BotMD’s Dorothea Koh on doing the things Google can’t

As part of this year’s Women Of The Year celebration, the Her World x Singtel “Hello Possibilities” award is presented in collaboration with Singtel and recognises inspirational female game changers who have made it their business to improve the lives of women and society at large through their company’s impact, creativity and clever use of technology.

Dorothea “Dot” Koh lights up when I tell her I’m not really sure how Bot MD works.

As we sit down for our interview in her cosy, industrial estate office, she rouses the sleeping monitor and turns on her computer. “Let me show you the presentation I show potential clients,” she says.

In her element, Dot takes me through the workings of Bot MD, an AI-based chat solution designed to minimise a variety of pain points for doctors. Born from her work in pharmaceuticals in rural regions of Indonesia and the Philippines, Bot MD is designed to help doctors and hospitals access necessary information efficiently and safely from their phones.

Not known for their swift uptake of new technology, the medical industry was initially interested in Bot MD, but take up was not quick. Dot solved that problem by literally rebuilding the product when they were on the brink of running out of money.

“It’s frustrating because in my mind I’m like, why aren’t doctors using it?” She mentions a viral moment when a doctor in Egypt put it on Facebook and over 10,000 doctors then downloaded Bot MD but after that they didn’t use it. So the pressure was on to figure out why.

“I used to have these, ‘Come to Jesus’ moments with my team, where I’d be like ‘I’ll be the first to tell you, you may need to go look for another job’.”

But the pressure worked. “As it was, I had an epiphany at church,” says Dot. “The worst thing about what we were doing was competing with Google. What we should be doing is to take what Google doesn’t have, and deliver it in that way.” 

Around this time, she was speaking to a cousin who was a doctor, who then asked if Bot MD could be loaded with lists of which doctors were on call from which department. Dot learned that many doctors often took down this information manually, as the hospital intranet system would take too long to access. So she added it in and tested out the new app on 20 residents in NUH in 2019.

“Immediately I knew it was working because I would get residents texting me separately about how their friends wanted to be part of the pilot. We went from 20 residents to about 500 in like a month.”

Dot would be the first to admit that the company benefited greatly from the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Covid was one of those, Black Swan events. You were either in a field where it just destroyed your start-up, or you were in a space where, suddenly overnight, they needed you.” She reflects on this time, where instantly every organisation wanted digital health, and rules around data collection relaxed, “because people were freaking out.”

She considered it her “national service” to help out and create a platform that could help monitor Covid patients, in particular migrant workers, most of whom were quarantined in their dorms.

“[Doctors] asked me, ‘Can you design something that would be able to collect data, triage it, and alert us whenever they need help?’” She recalls. So the team started with a simple idea, basically, an automated reminder, which would sound again if they failed to report their health stats.

“We would read whatever data they submitted, from temperature, heart rate, all vitals etc. and then triage it. If somebody had any major symptoms, doctors would be alerted.” And sure enough, a migrant worker complaining of chest pains was found to be having a heart attack. “After that, it started growing,” says Dot with quiet pride. “By the end of the year, we had about 5000 migrant workers onboard.” 

Dot is most proud of being able to alleviate the burden of doctors manually monitoring individuals. After the success in Singapore, Bot MD launched in Indonesia and the Philippines. Suddenly amid the pandemic, everyone was interested. “I had a mentor that told me, never waste a crisis,” recalls Dot. “After Covid, I reached my Series A funding.”

Growing the business is very much on Dot’s mind. “It’s actually the thing that keeps me up at night,” she says. “The company tripled in size in just nine months (from 15 employees in January to 40 in October), and it kind of makes me freak out because [one day] I might have a company, with 100 people and I won’t know everybody.”

“It’s very different from four people in a garage, or like 40 people now. So I think about that a lot. How do we scale in a more thoughtful manner? How do we avoid becoming a big, slow, bureaucratic company? It’s a very different part of the journey that we’re on now.”

With that in mind, we go back to her presentation, where she shows me two slides, Bot MD’s clients right after Covid, and Bot MD’s clients now. There’s a notable change in the sizes of the logos to make space for so many more on the page. Dot is quietly proud of her achievements but is always looking ahead.

“Startups are never easy – but they are very fun,” she says. “Because startups are literally how you dream the world to be. It’s cool to be building you brown thing and controlling your own future in many ways. “