Co-worker’s tragic story of suicide that spurred Sydney start-up Facere to save lives

Many calls to crisis support services go unanswered due to workload, and are expensive, but Dr Bin Rong’s start-up has harnessed AI to change that and help those in desperate need.

Facere founder and managing director Bin Rong.

Bin Rong started his company – which aims to save lives, accelerate productivity in the healthcare sector and curb insurance fraud – while playing tennis with a former colleague.

During that game his colleague related a tragic story of personal loss.

“He unfortunately lost both his mum and a son due to suicide,” Dr Rong said.

“We talked about this while playing tennis and we did some research. We were horrified to find out in this country that a lot of big organisations, NGOs get huge funding from government every year but their core success rate is roughly eight to 10 per cent, which is absolutely criminal.”

Dr Rong, who is based in Sydney, said many phone calls from people seeking mental health support went un­answered.

“The phone just goes nowhere,” potentially leading to tragic consequences, he said.

Facere founder and managing director Bin Rong says the company achieved $100,000 in annualised revenue within three months.

In an attempt to help solve the problem, Dr Rong, who has a PhD in computer science, turned to artificial intelligence to create Facere.

The company’s core aim is to streamline patient care by automating more tasks, such as using bots to take phone calls and using natural conversation to book medical appointments or other support services.

“Our AI is pretty much like a human being. It can understand any text and speech semantically,” said Dr Rong, who is seeking to raise about $10m to expand to North America.

Locally, not-for-profit crisis support service Lifeline says every answered call costs it $39.

“The average wage for a call centre worker is around $30 an hour,” Dr Rong said. “Now, you can imagine a worker can only take one call an hour – that’s pretty low efficiency. But our AI can automate … capture, gather information. We can further the process, in terms of the particular workflow.

“In the healthcare system there is a lot of waste. In the US, they spend $4 trillion every year on healthcare, $1 trillion is spent on admin overhead. And Australia is falling into the same category.”

Dr Rong said his software – which was developed using Meta’s Llama 3 model – keeps data on premises rather than the cloud, in order to ease health-sector privacy concerns.

It can collect a patient’s details, including symptoms and personal information, and can even schedule an appointment. This reduces call centre and GP practice managers’ workloads, allowing them to focus more on patient needs rather than administrative tasks.

“AI does most of the tedious work but we still want to put a human at the centre. The humans are still in the driving seat. They just need to spend five seconds verifying everything,” Dr Rong said.

“It is possible to autonomously handle both the communication to gather information and the further information processing parts, including tasks such as answering phone calls, emails, booking appointments and creating patient files.”

Dr Rong said this also allowed National Disability Insurance Scheme providers, hospitals, specialists and GP clinics to automate health-fund eligibility verification and complete fraud detection.

“Our AI software makes healthcare workflows extremely efficient and provides better services and improves the quality of life for people across Australia. This means that no call will go unanswered, when people reach out for help and need it the most,” Dr Rong said.

He said Facere had already signed on several Australian customers and was finalising its first Canadian client.

“A lot of start-ups in Silicon Valley get tens of millions of dollars in funding and barely generate $100,000 in annualised revenue. We already beat that in a short period of two or three months because we only have one competitor in the world. The UK, Canada and US markets are wide open,” Dr Rong said.

“It’s amazing, we’ve even sold to Brisbane clients without meeting face to face.”