Daniel Fabbri, PhD, assistant professor of Biomedical Informatics and Computer Science, spoke on campus on April 30 about his entrepreneurial journey from graduate studies to founding a successful health care technology company. The talk, sponsored by the Brock Family Center for Applied Innovation, the Vanderbilt Center for Technology Transfer and Commercialization, and the School of Medicine, provided insights into the challenges and rewards of commercializing academic research.
Through his company, Maize Analytics, Inc., Fabbri developed software to monitor access to patient medical records (and thus support compliance with federal patient privacy regulations). The idea grew out of Fabbri’s doctoral thesis at the University of Michigan. Throughout the process of building the company, Fabbri learned the importance of customer feedback, adapting to changing organizational needs, and building a strong user support system.
“Problem formulation is key. It’s easy to have some basic hypotheses or assumptions that are not based in the reality of what your customers actually need,” he said. “Until you actually go talk to them, until they tell you it’s an actual pain point, until they tell you, ‘Hey, I would love to have that,’ you really don’t know anything.”
Fabbri also discussed the challenges of scaling a health care technology company, from navigating legal and regulatory requirements to securing funding.
In 2021, Maize Analytics was acquired by Austin, Texas-based SecureLink, Inc., a leader in third-party remote access and security. A year later, SecureLink was in turn purchased by Waltham, Massachusetts-based Imprivata, Inc. Fabbri, who had transitioned to a chief data scientist role at SecureLink, briefly stayed on in that role at Imprivata before leaving the company last July. In all, his was a 10-year entrepreneurial journey.
The talk concluded with Fabbri sharing his current research on using artificial intelligence in the form of large language models to extract information from clinical notes, aiming to streamline research processes.
