Problem

HealthKey addresses the bottleneck of finding qualified patients for clinical trials. Research sites typically have to search dense medical records manually, while basic search tools cannot interpret nuanced inclusion and exclusion criteria. A clinic may review records for roughly 1,000 patients with a relevant diagnosis only to find that about five meet every requirement. The economics are significant: each enrolled patient can generate approximately $20,000–$100,000 for a site, so inefficient screening creates wasted staff time, missed site revenue, and fewer patients gaining access to potentially life-changing treatments.

The primary use case is helping a doctor’s office or research site identify eligible candidates from its existing patient population, particularly for complex studies such as urology trials requiring specific cancer stage, tumor size, imaging, and treatment-history criteria. HealthKey’s YC case study describes a multi-location urology partner facing a reported $1.4 million missed-revenue opportunity, illustrating the commercial pain it targets.

Product / Service

HealthKey is an AI-powered patient-identification SaaS product for clinical-trial sites. It connects directly to a clinic’s EHR, including faxed PDF records, encodes each trial’s eligibility criteria, and compares those criteria with patients’ medical histories. The system ranks likely candidates and presents supporting evidence—such as imaging details and encounter notes—in a dashboard so doctors or clinical research coordinators can verify and qualify them. The company says it supports integrations including Epic, Athena, Veradigm Allscripts, NextGen, and MedConnect, with onboarding possible in under a week for existing integrations.

The delivery model is performance-based: clinics pay success fees only when qualified patients are successfully identified, with no upfront cost. HealthKey positions the product as a way to replace manual chart review, process thousands of records in minutes, reduce screening failures, and increase enrollment; its site claims that customers can double patient matches in half the time. The company also describes a workflow in which pre-screened, prioritized candidates are reviewed by clinical research coordinators, preserving human oversight while reducing the amount of chart review required.

Market

HealthKey competes in healthcare IT and clinical-research software, specifically AI-enabled clinical-trial patient identification, recruitment, and prescreening. Its customers are research organizations and physician practices that serve as trial sites, while pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical-device sponsors are the economic beneficiaries of faster enrollment. The overlapping competitive set includes patient-matching and clinical-trial recruitment platforms such as Deep 6 AI, Tempus AI, TriNetX, and Clariness, although the available evidence does not establish that each is a direct like-for-like competitor.

HealthKey is not pre-revenue according to its company profile: it is an active Y Combinator Winter 2025 company that has raised a seed round, reports several active paying customers, and says it has a backlog of signed customers awaiting onboarding. The company reports a 10-person team, existing EHR integrations, and a case study in which it had already identified hundreds of eligible patients for a urology practice. The available sources do not disclose funding amount, total revenue, or independently verified enrollment volume.