Company leader
Lukas Saari
Co-founder and CEO
Tandem Health
Lukas Saari is the co-founder and chief executive of Tandem Health, a company based in Stockholm, Sweden, whose AI scribe drafts clinical notes for clinicians across Europe.
Engineering and Consulting
He studied industrial engineering and management at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and worked on machine learning at Spotify. He then joined McKinsey & Company as an analyst and went on to lead its healthcare analytics work in the Nordic countries, where he saw how AI could change care from inside hospitals and clinics.
The Turn to Generative AI
His first look at ChatGPT in 2022 changed his plans. "It felt like the largest platform shift of our lifetime." He began looking for problems in healthcare that generative AI could solve quickly, and clinical documentation stood out, since doctors were spending hours on notes during and after visits.
In August 2023 he left McKinsey to found Tandem Health with Oscar Boldt-Christmas, a senior partner from McKinsey's healthcare practice, and Oliver Åstrand, an engineer who had built AI at Google X and Uber. The three built the first version over a few weekends and had it in the hands of doctors in Sweden within weeks.
Building Tandem Across Europe
In 2024 Tandem launched in the UK, France and Germany at the same time, with a local leader for each country. He has stressed building for clinicians first. "Many healthcare solutions come from the decision maker perspective rather than the end user perspective," he said. More than 80% of its commercial team has a medical background.
Regulation has shaped the company. "What surprised me most is how ambiguous the regulatory landscape is," he said. Tandem's scribe and coding assistant are both certified as Class IIa medical devices under EU MDR, and through Accurx its scribe is available to more than 200,000 NHS staff.