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hen Eunice Wu, 26 worked as a pharmacist, she was frustrated by the endless and endlessly tedious data entry and administrative work her job entailed. So with Can Uncu, 25, who she met in a Canadian accelerator program, she started Asepha, which uses AI software to process handwritten prescriptions and verify medical codes expediting the work that many pharmacists would say is the worst part of the job. The two-year-old startup has now raised more than $4 million in venture funding.
“Probably 90% of my day was being wasted on this manual work instead of actually seeing patients,” she told Forbes. “We give pharmacists back their time so they can focus on patients instead of paperwork.”
Wu, who is this year’s featured entrepreneur, and Uncu are just two of the rising stars on this year’s Forbes 30 Under 30 Healthcare list, a batch of honorees all working to solve some of the industry’s biggest challenges. They’re improving clinical care, increasing access and reducing administrative burdens, often helped by technology.
Jeffery Liu, 28, and Jon Wang, 28, founders of Assort Health, are using AI to solve a different pain point: scheduling doctor appointments over the phone. Their company, an alum of this year’s Forbes’ Next Billion-Dollar Startups list that has now raised more than $100 million from investors that include Lightspeed and First Round Capital, developed a text-to-voice AI-enabled chatbot to search physicians’ calendars to match openings with the type of appointment required. This might sound simple, but in healthcare even things that seem easy rarely are. Assort’s software has cut wait times for millions of inbound calls—and reduced frustration for patients and physicians alike.
