Healthcare IT · Clinical handoff
Medisas
A hospital doctor who could program set out to replace the scrap of paper that care teams pass between shifts. Medisas raised $10.6 million in December 2016 and was still selling into hospitals in 2019. Private market databases now list it as out of business.
The piece of paper
Every hospital shift ends the same way. The team prints its patient list out of the electronic medical record, scribbles in the margins, and hands the sheet to whoever is coming on.
“The team will print out a patient list on their EMR systems. They’ll scribble all the important things that need to be done,” Gautam Sivakumar told an interviewer in 2019. “It’s an incredibly manual process.”
He knew what happens when the paper fails. A patient needs her blood thinner dose reviewed that evening. Nobody says so. Overnight she bleeds internally. Sivakumar described exactly that to Forbes in 2014, and ended the sentence with one word: Nuts.
Medisas was the fix he built: a cloud patient list shared across web, tablet and phone, sitting on top of whatever EMR the hospital already ran, with tasks, labs, secure messaging and a discharge checklist attached to each patient.
Why anyone cared
The handoff is one of the few places in a hospital where a known failure mode has a name and a literature. The Joint Commission devoted Sentinel Event Alert 58 to it in September 2017, opening with the observation that diligence “falters when the patient is handed off, or transitioned, to another health care provider for continuing care, treatment or services.”
The strongest evidence that fixing it works is not about software at all. In November 2014 the I-PASS Study Group published a nine hospital study in the New England Journal of Medicine covering 10,740 admissions. Medical errors fell 23 percent and preventable adverse events fell 30 percent. The intervention was a mnemonic, training, faculty observation and a sustainability campaign. That is a process bundle, not a product, and it is the benchmark any handoff vendor was measured against.
A doctor who could code
Sivakumar grew up in Northern England, programming and designing as a teenager while planning to be a cardiothoracic surgeon or an oncologist. He told Sramana Mitra in 2019 that his mother was diagnosed with breast cancer when he was very young, and that the people who looked after her had a huge impact on him.
Medicine delivered the motive and the grievance at once. As a working doctor he found the software unusable, and as a programmer he found that intolerable. He sold his flat, moved back to the family home, and applied to Y Combinator. Medisas went through the Winter 2013 batch. An archived version of the company site from 2015 named Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel and Y Combinator as backers, and listed Paul Graham, Paul Buchheit, Geoff Ralston, David Petersen and Dave Hersh among the angels.
Ten and a half million, then quiet
On December 15, 2016, Medisas, Inc. filed a Form D with the SEC. First sale December 1. Offering $10,689,641. Sold $10,589,641. Thirty nine investors. Two related persons: Sivakumar as executive officer, director and promoter, and Keith Rabois as director. Reuters carried a one line item the same day. Rabois later published his own list of investments he led at Khosla Ventures, and Medisas (Series A) is on it.
Three years later the company was still working. In September 2019 Sivakumar said Medisas had “about a million patients on the platform” at any given time, and put the hospital count in the high tens without naming one. The same month he argued in a bylined trade piece that “EHRs of today are largely digital remakes of paper charts, just as many early motion pictures were merely plays captured on celluloid.”
Then the trail stops. The company blog ran interviews with clinicians at the University of Chicago, UCSF, Stanford, OHSU, the University of Florida and the Cleveland Clinic between April 2017 and January 2018, and posted nothing after. Archived homepage captures from July 2019, June 2021 and December 2023 are the same page. PitchBook records an out of business event dated April 14, 2021. Tracxn calls the company deadpooled. Seedtable lists it as closed. The domain still resolves in September 2026.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| Form D, Dec 2016 | Medisas, Inc., CIK 0001692364. First sale Dec 1, 2016. Offered $10,689,641, sold $10,589,641, 39 investors, Rule 506(b). Related persons: Gautam Sivakumar and Keith Rabois. Delaware incorporation given as 2013. It is the only filing under the company CIK, with no amendment and nothing after. | Public record |
| Regulatory and clinical record | No FDA 510(k) or PMA, no registered trial, no NIH or NSF award, no PubMed hit. No ONC certified health IT listing surfaced in searches. | Not found |
| Handoff evidence base | I-PASS, New England Journal of Medicine, Nov 6, 2014: nine hospitals, 10,740 admissions, medical errors down 23 percent, preventable adverse events down 30 percent. | Public record |
| Error reduction claim | In 2014 Sivakumar predicted Medisas would cut a hospital medical error rate by at least 30 percent, and said hard data was being collected and would hopefully be published. No publication was ever found. | Claim without record |
| Size of the problem, as stated | In 2014 Sivakumar said bad handoffs kill more than 60,000 Americans a year. In 2019 he said the handoff process alone causes about 300,000 to 350,000 deaths a year. The company figure moved by a factor of five. | Company figures differ |
| Scale, as stated | 2019: about a million patients on the platform at any time, hospitals in the high tens, none named. The Y Combinator profile says the care teams of half a million patients and counting. No customer was ever named publicly. | Company-stated |
| Investors | Keith Rabois lists Medisas (Series A) among investments he led at Khosla Ventures. The Form D names him as a director but names no fund. The archived company site named Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel and Y Combinator plus angels. | Investor list |
| Status | PitchBook: out of business, Apr 14, 2021. Tracxn: deadpooled. Seedtable: closed. CB Insights still shows the company as alive. | Databases disagree |
Read plainly: the money is documented and the product existed. Everything about impact is company-stated. Medisas promised evidence-based software, borrowed the credibility of the handoff literature, and never added to it.
What to watch
- Whether any successor entity claims the Medisas assets. No acquisition record was found, and no Form D has been filed under the company CIK since 2016.
- The live domain, which markets a Mara cognitive engine and an operating system for hospitals, language absent from the archived captures of 2019 to 2023.
- Whether the database disagreement resolves. CB Insights still lists the company as alive against three providers calling it closed.
- The same problem, restated. Current entrants in clinical workflow automation are selling into the gap Medisas described in 2013.
In their words
“It was completely insane to me that within a couple of minutes of my friend falling over in Australia, I could see an HD video of that on my phone, but I can’t access my patient’s blood results from a hospital 20 minutes down the road.”
Gautam Sivakumar, founder and CEO, Inc., 2014 · Independent
“I could live with failure, but I just couldn’t live with not having had a go”
Gautam Sivakumar, on leaving medicine, Inc., 2014 · Independent
“Somebody forgets to relay that a patient needs to have her blood thinner dose reviewed in the evening, which leads to the patient having a serious internal bleed overnight. All because it wasn’t handed over properly. Nuts.”
Gautam Sivakumar, Forbes, 2014 · Independent
“We think that we can probably reduce more than half the number of errors that happen each year because of poor handoffs, which would mean saving more than 30,000 people each year in the US, if we were in every hospital.”
Gautam Sivakumar, Forbes, 2014 · Company claim
“Where in the world do you see faxes and pagers other than in hospitals?”
Gautam Sivakumar, Sramana Mitra interview, 2019 · Interview
“in a typical business, if you try something new, the worst that can happen is you lose money. In healthcare where you’re dealing with sick patients, the worst thing is, you kill someone.”
Gautam Sivakumar, on hospital risk aversion, Sramana Mitra, 2019 · Interview
“We don’t disclose the number of hospitals exactly. It’s in the high tens.”
Gautam Sivakumar, Sramana Mitra, 2019 · Company-stated
“You’ve taken a very challenging part of our EMR and turned it into something much more user friendly.”
Unnamed clinician, user testing feedback, Martini Design case study, 2016 to 2017 · Practitioner
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordForm D, Medisas, Inc., CIK 0001692364
- Public recordChanges in medical errors after implementation of a handoff program
- Public recordSentinel Event Alert 58: Inadequate hand-off communication
- Not foundFDA, ClinicalTrials.gov, NIH, NSF and PubMed searches
- IndependentMeet Medisas, The Company That Saves People’s Lives
- IndependentHow Being a Doctor Made Me a Better Founder
- IndependentMedisas Inc raises $10.6 mln in equity financiang
- InterviewThought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Gautam Sivakumar, parts 1 to 3
- IndependentMedisas profile, out of business Apr 14, 2021
- IndependentMedisas company profile, stage Series A, alive
- PractitionerMedisas Medical App, design case study 2016 to 2017
- InvestorInvestments led @ Khosla Ventures
- CompanyWhy Healthcare Is Finally Moving To The Cloud
- CompanyMedisas about page and homepage captures
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
