‘Good admin isn’t sexy, but saves lives’: Start-up uses AI to cut healthcare administration burden

Most clinicians would prefer to spend more time with their patients and less time on paperwork. But good follow-up is vital to good outcomes, so they grit their teeth and get on with it.

Help is at hand, however, in the shape of artificial intelligence (AI). That’s what is powering MedWrite, a new clinical documentation platform designed to relieve the administrative burden on hard-pressed healthcare professionals.

MedWrite (with human oversight) captures, drafts and sends the notes, care plans and reports that form a vital part of patient care and significantly cuts the amount of time clinicians need to spend on administration.

The idea for the platform started to take shape in 2023 when Seán Kirwan, Ahmad Albarqawi and Ruth MacIver worked together at pharma giant Novartis. Forward thinking was part of their remit, and as the possibilities of large language models became apparent, they teased out how the technology could be applied in healthcare settings.

“Around this time, my brother was diagnosed with lung cancer and was being treated in Germany. Our family was trying to follow his care from abroad, in a language that wasn’t ours, and it was really difficult. So we started with a simple question: could technology help patients and their families understand their care more clearly?” Kirwan says.

“As we worked on that problem, we began to see just how much time doctors were spending on patient-related paperwork, with writing up documentation for heavy caseloads often spilling over into evenings and weekends. This is what ultimately led us to develop MedWrite,” says Kirwan, whose fourth co-founder is Dr David Menzies, a consultant in emergency medicine and clinical professor at UCD School of Medicine.

“We already knew first-hand how difficult digital health solutions can be to implement, but when the large language models began to emerge, it was clear that something fundamental was changing. With that came the opportunity to apply the technology to healthcare,” Kirwan says.

“Clinical teams are overwhelmed by documentation and fragmented systems, and many of the AI solutions available are generic, retrofitted or adapted from consumer platforms. We built MedWrite from scratch as an AI-native company with a focus on enterprise-scale healthcare organisations.”

Kirwan adds the hitch with many digital health solutions is that clinicians are so pressed for time. So, while developing a companion app for someone with a chronic disease might sound good in theory, a doctor with 15 minutes for a consultation doesn’t have time to go through the ins and outs of what the app is recording.

“I was very aware of the problem from working at Novartis where we killed more projects than we started because of it,” Kirwan says.

“When AI came along, it was actually the first time we could really see how it could be used to ease the burden on doctors. David Menzies identified the patient discharge process as a real problem, so we did a comparative study of manual discharge versus using AI, and the AI came out on top. That convinced us we were on to something.”

Artificial intelligence has already made its way into healthcare, but Kirwan says that existing products generally do one thing for one clinician.

MedWrite is a single solution for the whole organisation as it can handle all the different clinical and administrative workflows that typically make up a busy hospital.

“Our technology has been developed alongside clinicians and can adapt to an organisation’s individual requirements so each department has exactly the type of AI set-up they want. This flexibility is really important because an emergency department works very differently to an ICU or a cardiac team. Our system allows each department to maintain its unique operating processes,” says Kirwan, who adds that the platform’s other sweet spot is that it gives the information technology (IT) team full control of the system.

“Clinicians want access to AI tools, but IT departments do not want dozens of separate applications operating across their organisation,” he says.

“MedWrite gives them one governed platform through which they can manage different AI services, integrations, access and oversight. It also gives hospitals visibility over the cost of AI, meaning usage can be measured and linked back to budgets.

“One of the other features of the platform is ambient documentation,” Kirwan adds. “With the patient’s permission, it listens to the clinical consultation and prepares the documentation the clinician needs afterwards. The clinician reviews the output, makes any necessary changes and signs it off.”

The company’s main customers are hospitals and healthcare facilities, but there is also a version for consultants operating in private practice. The system went live in July 2025, and MedWrite is currently being used by the Mater Private Hospital, St Vincent’s Private Hospital and Charter Medical. The company makes its money through a combination of licence and transaction fees. “It’s very much value-based pricing,” Kirwan says. “An organisation only pays for what it uses.”

Kirwan estimates the development costs to date at about €1.3 million, which includes private investment and €250,000 from Enterprise Ireland through its pre-seed and HPSU (high-performance start-up) funds. Wicklow Local Enterprise also supported the venture in its early days. The next financial milestone will be the launch of a funding round of approximately €2 million to drive expansion in the UK and the Gulf markets. MedWrite has a distributed team of 18 split between Ireland and the Middle East.

“A significant part of the investment to date has gone into AI research and development, building our data science and engineering capability and validating how the technology performs in real clinical settings. This has included clinical studies with Irish hospitals examining the accuracy, safety and time savings delivered by the technology,” Kirwan says. “We have also invested heavily in the software around the AI, building the MedWrite platform across web, mobile and desktop and integrating it into the systems hospitals already use.

“The third major area has been security, clinical governance and regulatory compliance,” he adds. “Healthcare has a very high bar for introducing new technology, particularly technology handling patient information, so we have built those requirements into the MedWrite platform from the outset.”