Healthcare IT · Clinical communication and AI governance
Medigram
Founded in 2011 as a HIPAA compliant group messaging app to replace the hospital pager, Medigram has spent the years since as a small, self-funded communication vendor for hospital clinicians. In 2026 the company is marketing something different: a governance and evidence layer for hospital AI decisions, called Darwin.
Chat for doctors
At Y Combinator's March 2012 demo day, TechCrunch summed Medigram up in four words: "chat for doctors." The pitch was simple. Physicians were still carrying pagers, a one way device that cannot tell a doctor what a page is about or whether it has been seen. Medigram proposed a free, HIPAA compliant group messaging app, built for iPhone, Android and the web, that let a care team text, send images and share audio inside a system with 256 bit AES encryption on the data.
By April 2012 the app was in closed beta with physicians at three well known Bay Area institutions: Stanford Hospital, Lucile Packard Children's Hospital and the Palo Alto VA Hospital, according to a review published that month in iMedicalApps.
The problem it set out to fix
Medigram's own materials point to the Joint Commission's long standing finding that a delay in communication is a leading cause of preventable death in hospitals. Hospitals are also, in the company's words, "high interference and low connectivity" environments, where even a well wired facility has dead zones for Wi-Fi and cell signal. A pager cannot route around that. A messaging system built for hospital networks, the company argued, could.
Founders and leadership
Dr. Michael Chiu started Medigram in 2011. He held a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship, awarded in 2009 to support an MD at Stanford University, and later worked in oncology diagnostics at Foundation Medicine. Chiu remains listed as a company advisor rather than an operating executive.
Sherri Douville has led Medigram as CEO for most of its public history. In a 2017 trade profile she described the founding problem in her own words and credited board chairman Wim Roelandts, a former semiconductor chief executive, with mentoring the company through its early years. "Driving this kind of innovation requires great, steady leadership paired with mentorship in order for Startups to succeed in my view, which we have benefited from tremendously," she said of his chairmanship.
From messaging app to governance vendor
Medigram's public story after its 2012 demo day is thin. There is no evidence in FDA, NIH, NSF or SEC records of a device clearance, a federal grant or a registered securities offering under the Medigram name. A 2017 CIOReview feature described the product as having moved toward an "IoT platform" that ingests remote patient data and device telemetry, on top of the original messaging engine, which the company said was built in the Erlang programming language. The company claimed in that piece that a customer had cut a hospital discharge process from 12 hours to 20 minutes, a figure that has not been independently verified.
By 2026, Medigram's website had changed its subject entirely. It now markets Darwin, described as "the governed decision platform" for hospital artificial intelligence. The pitch: hospitals are deploying AI systems they do not fully control, and cannot always reconstruct after the fact why an AI assisted decision was made. Darwin is positioned as the record keeping and vendor assessment layer that sits above those AI tools, scoring vendors against what the company calls the TIPPSS dimensions, Trust, Identity, Privacy, Protection, Safety and Security, drawn from the IEEE UL 2933 standard. Douville describes herself as co-chair of that standard's Trust and Identity subgroup and a co-author of ANSI/HSI 2800:2025.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| Y Combinator batch | Presented at YC's March 2012 demo day as a mobile focused company, alongside PlanGrid and others, per TechCrunch's contemporaneous coverage. | Independent |
| 2012 hospital beta | Closed beta reported with physicians at Stanford Hospital, Lucile Packard Children's Hospital and the Palo Alto VA Hospital. No later independent reporting names a live hospital customer by name. | Independent |
| Discharge time claim | Company said in 2017 it had helped a customer cut discharge time from 12 hours to 20 minutes. Customer not named, no underlying data published. | Company-stated |
| FDA, NIH, NSF, clinical trial records | No matching records found under the Medigram name as of Sep 25, 2026. | Not found |
| SEC Form D | No Form D or other filing under Medigram appears in SEC EDGAR full text search as of Sep 25, 2026. | Public record |
| Company size, 2022 snapshot | An archived ZoomInfo profile lists Medigram at Los Gatos, CA, revenue under $5 million, fewer than 25 employees, CEO Sherri Douville, CTO Eric Svetcov. | Independent |
| Standards role | Douville states she is co-chair of the Trust and Identity subgroup of IEEE UL 2933 and a co-author of ANSI/HSI 2800:2025. Not independently confirmed against the standards bodies' own rosters. | Company-stated |
Read plainly, Medigram is a very old startup by Silicon Valley standards, fourteen years from founding with no outside funding round, product clearance or grant on the public record, and no independent reporting on its business since roughly 2017. The company is still operating in 2026 under a changed name for its flagship product, and it is publishing detailed claims about AI governance standards work that a reader cannot verify without going to the standards bodies directly.
What to watch
- Whether any hospital names itself as a live Darwin or governed decision platform customer.
- Any SEC Form D or other financing disclosure, none of which exists under the Medigram name as of this writing.
- Independent verification of Douville's stated roles on IEEE UL 2933 and ANSI/HSI 2800:2025.
- Whether the original clinician messaging product is still sold, or has been fully retired in favor of Darwin.
In their words
“Medigram is a HIPAA-compliant messaging app for hospitals. It hopes to one day connect all vital medical information via devices to doctors making split-second decisions that can save lives.”
TechCrunch, Y Combinator demo day coverage, Mar 27, 2012 · Independent
“Medigram is currently in closed beta with physicians at Stanford Hospital, Lucille Packard Children's Hospital and the Palo Alto VA Hospital.”
iMedicalApps, Tom Lewis, Apr 27, 2012 · Independent
“Hospitals are often high-interference and low connectivity environment; even the 'most wired' hospitals have areas with no Wi-Fi and low connectivity.”
Sherri Douville, CEO, CIOReview, 2017 · Company-stated
“We've reduced discharge times from 12 hours to 20 minutes.”
Sherri Douville, CEO, CIOReview, 2017 · Company-stated
“The Medigram application will provide cost savings for medical institutions by providing faster and secure communications for both care and administrative processes.”
Wim Roelandts, Board Chairman, CIOReview, 2017 · Company-stated
“Hospitals are deploying AI they don't control, generating data they don't own, creating liability they can't defend.”
Medigram company website, accessed Sep 25, 2026 · Company-stated
“Darwin seals an accountable governance record at the moment every high-stakes clinical and performance AI decision is made.”
Medigram, Darwin product page, accessed Sep 25, 2026 · Company-stated
Related companies
Sources
- IndependentAt Y Combinator's Biggest Demo Day Yet, Mobile Is Taking Over
- IndependentMedigram app allows HIPAA compliant group text messaging between doctors
- IndependentY Combinator company listing for Medigram
- IndependentMichael Chiu fellow profile
- IndependentMedigram, Inc. company record, archived snapshot
- Public recordSEC EDGAR full text search, query Medigram
- CompanyMedigram: A Catalyst for Change
- CompanyMedigram homepage, Defensible AI Decisions
- CompanyDarwin by Medigram, product page
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
