When an accident led to severe back injury and misdiagnosis, everything changed for Mike Ng. Now, the Bachelor of Commerce alumnus is making sure clinicians have more time for what truly matters, with an AI health platform that allows doctors to spend less time on paperwork and more time on patients.
Long before Mike was building AI systems and tools for the medical community, he was a student at the University of Sydney Business School, eager to learn as much as he possibly could. “I always knew I wanted to run a company one day, so I wanted a really in-depth, rigorous, and broad background on different aspects of business,” he explains. “From a place of curiosity, I chose to study a range of subjects from economics to finance to marketing and even took a number of law subjects – I wanted to have a strong foundation and build from it.”
Today, this foundation underpins his company, Ambience Healthcare, an AI operating platform that takes routine administration away from the day-to-day life of clinicians. It works by following a patient throughout their entire health journey, sifting through medical records before each visit, listening in the background to capture the appointment conversation, and handling the coding and documentation afterwards.
I was at the right stage in life to dedicate the next chapter of my career to building a company that was at the intersection of healthcare, machine learning and AI.
Mike Ng (BCom, '09)
A happy accident
While studying pre-honours at the University, Mike fell in love with statistics, eventually basing his thesis on time series modelling and prediction – the very techniques that would later underpin the core of Ambience. “It’s one of those things where, as you start following your passion and what excites you, it leads to different things,” he says. In this case, his passion for data and numbers led him to an internship at Morgan Stanley in Sydney while studying, made possible by the University.
Upon graduating, he took an opportunity to transfer to the bank’s Hong Kong office. He then moved into the Mergers and Acquisitions team in the US before finally landing in private equity in Boston. “That’s where I learned how to not just think about what’s in the model, but what’s driving underneath, and what the operational changes were that I wanted to make.”
Then, in 2012, everything changed. An accident caused him to fracture his back – a diagnosis initially thought to be a sprain. “I ended up Googling to figure out what was the best care pathway, and then I realised I wasn’t alone in doing this, and that most people do it too,” he says.
Around the same time, he watched his now partner, living with the daily reality of her role as a doctor beyond her patients – billing, documentation, coding and more.
For Mike, these two experiences became impossible to separate. “The misdiagnosis, struggling to get the best care myself, then seeing my partner struggle through this – the culmination led me to believe I was at the right stage in life to dedicate the next chapter of my career to building a company that was at the intersection of healthcare, machine learning and AI”, he explains.
You need to take time to follow your curiosity, even when you can’t yet see where it leads.
Mike Ng (BCom, '09)
The road to Silicon Valley
This moment of clarity took him to MIT, where he studied an MBA, and met co-founder Nikhil Buduma. Together, the two began building what would become Ambience Healthcare. The pair moved to San Francisco to launch the business properly. “Having the ability to go to a city that’s so dense with experience, and having access to mentors who've done it all before, really helped our entrepreneurship journey.”
This commitment paid off, with Ambience having since raised more than $300 million from investors, including a16z, Kleiner Perkins, Oak HC/FT and OpenAI. “If you show up and you’re really mission driven, working on an ambitious problem with the right co-founders at the right time, then typically people and resources find you too,” he explains. Today, the platform is used inside some of the most complex health systems in the US including the Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic and Penn Medicine.
While Mike’s journey has taken him miles from the lecture theatres of the University of Sydney, his experience and career journey remains connected to those early days. “You need to take time to follow your curiosity, even when you can’t yet see where it leads,” he explains. “Sometimes it will take years before its obvious, but it will all connect together eventually.”