Lab Dispatches

Venture of the Month – avoMD

About avoMD

avoMD is a next-gen platform for interactive clinical guidelines and decision support.

The software allows healthcare organizations to digitize their clinical content pathways and workflows into “virtual clinical consultants” that provide on-demand decision support for clinicians, at the point-of-care. In usability trials and live deployments, the software has been shown to dramatically increase the usability and usage of clinical guidelines. 

The technology functions on a standalone basis via web and mobile apps (iOS and Android) or can integrate into the EHR (electronic health records). Updates to guidelines can be done simply and deployed instantly. Led by a team of physicians and informaticians from Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Mount Sinai, avoMD has over 10 current hospital and urgent care partners including

Children’s Minnesota, PM Pediatrics, and Samsung Medical Center.

To see a brief overview video, click here

About AvoMD’s Founders

 

Dr. Joongheum Park, Founder / Executive Chairman

Dr. Park is a practicing board-certified internal medicine physician and clinical informatician. He is an Associated Harvard Medical Faculty (AHMF) at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He was an internist/clinical informatics fellow at New York Presbyterian-Columbia University Medical Center (“CUMC”), and was on the executive board of the National Association of Clinical Informatics Fellows.

He is also a professional developer and has been mentoring computer science classes in healthcare software at Georgia Tech. Additionally, Dr. Park leads multiple clinical AI projects in collaboration with Columbia University, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Rutgers University, and the University of Pittsburgh. He has presented his AI and mobile health projects at national conferences held by the American Medical Informatics Association, the American College of Rheumatology, the Society of Hospital Medicine, and the American Psychiatric Association. He was building the software that later became avoMD for his own personal clinical use.

 

Dr. Yair Saperstein, Founder / CEO

Dr. Saperstein is a board certified internal medicine physician, affiliated with Mount Sinai Hospital. He is a member of Alpha Omega Alpha (AOA), and graduated from Albert Einstein College of Medicine with distinction in research in global health and from Yeshiva College as Valedictorian. Previously, Dr. Saperstein has co-founded two non-profit organizations, StartScience.org and Teach4Kids.org, and served as the inpatient medicine Chief Resident at Kings County Hospital. Additionally, Dr. Saperstein is an acclaimed classical concert pianist and recreational ukelele jammer and has won numerous awards including The Jewish Week’s “36 under 36” most influential Jewish Americans, and was a semifinalist in the Dell Social Innovation Challenge. He had independently thought about avoMD as a solution, and met Dr. Park while doing a clinical informatics rotation at Columbia’s Department of Biomedical Informatics. They quickly teamed up to enhance the clinical content and the software.

 

Laurence Coman, Founder / COO

Laurence recently graduated from Columbia Business School where he studied entrepreneurship and healthcare. Prior to Columbia, Laurence worked on the investment team at Vector Capital, a private equity firm focused on software investments. At Vector, Laurence helped evaluate and acquire enterprise software companies, in addition to serving as a Board Observer for two of the firm’s portfolio companies. Prior to Vector, Laurence worked at Greenhill, an investment bank focused on M&A and restructuring. Laurence received a BS in Economics at The Wharton School and a BA in International Studies and Hispanic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. Laurence initially joined Dr. Park and Dr. Saperstein as an advisor for business strategy. He soon joined as a third founding member.

What advice do the founders have for other entrepreneurs?

Always be on the lookout for opportunities, and when they come, be ready for them. Seek out advice and feedback. Then do it some more. Pivoting is not giving up.

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