The Brock Family Center for Applied Innovation was featured on the Vanderbilt Health Innovation panel at Vanderbilt University’s inaugural Convoy Conference on March 6. The three-day conference included a robust line-up of keynote speakers and panel discussions that covered a wide range of topics, from alumni entrepreneurial experiences to industry leaders' insights.
Brock Family Center Director Ken Holroyd, MD moderated the panel discussion that highlighted three founders who are innovating in their respective fields— Jeffrey Dendy, MD, Daniel Fabbri, PhD, FAMIA and Michael Golinko, MD, FACS, FAAP.
Who Our Innovators Are
Dr. Dendy, a cardiologist who specializes in cardiovascular imaging, founded Heartvue.ai, a company offering software that utilizes artificial intelligence to automate MRI image interpretation, reporting and billing.
Dr. Fabbri, who is Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Computer Science and the Director of Informatics Innovation at VUMC, founded Brim Analytics, an AI-enhanced tool that provides faster chart abstraction. He’s also an experienced entrepeneur, founding and later selling Maize Analytics, a company that monitored every click in medical record systems across the United States.
Dr. Golinko is the Delta Dental of TN Smile 180 Foundation Director of the Cleft & Craniofacial Program, Chief of Pediatric Plastic Surgery at Monroe Carrell Jr. Children's Hospital, Program Director of the Craniofacial Fellowship and Associate Professor of Plastic Surgery, Oto-Head & Neck Surgery and Neurosurgery. He founded ImageAssist, an intuitive iOS app that streamlines clinical standard photo capture, management and storage.
What Inspires Our Innovators
It was clear during the panel discussion that each innovator was inspired by the problems they face every day in their fields.
As a plastic surgeon, Dr. Golinko knows how much time and effort is put into taking standardized clinical photos of patients.
“We take photos every day, whether it's tracking growth in patients, before and after photos, for research, clinical outcomes work and sending them to insurance companies,” he said. “The problem is, there are national guidelines to take standardized photos so you can compare apples to apples, but implementing those standards is very hard. You often need a special room, special lighting, a lot of staff to take a consistent photo, and even then, getting the photos in the medical chart is even more cumbersome.”
This pain point in his own practice led him to believe it was a pain point for others. It only made sense to create a smartphone application that seamlessly integrates into the regular workflow of practitioners.
“With about 200 or so million photos that clinicians take every year, we're hoping ImageAssist can make a huge impact,” he said. “We have AI guided smart frames that, just like mobile check deposit, go red to green when the proper lines are met and then subtracts the background and gets it right into the chart to make it as seamless and easy as possible.”
For Dr. Dendy, the pain points in his practice drove him to seek out a solution to cut down the time and physical efforts of analyzing cardiac images.
“We obtain an average of 2,000 images per patient 11 to 13 times a day, and it takes about half an hour to an hour to read the images on a patient. A lot of that time is spent performing manual measurements,” he said. “It's 2025 and physicians are still drawing circles and making measurements by hand.”
On top of that, Dr. Dendy found that 25% of the time, imaging submissions are being under-coded, meaning physicians are leaving money on the table.
“We invented this new algorithm to automate the measurements. It pushes them through to an automated reporting system and then automatically submits the billing,” he said. “We're trying to optimize time and revenue for the physicians and hopefully reduce things like burnout, improve turnaround time for imaging for patients and improve patient care.”
Another pain point in the healthcare system: medical record chart abstraction. Dr. Fabbri is working to automate that process with his AI-guided tool.
“We have a ton of unstructured medical notes in the health system today with a bunch of facts that need to be abstracted out for downstream processes, whether that’s for clinical trials, medical research, or prepping for a clinic,” he said. “We currently have a bunch of nurses and staff reading those notes to fill out data or do things with that information and at Vanderbilt, we probably spend $15 million a year doing that.”
Insights from Our Innovators
When asked about the challenges faced while starting his company this time around, Dr. Fabbri said it’s the distribution of the tools rather than their technology that causes the most hiccups.
“I like to tell people that when you're building a healthcare technology company today, 20 to 25% is your cool piece of technology, all the rest around it is the plumbing that is necessary to make that company work,” he said. “It's integrating with EMR, dealing with data governance, dealing with privacy, security, and really providing value. Health informatics is a contact sport, it’s not just a technology by itself. It’s the people, process, and technology as an aggregate to provide value that’s important.”
Getting new technologies embraced and adopted into the current healthcare ecosystem is a process, requiring strategy and some help on the inside.
“I've trained a fair number of cardiac MRI physicians in the southeast, so our first strategy was to deploy into several different beta sites and most of those are where our trainees are,” Dr. Dendy said of his first step in introducing his AI software to the hospital setting. “We found our physician champions.”
The next steps were to prove financial viability and quality assurance.
“We’ve got the data to show that by optimizing the time it takes to read these images, we free physicians up for either other revenue generating activities, potentially reducing burnout and reducing need for physician hires. It cost an average of $2 million to hire a physician in a hospital system,” he said. “And our software has to be secure, maintain patient privacy and maintain quality standards for FDA. Now, most hospital systems have some sort of AI committee that evaluates your AI systems for bias and ensures that your data is trained in an ethical manner. So, we’re really focused on those three areas and have tried to establish excellence in our appliance quality, so folks won’t say no.”
In the same vein as finding physicians to champion new technologies, Dr. Golinko gave insight on the impact that partnerships have had on advancing his company.
“Given that last year I didn't know what a pitch deck was, which is quite frankly the truth as a total clinician plastic surgeon, the partnerships are mission critical,” he said. “Especially when you're building a product, building a startup, and trying to enter the market, even if you're of that market and a kind of an end user. Having that business know-how and finding those partnerships with someone that has go to market strategy is critically important.”
As faculty at VUMC that have gone on to create start-ups, the panelists provided insight on what it’s like to step away from academia to pursue entrepreneurship, balancing being full-time faculty and a CEO and utilizing institutional departments and resources to get a product off the ground.
On switching gear to part-time clinical work and full-time CEO work, Dr. Dendy said, “It became clear that that we had invented something that was really going to be helpful for clinicians. We could have published it and let someone else build a product. We could have tried to license it. But as an end user, I have an engineering background, and with my partner Steve who worked at Vanderbilt in our lab for a long time, I feel like we really have the skill set where we could build this and pull it off.”
From building the product to pushing it through the FDA process, the amount of time needed meant Dr. Dendy had to choose his focus: being faculty or a founder. He chose the latter and thanks cardiology leadership for their flexibility and support that’s allowed him to step into a more part-time role.
“I really have to thank cardiology leadership for letting me pull back, giving me the ability to do that so that we can build Heartvue.ai,” he said.
Dr. Fabbri’s path has seen him take on the balancing act of CEO and full-time faculty.
“I think there's a ton of advantages from the academia perspective,” he said. “We were lucky enough to receive a $2 million ARPA-H award last year. Essentially, it's non-diluting funding to get the project off the ground, support it, grow it, and deploy it here. We’ve now built this product, it's running, it’s deployed here and at other institutions and that’s been with institutional support and getting end-users here using the tool and providing feedback.”
Over the years, he also developed a trick to help balance both roles.
“One of the stupidest things we did was just based off the physical property of time and space. So my office for Vanderbilt is in 2525 West End, just down the road and my office for the company is literally across the street,” he said.
The health IT department played a pivotal role in Dr. Golinko’s success with developing the ImageAssist application and getting it deployed within VUMC.
“To echo what Dan was saying, I think it's a tremendous value being in an academic medical center of this size where you have every single specialty, subspecialty, it’s a perfect place to be,” he said. “If I was at a community hospital, I don’t think we’d be able to move as rapidly as we’ve been moving.”
Health IT was able to help get the application integrated with the EPIC system, leading to an easier and free deployment within the medical center for testing and feedback.
“I think Vanderbilt’s a great place where we have this ecosystem that’s really nurturing startups and nurturing development and innovation,” he said. “We have healthcare, we have tech here, all those pieces. It’s all here for anybody that wants to do it.”
