BetterClinic

Ambient AI clinical documentation for the Philippine healthcare system

Philippine doctors spend roughly 40% of their consultation time doing paperwork. Not triaging. Not diagnosing. Not talking to patients. Writing notes. BetterClinic gives that time back — and in doing so, it doesn't just improve a doctor's workflow. It changes how many patients a clinic can see, how thoroughly each one is documented, and how sustainably a physician can practice medicine over a career.

The problem isn't a software gap — it's a tax on care

Clinical burnout in the Philippines isn't primarily caused by difficult patients or long hours. It's caused by the relentless accumulation of administrative work — SOAP notes, referral letters, PhilHealth documentation — that falls entirely on the physician, often outside of clinic hours. Doctors here don't have the medical assistant infrastructure that makes US or European clinical administration manageable. The record gets written because the doctor writes it, at 10pm, after the last patient leaves.

BetterClinic's Ambient AI Scribe sits passively in the room during a consultation, listens, and produces a structured draft note that the physician reviews and signs off on — rather than authors from scratch. The shift from author to editor is not a minor convenience. It's the difference between documentation taking 15 minutes and taking 90 seconds. Across a full clinic day, that's the two hours back the data shows.

Why a global solution doesn't work here

The AI scribe category exists globally — Suki, Abridge, Freed, and others have built strong products for US clinical workflows. The critical question we asked was: why can't a Philippine clinic simply use one of those?

The answer has three layers. First, language. A typical Filipino consultation switches fluidly between Tagalog, English, and regional dialects — sometimes mid-sentence. A model trained on English-language clinical audio will miss a significant portion of what's said, or misinterpret it. BetterClinic is built natively for this code-switching reality, with reported accuracy above 95% in mixed-language consultations.

Second, pricing. US AI scribe products are priced for US healthcare economics. Philippine private practitioners operate on fundamentally different unit economics — a consultation may cost ₱500–₱1,500, not $200. A tool priced at $100+/month for a Filipino solo practitioner is not a productivity solution; it's a non-starter. BetterClinic's local pricing model makes adoption viable across private clinics and public health units alike.

Third, compliance. The Philippines has its own data privacy framework (the Data Privacy Act of 2012) and distinct PhilHealth documentation requirements. A US-built product adapted for the Philippines is still an adaptation — BetterClinic is built for these constraints from the ground up, not retrofitted.

And the Philippines is just a starting point.

The founder: someone who has actually built healthcare infrastructure here

We invest heavily in the quality of the founder. With Jay Fajardo, the credentials are specific and verifiable — not just "serial entrepreneur" as a label, but a track record that maps directly onto what BetterClinic needs to succeed.

Jay founded Airborne Access in 2002 — the Philippines' first Wi-Fi hotspot network — and grew it to over 600 locations before it was acquired by PLDT in 2008. That's a full exit cycle in a market where that was extremely rare. He then built Proudcloud into a leading technical development firm, and co-founded Launchgarage, one of the country's most important startup accelerators, with Jojo Flores of Plug and Play. He also co-founded MEDIFI, a digital health platform — giving him direct experience with the specific regulatory, cultural, and operational complexity of Philippine healthcare.

What this means in practice: Jay doesn't need to be educated about how Philippine hospitals make procurement decisions, how LGU health programmes are structured, or what it takes to build trust with DOH. He has navigated all of this before. In a sector where enterprise sales cycles are long and institutional relationships are everything, that's a durable advantage.

The policy tailwind is structural, not cyclical

The Republic Act 11223 — the Universal Health Coverage Act — mandates the formation of LGU-centric Healthcare Provider Networks across the Philippines, with targets requiring coordinated digital health records across primary, secondary, and tertiary care. This isn't aspirational; the DOH has set binding digitalization targets running through 2028, and LGUs are actively being required to deploy interoperable health information systems.

BetterClinic is not just a productivity tool for private clinicians — it is a structured documentation system that generates the clean, compliant clinical records that LGU networks need to function. The path from private clinic adoption to LGU integration isn't a stretch; it's the product roadmap.

What would have to be true for this not to work

We ask this question about every investment. For BetterClinic, the primary risk is distribution speed: the Philippine health system is large, fragmented, and relationship-driven. Winning private clinics is tractable; scaling into public health networks requires working with LGU procurement processes that move slowly and aren't always meritocratic. Jay's network mitigates this risk meaningfully — but it doesn't eliminate it.

We also considered whether a well-funded global player could adapt for the Philippine market quickly enough to compete. Our conclusion: the language and pricing moats are real, and the compliance burden is underestimated by external observers. Building genuine multilingual clinical AI for Filipino code-switching is a multi-year effort, not a fine-tuning sprint.

On balance, this is the kind of investment Indelible was built for: a mission-critical problem, a founder with the specific credentials to solve it, a local moat that global capital can't simply override, and a policy environment that is actively pulling adoption forward.