Our investment in SimConverse

We’re thrilled to welcome SimConverse to the Folklore family by leading its seed round, joining co-founders Aiden Roberts, Will Pamment and their team to fully digitise healthcare education globally through patient simulation. 

We've known Aiden and Will for over two years: We met them when they first pitched us Dymaxion Technologies, a data integration layer. The duo ended up pivoting from that to build SimConverse, and we were thrilled when they came back to us with their vision. 

Aiden and Will are intelligent and systematic founders with the ambition to build a venture-scale business. Having been friends since med school, they have the ideal balance of technical know-how, a thirst for sales and an existing relationship built on trust. From day one, the duo impressed us with their thoughtfulness and their strong vision for the future of healthcare.

SimConverse utilises AI to create a library of simulated patients to help students and clinical professionals practice core communication skills at scale. By working directly with universities, hospitals and health networks, SimConverse is developing scalable and accessible training tools to improve the quality of care that all patients receive. 

Why start with communication training? Communication is a key determinant of the quality of care a patient will receive. A chart on a clipboard can only reveal so much about a patient’s condition and sense of well-being. As patient care begins from the moment of arrival all the way to the bedside, clear communication, observation, examination and clear practitioner-to-patient connection are critical. When GPs, nurses, and other medical professionals can engage in meaningful conversations with their patients, they can develop a more holistic understanding of their well-being, reduce the risk of errors, and ultimately deliver better care. 

Research indicates that ineffective communication among healthcare professionals is one of the leading causes of medical errors and patient harm. For example, CRICO Strategies investigated 23,000 medical malpractice lawsuits and found that over 7,000 of those lawsuits could be attributed to communication failures, resulting in $1.7 billion in malpractice costs alone and almost 2,000 preventable deaths. To date, verbal communication training has been poorly delivered, with in-person role-play training being the primary medium. This is where universities or hospitals use human actors, such as paid professionals or students, referred to as ‘Simulated / Standardised Patients’ (SP), to act as a patient – this is inefficient, difficult to scale and ineffective. Simulation has been used in education for many years with simulation mannikins, text-based platforms, and VR being some tools in the classroom. However, these modalities have limitations and aren’t the most effective methods of training patient communication. SimConverse's modular content approach allows customers to design patients flexibly to integrate into the classroom, enable students to have one-to-one conversations and meet set clinical concepts specified in a curriculum.

Finally, reducing clinical error rates is a significant and global problem with early signs of positive regulatory momentum. The UK have been early movers in adopting Simulation-Based Education (SBE) with the UK government creating a $15 million SBE fund and accepting SBE hours as a replacement for clinical placement. Given the need for clinicians to complete continued professional development (CPD) training each year, and simulation starting to substitute in-person CPD requirements in the UK, there is potential for SimConverse to ride the momentum of simulation training in healthcare. 

The team is already working with healthcare education institutions and hospitals in Australia, the US and the UK, and this round will help them further drive growth into these key markets.

We couldn’t be more proud to join Aiden, Will and the rest of their team on this journey and look forward to seeing how their work will impact future generations of healthcare professionals and, in turn, their patients. 

The future of healthcare is digital, but it must also be patient-centric, and we believe that SimConverse will play an important role in creating that future.