Yair Saperstein, co-founder and CEO at Avo, recently sat with Juno Health’s editorial team to discuss healthcare, data, and the value of AI in EHRs as our technologies combine for a transformative partnership. Explore his thoughtful insights into how AI is improving healthcare for patients and providers alike.
The following has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: As someone who’s dual board certified in internal medicine and informatics, what sparked your interest in the confluence of healthcare and data?
Saperstein: Technology and AI are jumpstarting processes. The world is starting to recognize it, but it's been ongoing—and it's the vector to affect change across whatever medium you're trying to improve. For me, that’s healthcare.
But it's system-level technology that’s only as good as its people. You need to ensure that good change management and processes are in place with the right people. I've long been interested in this systemic change and the ability to help a whole system improve for a broader positive impact. The way I could do that was by combining the different fields of health and data.
I think about it holistically and wanted to combine efficiency with efficacy. I’m someone who wants to do things fast and do them well. Working faster to get home in time for dinner with my family, go open water swimming in the nearby ocean, and make it to prayers on time is a huge bonus. I'm a doctor, but I also have a whole life.
I want to treat my patients well and improve care delivery in a way that is real. But I also have a public health degree, so I recognize that we're within a larger system. One time I witnessed a primary care doctor telling a patient to come to the ER claiming acute pain because that way the insurance would pay for it immediately, instead of him needing to wait. This inspired my interest in studying hospital policy and management, because it's like systems are working against each other. I wanted some way to put it all together—to be able to drive healthcare delivery forward with the right information at the right time to the right person in the right way and increase workflow alignment and solve higher-order problems.
Avo is the provider's assistant, focused on extracting patient data and creating summaries for providers before they see the patient to support inpatient, outpatient, and even specialty workflows. We combine that with AI Scribe to create a unified workflow, so you get Avo AI in the EHR. We're not just a layer that sits on top. We integrate deeply to generate orders and notes and perform billing and coding, all on the provider side. This mixture of rule-based support infused into our products and AI in EHR workflows transforms healthcare.
For one, it means better care quality for patients, as these systems offer suggestions to doctors to review and confirm. And if providers are looking at the computer less, they can spend more time with patients and make more of a connection.
Organizationally, healthcare systems need to make money to survive. If there’s a way to improve clinical documentation so you can code at a higher level, then you can do risk adjustments and get the right HCCs and ICD 10s. Billers and coders usually look at charts and try to guess what the doctor meant weeks after the patient's been discharged, so it doesn't help the patient or providers.
But if you have a workflow providers love, it’s game-changing. In Avo’s case, we combine patient charts with AI Scribe so you can use either one. The combined workflow brings voice conversation data and existing EHR data together, so you can run a clinical documentation improvement layer, a building encoding layer, and a decision support layer to account for any questions coders may have.
And if there's more value for patients, there's more value for healthcare systems. For example, inpatient care is constantly trying to solve throughput and how to get patients discharged faster and safer. One reason is provider variability and whether or not a given patient is eligible for discharge. If you consistently have that decision point across their full panel of patients, it reduces variability. And if AI in the EHR can automatically write discharge or progress notes, even better. Providers are happier, reducing turnover—and patients receive better care for reduced stays.
Q: How do you see AI fitting into care delivery?
Saperstein: I think my parents thought of this more than 30 years ago when they named me, because my first name starts with Y-A-I! Integrating AI into healthcare is at the core of what we're doing.
The way I think about it, you can either have rule-based decision support or LLM-generated AI clinical decision support. If there's no room for error, you stick with rule-based; if it's okay to have a little room for error, you go with LLM-based.
You may ask, “When is it okay to have a little room for error?”
The answer is when there's a driver in the driver's seat. If you present information in a way that allows me to do source tracing and it prompts me like the best intern I could ever have, that's okay. I want something that will do better—and faster—than I would have done without it.
But if you're patient-facing and have a conversational AI agent that can outperform doctors in clinical decision making, it starts to get interesting.
If you can democratize information for patients, that’s amazing. But there's more room for error, and one mistake can shut everything down. The same thing happened with self-driving cars. Even if self-driving cars are safer, it doesn’t matter when that one accident is all over the news.
Q: What about Juno Health and Juno EHR interested you in partnering with us?
Saperstein: Juno Health is tackling smaller acute and behavioral health markets, which are not well served by existing EHRs. When I spoke to some of the Juno Health team—even before I knew your mission—they were the smartest mix of people with rich experience, who just wanted to do this right. As I learned more, I realized we could work well together. Avo thrives when we're integrated deeply with an EHR—and with a team that really gets it—to provide an effective AI backbone. This sort of “marriage” was exciting.
Discover the future of EHRs with Juno EHR + Avo! Learn more about Avo’s clinician-focused AI solutions, and contact Juno Health for more information on how we’re building smarter, more flexible digital healthcare solutions.
