brown, the Warren Alpert Medical School, Stanford University’s School of Medicine and medical technology companies.
Two of Kyron’s key mentors at the University include Danny Warshay ’87, executive director of the Nelson Center, and Abigail Kohler ’20, adjunct lecturer in engineering. As startup founders themselves, Warshay and Kohler have provided first-hand expertise and advice to Kyron.
Warshay said he is “thrilled to see the progress Jay and Lucas are making using the structured process we teach at Nelson to build such a rapidly growing venture.”
Gopal and Lieberman said they are conscious of the ethical concerns regarding the integration of AI into healthcare, especially in data privacy, HIPAA compliance and job security for physicians. The startup has used platforms including AWS HealthLake to take steps to fully encrypt their data and ensure that it is HIPAA compliant.
Both Gopal and Lieberman are researchers for the Serre Lab and have learned through their time researching explainable AI that “you can’t apply AI as a panacea, or catch all,” Gopal said. They utilize this philosophy in their work at Kyron by using AI as a tool to supplement rather than replace traditional software.
Gopal and Lieberman emphasized that their goal is not to replace the work of doctors, but rather to “give people a tool that will help them with what they love to do,” Lieberman said. “Doctors like to be doctors, so we’re going to let them be doctors.”
“We think that the use of tech and AI in medicine is, in a lot of ways, inevitable,” Gopal told The Herald. “The question is, who does it and how do they do it right? And we want to be on the front lines to make sure that it’s done properly and it’s done with the physicians and patients in mind first.”
