Roscommon native and his fiancé taking innovation to a new level 

A start-up business founded by a Castlerea native and his fiancé is taking the hassle out of writing up medical notes and referral letters.

Clinic Notes AI, devised by Lucia Byrne and Chris Cornwall, is an AI scribe that removes the burden of writing up notes and referral letters for medical professionals.

Lucia Byrne set up her podiatry practice in Donegal town three years ago.

As it became busier and busier, she found herself struggling to cope with the volume of patient notes that needed to be written up each day. Her fiancé, Chris Cornwall, a software engineer, tried out several software tools that were supposed to help. In reality, they didn’t, and this prompted the couple to pool their clinical and IT expertise to develop Clinic Notes AI, which automatically generates medical notes and referral letters.

From Arm, Castlerea, Chris, son of Albert and Catherine was educated at Castlerea Community School before studying Computer Science and IT in NUIG.

During college he worked in HPE in Galway before working as a software engineer for a startup company called Webtext who were later acquired by an American company, called SharpenCX. After the company was acquired, he and Lucia (a podiatrist from Glenties) set up a podiatry clinic in Donegal town called Stride Foot & Ankle Clinic, where they now employ seven members of staff.

The couple live in Inver, just outside Donegal town and Chris now works in Clinic Notes AI full time.

They now have hundreds of users spread across Ireland, the UK, The Netherlands, Australia & New Zealand.

Chris is well known around Roscommon for playing music on the button accordion. “I grew up playing with Comhaltas and some fantastic local musicians such as the Igoes, Terry McGowan, Patsy Finan, Mick Lohan and Patsy Bligh in Castlerea and around Roscommon,” he told the Roscommon Herald.

The couple recently took part in an Irish Times “Innovators to Watch” event. “With Clinic Notes AI, a practitioner can turn hours of writing up notes into minutes. The aim of the system is to streamline workflow and let practitioners get back to what they love – caring for patients.

“Lucia knew first-hand how different each practice is, so Clinic Notes is built with customisable features to suit both solo practitioners and larger teams. For example, some clinicians want a template for brief notes with headings whereas others prefer a format that allows the notes to run to several pages if required,” Chris told The Irish Times.

Clinic Notes AI was launched last September. The initial product was aimed at podiatrists with features tailored specifically to their needs. However, the couple quickly discovered that other health professionals were trying out their system which, Chris says, can be tweaked to suit different medical disciplines and languages other than English.

The next step is to widen the application of the system and the company is now looking at potential options to fund it. Chris says it will take about €250,000 to support the planned development.

So far, the main investment in Clinic Notes AI has been time (and about €20,000 in personal savings), as Chris has done the development work himself. He is currently on the New Frontiers programme at ATU Sligo.