The Launch Place is investing $250,000 in a company that enables doctors to record patient encounters using an app and have the medical information documented and entered into their medical records by remote writers.

Representatives with Durham, North Carolina-based iScribes and The Launch Place announced the investment Friday morning at Spectrum Medical in River District Tower.

The money is to further iScribes’ operation capacity and technology for delivering its virtual services, said Jimmy McGarry, who serves on the board of directors for The Launch Place.

Community leaders attended the event, including city officials and Delegate Danny Marshall, R-Danville.

iScribes, which started in 2014, has 27 employees in Virginia and is in eight states, said CEO and founder Dr. Jared Pelo. He hopes to hire scribes in the Dan River Region who would work from home.

“I plan on bringing lots of jobs to the region,” Pelo told the Register & Bee.

Christopher McGuire is the co-founder and head of sales at iScribes.

The company will have a satellite office at The Launch Place, Pelo said.

With iScribes, health care providers record patient encounters using the mobile app, and remote, virtual writers listen to the interaction, write medical documentation and enter it into electronic medical records for the providers. It saves physicians hundreds of hours per year of clerical work, according to Pelo.

Doctors spend 40 percent of their time documenting patient visits in electronic medical records, decreasing available time for patient care, Pelo said.

The use of medical records has been an important step in the modernization of health care, but it has posed challenges for providers. It has also affected the doctor-patient relationship, with some physicians conducting exams facing a computer instead of their patients.

“iScribes exists to make health care functional and efficient,” Pelo, an emergency medicine doctor for Centra, said in a prepared statement. “Virtual medical scribes enable providers to conduct patient encounters naturally and efficiently with exceptionally high-quality documentation.”

No dictation is required and the scribes complete documentation directly in the provider’s electronic medical records.

Two physicians at Spectrum Medical use iScribes, Pelo said during the announcement.

“The problem of time-consuming documentation for every patient office visit has been reduced,” said Dr. John Mahoney, orthopedic surgeon at Spectrum Medical, who has used iScribes since October. “I can focus more on my patients instead of spending long hours at a computer or working with dictation services.”

Dr. Jonathan Krome at Spectrum Medical also uses iScribes, Pelo said.

iScribes has continued to grow since it began in March 2014, Pelo said.

“We love this region, we love Southern Virginia,” he told attendees. “We want to grow the ecosystem in this area.”

“It’s exciting even to be in this building today,” McGuire said, referring to the new River District Tower.

The Launch Place led the investment deal in which Triangle Angel Partners II, LLC (TAP II), an angel investment fund in the Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, co-invested for a total of $410,000.

“We have had a strong relationship with TAP for multiple years and look forward to continuing our work together,” said Launch Place President and CEO Eva Doss, in a prepared statement. “iScribes’ use of technology to improve a health provider’s productivity and accuracy as well as overall patient satisfaction has shown tremendous traction in the last year by the number of customers that have selected to use iScribes for their medical documentation.”

iScribes is the 12th investment for The Launch Place, totaling $2.25 million.

As for providing jobs, Pelo said the company is hiring. A medical background is not needed for positions, he said.

Applicants must be hard workers and decent writers, Pelo said. Those interested can apply online at iscribes.co.

The Launch Place, from a $10 million grant received from the Danville Regional Foundation in 2012, helps with entrepreneurship and business development, and job creation and retention through its business consulting, mentoring and training, residential and office subsidies, and two seed investment funds in the Dan River Region.