Dr. Sadok Derouich

I've been a practicing gynecologist since 2012.

My first years were spent in maternity hospitals across Tunisia. Every day, I watched the same problem repeat itself: patient records lost between departments, paper files impossible to track, critical medical history buried in stacks of folders. I felt the frustration every single day — but as a staff doctor, the decision to change anything wasn't mine to make. That was up to the administration.

So I kept working. And kept watching the problem get worse.

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Launching My Own Practice — And Hitting a Wall

In 2017, I opened my own private medical office. For the first time, I could make my own decisions about how to run things. My first decision was clear: no paper records. I was going fully digital from day one.

What followed was one of the most frustrating experiences of my professional life.

I spent weeks evaluating every EMR solution I could find. What I discovered was discouraging:

• Most were built exclusively for the US or European market — practically unusable outside those regions
• The ones that worked internationally were priced for clinics and hospitals, not solo practitioners
• All of them came with dozens of features I didn't need and a sales process I didn't want
• Every single one required training, onboarding calls, and weeks before I could see my first patient

I was a doctor trying to run a medical office, not an IT department.

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Building My Own Prototype

Given that I've always been passionate about technology — medicine and software have been parallel interests my entire career — I decided to build what I couldn't find.

I developed a prototype. Nothing polished, nothing scalable — but something that worked for my practice, my workflow, and my patients. I used it for years, quietly, while continuing to see patients every day.

Then something unexpected happened.

Colleagues started asking questions. They saw how I worked — no keyboard, no paper piles, files instantly accessible — and they wanted the same thing. But when I looked at sharing my prototype, the reality was sobering:

• It wasn't production-ready for other users
• Many of these colleagues had years of paper records they couldn't just abandon
• Most weren't comfortable with keyboards and desktop interfaces
• They needed something that worked on a phone, required no training, and could migrate their paper archives without disruption

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Founding Cynalys and Building Doctolys

In 2021, I founded Cynalys — a digital health company — with one goal: build the medical office app I had always needed, and make it available to every doctor in the world.

Not just doctors in France or the United States. Every doctor. Anywhere.

Doctolys was born from that mission. An AI-powered medical office app that runs entirely from a smartphone, digitizes paper records with a phone camera, requires zero training, and costs $19 a month with no commitment. Everything I had wished existed when I opened my practice in 2017.

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Going Further: doctoGyn for Gynecologists

As Doctolys grew, my own specialty kept teaching me new lessons.

Gynecology has specific clinical workflows that a general medical office app can't fully serve — pregnancy follow-up protocols, fertility management cycles, and deep integration with ultrasound machines. These aren't features you can bolt on.

So we built a dedicated product for it.

doctoGyn is the specialized EMR for gynecologists, obstetricians, midwives, and fertility centers — with the same mobile-first, AI-powered philosophy as Doctolys, but built around the specific workflows of reproductive medicine.

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Why I Write About Digital Health for Doctors

Everything I publish comes from a single, practical question: what would have helped me when I was sitting in that paper-filled office in 2017, trying to figure out how to modernize my practice?

I write for the doctor who is brilliant at medicine but frustrated by the tools available to them. I write for doctors practicing outside the traditional Western markets who have been ignored by mainstream medical software for too long. And I write for anyone who believes that a doctor's time should be spent on patients — not paperwork.

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Dr. Sadok Derouich is a practicing gynecologist since 2012, founder of Cynalys, and CEO of Doctolys and doctoGyn.