At Wisedocs, we’re building a stellar team and we’re proud to introduce our team members over time through our monthly Wisedocs’ Brain Power series. Recently, we introduced you to Michelle Mabee, our Director of Customer Success. Today, we will meet Lisen Kaci, our Engineering Lead. As Engineering Lead, Lisen oversees software innovation and new product launches.

Let's get to know Lisen!

I’m Lisen Kaci, Engineering Lead at Wisedocs, the medical record summaries and review platform for the insurance ecosystem. I am a senior full stack developer who has built companies and projects from scratch to product-market-fit. An entrepreneur by nature, I absolutely revel in the startup environment and enjoy digging into the code and building the latest and coolest product offerings in business-facing software.

Tell us about your career so far, how did you get to where you are today?

I began as a sales coordinator for a technology company. For years, I was coding projects and studying computer engineering in my own time.

When I moved to Toronto, I co-founded a website development and marketing agency. My business partner and I split the tasks and I focused on website, software, and application development for businesses while Samantha Lloyd, my business partner, led marketing strategy and execution. This experience allowed me to interact directly with clients while ensuring all projects were directly reflective of what they had in mind to create. It was challenging and I had to learn the latest in web development and design as quickly as possible. During this time, I pursued the Web and Mobile Application Development certification at University of Toronto. I also hosted the Float or Founder podcast, Toronto’s startup podcast.

I eventually returned to the workforce as a software developer. Later, I launched a startup with my former business partner. The startup was a no code artificial intelligence (AI) platform, designed to allow users to apply their bundles of data to create tailored machine learning models for their personal needs or to build AI businesses off. Our goal was to bring AI to everyone to help automate work and personal tasks and create fun tools. While we did not secure funding, the startup was a great opportunity to fine-tune machine learning models and build on top of existing artificial intelligence infrastructure to create something people understood in AI. Through this process, I really began to delve into the AI world and take more courses to improve my understanding.

I was so excited to join Wisedocs as an Engineering Lead – at the forefront of artificial intelligence for the insurance industry is a great place to be. I’m part of a diverse team of creative, hardworking, and talented individuals who challenge the norm and push innovation at every turn.

What’s the day-to-day of Wisedocs' Engineering Lead?

As the Engineering Lead, my job is within the Engineering and Special Projects function of the organization. My role requires me to bring innovative ideas to the table, lead team members in the building of these, and execute on the plan itself. My average day looks like:

• Make coffee(s)
• Join the morning huddle(s) and meetings
• Assign tickets against the roadmap
• Look through my tickets
• Code, code, code!
• Collaborate with engineering and product team members
• Share progress with the relevant team(s)
• Have teams or customers demo the latest features
• Receive feedback and assign new tickets or make plans for the next day
• Do it all again!

I really love and enjoy coding. It’s a very satisfying job. It allows me to have an idea, be able to build it, see it come to life, and have people enjoy interacting with and using it. If you like tinkering, building, creating, making – software development is a career path I highly recommend.

What makes you excited about Wisedocs? What are the challenges?

The team at Wisedocs makes coming to work every day a fulfilling endeavor. I’m grateful to the talent Wisedocs has onboarded. To be able to work alongside Founder and CEO Connor Atchison, Co-Founder and newly anointed COO, Jenna Earnshaw, as well as investors/advisors such as George Papayiannis encourages me to really step up and work hard to build the future platform of Wisedocs. I love being part of the nimble and smart engineering team, and really appreciate the collaborative nature of team members like Jonathan Enders, on creating the new generation platform. Wisedocs appreciates everyone bringing their ideas to the table. Finally, I really appreciate our customers. They are active in their use of the platform but also their feedback. This allows us to continually innovate and build products our customers truly need. Receiving customer validation on product builds is validating and rewarding.

The challenges lie in a similar place to all startups – we've got the best product and we are set on leading the market. That means moving fast while also being caring and detail oriented. Moving fast does not equate to breaking things. You’ve got to be able to see the big picture and then plan the steps to get there effectively. There are a lot of moving pieces which make every day at work unique, rewarding, and fun.

You recently led our Summary Platform production team, tell us about the experience developing a new product.

As I have mentioned maybe a few too many times, I love building products. The Summary Platform was a great experience as I got to build from a thoughtful and intuitive design from Marquessa MacKenzie, receive constant feedback from multiple teams, and watch all our ideas come to life.

Getting to lead the platform’s software development and work closely with the engineering team to bring our AI capabilities to our customers plus collaborate with sales, customer success, our in-house experts in medical records, and customers means we built something truly valuable. It’s not easy building something new and unseen by the market – you have to trust your customers and team to guide the product roadmap and test your ideas regularly to be sure it’s on the right track. Easily, this is the most satisfying part of development. Seeing it go live, be used by customers, have our sales team get to share it with prospects is really the wow moment.

What’s an unexpected perk or challenge (or both) about being an Engineering Lead?

Leading Engineering and Special Projects means getting to innovate on new platforms and features for Wisedocs while collaborating cross-functionally with design, product, sales, marketing, customer success, quality assurance, and executive teams. I really appreciate that my role enables me to work outside my function and interact with as much of the company, and our customers, as possible. In a remote or hybrid environment, it can be challenging to meet everyone so it’s an excellent perk to get to talk to many functions and get their incredibly valuable input.

What part of Wisedocs are you most proud to have worked on, to date? What is your biggest achievement you celebrate here?

It’s hard to believe that around time of writing this article, I've only been part of Wisedocs for six months. It feels, in a good way, like I’ve been part of the organization for far longer. Easily, my biggest achievement, is being an integral part to leading the development of the AI Medical Summary Platform.

As per our recent press release on Wisedocs’ Summary Platform launch:

"Implementing our advanced artificial intelligence capabilities into the Wisedocs’ platform to support our customers with medical record summarization and document insights has been imperative to the success and fast adoption of the platform,” states Engineering Lead, Lisen Kaci. “Giving our customers the ability to automate the generation of summaries and gain insights using artificial intelligence is critical in moving the insurance ecosystem further towards automation and away from manual, laborious processes.”

Tell us more about the Summary Platform: Why is this product a big deal to the insurance and claims ecosystems?

Wisedocs’ Summary Platform is the way forward for the insurance and claims space, as it pertains to medical records. The industry knows it has had a massive backlog of claims, especially when COVID hit. To move forward and prevent burnout of the hardworking people within the insurance, legal, and healthcare spaces, we need automation, technology, and artificial intelligence. These sectors are adopting artificial intelligence and it’s really exciting to be part of making the claims space faster, less expensive, less cumbersome, to truly support claimants in their recovery process.

With Wisedocs’ Indexing product we’re talking about moving through a medical record case file up to 85% faster - processing hundreds of pages in minutes. Now, with our Summary Platform, we’re offering the ability to get an automatic medical summary generated. It’s a crazy change that means more medical record reviews can happen in less time.

Which part of Wisedocs’ new Summary Platform do you know customers can’t wait to use?

Having been able to demo the platform to Beta users, we know our customers are really excited about the chronology capabilities. Due to Wisedocs’ Intelligent Optical Character Recognition (OCR) capabilities, medical records can be easily digested by the platform (and it goes through redaction prior to) and have key phrases, dates, and other important information pulled. This allows for a chronology that is very easy to look at and get a big picture overview of the medical case and everything that occurred over the course of time. It’s the first time working with medical records where I really saw a “story” form. It really drives home the impact of what we’re doing at Wisedocs – there is a claimant with complicated and long-endured health issues that wants a quicker resolve for their claim. We’re allowing for that.

The other thing our customers really seem to need and appreciate so far is the ability to select any section of any page in the medical record, highlight, and have the platform automatically make a “Sticky Note” of the information contained inside that highlight. Again, this is due to our Intelligent OCR being able to digest the record and disseminate the information within the highlight to store for the customer’s reference.

Which part of Wisedocs’ new Summary Platform is the most exciting to see in-action?

The artificial intelligence capabilities of both the Summaries and Insights on Wisedocs’ new Medical Summary Platform is incredibly thrilling to see in-action. Watching the platform digest hundreds of pages of medical records and generate usable, shortform summaries is incredible. Building these intelligent capabilities into the platform means introducing something new to the industry which is rewarding – it is so rare to have an opportunity to truly create something innovative and game-changing. Generative AI is reshaping healthcare, insurance, legal, and many other sectors. It’s amazing to build software that contributes to this innovation and moves the claims space towards faster and more accurate reviews and decisions on medial records for claims.