EY Entrepreneur of the Year finalists Mark Gilmartin and Jonathan Larbey, founders of Dublin-based T-Pro, discuss how they aim to revolutionise global healthcare by voice-enabling electronic patient records to achieve greater accuracy.
This year 24 Irish finalists have been named for the EY Entrepreneur of the Year Awards which take place in November. Currently in its 27th year in Ireland, the programme works to recognise, promote, and build a supportive community around Ireland’s high-growth entrepreneurs and is considered one of the strongest programmes globally.
Since its inception, the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year Ireland community has grown to a tight-knit network of more than 600 alumni who harness each other’s wealth of experience, with three quarters (75%) conducting business with one another. Together, the EOY alumni community generates revenues of €25bn, and employs more than 250,000 people across the island of Ireland.
“We put our effort into the cloud before the cloud was really a thing. We made it a mobile-first platform before that was a thing. And we decided to charge a subscription before SaaS was really a thing”
In the past 10 months the finalists have engaged in a strategic growth programme which includes a week-long CEO Retreat.
Giving voice to ambition
Among the finalists this year are Mark Gilmartin and Jonathan Larbey, who founded T-Pro 12 years ago initially to support the legal sector before pivoting and maintaining a strong focus on electronic patient records in the healthcare sector.
What’s fascinating about their journey is they were friends before establishing T-Pro and were dabbling with a number of start-up ventures. Throughout their journey they have maintained a focus on building all of their technologies from cloud to voice-based artificial intelligence from the ground-up.
This stubborn focus on results has paid off with a business that is growing its revenues, profitability and headcount in the right direction.
T-Pro’s technology allows healthcare providers to voice-enable their existing electronic patient records. This enables them to reduce traditional transcription costs, improve clerical efficiency and capture patient information effectively and efficiently from anywhere on any device.
The company’s technology turns millions of minutes of dictation into clinical documents each year. Customers of the business include Midlands Partnership NHS Trust, Rotherham NHS Trust, Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust, to name a few.
T-Pro’s early days were quite informal. Both Mark and Jonathan were part of a social circle of tech workers who would meet for the odd pint after work. They dabbled casually in a number of start-up ventures, one of which was initially about supporting lawyers’ IT admin.
Mark recalls: “I had seen an idea in Germany where there were businesses that were doing a lot of admin for lawyers and the Germans were quite obsessed with data and about it staying in the right jurisdiction. It was around the time of the recession and while lawyers were downsizing, they still needed admin to be done so we built a platform and we got paid for it. It wasn’t full-time for either of us, it was just an idea. We were a lean organisation but managed to get ESB’s legal division as one of our first clients and that gave us a good starting point. We chipped away at it, reducing the human element and streamlining it and making it stronger and safer.”
The key point in the journey was how software development businesses kept telling them what they wanted couldn’t be done and certainly not in the cloud. “What we did was we developed our own software. Our work led to us doing bits and pieces in the medical sector and there was a big data breach at a hospital where someone was found sending hospital data to the Philippines.”
The data breach ruckus that ensued was T-Pro’s turning point. “We were in the right place, at the right time with web infrastructure where all the data could be securely stored in Ireland,” Mark recalls. “Suddenly we had a hospital as a client with 3,000 doctors. They paid on time and instead of dealing with hundreds of one-man-band lawyers who never paid on time or were ringing us to change their printer cartridges, we saw a bigger picture. And that bigger picture was outside of Ireland.”
To borrow a modern term “pivot”, T-Pro started to accelerate. Mark and Jonathan bootstrapped the business while at the same time leaving their day jobs to focus full-time on T-Pro.
“There are a few things that have stood to us well over the years,” says Jonathan. “We did that initial hard bit ourselves without taking on venture capital. That leaves you with way more value and more ability to move quickly and make decisions rather than reporting to a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley or wherever.
“The other big thing was we put our effort into the cloud before the cloud was really a thing. We made it a mobile-first platform before that was a thing. And we decided to charge a subscription before Software as a Service (SaaS) was really a thing.”
A stronger voice in healthcare
Another factor that played to T-Pro’s advantage was the need for hospitals to move from paper to electronic records. How do you do that in a sector where everyone from doctors to nurses and admin workers were hard-pressed and didn’t have time to be trained up or the money to invest in expensive IT systems.
The concept of cloud and mobile was the silver bullet. “We could come in and do a project without any IT involvement because we hosted everything,” Larbey said. “We gave people an app and we were super agile.”
Not only had Gilmartin and Larbey stolen a march on the big tech giants who hitherto raked in billions of dollars from expensive, unwieldy systems, they had an eye on another major shift in technology.
“Speech recognition technology, we decided, was going to be the future,” Gilmartin said.
Not only that, but by combining AI with speech recognition, they could help engineer more accurate data-gathering on hospital floors, leading to more efficient record keeping and safer outcomes for patients.
When they went looking for a speech recognition system they could bolt onto their platform, some tech giants were charging eye-watering sums. They reverted to form and decided to build it themselves.
“We released our first speech model in 2015 and we were somewhat ahead of the curve. So we’ve been doing this for 10 years now and we’re well positioned,” Larbey said.
Having bootstrapped the business for the first decade, the founders decided that if they were going to keep up with the market opportunities they would need to take on private equity. Last year UK, Australia and US private equity player Livingbridge announced a minority investment in T-Pro. Livingbridge’s investment has enabled T-Pro to continue developing its market leading dictation and speech products, further advance its AI capabilities, and support international expansion and acquisitions.
T-Pro has grown rapidly in recent years via the launch of new software products and expansion of its customer base in Ireland, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, acquiring Syberscribe in Melbourne in 2022. In 2023, T-Pro acquired NTS Transcription Services based in Australia.
“We realised that if we want to keep up with the momentum, we would need to do acquisitions,” Larbey said. “We identified a business in Australia and acquired it during the Covid lockdown which was an incredibly hard thing to do. To continue doing this we needed take on private equity which would also allow us to maintain control.”
Gilmartin added: “Livingbridge were one of the top three mid-market private equity firms in the UK and they hold a lot of sway in the market. Now we have a proper board, an excellent chairman and it’s a business that is designed to scale. We’ve identified gaps and we’ve brought in excellent people and have built management around us.”
Astute use of platforms like AWS means that T-Pro can be truly global in their efforts, securely supporting data entry and localised hosting for hospitals in Europe, North America and more recently in Asia-Pacific countries.
“We are now at a point where we are the major player in our field in the Asia-Pacific region and we recently deployed a pilot for AI at the Children’s Hospital in Singapore and we have clients in Kuala Lampur as well as two offices in India where we are able to get tech resources and integration engineers and other skills that can be hard to find here.”
Larbey said that the efficiency of combining mobile with cloud and speech recognition is revolutionary in a hospital context. “Every time a clinician, whether it be a doctor, nurse, physio, whomever, interacts with a patient that has to be documented. That’s a statutory requirement, almost globally. It used to be a case where it would have to go into a form and you’d have someone typing the rest of it, and it goes back to them, and they would sign it off. But with speech recognition they can just talk directly at the machine, and the words appear in real time in front of them. Plus you don’t have the expense and the people in the background doing the admin.
“Our technology is incredibly accurate for medical recognition and it is tailored for each jurisdiction and it is structured data that can be analysed and researched and will lead to speedier outcomes for patients.”
The future of T-Pro is growth, says Larbey. “There are lots of mergers and acquisition (M&A) opportunities and we are dominant in our market space. In the UK we are the fastest growing vendor and we have 60% market share in Australia and New Zealand.
“We see ourselves continuing on that growth trajectory and getting a stronger foothold in markets like the US, mainland Europe and Scandinavia.”
Nuance, a major competitor of T-Pro’s in the speech recognition arena, was acquired by Microsoft two years ago.
Larbey says the impetus for the business is to continue to scale globally and achieve unicorn status. “For that to happen the whole team will have to have grown organically around us and we’ll stay involved in the business to drive it on.”
He concluded that being selected as an EY Entrepreneur of the Year finalist is gratifying in terms of the calibre of businesses also short-listed. “Everyone in it is a proven success story. The quality of those businesses is outstanding. For us to even be considered in the same vein is great.”
Main image at top: T-Pro founders Mark Gilmartin and Jonathan Larbey
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