As a practicing hospitalist, Dr. Yair Saperstein knew the feeling well: twenty patients to care for, an electronic health record full of data, a stack of guidelines to reconcile, and a growing list of administrative tasks pulling him in every direction. "This impossibility was really what drove me and my co-founders way back when, when we were starting Avo, to start it," he says. "It was to solve our own problems of this overwhelming nature of what we need to do in order to really do our work well."

That overwhelm, he says, was leading straight to burnout – and getting in the way of the thing he actually wanted to do: make the best possible care decision for the patient in front of him.

Today, Avo sits inside the EHR as an intelligence layer, pulling in patient data and running it through clinical decision support built in partnership with DynaMed. Instead of a generic best-practice alert clinicians learn to ignore, Avo surfaces a concrete next step, and helps translate that decision into a note that captures the real complexity of the case.

"I want my system to be able to have all the patient context and then to guide me: here's what you should do, here are suggestions of what your next steps might be," Dr. Saperstein says. "I live in an agentic world. I expect things to work the same way in medicine, and they don't unless you use Avo."

That documentation piece matters more than it might seem. Health systems are under pressure to capture the full value of a clinical encounter in real time rather than chasing it down after the fact through queries physicians may never answer. Dr. Saperstein sees an unusual bit of alignment there: when a physician-first tool accurately captures the true complexity of a decision as it's made, it also happens to solve the compliance and revenue-capture problems health systems care about. "It actually is coming from a physician-first lens," he says, "but in a way that also makes the compliance and quality guys happy."

Avo raised its Series A earlier this year, marking a shift from a founder-led tool solving individual clinical workflows to an enterprise platform built for system-level priorities: rapid adoption, measurable outcomes, and financial impact. The company has grown from a small group of co-founders at Columbia to nearly fifty employees.

Dr. Saperstein describes the leadership shift with two images: building a jazz band, where every new player has to find how they fit with the others, and standing on the bank of a river, hopping from log to log while bringing the whole band along. "There is a change in the way that things are done," he says. "I want the intentionality of, okay, this is how we're driving it."

Dr. Saperstein has been part of the StartUp Health community since 2020. If you're building at the intersection of AI and clinical care, join the community to connect with Health Transformers like him, collaborate on the problems you're both solving, and share your own health moonshot story.