This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: the Podcast” is with Lina Song, founder of the Madison-based startup Doogooda.
The company, which originally hails from South Korea, builds “decision infrastructure” for hospitals, with a focus on academic medical centers.
“The problem that we are trying to solve is that hospitals usually make like dozens of really, really high-stakes decisions, multi-million dollar decisions every year or every month,” Song said. “These could be something like whether to acquire struggling community hospitals or physician practices or like whether to expand a service line or cut it, or how to allocate capital across competing different priorities.”
She says most hospitals don’t have a formalized record of how and why decisions like these are made, despite being data-driven organizations. Song noted hospitals typically “want to make sure their decisions are rigorous” and analytically supported, and her platform aims to support that.
The company is currently raising its U.S. seed round and developing relationships with Wisconsin health systems; Song notes a “deep dive” with UW Health is in the works. While she’s targeting academic centers, the platform can also be used by smaller critical access hospitals and rural care facilities.
Song, who has a PhD from Harvard, spent a decade deploying the platform at various institutions abroad before recently launching domestically through gener8tor’s gBETA program. She previously taught in London as a professor at University College London, focusing on the U.S. healthcare system and data science statistics.
While her business had “some traction” in South Korea, she views it as a much better fit for the U.S. medical system, noting it’s more complex and needs more decisionmaking support.
Song says she’s glad to have landed in Madison in recent months, calling it a “perfect market” for Doogooda given its developed ecosystem around health care and available pool of skilled talent.
“We would like to raise funds in Madison,” she said. “We recently got connected to various angel investors as well as some health care VCs and other VCs from Wisconsin, so gener8tor has been very helpful.”
Listen to the podcast below, sponsored by UW-Madison:
