Founder · Physician · Houston, TX
Joshua
Joshua
Reischer
He stopped seeing patients one at a time so he could reach millions before the visit even starts.
The doctor who quit the clinic to fix it
He stopped seeing patients one at a time so he could reach millions before the visit even starts.
The doctor who quit the clinic to fix it
Walk into a clinic that runs Health Note and the most tedious ten minutes of the appointment have already happened. The patient answered the questions a physician would have asked anyway, on their phone, in the parking lot or the night before. By the time the doctor opens the chart, there is a draft clinical note waiting, structured and slotted into the right fields of the electronic record. Joshua Reischer built that. He is the CEO and founder of Health Note, and he is the reason a growing number of American clinics start the visit already caught up.
The pitch is deceptively quiet. Health Note is not trying to be the doctor. It is trying to delete the part of medicine that no one went to medical school for: the typing, the re-asking, the information that gets collected and then lost on its way into the record. Reischer calls the work "simply connecting the dots." The investors who wrote the checks - SignalFire, Cedars-Sinai, Northwell, UnityPoint Health - call it a $17 million bet on physician burnout having a software-shaped solution.
What makes him credible is that he was the burned-out physician. Board-certified in internal medicine, he spent his days in Tucson exam rooms before he decided the bottleneck was worth more of his life than any single shift could be. He left clinical practice in October 2018. He has been building the fix ever since.
“We're not trying to replace the role of a doctor with AI but instead better the productivity.”
Figures per Health Note's Series A announcement, Dec 2022. Total funding reported at ~$22.1M.
The clinic was in Tucson. The patients were on Medicare, often well past 65, and the visit kept hitting the same wall: nobody could reconstruct their own history without help. A son or daughter would fill in the gaps. Someone would empty a bag of pill bottles onto the desk so the doctor could read the labels. The actual medicine - the diagnosis, the plan, the conversation - had to wait for the paperwork to catch up.
Reischer noticed that the information patients gave during a visit often never reached the right place in the record. It evaporated. That gap, repeated across every appointment of every day, is the raw material of physician burnout. He decided the only person who could fix it was someone who had lived inside the problem with clinical training - and that the leap out of medicine was the hardest and most necessary part.
He met Aaron Rau at Y Combinator's Startup School. Rau was a serial entrepreneur who had built software for Goldman Sachs and for Medicare. The two of them turned a doctor's frustration into a product, and the product into a company that now runs in clinics across the country.
Before deciding how patients would reach Health Note, Reischer studied the demographics of his own oldest patients. App downloads lose people. A texted link does not. He chose SMS so the patient least comfortable with technology could still finish the form without a grandchild on the phone.
Health Note was not his first swing at fixing care delivery. He founded Better On Call, a platform that connected patients to physicians for in-home house calls - the same instinct, pointed at a different bottleneck: getting the doctor to the patient.
His reasoning for leaving medicine was arithmetic, not ambition. A physician helps a finite number of people across a career. Through software that runs in clinics nationwide, he reasoned, he could reach more patients than any single doctor ever could.
“Making the leap was the hardest part. You have to do the research and understand if the problem you want to solve is worth solving.”
“The vision for Health Note has always been to support care providers by empowering patients to create and interact with their health data before the visit starts.”
“We're now in clinics around the country having millions of patients using the product every single year.”
There is a particular kind of founder who is fluent in both halves of the problem they are solving, and Reischer is one of them. He can sit across from a hospital's chief medical officer and speak the language of clinical workflow because he lived it. He can sit across from an engineer and describe exactly which discrete data field a patient's answer needs to populate. The translation layer between medicine and software is usually the most expensive thing a health-tech company has to build. He carries it in his own head.
That fluency shows up in the unglamorous decisions. The choice of a text-message link over an app was not a technical shortcut - it was a bet that the success of the product depended on the least tech-savvy patient in the waiting room. Health Note's reported 85 percent completion rate is the dividend on decisions like that one. The notes the platform generates are not freeform paragraphs; they are structured to drop into the electronic health record where a clinician can actually use them, which is the difference between a clever demo and a tool a clinic renews.
The thesis underneath all of it is that physician burnout is, in large part, a documentation problem wearing a wellness costume. Doctors do not burn out because they care too much. They burn out because the system asks them to be transcriptionists and data-entry clerks on top of being doctors. Reischer's answer is to move the data capture upstream, to the one person who actually knows the answers - the patient - and to do it before the clock starts on the visit. Save five to ten minutes per appointment, multiply by every visit in a busy practice, and the math becomes a reason to keep practicing medicine.
His investors did not arrive by accident. SignalFire led the round, but the strategic names around the table tell the real story: Cedars-Sinai, Northwell and UnityPoint Health are not financial tourists - they are large provider organizations whose own clinicians feel the documentation burden every day. When health systems invest in the company building their tooling, they are voting with operational self-interest. Reischer turned a problem he had personally suffered into a product the people who suffer it most wanted to own a piece of.
He is also, by his own admission, the founder who never gets back to you by email fast enough, because there is a decent chance he is out on his Stromer electric bike. He has had the same one for years and talks about it the way some founders talk about their first exit. It is a small, human detail in a story that could otherwise read as a tidy arc of credentials. The credentials are real - Queens College, Ross University, ABIM board certification, a Biodesign fellowship at TMC Innovation, Y Combinator. But the thing that makes the work land is that he never stopped thinking like the doctor who watched a patient dump a bag of pill bottles onto a desk and thought: there has to be a better way to ask.
Health Note's ambition is not to win a headline. It is to make the most common interaction in medicine - the question a physician asks and the answer a patient gives - finally count as structured data the whole system can use. If Reischer is right, the future of the clinical visit is one where the doctor walks in already knowing, and the patient never has to repeat themselves to a fourth person in a paper gown. That is a quiet revolution. It is also, for a physician who left the bedside to build it, a deeply personal one.
Reischer on camera, talking through Health Note and the problem that pulled him out of the clinic.
Josh Reischer, Health Note — YouTube