XPC Hackathon Spotlight: Aylin Özpınar and Jack Talley from Shepherd Health
Offcall recently sponsored the XPC Hackathon, an innovative digital challenge hosted by X=Primary Care and Dr. Paulius Mui designed to invent and showcase ideas that transform care workflows. The event brought together innovative teams of individuals determined to make care workflows smarter, faster, and more human, and the results were incredible! As part of our commitment to uplifting clinicians who are working to transform healthcare by putting fellow healthcare workers at the center, we are spotlighting the winners of this year's XPC Hackathon here. For the full list of winners and video descriptions of their companies and pitches, see here. In this article, we feature second place winner Shepherd Health, led by a team including Aylin Özpınar and Jack Talley. For a profile of the first place winner Wellbeyond, led by a team including Russell Stover, see here. And for a profile of third place winner EpiNet led by Jung Hoon Son, see here.
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1. Aylin and Jack, tell us about the problem you were trying to solve and the key elements to the solution you built? Today, clinicians have an overwhelming amount of data to navigate for any given patient, including fragmented EHR data, wearables data, new research and clinical guidelines, past cases, and payor coverage. This amount of data makes it challenging to cut through the noise and pick out the clinically relevant data, and fragmentation of data across sources impacts continuity of care and leads to errors. We set out to solve the issue of clutter and data under-utilization. Our solution allows clinicians to access patient medical history across EHRs in a simple summary, provides an AI chatbot trained on up-to-date guidelines and medical history of the patient, and guides treatment recommendations based on detailed comparisons to past patients with overlapping symptoms and treatment history.
2. Why is this such an acute pain point that you think is worth solving? For both patients and clinicians, quick access to medical records remains a huge challenge. Nearly half of patients report trouble getting their health records in times of need. We believe that patients should have access to an easy portal to view their records, quickly ask questions about their medical history, and share this easily with a provider. On top of this, use of EHRs leads to physiological fatigue within the first 22 minutes of use in 80% of ICU physicians. The platform we built alleviates this by pulling all of a patient's records across sources into a single page. We also built AI functionality to allow clinicians to quickly ask detailed questions about their patient's information and compare them to similar past cases in a way that Epic doesn't allow today.
3. Where will you go from here? What are you planning to do with the solution you built? We're continuing to build and refine our idea with the aim of delivering a tool for patients to access their medical records and consult AI to decide the next best step in their treatment journey, including finding care that meets their needs. We really admire what's been done with tools like ChatEHR as an LLM for clinicians with access to patient charts. Our goal is to empower patients with the same ability to access their medical data and ask questions about it. We also want to continue working with clinicians to create the best platform to streamline access to patient records and support treatment decision-making and clinical workflows.
One of our new ideas from the hackathon was the function of comparing a current patient to similar past cases. As a next step, we want to train a dedicated AI model to serve as a co-pilot for physicians based on symptom and treatment histories of large patient populations across conditions. The goal is to give clinicians another robust datapoint to work with in making treatment decisions on challenging cases, with direct insight into how patients with similar profiles responded to specific treatments in past cases.
4. What was it like to participate in an XPC hackathon? What was most memorable? The hackathon was an amazing opportunity for us to get feedback from clinicians and work with others building in the healthcare technology space. We had numerous sparring sessions with physicians in the group that helped us figure out where we could add the most value with the ideas we were working on. We also want to give a shoutout to the sponsors, especially Metriport and Keywell, who provided guidance and access to cutting edge tools that made our project possible!
5. What is your #1 advice to fellow clinicians / physicians who are curious about entrepreneurship but may be hesitant to take the leap? While we're not clinicians ourselves, the guidance we received from clinicians participating in the hackathon was super valuable. There is a lot of excitement about building with AI in healthcare right now, and the most critical part of that is getting input from providers who are in the clinic working with patients every day and understanding where there are pain points we can solve. We want to see more collaboration between clinical and technical leaders in every aspect of healthcare.
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Resources mentioned in this interview
Metriport: https://www.metriport.com/
Keywell: https://www.linkedin.com/company/keywellai/
To learn more about the XPC Hackathon and read the entire breakdown of the winners and event, see here.
Offcall Team is the official Offcall account.