Key takeaways from this episode

• docology turns messy referral packets into a clinically useful pre-visit summary the physician can use as the HPI. Dr. Sida Niu, a private practice urologist in Omaha, built it after spending nights and weekends reading 10- to 30-page scanned PDF packets for clinics of up to 50 patients.
• Per-patient chart prep dropped from roughly seven or eight minutes to about 30 seconds. Dr. Niu keeps his same workflow of reviewing each chart a night or two before clinic, but reads the docology narrative and treatment timeline instead of hunting through the PDF, and goes back to the source documents only when something needs validating.
• A standalone web app was not enough; beta users demanded the tool live inside the EMR. Physicians would not log in and complete another MFA process mid-clinic, so docology built field-level bidirectional EMR integrations rather than dropping documents into a work queue.
• Roughly 80 percent of docology's value is on the front-end document intake, not the summaries. It connects by API to the practice's digital fax solution, routes every incoming document within seconds, creates new patients in the EMR, and files parsed components (SOAP notes, pathology reports, old physician notes) in the correct chart location.
• Insurance data is OCR'd out of the packet and placed in the EMR so eligibility can be run sooner. Group number, plan number and payer are extracted automatically, shortening the time before the practice can verify coverage and get paid.
• Automating intake lets practices shrink a four-person document team to one. With an average of 4.67 full-time employees supporting each revenue-generating physician, the freed staff move to scheduling, billing and prior authorizations, and high-turnover intake roles no longer stall clinic.
• docology was selected for the AUA Innovation Nexus program. Dr. Niu, as the clinical subject matter expert, trains and validates the summary models on the pertinent positives and negatives for each diagnosis, then pilot users refine the algorithm before expansion to other specialties.
• The company is raising $2.5 million in Q1 2026 and wants physicians in the investor pool. Demos and inquiries go through docologyhealth.ai or tyler@docologyhealth.ai, with a link on the episode page at prsnetwork.com/274.

Transcript

Lightly edited for readability; timestamps mark where each speaker turn begins in the recording. UCR 274, recorded January 2026, with Scott Painter and Mark Painter of PRS Network, and guests Tyler Hammock and Dr. Sida Niu of docology.

Meet the docology founders

[00:00] Scott Painter: On this episode: a conversation with Tyler Hammock and Dr. Sida Niu from docology, a new AI journey. Welcome to episode 274 of the Urology Coding and Reimbursement Podcast. I'm your host, Scott Painter, with my co-host Mark Painter. On today's episode we want to have a conversation with docology founders Tyler Hammock and Dr. Sida Niu. Dr. Niu is the Chief Medical Officer, and Tyler is the Chief Revenue Officer. Welcome, guys. Can you share a little bit about yourselves, please? Let's go with Tyler first.

[01:00] Tyler Hammock: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having us. My background is really in financial technologies. Over the last four and a half years I was selling AI, OCR and machine learning software to that industry, and got AI certifications from Rutgers and UPenn's Wharton School, as I really saw the industry shifting very quickly into the evolution of what AI not only has been for the last 15 years, but where it's going. That led me to meeting Sida, Dr. Niu, and coming up with the idea of what docology has become. So, looking forward to diving into that with you guys today.

Scott: Excellent. All right. And Dr. Niu, how about a little bit about yourself?

[02:00] Dr. Sida Niu: Yeah. Thank you very much for having us on the podcast. My name is Sida Niu. I'm originally from Beijing, China. We moved here when I was eight years old, to Kansas City. That's where I spent most of my years. All of my training was done in Kansas. I have a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering, and then I decided to pursue medical school after college, where I pursued my residency in urology, and now I practice urology as a private practice urologist in Omaha, Nebraska.

For me particularly, I've always been interested in improving workflow efficiencies. I feel like medicine has become a field where we have been late adopters for a lot of technology and things that just improve workflow. When I tell some of my colleagues that some of us still carry pagers around and still use fax machines, they are just absolutely flabbergasted. So it's been a really great experience for me to try to come up with a solution, working with Tyler and the rest of our team, addressing some of these workflow inefficiencies by adopting technology. I think docology has become a really pivotal point for my practice, and I hope to share this as a resource for all the clinicians out there.

Scott: Very good. And before we get started, would you give us a brief introduction to what docology is, what it does, and how it helps your practice?

Why docology exists: referral packets and physician burnout

[03:00] Dr. Niu: Yeah. When people ask me how this started, or why docology, docology started not because I wanted to set out to build a company. I was just trying to survive clinic more efficiently. I remember thinking, why am I, after all these years of training, spending hours manually reading PDFs just to figure out why a patient is here today? That's not physician work, that's friction. So we built docology to do one very specific thing well, and that's to take messy referral packets and turn them into clear, clinically useful summaries before the visit that a physician can then use as their HPI. So there's not more data; there's less reading, there's more clarity. When I walk into a patient's room, I'm prepared, focused and actually present with the patient.

In recent years physician burnout has become a hot topic, and most physicians don't burn out because of medicine itself. We burn out because of the administrative work that surrounds practicing medicine. In a busy clinic, especially in private practice, I might get a referral packet that's 10, 20, 30 pages long, and I'm seeing up to 50 patients in a busy clinic. So I'm sitting there the night before, the weekend before, sometimes the day of if I get those last minute, scanning PDFs, duplicated notes, sorting through outdated labs, trying to find that one piece of information I'm looking for, and I'm expected to digest all of that before I ever walk into the room.

And that's the problem. A lot of this work doesn't happen during the day. It happens at night, on weekends, after my kids go to bed. Now, with higher patient volumes, staffing shortages and lower reimbursements, that burden has only gotten worse. Physicians are being asked to do more with less support and somehow still deliver perfect care, and that's just not sustainable. So we needed to come up with a solution to help physicians.

Scott: Very good. Mark, I'll toss it over to you.

How the founders met, and why medicine adopts at the speed of trust

[05:00] Mark Painter: So how did you and Tyler meet? Obviously the need is there; we've seen that in every urology practice across the country. But how did you get hooked up with docology and Tyler?

[06:00] Dr. Niu: Tyler and I became friends actually through our wives. Our wives do yoga together; they have a yoga night once a week. Through our wives I got to meet Tyler, and Tyler explained his background a little bit. He has a lot of experience selling technology and AI products in this kind of space, not necessarily in the medical world, but in other industries. When we were describing our jobs and daily workflows to each other, and I was explaining my pain points to Tyler, it dawned on both of us that there's a better way to address this problem. That better way is essentially what Tyler was selling in a different industry, and it was just something that hadn't been introduced and repurposed in the field of medicine. We saw that this was a big need and a niche that we could offer and explore and help other physicians. That's ultimately how we came up with the idea for docology.

Mark: Nice. And Tyler, as you've pivoted from finance and that world into the healthcare world, what have you found to be the biggest difference between the two industries?

[07:00] Tyler: Definitely there's way less egos here. A lot easier to sell into. No, I was at a conference earlier, actually now it's 2026, so I'll say the middle of last year, and somebody made a comment that medicine adopts at the speed of trust. That's one that I loved, just as a beacon of truth for why medicine is slower to adopt, and it's because there's not any room for error. I initially was like, oh, we're going to be able to sell into these clinics so fast, they're going to see the value right away. And that's not what the clinic is looking for. They want to build trust with you, build rapport, build the relationship, but more than anything, trust that the value you're going to deliver works and works inside of their workflow.

That was a really big key moment for docology when we were with our beta testers, because we initially existed, similar to how Heidi and some of the AI scribes do out there, as a standalone web application that did not integrate with the EMR. Early feedback was, look, Tyler, we love the summaries and the timeline that your product is producing, but I can't log in and do another MFA process into another system in the middle of my busy clinic day. I need you to put this inside of my EMR. That really quickly opened up the true bottleneck of information, the pain point these clinics are dealing with, and that's the front-end intake of documents and the routing of all medical documentation, not just those referrals, but the one-offs and everything else coming in that needs to get routed over to the EMR.

So we saw that as a much bigger pain point than the initial physician pre-charting solution that we developed, and we added that. It's been a really fun journey to sell into the practices, but also to really listen to them and evolve with them. I think that's a big advantage that companies like docology have: we can innovate a lot faster. These EMRs are very large companies with a lot of features in their systems, and they have a tremendous amount of value as they live today, but it's really hard for them to wake up the next day and be an AI company and have the best AI solution. So we're finding the right EMR partners to integrate with and deliver value that way.

Working with practices instead of forcing a workflow

[09:00] Mark: Obviously we had our interaction in Chicago, where we had a great evening talking about AI and healthcare, and one of the philosophies you imparted there, as well as here, was your willingness to really work with the practice. When we saw electronic medical records being, quote unquote, voluntarily adopted by physicians across the country, there was a significant amount of change physicians had to deal with in order to conform to the templates that the programmers put together based on what they thought physicians would need. What I've been impressed with has been your philosophy of really getting in, rolling up your sleeves and working with the practice. And of course you heard me say that we in the physician world need to jump into this boat and start shaping it; otherwise it will be shoved in.

So as you've gone through all of this, how has it been working with the practices and the physicians? It sounds like you're doing workflow and clinical at this point in time. Who's your best talking point? Where's the contact and connect with the practice to really adapt and adopt your technology into each of those practices?

[11:00] Tyler: There are a few things that I find so unique about docology, both as a product and a company. I'll start on the company front, which always starts with the people. I don't care what industry you're selling into or what product you're selling, it starts with the people and the relationships. So I appreciate the comments about being willing to sit across from these clinicians and COOs in their clinics. That's a big reason why we hire former clinicians as our onboarding specialists, because I need people that have lived this pain point and have understood for years what fragmented information workflows have done to patient care, and not just patient care, but how physicians are able to take care of themselves. That's why we have a very clinically experienced team, now on the business side, that is so excited to take that knowledge and apply it to a much more grandiose scale, listen to so many different physicians, and mold this to what each clinic needs and what each clinic is looking for, rather than asking them to change their workflow to fit into docology. I think that's a really important element: you have to understand what their workflow is.

From the product standpoint, you're absolutely right, it's both the workflow and the summary side of things. I was at a clinic just Monday, two days ago, and I said that Sida and I came up with a very good idea. I'm proud of that idea and I'm proud of the company that it's become. But the best ideas for improving this product are going to come from the other side of the table. They're going to come from the clinical managers and clinical directors who are really that main point of contact, that internal champion for us, overseeing the operations teams and maybe the nursing teams, who are able to maneuver where the product fits into the workflows. So it's all about listening to the customer, listening to their feedback, and what they need.

A day in clinic with docology

Scott: I have a question for Dr. Niu. Can you share with us what your day looks like now when you're using docology, and how that works in your workflow?

[13:00] Dr. Niu: Traditionally, before docology, I would usually spend anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour the night or a few nights before clinic just looking through all of the patients I'm seeing for clinic that day, reviewing their charts, their updated imaging and labs, any pathology, anything new from the last visit. If it's a new patient, I'm spending even more time reviewing the reasons why they're coming to see me. Given that I practice in a private practice, a lot of this information comes in scanned as a PDF, and I find it extremely cumbersome to click through PDFs on a computer screen. I think it's even more tedious than flipping through pages of printed material. But I can't always print out 30 or 40 pages of referral packets at home. It's wildly inefficient for me to do that as well.

I'm only a few years into practice, and I knew that I had to do this to provide the best care for my patients, because I pride myself on being able to walk into a patient's room and answer all their questions and know exactly what's been done for them. But obviously that came at a really high price for my mental energy, the time I'm able to spend outside of work, the time I can spend with my family. It got to the point where I found that something had to change. I wasn't willing to do less for my patients, but I also didn't want to spend less time with my family. So I was having to make a terrible decision between being a good father and husband or being an unprepared physician, and I don't think any physician ever wants to have to make that decision.

So when we developed docology, I spent a lot of time working with our coder and our process engineers to figure out how we can develop this technology to really distill down the information that I need as a urologist when I walk in to see a patient. Instead of looking through 40 pages, I just look through one page, or maybe even one paragraph, and it has all the information I need to walk in prepared. When we were able to successfully create the algorithm to do this for us in an automated fashion, it tremendously changed my preparation, my perception of clinic, and how my patients perceive me, because I'm happier. I didn't spend two hours staring at a computer instead of being with my family, so I'm not tired or maybe even annoyed sometimes when I walk into clinic. Now I'm happy, I'm ready to walk in prepared, and I got to spend time with my family. It's a win-win on both fronts. It's saved me a tremendous amount of time on nights and weekends, where I can use a fraction of the time to get ready for clinic. It's truly been a blessing.

Scott: Now, are you walking in having read all those summaries, or are you doing a hybrid where you're scanning it before you go in? How does that work?

[16:00] Dr. Niu: I still do the same workflow I did before, which is, the night or a few nights before, I like to go through my clinic and each patient's chart. But instead of hunting and pecking through a 10- or 20-page PDF packet trying to find the information I need and then summarizing it all myself into a cohesive HPI, docology has done that for me. That time I was spending clicking around, hunting and pecking, is essentially non-existent. All I'm doing now is opening up the chart and looking at the summary docology has generated for me. A lot of times, if it's a more complex patient, it'll also have a timeline of treatments available for me, and in some cases that's very helpful, because I want to see chronologically what has happened to a patient as well as a narrative summary.

That basically trims down the prep time from maybe seven or eight minutes to 30 seconds of me reading this narrative and timeline. Certainly, if there's something I need to validate, I will then go look at the original documents to see if there's anything I have a question about or if I need a little more information. But nine out of ten times, I would actually say 9.9 out of ten times, it's got more information than I need, and certainly a lot less than what I would be going through if I had to flip through all 20 or 30 pages of PDF on my own. So it's definitely cut the work by a tremendous amount.

Scott: That's awesome.

The front-end intake problem and EMR integration

Mark: Excellent. And Tyler, I know from previous discussions that there's a significant workflow component to docology. As we talked about in the beginning, the mounds of paper and how it comes in, faxes and everything else, and dedicating a team to sorting all those things. That's part of the process that docology solves, correct?

[18:00] Tyler: Yeah. I would even argue that's the majority of the value we deliver, actually on that front-end operational piece. No shade to Sida and the summaries; they're very much valuable for him and they shave off time getting ready for clinic. But we found that 4.67 full-time employees on average support one revenue-generating physician. When you think about the amount of intake, pre-auth, billing, scheduling and revenue cycle management full-time employees that are supporting these physicians, it really stacks up. That was really the blessing of when I met Sida. He had recently become a partner in his practice, so he was already living that pain point, but he was just starting to see the financial impact it was having on the RVUs and the money he was generating to bring into the practice.

So I really like to communicate that 80 percent of the value we deliver is on that front-end bottleneck of information. What we do is build API keys to tap into whatever digital fax solution each practice uses, and we route all of those documents to the docology software. Then we have field-level bidirectional integrations into the EMRs. If it's a new patient, our software is automatically creating the new patient in the EMR and dropping in the parsed-out documents, not just a 40-page referral summary, but parsed out into SOAP notes, pathology reports, old physician notes, all of these different elements of that referral packet, and those land in the correct place.

What I would say has been one of the most exciting additions to our product is being able to surface and extract all of the insurance information. Via the same OCR technology, we OCR out the group and plan number and payer for each patient and put that into the correct spot in the EMR for that patient's chart, so they can start running eligibility faster on their patients. It's all about shortening the time spent engaging with the practice so you can get paid and move on to treating the next patient.

There are a lot of exciting AI tools out on the market, but I was always really surprised when we started this that so many were ignoring the very first pain point, and that was the intake of all of these documents and the teams that were doing manual data entry and downloading and scanning and printing and re-scanning, all to get into the right place. Yes, you have to have a really talented engineer, like we have, who is able to build these field-level integrations, not just dropping them into a queue inside your EMR for the rest of the team to still work through. But by automating that whole front end, we're seeing our clients take four-person document intake teams down to one, and the other three then get to focus on scheduling, billing and pre-authorizations. There's just so much better time spent from removing what Sida put earlier as friction at this level. And the truth of the matter is, a lot of these positions have a high rate of turnover. So it's a lot of rehiring, retraining and getting new hires back up to your process on where the documents need to go. It can slow down clinic too, if the patient's documents for Dr. Niu aren't in the patient's chart yet. That isn't a problem with us, because we route it all within seconds to the chart.

AUA Innovation Nexus and training the clinical summaries

Scott: That's excellent. One final question from me, and then I'll give Mark one final question. We heard that you were selected as one of the few companies by the AUA for the Innovation Nexus program, and that's recognized as one of the world's most innovative programs for urology. That's pretty exciting. Tell us about that.

[22:00] Dr. Niu: Yeah, I think being selected for the American Urological Association Innovation Nexus was incredibly validating for us. This isn't an incubator that picks up ideas based on hype. It's a program curated by the AUA to spotlight solutions that are actually moving the field forward. The fact that docology was selected alongside a very small group of companies tells me something important, and that's that our specialty is recognizing that physician workflow is a real problem that needs real solutions. What stood out to me is that this recognition didn't come from venture capital or tech insiders. It came from the leading professional organization in urology. That signals a shift: our industry is no longer just asking, what's the next device or procedure? It's asking, how do we make day-to-day clinical practice more sustainable for physicians? To me, the Innovation Nexus selection says that urology is ready to embrace tools that reduce administrative burden, improve our preparation, and let physicians focus on patient care again. That's exactly the problem docology was built to solve.

I'm more excited too that down the road, hopefully, we can share this. That is absolutely our plan, to share this with our colleagues even outside of urology, because we're looking at other verticals we can expand to, to get this in the hands of as many clinicians as possible.

Scott: Awesome.

Mark: Excellent. Along those same lines, I'll go back to you, Dr. Niu, really quick. As you go through figuring out what goes into a summary, every specialty has to deal with the upfront shuffling of paper and moving that stuff through, but it sounds like you're taking your time and really rolling out the clinical summary in a very focused manner. How did you decide what to lever up and include in the summary, with all that information coming in, and how do you train the AI to get it there?

[24:00] Dr. Niu: I think that's a great question, and a lot of that really just comes with experience practicing. We know that for certain diagnoses there is relevant information. When I see a patient who's seeing me for an obstructing kidney stone, there are certain questions that are important to me, that are pertinent for my decision making and my treatment management plans. And then there are things the patient is going to tell me, or the PCP is going to include in the note, that are going to be irrelevant. With urology training these days, and residency training across all specialties, we've been taught very well to know the pertinent positives and pertinent negatives and the relevant information. Having good guidelines in our field and strong training has really helped me be one of the subject matter experts in training and validating our models. We then roll it out to pilot users, who help further strengthen the algorithm so we can get it as spot-on as possible. That's our plan, to essentially expand across multiple verticals in a similar fashion.

Mark: Nice.

Sponsor, capital raise and final thoughts

Scott: Very nice. All right, let's wind this episode up. We want to thank ModMed for supporting this episode. If you're in the market for an EHR or a practice management system, you can go to modmed.com/prsnetwork for specials for our listening audience. All right, let's go around and get some final thoughts. Tyler, final thoughts today?

[26:00] Tyler: Final thoughts for me: I think it's really important to share that we're going through our capital raise right now. We've had some wonderful investors that have allowed us to exist this far, but we're going to be raising $2.5 million here in Q1. One really important element of that raise is that we want physicians to be a part of that investor pool. We already have a handful-plus that are involved. But if there's anyone out there who is interested in investing in an important need, we want to hear from you, and as Mark brought up earlier, we want your voice at this table. It's the only way we can succeed. It's the only way docology becomes what I know it will become, and that's having the right people in the right seats to make this company what it is, but also the right people who are willing to listen and take feedback on how it needs to evolve. So if there's anyone out there who, A, is interested in learning more about how we can implement docology at your practice, or is interested in investing, please reach out.

Scott: Final thoughts, Dr. Niu?

[27:00] Dr. Niu: For me, patients don't see the hours we spend outside of clinic reading through their records, but they feel the difference. When I've been up late at night before clinic, I'm less focused, less sharp. But when docology does the heavy lifting for me, I walk into the room fully prepared and I already know their history. I can make eye contact, I can listen. That builds trust, and it leads to better decisions and better care. Ultimately, docology lets me practice medicine the way it was meant to be practiced. I believe that's the gift docology gives me, and I want every physician to feel the same relief.

Scott: Mark, final thoughts?

[28:00] Mark: As we've been around the country working with physician groups everywhere, and for those groups we provide revenue cycle for, there's no doubt that the pain point of the upfront demographics, the gathering of the data, the referrals, the prior auths, all that stuff, which is a critical portion in today's environment, is a tough one to do. We don't always have, or see, practices with enough staff or well-trained staff to routinely make that happen. So it is an area where we really see a need, and with the advancements in AI, the possibilities of real solutions. We'll certainly love to keep an eye on the progress of docology and all the improvements you're going to make over time, and hear the stories of what they're doing. As with everything, we're looking for any other solutions out there so that, once again, we can help the practicing physician do what they really want to do, which is care for patients, with the rest of this stuff happening in support of that, not in spite of all those actions.

Scott: Well said. All right, we'll go ahead and wrap this episode up. We will put a link to docology on the episode page, so if you go to prsnetwork.com/274 there will be a link there so you can get in touch with Tyler or Dr. Niu. Tyler, on that page they can schedule a demo, or what's the best way for them to get in touch with you?

[29:00] Tyler: Either from our website, docologyhealth.ai, where there's a schedule-a-demo page, or my email, tyler@docologyhealth.ai. I was close to giving my cell phone number, as I give it out to everybody, but just reach out via email and I'll follow up with that. I'm very responsive, and just like Sida said, we have a burning passion to spread this message and spread this solution, because it's the most valuable piece of work I've ever done in my career. I'm fired up every single day to help more and more physicians. So give us a call when you're ready.

Scott: Awesome. Well, we want to thank you both for joining us. We really appreciate all the information. That's all we have for today. Thank you all for listening. Take us out, Mark.

Mark: Happy coding.

Get in touch with docology:

https://docologyhealth.ai

Tyler Hamik <tyler@docologyhealth.ai>

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