This Healthcare Startup Duo Just Pulled Off a 4 Acquisition Streak, And They're Not Slowing Down
Slice of Healthcare Team
10/23/2025
Introduction
Hospitals are drowning in paperwork. These physician founders are throwing them a lifeline, one smarter note at a time.
What Smarter Technologies Actually Does
Smarter Technologies isn’t trying to automate doctors out of the picture. It’s trying to give them their time back. The company focuses on improving revenue cycle management in healthcare, which basically means helping hospitals get paid accurately and faster for the care they provide.
Their platform helps ensure clinical documentation (like physician notes) is both clinically meaningful and billing ready, without dumping more work on already overloaded providers.
Their latest product, SmarterNotes, ties it all together: it captures complex inpatient data to generate high quality clinical notes that also drive revenue accuracy. That combo is rare and timely.
How It All Started
Mike Gao, MD, co founder and CEO of Smarter Technologies, has a clear mission: cut the administrative bloat in healthcare and make sure hospitals can actually get reimbursed for the care they deliver.
Earlier this year, Smarter Technologies made a strategic acquisition: Pieces Technologies, founded by fellow physician Ruben Amarasingham, MD. Ruben’s team had been working on ways to make clinical note writing easier, especially in chaotic, high acuity settings like ICUs.
The two companies weren’t just aligned technically. They were aligned philosophically. As Ruben put it, “It was a perfect jigsaw puzzle coming together… almost a merging of soulmates of companies”.
Why This Move Stands Out
Revenue cycle tech isn’t typically built by physicians. That’s what makes Smarter different. Both Mike and Ruben have firsthand experience with the grind of clinical work and the exhausting burden of documentation.
Most documentation tools capture what doctors say. But in inpatient settings, where patients may be unconscious or hooked to machines, it’s not about what’s said, but what’s in the data. Think: 30,000 plus data points per ICU chart. That’s where SmarterNotes shines.
It automates the documentation process using structured data, not just audio, and then ensures those notes are optimized for billing. The result? Less burnout for doctors, better revenue for hospitals.
A Real Solution to a Real Pain Point
“For the last 20, 30, 40 years, we’ve asked physicians to do more and more,” Ruben said. “We want to get back to an environment where what they do and the note they write is the most important thing, not all the downstream junk”.
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