Covid? There’s an app for that

Lawrence siblings lead contest-winning team

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Being quarantined during the coronavirus pandemic wasn’t an obstacle for the scientific ingenuity of Lawrence siblings Yair and Yiela Saperstein, along with their colleagues from the startup company avoMD, which is in the business of disseminating medical information and has an app of the same name.

An enhanced version of the avoMD app took first place — and a $20,000 prize — in the annual Columbia Venture competition last month, which is a contest between startup companies and invites contestants from the Columbia University community, including alumni who graduated within the past five years.

“As a doctor myself, I experienced firsthand the chaos with quickly changing guidelines from multiple sources, constant email updates about recommendations and many subspecialties joining forces,” explained 29-year-old Yair Saperstein, a chief resident in internal medicine at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn. “It was impossible to keep up with the information and to keep physicians updated on what they need to know. That’s when I realized avoMD was perfect for disseminating information about Covid-19.”

There were three rounds of the Columbia Venture competition, on Feb. 8, March 1 and the April 17 final, which included the awards ceremony on Zoom. In the first round, competitors submitted written answers to questions from the judges, made up of Columbia alumni.

The second round was a recorded video pitch, presented in avoMD’s case by Yiela Saperstein, 23, who recently graduated from Columbia with a degree in biomedical engineering and is the company’s head of growth and operations.

Then Yiela partnered with Laurence Coman, 29, its chief financial officer, for the final round. Yiela’s brother, Yair, avoMD’s chief executive officer, served as an adviser in all three rounds.

“It was different pitching virtually,” Yiela said. “I set up a laptop on a little chair in my room, sat on the floor and joined the Zoom link. Although different, it was a great experience.”

Both Sapersteins said that winning the competition legitimized avoMD’s work. “It’s exciting for multiple reasons,” Yair said. “It’s a validation of what we believe to be true of how vital this software is to the medical field, and second, the $20,000 will help us in our path to expanding and improving.”

The app was created by Dr. Joongheum Park, 37 four years ago, to help doctors improve their diagnoses of patients by ensuring that they have access to the most up-to-date information and helping them create treatment plans. The app went live in 2018, and now has 36,000 users around the world.

The Sapersteins teamed with Coman, a graduate of Columbia’s business school and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania; Park, now at Harvard-affiliated Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston; and Dr. Shawn Ong, 42, who trained at Yale University, to accelerate the growth of avoMD. They tweaked the app for the coronavirus pandemic, as the guidelines for treating Covid-19 are rapidly evolving.

“It’s a mobile app that works as a personal assistant for physicians,” Yiela said. “It uses a conversational style to ask the physician questions about the patient at hand, and then it provides them with personalized, readable, practical guidance based on the latest medical guidelines.”

“I was ecstatic,” Coman said of winning the competition. “Yiela and I both did the pitch, then I passed the baton. I was humbled by the win considering the quality of the competition.”

He added that the next steps for the company are targeted toward growth, building content and further improving the app.

Ong, avoMD’s head ofmedical operations, was also elated with the contest victory, and said he looked forward to expanding what he called the app’s “decision trees” and ensuring that doctors using it have access to the latest updates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Society of Critical Care Medicine and the World Health Organization.

“It’s important to do anything we can do to facilitate medical knowledge on the front lines to help physicians,” Ong said. “It is not easy to access information when you want it, and what you need for a sick patient. This gives us more tools.”

The company aims to raise $3 million in seed funding over the next few months, Yair said, and signed an agreement with SUNY Downstate’s Department of Medicine for the use of its app on May 11.

“We are expanding our workforce, hiring a software engineer and a clinical informaticians from Yale,” Yair said. “We secured a bunch of advisers, and will expand our sales force to really see if we can get the software into more hospitals.”