Hospital software is broken. This startup wants to fix it

Michel Abdel Malek was on duty as an anesthesiologist when a near-miss shook him. Patient data was technically there — but buried, unsearchable, spread across systems that didn't talk to each other. A colleague almost pushed the wrong medication. It could have been worse. 

"I struggled to understand how often it happened," he recalls. "Then I asked colleagues if they recognized the problem. They all said yes."

That moment became the seed of Delphyr. The Amsterdam-based startup he founded two years ago is developing a smart layer for electronic health records (EHRs), the backbone of modern healthcare facilities. These systems are rigid, siloed, and notoriously hard to navigate. Patient data sits in tables of unstructured text with no meaningful search function. 

What Delphyr has built is, in its founder's words, "an agent operating system for legacy healthcare software." In this way, it allows specialists to query patient data conversationally, surface relevant clinical guidelines, and get support for the decisions that surround a patient consultation — both before and after the appointment. 

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Knowing what doctors need 

Abdel Malek’s path diverges from that of a typical tech founder. Software engineering and technology have been among his greatest passions since his childhood, as he began writing code at the age of 13. Medicine has also been one of his main interests, to the point that he trained as a fully qualified anesthesiologist. 

It was during the medical specialization that he reconnected with engineering, particularly data science and AI, realizing he sat at a key intersection. “I had a pretty good understanding of what is needed from a clinical perspective, but I also understood the technology, the plumbing of software and integrations," he says. "So I had a pretty good view of what was missing."

According to Abdel Malek, most startups active in this space are focusing on doctor-patient conversations. Yet, he argues this represents “10% of clinicians’ cognitive load.”

The remaining 90% is the work that happens before a patient walks in, such as reviewing history, laying out options, and forming a clinical hypothesis, and the administrative work that follows the consultation. Delphyr’s founder believes this is where most of the burden is and where most mistakes are made, and thus where patients can benefit the most, improving care quality. 

The platform is being built toward multimodal capabilities, and ambient listening remains on the roadmap. But for now, the focus is on those pre- and post-consultation phases that have long been left to the healthcare professionals’ own memory and stamina.

M

Michel Abdel Malek

CEO at Delphyr

After becoming an anesthesiologist, he decided to follow one ot his other passions, technology, founding a startup to help fellow healthcare professionals.

Being part of the workflow

This load will only grow further as the population ages. Faced with personnel shortages and budget cuts, healthcare systems worldwide are strained. By 2050, healthcare expenditure per capita is projected to rise by 35%, from $1,754 (PPP) in 2022 to $2,375. 

Delphyr is aware of this and aims to seamlessly integrate into doctors’ workflows. To do so, not only has usability been a top priority from day one, but also compliance with regulatory frameworks. Operating in European healthcare means navigating some of the world's most demanding regulatory frameworks: General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Medical Device Regulation (MDR), and the EU AI Act, which classifies medical AI as high-risk.

All patient data is processed and stored within Europe, on infrastructure hosted by a European hyperscaler — a large-scale cloud computing provider. Nothing leaves EU jurisdiction. "We don't store patient data beyond what's needed," he explains. "We use it only for answering questions, and once it's done, it's removed."

Delphyr's team - © Delphyr

Value for the clinicians — and patients

In March, Delphyr announced a €1.75 million seed round. This money is helping fund the team expansion, growing from seven to thirteen, with the fourteenth and fifteenth hires still under consideration.

The startup currently has its platform deployed in one mental health hospital, with several more deployments in the pipeline. Revenue is starting to come in alongside the investment, which Abdel Malek calls a useful buffer. "It gives us more breathing space to make upfront investments before the deals we aspire to close have all been signed."

The immediate priority is polishing the product experience — user interface refinements, response reliability, and tightening the feedback loop with early clinical users. "The technology is sound," he says. "It's more about getting the product experience to a level where it's very effective to use." The ambition, stated without irony, is to become healthcare software as intuitive as consumer apps.

Early signs are promising. When the platform went live at the mental health hospital, the response from staff was, in his telling, immediate and enthusiastic — not just positive feedback, but requests to expand. "We've always said we want to be where the value is for the clinician," Abdel Malek concludes. "And the response has been phenomenal."