One week before my Y Combinator interview, my doctor told me I needed open-heart surgery to fix a leaky valve. I had just moved from India to France. I didn’t speak French, and I found myself explaining my medical condition over and over again to different doctors across multiple hospitals. Filling out forms and getting appointments became a full-time job. I remember thinking, what if I could just take photos of all my medical reports, email them, and the hospital’s system could automatically capture everything?


Why Businesses Rely on Forms

Years later, I found myself building digital intake forms for hospitals to onboard patients. I couldn’t help but ask: why do doctors ask patients to fill out forms when they could simply ask those questions during the consultation?
It turns out that when patients explain their symptoms verbally, they often miss critical details. Extracting that information during an appointment takes extra time. A well-designed form forces the patient to think beforehand, saving time and improving accuracy.
This issue isn’t limited to healthcare. In every industry, when customers email businesses, they miss key details needed to help them. So these businesses reply with follow-up questions and wait. What could’ve been a quick resolution stretches into days of back-and-forth.
To fix this, businesses implement forms with required fields. That way, they gather complete data upfront and streamline operations. They use products like Google Forms and sync the responses to Google Sheets, so that they can track the status and create reports.


Why Customers Hate Filling Out Forms

While forms are useful for businesses, they frustrate customers for two main reasons:
  1. Many fields like name, age, insurance, medical history already exist on ID cards or previous records. Increasingly, people use AI tools like ChatGPT to extract and paste this data into forms just to avoid errors.
  2. Form creators often over-collect. In trying to capture every detail, they create long, tedious forms that overwhelm users. Patients may not have a choice, but no one will fill a 3-page customer satisfaction survey.
What if, instead, a patient could just snap a photo of their insurance card or previous report, send it via email, and let AI handle the rest? That’s exactly what we’ve built.


Introducing Semantic Email

With Semantic Email, customers email naturally, while your team receives structured, actionable data. Here’s how it works:
  1. Create an email address connected to your existing Google Form.
  2. Customers send emails with attachments or freeform text.
  3. AI extracts key information from the email and attachments using your form logic.
  4. Missing details are collected through conversational email follow-ups. The customer reviews the filled form, signs, and submits.
  5. Data syncs automatically to Google Sheets and is saved as PDFs in Google Drive — ready for integration with systems like Electronic Health Records (EHR).
We’ve made it HIPAA-compliant, with built-in eSignature support for consent forms. Our hope is to make life just a bit easier for patients navigating already difficult situation.


Beyond Healthcare

Healthcare is personal to me, but this product works for any business using Google Workspace that wants to reduce friction in collecting customer information. It gives customers the ease of email, and your team the structure of forms — without forcing either side to compromise. Try Semantic Email for free and let us know what you think.