HEARD Wants to Fix How Patients — and Employees — Navigate Healthcare
ATLANTA, August 10 (Hypepotamus) - Hypepotamus first heard Rachell Dumas pitch her startup HEARD during Atlanta Startup Village in July. And her pitch, which started with a very personal story, got those in the room to sit up and listen in.
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Before becoming an entrepreneur, Dumas was a healthcare professional who holds an MSN in Nursing Informatics and is a Doctoral Candidate in Nursing Informatics. Over the past several years, she navigated infertility and miscarriages, and then unexplained blindness, two brain brain surgeries, and repeated experiences of having her medical concerns dismissed by healthcare providers. As both a nurse and a patient, she saw the same failure that meant patients don't have a reliable way to capture, track, and communicate what's happening with their health.
She thought that if she could not get the care and advocacy she needed as someone who knew how to navigate the medical field…how could a regular person?
So she built HEARD (which stands for Human Enabled AI Reporting & Documentation).
And it turns out, enterprises see a big opportunity.
What HEARD Does
HEARD is an app platform that documents a patient’s symptoms with evidence-based documentation, helps them prepare with appointments, escalate concerns, and can coordinate with caregivers or family members.
This means HEARD acts as an AI-powered health advocate, providing insights to ensure patients ask the right questions and spot patterns in their health changes.
HEARD got off the ground with a $50,000 non-dilutive grant, and Dumas told Hypepotamus that she initially planned to bootstrap the business. But she recently secured $80,000 from angel investors with more external capital “rolling in.”
Dumas brings more than clinical experience to the startup. She has supported electronic health record implementation across more than 40 clinics and healthcare facilities and previously ran her own small business.
“The health technology startup ecosystem [is] unique,” Dumas said. “Navigating venture fundraising, developing a scalable technology product, and learning the expectations of high-growth startups required a new level of education and adaptation. My healthcare, informatics, and entrepreneurial backgrounds have ultimately given me a strong foundation for building a platform that addresses a problem I understand both personally and professionally.”
The Enterprise Play
Patients and caregivers aren't the only ones seeing value in HEARD. One of the startup's fastest-growing segments is its enterprise product, which helps employees understand, access, and actually use the benefits their employers already provide.
Dumas said there are common problems that come up in employee benefits programs, including the fact that employees don't understand the full scope of benefits available to them, benefits are scattered across multiple vendors and portals, and HR teams lack visibility into why benefits go underused.
The pitch to HR teams is that employees give HEARD their healthcare questions, and employers get aggregated, de-identified "Benefits Intelligence" showing where engagement breaks down — without HEARD exposing any individual's health details.
HEARD can help companies with benefit awareness and recommendations, improve employee engagement and satisfaction with what benefits they do get.
HEARD has already signed pilots with several well-known brands, with more in the pipeline. According to Dumas, a standard pilot can launch within 30 days; more complex procurement processes can push that timeline to roughly six weeks. Technically, HEARD can run as a standalone platform before integrating with a company's HRIS and broader benefits ecosystem, with the employee experience and business intelligence dashboard customized to each workforce.
Maija Ehlinger
What’s Next
HEARD took home the top spot at that Atlanta Startup Village pitch competition. Looking ahead, Dumas said she is focused on scaling HEARD.
“Our primary need is strategic capital and partnerships that will allow us to scale the platform, expand enterprise distribution, strengthen our sales capacity, and continue advancing our technology and business intelligence capabilities,” she told Hypepotaus. “We are building the infrastructure necessary to support large employer populations while delivering measurable outcomes related to healthcare navigation, patient advocacy, employee productivity, and caregiver burden.”
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