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Dr. Yair Saperstein is a dual-board-certified internal medicine and clinical informatics physician who is the founder and CEO of AvoMD (www.avomd.com). He is a member of Alpha Omega Alpha (AOA), and graduated from Albert Einstein College of Medicine with distinction in research in global health, from SUNY Downstate with a Master’s in Public Health, and from Yeshiva College as Valedictorian. He continues his clinical work at Mount Sinai Beth Israel.
Previously, Dr. Saperstein co-founded two non-profit education-based organizations, StartScience.org and Teach4Kids.org, and served as both inpatient medicine Chief Resident and Informatics Liaison at Kings County Hospital. He has contributed to Epic implementations in two hospital systems.
Yair 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, semifinalist in Dell’s Social Innovation Challenge, 1st place “most promising software” at Microsoft’s UIST, and most recently second place in the Lyfebulb-Loyola University Chicago Innovation Challenge (2021) and the American College of Cardiology People’s Choice award for AvoMD (2022).
Why did you get into medicine and how did you become interested in Clinical Informatics?
I have long dreamt of contributing to the practice of medicine through technology. As a child of two physicians, if I wasn’t playing “doctor,” or playing games on the computer, I was thinking about how the two might intertwine.
Throughout high school and college, I focused on the sciences. I majored in Chemistry, and competed in numerous science fairs and competitions. I credit the fostering environment of both my family and school life for promoting my blossoming interest in the practical application of the sciences. (Accidentally blowing up science experiments at home just made it more exciting…)
In medical school, I focused on teaching and empowering others as I myself learned. I helped grow two education-focused clubs into internationally operating non-profit organizations (START Science, and TEACH). I also did extensive global health work, working in 14 countries during my time in medical school. In Internal Medicine Residency at SUNY Downstate, I continued to look for opportunities to make a positive change, starting our first Internal Medicine Residency newsletter for the residents to have a voice, and founding our Wellness Committee. My advisor, Dr. Isabel McFarlane, suggested that I look into the field of Clinical Informatics, a subspecialty in medicine that combines IT and medicine.
What is your background and what has been your career path in Clinical Informatics?
After looking more into Clinical Informatics, I realized its potential for having a broad positive impact. I took an elective at Columbia University’s Department of Biomedical Informatics and met the faculty, including one fellow, Joongheum Park (PJ), who later became my cofounder in starting a clinical decision support (CDS) company. He told me over dinner how he was building a tool to help doctors make better decisions — specifically, shareable, modular CDS. I got to work on learning how to build a decision pathway and successfully built one for Diabetic Ketoacidosis, a crisis of diabetes. In the meantime, I served as the informatics liaison at Kings County Hospital and helped with implement a two-way communication system, and transition my hospital system from Quadramed to Epic.
In 2018, PJ, Laurence Coman and I founded our modular, shareable CDS company, AvoMD, Inc. and I have been its CEO since that time.
What advice would you give medical students, residents, or others considering Clinical Informatics as a career?
- Look for opportunities, and when they come, grab them.
- Learn from everyone.
- There are many careers outside of clinical medicine that allow you to have a broad, creative, positive impact. Explore them!
Why did you choose to become certified and what is the value of board certification for you?
I wanted to be well-versed in all aspects of Clinical Informatics, which led me to study its breadth. As well, as part of my role as CEO of AvoMD, I speak to many CMIOs, and I wanted to be able to speak the same language – that of clinical informatics. Getting certified allowed me to formalize this learning.